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Some days, Ginny Potts wasn’t sure taking this job had been the right thing to do. Every day that Obadiah Stane flirted with her was one of those days. He was always so careful, scooting right up to the line between boys-will-be-boys and outright harassment but not putting a toe over. It accomplished the same purpose, though, convincing nearly everybody from the media to the other women in Stane Enterprises’ admin offices that she was sleeping with him. Each sidelong glance or pursed mouth from her supposed co-workers, who didn’t have much to do with her honestly, was like walking through her day on sharp rocks.
She supposed that having to drive all over southern California running Mr. Stane’s errands should have been another strike against the job, but frankly, all the time she could be on the clock and not in the same building with him counted for the good in her book. For a man who had been running a major weapons manufacturer for over fifteen years, he wasn’t overly comfortable with current technology. Her predecessor as his personal assistant had spent most of his tenure trying to persuade his boss to launch a website for SE, and finally left the PA position to run it. For crying out loud, the man didn’t even want to fax documents back and forth to get signatures, instead insisting that Ginny hand-deliver and pick them up. Hence, why she was spending half this workday driving to a factory in Temecula—and part of why Stane Enterprises was struggling to survive. They were good at selling what they had; they were not good at coming up with new things to sell.
Creative stagnation was something Ginny understood. She had majored in business in college, but minored in art, because she loved it and thought she might combine the two someday, manage a gallery or become an agent for artists. SE was sluggish and unresponsive, and its competitors were stealing its contracts faster every day. Hammer Industries’ quality left a lot to be desired, but their CEO was damn good with a sales pitch. TSJB Innovations came up with amazing new ideas seemingly every day before lunch, making them both frustrating and admirable. Ginny secretly thought that anybody who named their company Truly, Simply, Just the Best, and then went by the acronym, probably had a screw or two loose, as her father would have said. Then again, creative types were like that; and they didn’t build weapons, so their impact on SE’s bottom line was minimal.
Alongside the more prosaic problems, however, there was one that stood out as unique. Shortly after SE finally launched its online presence, it gained numerous enemies, most of whom were standard garden-variety anti-war types, except one. He, or whoever, called himself Iron Man, and at first had contented himself with vague but sharp and angry public statements about the uses SE’s products were being put to. Then their systems started being hacked. Mr. Stane had hired the best cybersecurity experts available, but their best efforts had held up like tissue paper against the skilled and relentless onslaught.
The verbal attacks grew more pointed, and started to be augmented by physical attacks by what appeared from surveillance videos and witness reports to be some type of remote-controlled robot that fired missiles and concussive shots. It was, according to Mr. Stane, responsible for numerous deaths of SE personnel and the destruction of several million dollars’ worth of arms and resources. For a company already holding on by its fingertips, this was not a good look.
She sighed as she pulled into the factory parking lot and tried to put her concerns aside. Pundits had predicted the collapse of SE for years now. Hardly six months went by without some think piece in a business magazine or blog, speculating how different things might have been if Howard Stark, his wife Maria, and their only child Anthony had not died in a tragic accident on a lonely road back east in 1991. Ginny’s PA gig paid well enough for her to sock some money away. If the combination of inertia, competition, and a would-be supervillain finally did the company in, she wouldn’t starve while hunting new work. For the moment, her focus was on collecting the signed documents she had been sent for, left by the factory manager who was out sick, and getting them back to Mr. Stane as quickly as possible.
Ginny let herself in a back entrance; not wanting to bother the people working hard on the line, she didn’t even let them know she was there. The manager’s office was a train wreck, and it took a while to locate the folder she needed. She went out the way she had come in, but was surprised to see a crowd of people standing outside, on the scrubby ground beyond the parking lot’s edge. When a couple spied her, they started to yell and gesture wildly, joined by others a moment later. Ginny halted, puzzled, as the yells turned into screams.
Suddenly a gust of wind raked her hair and pulled at her skirt. She heard a roar like no engine she had ever heard, and the next instant, a powerful grip closed around her. The file slipped from her fingers as her feet left the pavement. Her shriek drowned everything else out in her ears for a second as she was carried aloft by—something. The flight didn’t last long enough for her to twist around in her captor’s grasp, though; within a few more seconds she felt earth beneath her again. She tottered briefly, crazily thankful her shoes hadn’t fallen off—she had saved months for these high heels.
