Compared to N'Jadaka, Stephanie had more faith in Camila, who had once fought with Peruvian anti-government guerrillas.
However, Eternal City's strategic deployment in South America required Camila to serve as a field commander. As an experienced insurgent leader, she was already stretched thin—and besides, she wasn't Black. Her potential psychological impact on Wakanda paled in comparison to N'Jadaka's. For all his shortcomings, N'Jadaka's heritage alone outweighed them. His declared claim to the throne was far too powerful to ignore. Even if he harbored ulterior motives, Solomon could only look the other way—in truth, he didn't care at all about N'Jadaka's loyalty. Loyalty or betrayal, it made no difference. What mattered was that, for now, their interests aligned.
Solomon needed a pretext to take action against Wakanda. N'Jadaka was, essentially, his "Earl of Glamorgan."
"If he follows orders, he's a pawn. If he doesn't, he dies. It's that simple."
That statement from Solomon was enough to dissuade Stephanie from pressing charges over Glamorgan's incompetence. She followed orders and authorized another shipment of ammunition. Eternal City had only delivered weapons to New York—N'Jadaka, even if he could scrounge up bullets on his own, couldn't maintain sustained consumption rates. He had no choice but to continue relying on Eternal City. What he didn't know was that Stephanie had already spoken to Wilson Fisk. (Stephanie didn't think much of Fisk, believing that such an uncouth partner would eventually die in a gang war anyway.) The black market arms dealers on the East Coast had been ordered not to sell ammunition to N'Jadaka. The most he could buy were handgun and rifle rounds from a Walmart.
Add to that the fact that N'Jadaka's recruits were all untrained felons, only marginally better marksmen than African warlords whose soldiers relied more on faith and bravado than skill—and even judges didn't like them because they made case quotas harder to hit—if N'Jadaka still managed to succeed, it would be a miracle.
N'Jadaka wiped the blood from his hands and racked the slide to check the chamber. Under the dim light, spent casings still warm from the gunfire reflected dully on the concrete floor. Though early summer air was chilly, the adrenaline coursing through him numbed the cold.
"Who's next? Better hurry—I'm on a schedule," he said impatiently, nudging a corpse's head aside with the toe of his combat boot.
The face of the corpse was covered in bruises inconsistent with gunshot wounds—clear signs of a brutal beating before death.
This idiot had tried to convince him to seize Wilson Fisk's turf. When N'Jadaka refused, the man started secretly rallying others in the crew, plotting to take N'Jadaka out and assume leadership. N'Jadaka was tired of it. He'd already made his intentions clear. Maybe the guy had fried his brain with drugs—many of the convicts he'd recruited were short-sighted fools. The smarter ones collected evidence, hoping to cut deals as informants later.
That evidence now burned inside a barrel, flames licking up the documents. The oil drum had originally been used by four homeless men for warmth, but the second they saw N'Jadaka armed, they ran without hesitation.
Once the adrenaline faded, no one else dared to speak out. Amid the murmurs and shuffling of his subordinates, he heard cowardice. And that was exactly what he wanted. As he prepared to give a rousing speech, a gust of rooftop wind raised goosebumps on his arms. Though not a superstitious man, he sensed something ominous. Even the yowls of nearby alley cats grated on his nerves.
Stephanie had no intention of letting N'Jadaka off the hook so easily.
"We've got FBI credentials now, my lord," she reported proudly to Solomon after hanging up a call. "All of our intelligence staff are now officially registered. My father spent a fortune to get us listed under a Congressional black ops task force. Turns out infiltrating the U.S. intelligence system is absurdly easy. I honestly don't understand how Alexander Pierce took so long to do it—what a useless man."
Stephanie's disdain for the radical faction of HYDRA was no secret. To her, they were a bunch of failed opportunists.
Solomon carefully reviewed her proposal—Stephanie intended to embed Eternal City's agents within the FBI. When N'Jadaka's operation eventually drew federal scrutiny, these agents would be slotted in as undercover FBI operatives infiltrating his organization. It was classic FBI playbook: send undercover agents into non-government organizations (the truly independent ones, without corporate backing), incite the leaders to commit crimes, then arrest them red-handed and prosecute them for felonies.
Some of these FBI agents, due to their professionalism, even rose to second-in-command or took over entire groups. This wasn't hypothetical; countless real-world examples existed where illegal domestic groups were pushed into committing acts classified as terrorism by undercover agents. The legality of such entrapment was deeply questionable. To counter bad press, the FBI had recently returned to tactics pioneered by Edgar Hoover—who had dominated American intelligence for half a century. They poured money into Hollywood, funding movies and shows glorifying FBI agents infiltrating terror cells, all to launder their image.
But the FBI's most mysterious aspect wasn't its operations—it was its personnel system.
No one knew how many agents the FBI actually had (aside from those with cross-state jurisdiction). You could never be sure if a friend or relative was an agent. Even the current FBI Director didn't know how many agents were under their command. Many carried no badges. Others didn't exist on paper at all. Some had resigned long ago—but their slots still drew salaries.
Local police often arrested people claiming to be FBI agents. The real ones could always verify themselves. The fakes? Sometimes even the Bureau couldn't say for sure if the person was rogue or just off the books. That's why former S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and current Eternal City operatives loved posing as FBI agents—because the FBI couldn't keep track of its own people. It was the ultimate irony: America, so proud of its freedoms and always mocking Soviet surveillance, was unknowingly the real "Big Brother" from 1984. From the FBI collaborating with Facebook to monitor users, to corporate-backed manipulation via Silicon Valley platforms—everything Orwell described was real. A cruel joke of the century.
Inevitably, FBI agents would infiltrate N'Jadaka's group. So why not make sure those agents were Eternal City's? On the surface, Fimbulwinter's elite troops would monitor him. In the shadows, Eternal City's assassins would eliminate Wakandan spies. And buried deeper still, Eternal City's undercover agents would pose as FBI operatives infiltrating N'Jadaka's gang. No matter what he planned, Stephanie could end him at a moment's notice.
Back on the smuggling ship, N'Jadaka had understood this perfectly. Eternal City would never let him out of their grip. His only path to survival lay through Wakanda. Only by entering Wakanda could he hope to use their resources to escape surveillance—and that mysterious assassin aboard the ship.
To do that, he had to eliminate a rising rival in his ranks—brutally and decisively.
And he did it without hesitation, without remorse.
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