Sitwell kept talking. "My original assignment had nothing to do with that ship. The transfer order came from Director Fury directly — last minute. If there's something wrong with the Lemurian Star's operations, that's not my problem. I followed legitimate orders."
Natasha stepped away briefly. "Steve. Let me check with Barbara and Sharon."
Jessica moved to the other side of the rooftop. "I'll reach Coulson."
While they confirmed, Sitwell looked at Steve with the patient expression of a man who had decided his best path was to be cooperative and reasonable for as long as possible.
"Don't keep making mistakes that compound each other," he said. "Whatever conflict you have with Secretary Pierce — whatever reason you're unwilling to say why Fury came to your apartment — that's between you and him. But Nick Fury was Pierce's man. Pierce personally elevated him. Before Pierce moved to the Council, he handed Fury the director's chair himself." He paused. "I'm not telling you what to conclude from that. I'm just making sure you have all the information."
Steve looked at him.
The implication was clear enough without being stated: if Pierce was HYDRA, and Fury was Pierce's man, then the chain of connection was something worth following. And there were the other threads — Bartók recruited through channels that traced back to Fury, Zola placing Fury within the system, Pierce authorizing an ICBM strike to destroy evidence that pointed through all of it.
But the logic had a gap. Fury had come to Steve's apartment, shot through his own window, to deliver a USB drive with a warning. That wasn't the behavior of a man protecting his own organization. A man covering his tracks didn't hand his enemies the evidence.
Natasha and Jessica came back. Both nodded. Sitwell had been telling the truth about the transfer order and the Inspectorate investigation.
Sitwell saw this and pressed it. "Hydra—" He stopped, then recalibrated. "I'm loyal to S.H.I.E.L.D. Under Director Smith now, same as under anyone else. I carry out my mission. If that mission led me to that ship, then that's where I was."
Steve said nothing.
Natasha cut the conversation short. She stepped forward, took Sitwell's right arm at the wrist and above the elbow, and applied rotational force in opposite directions. The break was clean and immediate.
Sitwell made a sound that came from somewhere past his training in controlled response.
She stepped around him and hit the back of his left knee with the heel of her palm, full extension, straight down. He went to the ground on one leg.
Sam looked at the rooftop and then at the street below and made a decision not to say anything.
Jessica started to speak, stopped.
Steve looked at Natasha.
"Special times," she said. She wasn't apologizing. "I'll be wrong, if I'm wrong."
She crouched in front of Sitwell. "The Zola algorithm. You're Pierce's assistant. You know what it does."
Sitwell was breathing through his teeth, managing the pain with the specific economy of someone who knows they have more to get through. "I don't—"
"You know," Natasha said. "Pierce doesn't maintain personal assistants who don't know. That's not how this works. You've been at his side for years. You know exactly what Project Insight is and what it's designed to do."
She reached for his other arm.
Sitwell said: "Target selection. Zola's algorithm selects targets for the Insight Project."
Steve leaned in. "What targets?"
A pause. Natasha's hand moved. Sitwell said, fast: "You. The broadcasting journalist in Cairo. The deputy secretary of defense. A graduating student in Iowa. Bruce Banner. Stephen Strange. Anyone who represents a threat to HYDRA's operations — present or future."
Steve looked at him. "Future. How does it predict the future?"
Sitwell almost laughed. The pain was still there but he'd moved through a threshold of it and something close to bitter amusement had replaced the sharp edge. "The twenty-first century is a data set. Zola taught HYDRA how to read it." He looked at them. "Your bank records. Medical history. Voting patterns. Emails. Phone calls. Your SAT scores from seventeen years ago." He looked at Steve specifically. "Zola's algorithm reads a person's past and calculates their future behavior. Anyone whose trajectory models as a threat — before they've done anything — gets added to the list."
Steve said: "And then?"
"Then the Project Insight helicarriers eliminate them." Sitwell said it flatly. "All of them. Simultaneously. Twenty million calculations per second. Millions of targets processed and neutralized in one operation."
The rooftop was quiet for a moment.
Jessica said: "Smith Doyle is the acting director. Are you not afraid of him?"
Sitwell's expression did something complicated. "We don't process everyone at once. There's a hierarchy. Some entities aren't going to be listed — entities whose response capability would turn the operation into a war rather than a cleanup." He looked away from her. "Director Smith is in that category. We don't record him."