The apparition she confronted did not seem impressed. It was bright gold and red, humanoid but with no facial features other than glowing slits for eyes and one slash for a mouth. A round disk blazed blue-white in its chest. “What the hell were you doing?” a male voice issued from the figure. “Did you think you’d jog home on those spikes?”
Ginny’s normal work MO was to keep her head down and stick to her business; but right now, anything approximating normal just caught the last train to Clarksville and wasn’t coming back anytime soon. “They’re my spikes, thank you, and I get around on them just fine. What were you doing, sweeping strangers off their feet with no warning?”
The impassive mask didn’t change, but the voice warmed. “Oh, I bet I could sweep you off your feet,” he almost chuckled before growing serious again. “No, really, was being caught in an explosion on your bucket list, miss, um, whoever you are?”
This had to be the robot of Iron Man, she realized, and she must be talking to the villain himself. If she told him who she was, was he more likely to kill her outright, or less? As she hesitated, a low boom reached her hearing, and it infuriated her anew. “I’m Mr. Stane’s assistant,” she snarled. “What did you blow up? How many people did you hurt?”
“Nobody!” the voice snapped. “The shipment of missiles in there was bound for an UN- embargoed country. I just made sure Stane couldn’t complete his illegal transaction. I called ahead to give the staff plenty of time to clear the building and told them to lock down and not let anybody back in!”
“Oh.” No wonder she hadn’t known. “I, um, just drove down, and slipped in to pick something up for Mr. Stane.”
The voice, even through its mechanical filter, fairly fumed. “No big surprise there, Ob…Stane would risk anybody, even his ‘assistant’, to get what he wants.”
Ginny could almost hear the air quotes, and the assumption enraged her as those hardly ever did anymore. “Assistant!” she nearly yelled. “Assistant. He might like something more, but I do my job and nothing else. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Is he—” Instead of more snark, the transmitted voice almost throbbed with emotion. “He’s not…” The iron man was silent. “Never mind. Not my business, like you said. Stay here, I’ll call somebody to come get you so you don’t bust an ankle walking back in those ridiculous heels.”
Before she could snap back, the robot blazed into the air and was gone in a blink. Every word its controller had spoken was true, though, she found. The factory had received ample warning, and only one shipment of weapons had been destroyed by a meticulously targeted detonation. Mr. Stane raged, and fired the plant’s head of security, a man named Hogan. “It wasn’t my fault!” he complained to Ginny when he came in to pick up his final paycheck. “I took the call, the guy on the phone was very clear, he didn’t want anybody to get hurt, get everybody out, not let anybody back in. I tried to call the threat in to HQ but nobody answered.” That, Ginny realized, was because Mr. Stane’s dislike, or distrust, of tech extended to letting anything or anybody other than herself take his calls; and she had been busily driving to that very spot. She sympathized, and Hogan went his way. He seemed nice, and competent, so she wasn’t surprised when she heard through the grapevine a while later that he had landed the post of deputy head of security for TSJB Innovations.
Ginny continued her daily routine, but kept thinking back to the encounter. She couldn’t remember any prior reports of someone speaking with the villain, and dove into some research to find out. Briefly, she considered asking her best work friend—well, her only work friend—to help her out. Natalie was a whiz at research, but Ginny decided against getting anybody else involved in her little project.
The research yielded much more than she had expected. Despite Mr. Stane spreading the word that Iron Man was a bloodthirsty mass murderer, not one deliberate death appeared to be linked to him. In fact, Ginny found only two deaths that had any tie at all to the hacker and his robot. One was an elderly retired engineer who had suffered a heart attack while Iron Man was hitting a shipment. Stane had terminated his pension, which had left his widow in a bind, but Ginny was glad to find a mention on a local website that the woman had received a sizable grant from a non-profit, enough to pay off her home and keep her there with caregivers. No real connection there.
The other was less easy to explain away, an SE employee found dead, badly burned. Stane had immediately blamed Iron Man, making a connection with the flaming exhausts that were Iron Man’s apparent propulsion as well as his MO of burning shipments of weapons, and trumpeted his assumption of guilt far and wide. A little digging, though, unearthed the autopsy report, showing the burns occurred after death. Intriguingly, the police report noted that the employee had been en route to meet a reporter doing a story on SE’s financial woes, which begged the question of what the deceased had planned to tell. (The reporter, when Ginny contacted her, professed ignorance.)
