The Last Avenger [What If...? x DCAMU Crossover]

6. Not So Alone

A couple days passed, and the Russians were yet to come after me. My bullet wound healed, and I carried on with life as usual. I'd gotten pretty lucky at work; I had a little office booth to myself in the corner of my floor. It allowed me to work in peace, but I also reminded me of how alone I was. It looked like a landfill site. Stacks of manilla folders and binders, Steve's notebook, a Marvin Gaye album, and a wall clock that told the wrong time.

I scrolled though pages and pages of java script, looking for any bugs in the system and updating the software and hardware. In my spare time I worked on recreating some of S.H.E.I.L.Ds security programs, cross referencing them with notes to make sure they weren't HYDRA while corresponding with Morgan Freeman from the Applied Sciences Division.

There was a soft knock at the entrance to my boot and I swung around in my spinny chair. It was a young man, mid-twenties maybe with shaggy dark hair and a lean build under his suit. He smiled with just a hint of mischief in it. "Hi. Dick Grayson."

"Jane Wallace," I said. "Step into my office General, what can I do fur you?"

Dick took the invitation and sat opposite me in the spare chair. "I'm having some trouble with my laptop..." He produced the computer and placed it on the deck in front of him. "...And Lucius told me that you were the guy to come and see."

The laptop was riddled with bullet holes. 40 S&W 9mm Luger Parabellum rounds by the looks of it. He must've picked it up on his night job. I looked Dick in the eyes and raised a brow. He had the decency to look abashed.

"I was at my coffee shop, and I spilt a latte on it."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"So did your latte happen to be holding a semi-automatic handgun?"

Dick scratched the back of his neck. "Look I'm trying to be nonchalant about this—"

"You can be chalant as you like," I said, cutting him off.

"My coffee shop is in a bad neighbourhood." He gave a tight-lipped smile. "If there is anything that you can salvage from it... I would really appreciate it."

"I can do that."

Luckily the bullets hadn't touched the computer's hard drive and I plugged it into mine. I then ran a keylogger program, a small piece of software that would backtrace every keystroke and sort out which files on the computer were used most often. I opened a file to blueprints, a timetable and a brief inventory, and saw it was in Cyrillic, the Russian script. The letters were like tunnels and gates. It had been a long time since I had read it.

Fifteen years give or take. Not since HYDRA and that other place.

Dick had dozed off while I'd been working, and I gave his shoulder a little shake. His head snapped up and he looked a little startled but shuffled his chair around to sit next to me.

"It looks like blueprints," I said.

"Do you know what of?"

I squinted at the Cyrillic. "Gotham Harbour. A shipment's going out in a couple days."

"You read Russian?" Dick asked, sounding a little surprised.

"Aye," I said. "So do you normally write felonies in Cyrillic?"

"Uh... what?"

I point at the screen. "This is a list of goods and people that are about to be trafficked to Russia."

"Did I mention I'm a cop," he said, and showed me his badge. "I was trying to keep it on the downlow."

"And you've done a wonderful job." I gave him a bit of a stink eye but nodded anyway as I download the files onto a stick. I handed it to him.