Clint snapped his phone shut and leant forward on both hands against the counter. Outside the window, all was dark, obscuring the view of Barton Farm, not that Clint would have seen any of it after what he'd just heard.
His whole world had just tilted sidewards and he wasn't sure how to react. This was almost as bad as being told that Phil had been killed while Clint'd been under Loki's spell. Thankfully, that had proven false, a secret hidden from not just him, but Nat, Steve, Tony, all of them really. Only Harry's insistence had unmasked that secret.
But this. Nat had been there. There was no coming back from something like that.
"Clint?" a soft, concerned voice asked from behind him.
Clint turned, forcing a smile on his face for his wife.
"What's happened?" Laura asked flatly. "Who was the message from?"
Clint looked at the phone still in his hand for a second as though it held the answers that he sought.
"Nat," he said simply. "It was Nat."
"What's happened?" Laura asked again. "Are you needed back for a mission?"
Clint shook his head.
"No, I'm not going anywhere; Nat even told me not to come, said that I needed to spend more time with you and the kids," he said.
"Always knew I liked her," Laura said, stepping forward to hug him briefly before leaning back, her eyes searching his face. "But something did happen."
Clint couldn't lie to her; it was pointless anyway. He may be a master spy and assassin, but she could read him like a book.
"It's Fury," he sighed. "He was killed earlier tonight."
Laura's hands shot to her mouth, her eyes looking horrified.
"Oh, Clint, are you okay? Is Nat?" she asked.
"We will be," he answered honestly.
"What does that mean for you, for S.H.I.E.L.D.?" Laura asked.
"To be honest, I don't know," Clint replied shaking his head. "You know that I've been thinking of getting out, joining the Avengers full time. Maybe this is the time to do so."
"Maybe it is," Laura replied, her arms tightening around him momentarily.
"I've got some more vacation time; I'll aim to make a decision one way or the other before that time's up," he promised.
ooo00ooo
Tony's curiosity was piqued. The Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. was dead. The man in charge of the world's top spy agency, with its fingers that spread all across the globe, assassinated. And yet there'd been nothing mentioned about it on any news channel, no tweets or Facebook posts, nothing. Secrecy was one thing, but this bordered on the ridiculous. The fact that the hit had been carried out in Steve's apartment, away from cameras may have had something to do with it, but it still smelt off.
"Still nothing, Jarvis?" Tony asked.
"No, Sir," Jarvis replied. "The top news story coming out of Washington is of a shoot out and car chase that caused hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage and left numerous police and SWAT personnel injured or dead."
"They catch the guy?" Tony asked.
"No, Sir. He appears to have disappeared without a trace," Jarvis replied.
"Really? Throw up the news report on the TV," Tony requested.
The screen blinked to life with the headshot of a news reporter. Tony ignored the woman, focussing in on the small image in the corner of the screen of a black SUV. Thankfully, the woman disappeared quickly to be replaced with what was obviously CCTV footage of the black SUV surrounded by police cars, at least six of them plus a SWAT van.
Tony leant forward on the couch staring intently. The SUV was riddled with bullet holes and a couple of dozen police officers, most with automatic rifles surrounded it.
"A battering ram?" Tony asked incredulously. "A bit of overkill, isn't it?"
The fact that the driver's window of the SUV didn't instantly shatter on the first impact from the battering ram nor even on the second indicated that the car was specially designed. When it did shatter, it was due to the mini machine gun that spat a spray of bullets from inside the car, killing a number of policemen immediately. A rocket took out the SWAT van just before the SUV's engine came to life and its wheels began spinning as it pushed police cars out of the way.
Tony's eyes widened as the briefest of camera shots showed the interior of the SUV and he rocketed from his seat across to the TV.
"Freeze!" he yelled. "Back it up a few frames."
Slowly, frame by frame, the footage played in reverse.
"There!" Tony said, stabbing a finger into the screen. "Jarvis, can you grab just that bit and enlarge the image of the driver?"
"I shall do my best, Sir," Jarvis replied.
A few moments later, a still image appeared on the screen. Due to the poor resolution of the original image, this enlarged shot was incredibly fuzzy. Still, it was enough for Tony to be able to make out a face, a face of a man wearing dark clothes, who was bald and sported an eye patch.
"What did you get yourself into, Fury?" Tony asked.
Whirling about, Tony headed for his nearest computer.
"Jarvis, hack into the DC police systems, find out what in the world they were doing targeting Fury like that," Tony instructed.
As he waited for a response, Tony's fingers began to dance. He suspected what the answer was going to be and figured that he might as well get a head start at hacking into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s databanks.
"DC Metro police show that there were no vehicles at that intersection at the time of the incident," Jarvis reported.
.
.
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