One other curious case she ran across involved a homeless boy supposedly snatched by Iron Man, at the same time an SE truck was hijacked. The thief and the driver reportedly fought, but both escaped when the truck overturned and burst into flames. There didn’t seem to be a link between the two events, though the boy claimed the robot had lifted him out of the way just before the wildly careening truck rushed by. The whole thing left Ginny wondering, however, if the would-be hijacker was an accomplice of the villain, and if actually stealing the truck had ever even been the intent.
The reason she had first fallen down this rabbit hole proved out, though; there was no one who had admitted to speaking with the robot-runner. So, Ginny reflected, she was likely the only person to whom he had offered any kind of explanation for his actions. She was strangely glad she had not told anyone about the exchange. Iron Man’s insistence that the shipment he had destroyed was in some way illegal or illicit seemed a stretch but by extension, could that conviction be behind his whole campaign against SE?
She wished she had had this information earlier, and that she had kept her wits more about her, in the moments she was in the robot’s keeping. There were so many questions she could have asked of its controller, with his husky delicious voice. Ginny sighed and mentally smacked herself, and let the matter drop, with regret that she would never get another chance. Which, naturally, meant she found herself in flight in the red and gold automaton’s grasp again, only a week later.
It was another errand-run, this time picking up some weapons samples Mr. Stane needed for a demonstration. Late in the day, the warehouse staff had all gone home except for a crew packing a shipment onto a truck, so Ginny stepped out the loading dock door, and right into the middle of a firefight between Iron Man and a half dozen police. For all her boasts about her skill navigating in high heels, she couldn’t run fast enough in them to dodge bullets. She barely had time to let out a startled squeak before the roar of propulsion deafened her and she was caught up in the metal arms of the Iron Man’s metal minion.
“He's got a hostage! Hold your fire!” an officer yelled from below as they shot skyward. That might have been the case, but Ginny didn’t feel particularly terrified as the wind whipped her hair into a ginger mess and the rows of warehouses, identical from the air, shrank to shoebox size beneath them. Truth be told, the strong embrace of the robot arms felt weirdly safe.
This time they flew a little farther, swooped down toward the flat roof of one of those indistinguishable blocky grey buildings—and in, through a square shaft that opened into a broad space. “Oh,” she gasped as they hovered. “Your lair, I suppose. Interesting. I’ve never visited a villain’s lair. Can’t say much for the décor, looks more like a grungy small-town garage than a hub for fiendish plotting.” As they touched down on the concrete floor, Ginny stumbled, held upright by the robot’s firm grasp, and when she looked down she saw one heel was missing. “My shoe!” she wailed.
The arms released her. “Why are you always getting in the way?” the voice of Iron Man demanded angrily.
She ignored him while she grabbed a squeaky rolling desk chair and sat down, pulled her one shoe off, and mourned its mate, lying lost somewhere in Orange County. Careful glances around showed no trace of another human, so the controller was in hiding somewhere. They also showed her, though, that her first impression had been incomplete; yes, the space was messy, cluttered with tools and fast-food bags and machine bits, but a closer look spoke of advancements far beyond SE’s capabilities. High-tech screens sat on workstands, an oddly familiar-looking round gadget lay faintly glowing despite the wires from it being plugged into nothing, and panels and switches could have been the latest holotech. “It looks more like the reverse,” she retorted. “I’m just doing my job, you’re the one getting in my way! Running around sabotaging right and left. How are you so sure the shipments you’re destroying are—are illegal? I’ve never seen anything to indicate that!”
“You wouldn’t! Obi—ah, Stane’s smart enough to cover his tracks. Nothing discoverable can be accessed outside his own system, but I’ve got ways. I’ve got connections helping me confirm that, for example, the truckload I just tried to take down, before the loading crew chief flipped out and hit the panic button, wasn’t going to a legit military contract, it was going to a Midwestern white supremacist group. I’ll destroy all I can, until I have incontrovertible proof, and then he’ll go down and Stark Industries will go back to what it was intended to be.”
Ginny blinked. That was new; nobody had called SE by its old name since the late nineties, when Mr. Stane had changed it after what he described as a great deal of soul-searching and with much sadness and regret for the tragic deaths of his friend, its founder, and the Stark family. She refused to let that distract her from the myriad questions on her mental wish-list, now that she had improbably gotten her shot at asking them, but it did give her a convenient starting point.
“Why do you want that?” she challenged. “Why are you fixated on it? You’re so obsessed, you don’t even seem to care what the public thinks of you. You’ve been blamed for crimes that aren’t your fault. That homeless boy--Peter, was it?--you did the same for him as you’ve done twice for me, rescuing from danger, so why do you let people think you’re a kidnapper, a killer?”
