A few of the veterans let their skepticism show on their faces. Fury, if he were being honest, didn't take either assignment particularly seriously. He sketched out both situations in a few brief strokes.
A kidnapped playboy. A military experiment gone loose. These weren't threats on the scale of global security — they were nuisances. He was only convening this meeting because the military and the government had applied a certain amount of pressure, and appearances needed to be maintained.
Whatever he privately thought, he let his single eye sweep the room. He wanted to see if anyone would volunteer.
As it turned out, someone did.
"I'll coordinate with the military on the experimental subject," Victoria Hand said. Daisy's one-two punch of organizational maneuvers had left her off-balance and under pressure. Volunteering now was a chance to recover her footing.
The room went quiet. Daisy, who had been running numbers in her head about shorting Stark Industries, noticed that several people were watching her out of the corners of their eyes.
Why is everyone looking at me?
It took her a few seconds to work it out.
Hand was issuing her a challenge. They'd each take one assignment, and the results would speak for themselves.
The older woman was cunning about it — she'd chosen the softer option. General Ross versus Colonel Rhodes: one look at their ranks told you whose network ran deeper. The gap in resources available to each of them was night and day.
Daisy smiled inwardly. Who had the easier job was far from settled.
Ross's mission was almost certainly another attempt to capture the Hulk — the odds of success were negligible. The other mission, though? Setting aside her foreknowledge entirely, the core fact was that Stark didn't need to be rescued. The man would walk out on his own.
She turned it over in her mind. Stark had just disappeared. He wouldn't be back for another three months, and the best moment to short the stock was right before he returned and announced he was shutting down the weapons division. From general relativity to string vibrations, her powers could touch virtually any oscillation in the universe — but stock market swings were beyond her. This market had no daily price limits, no up-limit or down-limit rules — move too early, and a few swings of volatility could wipe out everything she'd scraped together.
She needed to be there in person to track the timeline. And going to Afghanistan kept her hands free to manage the timing properly.
She ran through it one more time. No major complications. Might as well think of it as a working vacation.
"Fine," she said, loud enough for the room to hear. "I'll go bring Tony Stark home."
The meeting ended with those words.
Daisy and Hand took their respective assignments and went off to prepare.
On the way out, Daisy skimmed the briefing. Almost nothing was confirmed yet. What they had was sparse.
She had half a day to put a team together.
She went back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy to recruit.
Even as a Level 7 agent, she still occasionally sat in on lectures. But personally recruiting operatives — that was a first.
She reviewed the roster of trainees, then followed the directions she'd been given to the training room.
The woman inside was striking — blond, sharp-featured — and was currently holding two batons, fighting two male trainees at once, leaving them only able to block with no chance to counter.
She swept one man's legs out from under him with a low kick, then reversed her grip and cracked the second across the ankle before he could react. He went down with a yelp.
Start to finish: twenty seconds.
Daisy had been watching since the beginning, and she'd noticed the subtle shift when the blond woman clocked her arrival — the decision to end it quickly rather than drag it out. That told her something. Competitive, calculating — she knew when someone important was watching.
"Excellent work, Ms. Barbara 'Bobbi' Morse," she said, stepping forward with a friendly smile.
They were on S.H.I.E.L.D. grounds — no reason for suspicion. Morse put away her batons, looked mildly puzzled, and shook her hand.
"The Academy isn't the right place for where you're going," Daisy said. "I have an assignment, and I need your help." That was a convenient framing — the real reason was that this was Victoria Hand's territory, and talent left there tended to get picked up by Hand first.
Bobbi Morse was absolutely talent worth picking up. She looked unremarkable at first glance, but her ceiling was high. One day she'd take on the call sign Mockingbird, and within S.H.I.E.L.D. she'd hold the designation Agent 19 — the same tier of prestige as Daisy's frenemy Sharon Carter, Agent 13.
Bobbi had been a competitive gymnast before S.H.I.E.L.D. She'd completed basic training. What she lacked was field experience.
She didn't hesitate long before agreeing. Going out on assignment was standard for agents — and when a senior operative of Daisy's profile showed up to recruit you personally, there wasn't much reason to say no. Her only condition: she wanted to spar first. She wasn't interested in serving under someone she could beat.
The result was predictable. Bobbi didn't survive three exchanges before Daisy put her on the ground.
With one future elite secured, Daisy went back to the roster. A few other names rang bells — but either their training wasn't complete or they'd already been informally claimed by other departments.
She stopped looking. This was basically a working vacation anyway.
Too many eyes, too many complications — her sword-and-shield setup was off the table. She tucked an adamantium dagger into her boot, clasped her vibranium bracers over her wrists, and pulled her S.H.I.E.L.D. tactical suit on over everything.
Her intelligence division had a small handful of field agents — not exactly specialists, but serviceable. With Bobbi Morse added, Daisy assembled a team of ten: five men, four women, plus herself. They headed out to Andrews Air Force Base to link up with the officer currently running point on this — Air Force Colonel James Rhodes.
Rhodes was tall and lean. He was Tony Stark's closest friend, and in a few years, he'd be wearing his own suit of armor as a member of the Avengers, operating under the name War Machine.
In the films, he had a tendency to blend into the background — a bit more memorable than background extras, but rarely the focal point. The reality was that he was significant.
Colonel was no small rank. Nick Fury had held the same rank before his retirement. Steve Rogers had fought for four years and made it to Captain. Colonel put you well clear of the front lines, solidly in the officer class — to an enlisted soldier, you were firmly part of the upper tier.
An Air Force Colonel was one step from Brigadier General. Air Force commissions ran higher than Army by convention, but Rhodes was still one of the military's genuinely rising stars.
It struck Daisy, privately, that the last several major figures she'd dealt with had all turned out to hold significant rank or power — quite the streak of coincidences.
At least she didn't hold a rank herself, so she wasn't obligated to salute.
The two of them ran through the full account of Stark's abduction.
Based on the combat evidence at the scene, whoever had taken him belonged to a highly trained fighting unit. Every member of Stark's military escort had been killed — no survivors, no witnesses. The attackers had also deployed two missiles. Colonel Rhodes's working theory was that a local tribal faction, motivated by grievances against Stark Industries, had organized the strike specifically to capture Tony Stark.