Steve turned toward the car. "Let's move. We have a timeline to work against."
They put Sitwell in the back and drove. Sam drove. Steve rode in front. Natasha and Jessica flanked Sitwell in the back.
Sitwell was processing his own situation. He'd talked more than he'd intended to. Pierce would know, eventually. "HYDRA doesn't like people who talk."
Sam, without looking up from the road: "Then why did you talk so much?"
Natasha said to Steve: "Project Insight goes live in sixteen hours."
Steve looked out the window. "Smith canceled the algorithm."
"You sure about that?"
"He told Pierce to suspend it. But the carriers are still operational. The satellite network is still online." He looked at the road ahead. "Either he didn't know the full scope of what he was pausing, or Pierce told him it was suspended and didn't actually implement it."
"We need to get on those carriers and change the targeting architecture before they launch," Natasha said.
Sitwell said: "That's insane. Do you have any idea how many enhanced assets S.H.I.E.L.D. has staged around the Triskelion right now?"
Something hit the roof.
The window on Sitwell's side exploded inward.
A hand came through — not a hand, a metal hand — and closed around Sitwell's collar. The grip didn't negotiate. Sitwell went through the window gap and across two lanes of traffic and connected with the front grille of a freight truck doing sixty in the opposite direction.
The sound was loud and final.
Before anyone in the car could process this, Bucky was on the roof. He fired down through the ceiling — three shots, tight grouping, angled to find the back seat. Natasha was already moving left. Jessica's Lasher symbiote expanded upward through the roof panel, tendrils reaching for purchase.
Sam floored it and yanked the handbrake. The rear of the car kicked sideways. Bucky went off the roof on the inertia and hit the road behind them.
He did a controlled fall, got his metal arm down, absorbed the momentum, and was standing again in under two seconds.
Natasha was looking back. "He's already up."
An armored vehicle came out of a side street and hit them from behind. Sam's hands locked on air where the steering wheel had been — Bucky had cleared the gap fast enough to rip it through the windshield.
"Steering's gone," Sam said, stating the situation.
"We know," Steve said.
Natasha put two rounds through the windshield at Bucky. He pulled back onto the armored vehicle's hood. The armored vehicle hit them again, harder, and the sedan rolled.
Jessica came out of the window as the car went over, landed on top, and faced Bucky across two vehicle roofs. The Lasher symbiote uncoiled behind her.
Steve, Natasha, and Sam went out the far side and hit the road using the door panels as improvised sleds to scrub speed. Steve came up on the shield. Natasha rolled into cover behind a stopped car. Sam caught a guardrail wrong and went down hard.
Four more Winter Soldiers came out of the armored vehicle. One of them was carrying a flamethrower. Another had a shoulder-mounted sonic cannon.
Jessica moved first. The sonic cannon discharged before she closed the distance.
The Lasher symbiote recoiled from the frequency, pulling tight against her body. Jessica kept moving anyway, but her range was gone — the cannon was keeping the symbiote suppressed, and the flamethrower operator was circling to her left. She had two of the five occupied trying to manage her. That left three for Natasha and Sam.
The three Winter Soldiers had rifles and were using them that way — sustained, accurate fire, not trying to advance, just keeping heads down. Natasha and Sam were pinned behind two separate vehicles with a gap of ten feet of open pavement between them.
Natasha fired back on angles, controlled pairs, watching her count. Bucky picked up a grenade launcher from one of his team members.
The grenade hit the car Natasha was behind at the front axle. The vehicle lifted and came down on its side and she was already moving, dropping off the overpass railing, catching the understructure with her grappling hook and swinging to the underside of the bridge.
She ran along the I-beams, parallel to the road above, watching the shadows.
A shape appeared at the railing — Bucky, assault rifle, tracking her angle. She fired up through the railing at him. One shot. His goggles caught it, cracked, held.
He pulled the goggles off and threw them.
The goggles shattered on the beam beside her. She kept moving.
Both of them ran dry at approximately the same time. Natasha used the concrete supports and parked cars on the street level as cover and put distance between herself and the bridge edge.
Bucky looked at the three soldiers. "She's mine. Go find Rogers."
He went over the railing.
The three Winter Soldiers looked at Jessica Jones, who was dealing with the sonic cannon operator and the flamethrower, and made their assessment. She wasn't their target.
They followed Bucky over the railing and spread out into the streets below, heading in Steve's direction.