“Because I am!” There was pain in the tone, and she didn’t think she was imagining a strain of guilt too. Abruptly, the robot that had stood stock-still while she fiddled with her feet turned away.
“Are those bullet holes?” she asked, just as it halted mid-turn. A hissing noise like static issued from the speaker, and it resumed its turn, only to stop and hiss again. Were its hydraulics damaged, she wondered, or some other circuitry, or—it took a hitching step, and the obvious if slight limp brought a sudden, terrible realization that hit her like a blow. “It’s you!” she exclaimed, jumped up from the chair and approached, a part of her brain screeching at her foolhardiness. “Everybody thinks this is a robot, that the Iron Man is a person controlling it remotely, but it’s not, is it? it’s a—a high-tech suit of armor, and you’re in it.”
“No! That’s ridiculous. Who would be that batshit crazy?”
“Who indeed?”
Ginny tapped on the near side of the head—well, the helmet—and it jerked away entirely too quickly to be responding to external signals, even from a nearby room. “Hey, respect a guy’s carapace, would ya?”
She laughed, a little hysterically, despite herself. “Why?” she asked again, softly. “This is the most amazing engineering, and you’re getting shot at, getting yourself hurt, for what??”
He didn’t answer, just turned back to catch her around the waist and shoot back up through the ceiling shaft. Ginny yelped and hung on, anything she might have tried to say torn away by the howl of wind past them. Approaching from the opposite side of the SE warehouse, he swept in below the roofline and deposited her, still barefoot, at the front door. “You’re hurt,” she repeated in protest. “Do you have somebody to help you?”
He paused as if in surprise. “Uh…yeah. Yeah, I…yeah. Be careful, would you? Armor doesn’t make ya a white knight, and this rescue routine is cramping my villainous style, so, stay out of the way, okay? And watch what you say, to anybody, but especially to—to Stane.” With a little catch of breath and a whoosh, he was gone.
Ginny did watch what she said. Again, she told the police and her boss only that she had been whisked away and returned just as inexplicably. Really, she didn’t know why she felt this impulse to cover the tracks of a man who might be mad—a genius, clearly, but mad all the same. She also said nothing about the large box that arrived at her apartment a few days later, containing half a dozen pair of the highest-end high-heeled shoes on the market, in her size. And she barely admitted to herself the nights she lay in bed, staring up at her bedroom ceiling, imagining that whiskey voice in her ear saying more than just snarky quips, and wondered what the face behind the mask looked like.
She continued her research, driven to make sense of this strange someone. Who would do this; what had Obadiah Stane done to make someone hate him so utterly as to risk life and limb? From his angry rant about the company’s old name, she would have guessed a Stark, but they were all dead. And who could build such advanced tech to do it with?
Whoever Iron Man was, his predations took their toll. The US military continued to place their orders, since not one of those shipments was touched, but other legitimate buyers began to shy away even faster. Combined with Stane’s refusal to consider advancements, SE’s decline accelerated. It was no surprise, a few months later, when an offer to buy was made, by TSJB Innovations. Stane resisted, but the little company seemed to have unlimited deep pockets, and SE just didn’t anymore.
Seething, Stane ordered Ginny to dig up any and every shred of potential dirt she could find on TSJB. He was determined to bring them down before he would give up his company to them. The search revealed no dirt, at least none that her researching skills (though much improved thanks to, ironically, her side venture investigating Iron Man) could find. The owner was a reclusive genius named Edward Howard Marison, who possessed scores of patents on some of the most incredible tech imaginable. In fact, the diagrams and outlines made her wonder if her two pursuits might be about to merge into one. Maybe Marison was Iron Man, trying to drive SE into a ditch so he could grab it. Frankly, it was a disappointing thought; Ginny was just romantic enough that she preferred the idea of a brilliant man on some lunatic quest for justice, over the thought of simple avarice.
The final proof, to her mind, came when she ran across a patent for a tiny super-powered energy source she recognized. It was the one she had seen lying on the workbench in Iron Man’s lair. Somehow, though, it looked familiar in some other context, and after a minute or two she made the connection. When she had first come to work for SE, back when it was still Stark Industries, the building had been powered by a massive piece of equipment called an arc reactor, invented by Howard Stark. When changing markets had forced SE to downsize, Stane had had it deactivated, saying it was an ineffective relic whose creator had never been able to make it work; but she had accompanied him in supervising the disassembling and packing away of it, and she remembered it well. The huge base had crackled with energy, topped by a glass bubble—that glowed, she realized, the exact blue-white of Iron Man’s plug-in and of the centerpiece of the suit.
