Dressed in casual clothes, Steve pulled the hood of his jacket low, blending in perfectly with the aimless youths wandering the streets. No one would ever suspect that the most wanted man in Washington, D.C. would return to the very hospital where Nick Fury had died. In the minds of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, this was exactly the place he wouldn't be.
When Steve reached the small snack rack in the hospital corridor and saw the empty slot, his heart sank.
The USB drive was gone.
"Well, don't look so grim."
Natasha Romanoff appeared behind him, leisurely blowing a bubble with her gum, making it abundantly clear that she was the one who had taken it.
"Where is it?" Steve asked. Seeing Natasha instantly put him a little more at ease.
"Somewhere safe," she replied. "Where did you get it?"
"Why should I tell you?"
"Fury gave it to you, didn't he?" Natasha pressed. "Why you?"
That USB drive was something Natasha herself had personally handed to Fury—she recognized it immediately. What she didn't understand was why Fury had entrusted it to Steve.
"What's on it?" Steve asked.
That was what bothered him most. He was being hunted across the entire city, yet he didn't even know what he was risking his life to protect. The irony would have been funny—if it weren't so dangerous.
"I don't know," Natasha said bluntly. "I just pretend I know everything."
Even someone as close to Fury as Natasha had never been told what the data actually contained. She had simply followed orders.
But there was one thing she did know.
She knew who had killed Fury.
The assassin was a ghost—one whose existence many intelligence agencies refused to acknowledge. He appeared without warning and vanished just as completely. Over the past fifty years, he was rumored to have carried out more than twenty high-profile assassinations.
They called him the Winter Soldier.
Natasha pulled aside her jacket, revealing a hideous five-centimeter scar carved across her abdomen.
"Five years ago," she said quietly, "I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran. He shot out our tires. The car went over a cliff."
When Natasha dragged the still-living engineer from the wreckage, the Winter Soldier appeared and executed him—firing straight through her body to kill his target.
Soviet-made bullets. No ballistic trace.
Exactly the same method used to kill Nick Fury.
The investigation grew from one person to two.
They had no idea where the Winter Soldier was—but they did have the USB drive. And that made them targets. Because whatever was on it, both the Winter Soldier and the traitors inside S.H.I.E.L.D. wanted it desperately.
-----
After learning the real reason behind the hijacking of the Lemurian Star launch ship, the World Security Council convened. After deliberation, they decided to allow Alexander Pierce to continue with Project Insight.
There were less than twenty-four hours before the three Helicarriers launched.
Disguised beyond recognition, Natasha led Steve to a computer retail experience center in downtown D.C. This was where she planned to decrypt the USB drive.
The drive carried a Level Six S.H.I.E.L.D. tracking protocol. The moment it was accessed, S.H.I.E.L.D. would know their exact location and dispatch a capture team.
They had nine minutes.
The truth came out quickly.
The hijacking of the launch ship had been ordered by Fury himself.
He had grown suspicious of Project Insight. By bribing the raid leader to seize the ship, Fury created an opening—allowing Natasha to infiltrate the vessel, steal classified data, and delay the launch of the Lemurian Star satellites.
Fury's instincts had been right.
Someone was deliberately concealing the true nature of Project Insight.
Every time Natasha attempted to access the files, an internal AI automatically overrode her commands, blocking her at every turn.
So she changed tactics.
Instead of reading the data, she traced its point of origin.
The signal led them to an abandoned military base in New Jersey.
Steve froze.
It was the same camp where he had trained for the Super Soldier Program.
-----
Bathed in the glow of the setting sun, the deserted training ground lay quiet and still. Steve could almost see his younger self—scrawny, breathless, always lagging behind during runs.
The weak, stubborn kid named Steve Rogers.
Natasha searched the area and found nothing. At first glance, it was nothing more than a forgotten ruin.
But Steve noticed something wrong.
An ammunition bunker stood out sharply.
Army regulations forbade ammo storage within five hundred yards of a training camp.
Steve smashed the bunker doors open.
Inside, they found it.
The birthplace of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Rows of desks and equipment reconstructed the organization's earliest command center. The eagle emblem on the wall remained vivid, untouched by time.
On the far wall hung a series of framed photographs—the founders of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
Colonel Phillips.
Howard Stark.
Peggy Carter.
Steve discovered a hidden elevator. Together, he and Natasha descended into a vast underground chamber.
The room was filled with ancient computers and endless lines of obsolete data reels—bulky, low-capacity systems abandoned decades ago.
Natasha scoffed. "This can't be the data source."
Then she saw them.
A row of pristine, modern USB ports.
She inserted the drive.
The computers hummed to life.
And a face appeared on the screen.
Dr. Arnim Zola.
During World War II, Zola had been a Nazi scientist, later absorbed into HYDRA under the Red Skull to research the Tesseract. The weapons Steve had encountered during his rescue missions—all of them had been Zola's work.
It was during the mission to capture Zola that Steve's closest friend, Bucky Barnes, had fallen from the train—plunging into the ravine below, his body never recovered.
In 1972, Zola was diagnosed with terminal cancer. His body failed—but his mind was deemed too valuable to lose.
S.H.I.E.L.D. preserved his consciousness inside a 200,000-foot data archive.
Zola was still alive.
Alive in code.
And this place—this underground vault—was his brain.
From there, Zola revealed the horrifying truth:
HYDRA had never died.
They had infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. from within.
HYDRA was founded on the belief that humanity could not be trusted with freedom. Remove freedom—and people would submit.
When freedom was taken away, people rebelled.
That rebellion became World War II.
After the war, S.H.I.E.L.D. was formed. Zola was recruited. In the shadows, HYDRA grew—feeding off global conflict, engineering wars, profiting from chaos.
For seventy years, HYDRA had shaped the world from the dark.
Howard Stark had been assassinated.
Nick Fury had been assassinated.
And now, Project Insight—executed by a compromised S.H.I.E.L.D.—was HYDRA's ultimate weapon.
The organization Peggy Carter had built to protect the world was being used to enslave it.
Enraged, Steve smashed the computer screen.
Zola instantly reappeared on another terminal.
As Zola spoke, short-range missiles were already inbound.
He had never intended to let them escape.
The explosion hit with a deafening roar.
The birthplace of S.H.I.E.L.D. was consumed in fire.
Reduced to ashes—along with the lies buried beneath it.
--------------
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