Free The Ultimates: Against All Enemies by Alex Irvine Page A

if you didn't think it was true," Tony said. He leaned against the wall and hawked an enormous gob of blood into a handkerchief Blood had started coming from his nose, a slow trickle compared to the flow on his cheek.
    "Next time I'm not holding back," Steve said.
    Tony grinned. "Next time I won't stand there and wait for you to do it."
    "All right," Fury said. "I've seen enough. What's done is done. Now it's up to us to make sure that the consequences work for us. You two want to kill each other, do it some other time. Right now what we need to do is find out who we get in touch with at SKR."
    "Can't beat them, join them," Tony said. "You're a better politician than you give yourself credit for, Nick. And I hope that now you're not so worried that the original leak came from Stark Industries." He pressed the handkerchief to the cut on his face and added, "Now if you'll excuse me, there's a plastic surgeon whose golf game I need to interrupt."
    After Tony was gone, Fury said to Steve, "Sit." He indicated a chair.
    "Sir," Steve began, but Fury cut him off.
    "No. I did not say talk. I said sit."
    Steve sat.
    "Thank you, Captain. Now. I am going to ask questions and you are going to provide answers."
    'Yes, sir."
    "The first question is who asked you to leak the screener."
    After a pause, Steve said, "Admiral Garza."
    Sometimes, Nick thought, the obvious answer is the correct answer. "And I assume that Admiral Garza suggested SKR?"
    "Yes, sir," Steve said again.
    Fury caught himself pacing the room. Pacing annoyed him, in himself more than in others. He went back around behind his desk and sat. "I'm going to repeat one of Tony's questions to you. Why do you think Admiral Garza suggested SKR?"
    Steve shifted in the chair. "I didn't give it that much thought, General. Something needed to be done, and Admiral Garza found a way. That's as far as I took it."
    "Did Admiral Garza suggest to you that SKR was ready to take the screener into production?"
    "No, sir. He suggested them, and I made the call."
    Something about the newspaper article was bothering Fury, but he couldn't figure out what it was. "See, Cap, my problem here is that I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but at the same time I can't have SHIELD team members doing end runs around Congress whenever they don't like the political winds."
    "This isn't just any circumstance, sir."
    "Agreed, Captain. The point still holds. I took a lot of heat about Tony Stark at the meeting in Washington, because people there think he's a loose cannon. Now I get home, and I have an actual loose cannon to deal with, who also happens to be the public face of SHIELD. This is one more headache than I need."
    Steve stood. Fury eyed him but didn't comment on the small insubordination. Mostly he'd put the conversation on a chain-of-command footing because he wanted to calm Steve down. Now it didn't seem necessary. "General, I stand by what I said to you earlier and to Tony. This needed to be done. I did it. I'll take whatever heat is coming my way. Admiral Garza showed me the corpse of a Chitauri caught on the grounds of Andrews. Then we have the bombing downstairs. I'm not the most politically savvy guy in the world, but even I can tell something's coming. Do you want to look back and know that you didn't do everything you could?"
    Now Fury stood to look Steve eye to eye. "I don't know, Cap. Do you want to be the guy who stands up later and says he had to destroy the village in order to save it?"
    "I don't get the reference," Steve said.
    "You don't need to. Do you want to be the guy who uses the flag as an excuse to burn the flag? And what if Garza's got some other plan? You know as well as I do that you can't trust a single person in Washington. You should have brought this to me."
    For the first time since he'd come into the room, Steve's gaze wavered. "Admiral Garza suggested I not do that, sir."
    "Which is exactly why you should have done it, Captain Rogers. You're dismissed." Hell of a way to