There were no plans for the arc reactor, written or digital; all knowledge about it had died with Howard Stark, so Iron Man couldn’t have hacked and stolen it. Yet here, in the patent office’s database, was a miniaturized version, with another man’s name on it, staring Ginny right in the face. Gathering every scrap of courage, she called TSJB and set up a meeting to talk with Marison about the purchase offer. Her position as Stane’s personal assistant got her in the door of the unassuming HQ, but it was up to her to determine whether her theory was true.
The man who met her was, without exaggeration, gorgeous. He was tall and broad, built like he could manage a flying suit of armor, with high cheekbones, long brown hair in a ponytail, and cool grey-blue eyes. “Talk to me,” he said after she introduced herself and they sat down, and the voice was all wrong. Bright, pleasant, a little tense, and not sassy in the least, it was definitely not the voice of Iron Man, filtered or not. With a mental sigh, Ginny abandoned her hypothesis.
The thing was, it refused to abandon her. She had a list of questions, information that SE legitimately needed to know before considering TSJB’s buyout, but as she asked about multi-year projections, due diligence, and post-acquisition positioning strategies, one thing quickly became clear—the man sitting across the table from her was no businessman. “Excuse me,” she finally said, a few minutes in, while he kept fidgeting with his ear instead of answering her. “Are you Edward Marison?”
He wilted. “Nope. I’m his assistant, Jim Buchanan—we talked when you called before. Mr. Marison’s a busy man, he doesn’t want to see you.”
Ginny gaped. “Too bad,” she finally got out past her utter shock. “I want to see him, and if he has any interest in making this deal, he will want to see me.” A thought came to her, and she took the leap without pause to second-thought it. “If he just wants me to go back and tell Mr. Stane what I know, that’s fine. Otherwise, tell him I need to meet and speak with him. I’ll wait.”
The man, Buchanan, chuckled. “No need for all that,” he said. One more tug at his ear, and the tiniest earpiece Ginny had ever seen popped out. “He says bring you in.”
She followed him down a hallway into an office where another man sat behind a desk. Edward Marison, assuming this wasn’t yet another bait and switch, was not as big a man as his aide, but looked strong under his expensive suit. His dark hair flopped as it would, though his goatee and mustache were perfectly trimmed, and his huge dark eyes narrowed as she sat down. “Can’t do much for you. I’m the nuts and bolts guy in this outfit, not the dollars and cents.” She could barely understand him; his voice was a hoarse whisper. “Sorry about this. Allergies.”
How very convenient, Ginny thought, and how unfortunate you didn’t have your assistant tell me that right off the bat. “What a shame,” she said, dripping with false sympathy, and reached into her purse. “Here, have a cough drop.”
He eyed them with the expected suspicion, but they were individually wrapped, so he took one. His other hand tapped on a glass plate on his desk, before he ran the candy over it. She heard a beep that seemed to satisfy him, and he unwrapped it and popped it in his mouth. “Thanks. Hmph. Okay, so—” His eyes bugged out and he started to swear, loudly, in a normal, non-hoarse voice that she recognized. “Pepper!” he yelped and spat the drop halfway across the big desk.
Ginny tried to maintain an air of innocent surprise. “Oh dear. Yes, I’m very fond of spice. A friend got me some Fire Drops, and I must have confused them with the regular cough drops. So sorry…Mr. Iron Man.” His eyes now watering, he froze, blinked, and coughed for real, but he did not argue. “I haven’t told anyone anything I know from our earlier interactions, and I won’t, if you’ll tell me why. It could be greed, I suppose…but I don’t think so.”
“I told you. Fraud, profiteering, selling weapons with m—selling them illegally, to both sides of a conflict, to terrorists, to tinpot dictators oppressing their own people. I’m gathering the hard evidence to put Obadiah Stane away.”
“It can’t be only that. I mean, it’s an admirable goal, if accurate. You’re persistent. Obstinate, if I’m honest; so much so, that your motive has to be more than mere justice in the abstract. This is personal, somehow, isn’t it?” Their eyes met, and Ginny could see so much there, both determination and uncertainty, before he pushed away from the desk and stood, turning his back to her. Did she dare play her last card now? “Iron Man is run by an arc reactor,” she said quietly. “Only one man knew how to build that, and he’s dead.”
Marison let out a small, bitter laugh. “Agreed, except for one word. Only.” Ginny cocked her head in thought; somebody else knew, or had known, then? “In December 1991, Howard and Maria Stark died on a county highway on Long Island, New York. Their only son Tony was with them—they were going to drop him off in the city, to catch a train to visit his college roommate in Philadelphia. His body was never found, and it was assumed that he was hurt in the wreck of the car; that he wandered away into the surrounding woods and succumbed to his injuries and the elements. Course, you know what they say happens when you assume.
“What nobody knew was that Howard was delivering some top-secret experimental prototypes to a governmental agency. What he didn’t know was, it had been infiltrated by leftover Nazis after World War Two, and they wanted those protos. So they sent their finest mind-controlled assassin, code named Winter Soldier, and a handler, to get them, by whatever means necessary. The car tires were shot out, and when that didn’t do the job, he…killed them. My parents, that is.”
Ginny was so busy matching the story he told to the official accounts, she almost missed that part, and nearly cried out when her brain caught up to it. “I played dead,” he continued, still not looking at her. “The Soldier’s handler radioed in to give the all clear, and mentioned Obie’s name. The man was like family to us, and he tipped them off where to set up their little ambush. I figured I’d better disappear, but I’m not good at sneaky. Fortunately, when they spotted me, my gift for bullshit kicked in. I spun ‘em a yarn about abuse that would make a social worker sob—lies always work best wrapped in a little truth--all but kissed their feet in gratitude for rescuing me from an unbearable family, and offered my services. Pointed out my extensive CV, even at a young age, and told them I could build gear they’d never dreamed of.
“It worked. They took me back with them. Wiping my brain, like they had with the Soldier, wasn’t an option, since that was the part of me they wanted to use. I put on a pretty spectacular show, if I do say so myself, of playing fake Nazi, although learning to goosestep went a little too far…Anyway, I got tagged to help the Soldier with his gear, and we became—friends, which, yeah, sounds beyond bizarre, but, brainwashed, like I said, so he couldn’t be blamed, not like...Well, anyway, I learned to suss out when he started to come out from under their conditioning, taught him how to fake Manchurian Candidate, and we got tight, we had each others’ backs.
“I…had to work on their weaponry and tactical gear—shitty tech, mostly, so it was easy to manipulate. Some of it was, was Stark tech, so not so shitty, at least not at first. I couldn’t do anything to stop Stane from selling to them, but I could backtrack the deals and find out who else he was supplying. I could monkey-wrench that stuff the easiest. Hell, I designed most of it, of course I knew how to fuck it up, and not end up dead for it. That…doesn’t make me any less responsible, for what they did with it, but…” His dark head bowed for a moment, before he shook it and continued.
“I did something else with the leftover bits and pieces, though; built an armored suit, something to even the odds a little, since I’m not a super-soldier assassin, and I’d gotten very fond of living, by then. When the time was right, we lifted all the documentation we could, blew the main base sky-high, and hit the road. I’d found out the current head of that government agency wasn’t dirty, so we slipped anonymous intel to him. I used the dark passwords to hack into their systems, set up an extra layer of security for myself and used an AI I’d developed to scour their files and find out all their secrets. The ghost formerly known as the Winter Soldier went after the Nazi branch offices, and I went after the bastard who colluded in my parents’ murders and twisted my inheritance beyond recognition.”
Ginny sat silent, shaken. “Well,” she finally managed, “that’s more of a story than I expected. Your assistant didn’t seem like the assassinating type.”
When Marison—no, as crazy as it seemed, he claimed to be Tony Stark—turned, a fond smile was curling his mouth. “Yeah, he’s not, when his brain’s not chained to a wood chipper. Or at least, his skills are focused in the right direction.” He let out a whoof of breath. “You asked why, Miss ‘Pepper’ Potts, and now you know.”
Behind her, the office door opened, and Jim Buchanan’s voice started, “Mr. Marison—” Stark’s eyes flicked past her, and he shook his head. “Tony?!” Ginny twisted around in his seat; the big man’s grey eyes had gone cold enough to make her shiver a little, and see the killer he had been made to be, and probably still could be if need called. “Jarvis said you…told her everything? What the fuck?”
“Years living a double life without benefit of cold storage makes for good skills at judging intent, Tasty-Freeze.” The warmth of Stark’s tone melted the icy glare, a bit, but Buchanan folded his beefy arms and still looked displeased. “The hard evidence I need to put Stane away,” Stark continued, his focus returning to Ginny, “can’t be accessed from outside SI—excuse me, SE, dry-fuck him up the ass for slapping his name on the business my old man built. I designed the firewall in junior high, but the morons he’s brought in to ‘upgrade’ it have managed to fuck it up sufficiently that my old external admittances won’t work. I’m still trying, but…I may have to accept that it isn’t going to happen, that the best I can do is keep battering away at him, as TSJB and as Iron Man, and drive the value down until I can buy it back. Still won’t be able to get those files, he’ll delete them all, and he’ll walk, damn him, but at least I’ll have my parents’ legacy back.”
Shaken became angry, in the twinkling of an eye. “I can get you those files, Mr. Stark,” Ginny said.
“Huh?” Buchanan burst out.
It was gratifying to see Stark look baffled. “I can’t ask that of you. If he caught you, I don’t know what the fuck he might do, but it wouldn’t be good.”
“You asking has nothing to do with it. You’ve brought it to my attention. That makes it my responsibility to do what’s right for the employees—they’re caught up in something they have no clue about.”
His wide eyes took her in, then with a sharp nod he moved back to the desk and rummaged around in a drawer. “Ha, this’ll work,” he said and handed her a thumb drive. “The dongle in here’ll get you into the mainframe. Worse comes to worse, there’s a panic button on the side to hit.”
“If you’re determined to do this,” Buchanan added, unexpectedly addressing her, “I can be there.” His gaze had thawed, and seemed to hold a new respect for her now.
“Appearances aside, Buck’s the sneaky one in this relationship,” Stark confirmed with a proud grin. “You're gonna retrieve shipping manifests, dating back to, hm, let’s say 2000. Look under Executive Files. If not there, they’re probably on a ghost drive, in which case, look for the lowest numeric heading.”
“And when I bring that information back to you?”
“I hold Stane accountable for what he’s done. I get my old man’s company back, and I do with it what he intended. Howard was a shitty father, but he didn’t build Stark Industries from the ground up to have it used to kill the people he wanted to protect. That’s my gig.” For the first time, he hesitated. “I shouldn't be alive unless it was for a reason. I'm not crazy, Miss Potts. I just know what I have to do, and I know in my heart that it's right.”
Ginny eyed him, drawn almost irresistibly to the mingled courage and concern in his face, and took the drive. “Agreed, Mr. Stark,” she told him.
“Tony, please. Well, not in public, until this caper is done, but, Tony.”
“I’m Virginia.”
He screwed his mouth around as if the cayenne cough drop still burned. “Nope,” he said and smacked his lips with a grimace, but a good-natured one. “You’ll always be Pepper, to me.”
“You know you’re gonna have to explain that later,” Buchanan told him with a wicked look. “And I’m just Buck, miss Pepper.”
Ginny left with a smile, despite the madness she was about to embark on. She conveniently forgot that she was not a good liar, and thus, ended up with her being backed into the corner of Stane’s office the next day by the man himself, winding up to an apoplectic rage. “Mr. Stane, I’m so sorry, I, ah, had a bid in on some really cute shoes on ebay, and my laptop is acting up, and you were at lunch, so I didn’t think you would mind. I checked the ad blocker, and the anti-virus software, and I’ll clear your history so you don’t get weird pop-ups—” One hand in her jacket pocket clutched the thumb drive, rubbing the ‘panic button’ and hoping she could talk herself out of this mess and not have to press it.
“I’m sure you would, Miss Potts, but the question remains, why were you really nosing around in my office uninvited?” He grabbed her arm; she screeched as he hauled her hand out of the pocket, clamped around the thumb drive. She pushed the button and flung the little device as far into the opposite corner of the expansive window-lined room as she could.
“Great, now that’s my favorite lipstick probably ruined,” she huffed, straightened her suit and gave him what she hoped was a withering look. “Mr. Stane! I have put up with a lot from you, but manhandling is not in my job description.” He tried to bellow over her but she barreled on undeterred, wondering if Tony, Buck, or both would actually show up. “You are out of line, and I haven’t taken you to task for it, but it’s way past time that I did. For starters—”
A tinkle of glass breaking came from the window behind her. Stane stared, then grabbed her arm and jerked her hard against him. “You!” he ground out. “You must be the infamous Iron Man. If you think you’re coming for me, you are sorely mistaken. I assume you can see what I’m holding here.” When he spun Ginny around, she saw the red and gold armor standing where a big potted fern had been moments before; saw, too, the small pistol her boss was shoving up against her temple. “You’re far too soft, for something so tough-looking. I know the public image I’ve created for you is bullshit. You go out of your way to keep innocents out of harm’s way, so you’re going to let me walk out of here, because if I twitch, she dies.”
The armor—Tony—took a step forward, then another. Stane’s sweaty hand clutched her tighter. “Maybe…” Tony said, his tone hard but almost reflective, “you won’t even…twitch.”
One gauntleted hand flew up and a blast of energy from it struck Stane’s gun hand. He shouted and spun, trying to drag Ginny with him, but she braced herself and stomped hard on his instep. Fortunately, she was wearing a pair of the heels Tony had given her, and the man howled and stumbled, just as the nearest window broke. A cleaner’s suspended platform swung half into the office and its occupant dove at Stane who lunged for his dropped pistol.
“No!” Tony yelled and fired again; this time his blast flung the gun out the hole in the glass to fall seven stories to the pavement outside. Ginny took her ex-Navy dad’s advice and hit the deck, beside the window washer’s fallen hat and sunglasses. Buck crouched on the other side of them. shielding her as Stane staggered to his feet. Tony stepped past them both, his mask open now. “It’s over, Obie,” he said, quietly, his voice his own, at once grim and sad.
A demented grin of realization overtook Stane’s face. “You,” he said again, before he whirled and lunged for the opening. Tony shouted and tried to grab him, but it was too late. Ginny cringed and felt Buck’s arms go around her, almost as solid as the Iron Man armor—one felt literally that solid, in fact.
As she shook herself back to reality, a pounding caught her attention. “Mr. Stane!” somebody yelled, from the other side of the locked office door.
“Tony, go!” Buck hissed. “We got this.” He looked down at Ginny, his face, so close she could feel his breath warm against her cheek, suddenly unsure. “We got this, Pepper?”
She blinked, several realizations hitting her at once, some not altogether appropriate for the workplace. “We got this,” she affirmed and let him help her to her feet. Tony hugged Buck, and then, to her surprise, hugged her, before he launched out the gap and flew off.
Buck was indeed an incredibly sneaky character. His account of washing windows, seeing Stane threaten Ginny with a gun, and breaking the window to come to her aid, was the smoothest lie imaginable, and covered all bases.
Having no family, and not being an old man, Stane had put off making a will. Fortunately, while Stane Enterprises was still in an uproar over its disgraced CEO committing suicide to avoid being charged with assault, the long-lost Stark heir turned up, complete with DNA test results to prove his identity. While the legal ducks were being lined up, the mysterious Iron Man revealed years’ worth of documents confirming Obadiah Stane’s dirty deals, and Anthony Stark swore to clean his father’s business up in response.
Once TSJB and SE were merged, under the Stark Industries banner again, things began to take off. Tony’s tech pushed the business to a new level, and in a new direction, as the weapons manufacturing was shut down and changed over to green energy, cybernetics and other cutting-edge disciplines.
Ginny was ready to take her severance pay and a break, though as she told Tony and Buck, she hated job hunting. “Why should you be looking?” Buck asked, baffled. “Tony wants you to stay. Think he wants you to run the whole show here, actually. Also, he wants to kiss you, but you didn’t hear that from me.”
“Excuse me,” Tony growled, appalled. “I’m standing right here. I did hear it from you. Literally, as a matter of fact. You said you wanted to kiss her too.”
“Um, could we get this ‘running the show’ statement clarified, first?” Ginny asked.
“I told you before. I can build, I can negotiate, and my math is always right, but the financials—I can barely balance a checkbook, Pep,” Tony said. “And Buck’s got no interest in that field. You, though—I’ve been through Stane’s records. You did most of the brass-tacks figuring for him, it’s obvious. And I—we—trust you. So I’ll take on research and development, Buck stays head of security with Happy’s help—that’s your man Hogan, who Obie fired like the dumbass he was—but you’re going to be the resurrected Stark Industries’ new CEO—”
Buck groaned. “Ask, for pete’s sake, Tony, don’t order the gal.”
“Will I need to get used to being called Pepper?” she wanted to know.
“Yes,” both men said in unison; looked at each other, then at her, with such similar expressions of near-adoration that she thought huh, maybe those thoughts weren’t so work-inappropriate after all.
“Deal,” she said. Instead of a handshake, she got kisses. “I need a shoe allowance,” she said. “And you two are going to do everything I tell you to, right?”
“Of course,” they murmured, and Pepper Potts decided taking this job had been the perfect move after all.