Tony spread Ms. Davis's folder across the steering wheel and read by the glow of the dashboard. The AIM letterhead told him more than the documents themselves—whatever had happened to Chad Davis and the others on that list had a corporate sponsor. Someone had been running human trials in a Tennessee town and classifying the failures as suicides.
The problem was that hacking into AIM's internal network from a rural road with a damaged suit and no reliable connection was essentially impossible. From the outside, without credentials, their security architecture would take days to penetrate by brute force.
JARVIS, on the other hand, operated from the Stark Industries server infrastructure—still running, untouched by whatever had happened to the Malibu cliff face. If Tony could get a clean connection to relay instructions, JARVIS could be inside AIM's network in minutes.
He needed bandwidth.
He spotted the answer as he came around a bend on the edge of Chattanooga: a county memorial hall with vans parked outside and a string of lights along the entrance. A banner across the facade read Miss Chattanooga Christmas Pageant. Broadcast trucks were lined up along the square, their uplink arrays tracking satellites overhead.
Tony parked, pulled his hat down, and walked toward the nearest satellite vehicle carrying a roll of cable he'd found in the car.
The truck was unlocked. The equipment inside was exactly what he needed. He was running a speed test on the uplink terminal when the driver's door opened.
The man who got in looked at Tony, looked away, looked back. His mouth opened.
"Keep it down," Tony said.
The man closed his mouth, then remembered he was on a call. He said into his phone, "Mom, I'll have to call you back. The time to witness a miracle has come." He hung up and stared at Tony with the focused reverence of someone whose Iron Man portrait tattoo—visible on his forearm—suddenly felt very relevant.
"Tony Stark is in my vehicle," he said, barely above a whisper.
"Gary," Tony said, having read the credentials badge on his jacket. "I need forty percent more upload speed. The ISDN array on the roof needs to be repositioned. Can you do that?"
Gary could absolutely do that.
While Gary worked the rooftop hardware with more enthusiasm than precision, Tony opened a relay channel to Stark Industries and connected to JARVIS.
"I need you inside AIM's internal network. Full access—personnel files, research records, video footage. Start with anything tagged to the Extremis project and cross-reference against the names in the Davis file."
"Initiating infiltration now, sir," JARVIS said. "Their architecture is layered but not anticipating this vector. Estimated access: four minutes."
It took three.
Tony scrolled through the footage JARVIS pushed to the terminal. Research recordings, clinical documentation, trial logs. He watched a subject inject the compound and hold steady—thermal output climbing, tissue regeneration confirmed at the injection site. He watched another inject and lose control within ninety seconds, the internal temperature spiking past the threshold, the subject detonating in a contained space.
"They weren't building bombs," Tony said quietly. "They were building soldiers that couldn't guarantee they wouldn't become bombs." He kept scrolling. "And the failure rate was high enough that you needed cover. A terrorist organization claiming responsibility every time a trial subject detonated in public." He found the distribution records. Transaction logs, coded but readable with context. "So you found a buyer for the product. Sold the Mandarin persona to take the blame for your accidents." He leaned back. "I've got you."
He closed the connection, thanked Gary with the sincere brevity of someone who had already stopped paying attention, and pulled back onto the road.
What he hadn't found—because the architecture that concealed it was several layers deeper—was that AIM hadn't sold anything to the Mandarin. AIM was the Mandarin. The actor in Tennessee was Killian's prop, not his client. Tony had the mechanism but not the puppeteer.
He drove east, satisfied he'd solved it, and wrong about the most important part.
AIM Facility, Tennessee
Killian stood at his desk looking at the tracking screen and doing the math on a situation that had developed badly.
Maya Hansen's GPS locator—embedded in her credentials badge, which she apparently hadn't removed—was transmitting from the Fraternity compound. Korin Tower was visible from most of Manhattan; Smith Doyle had never made any secret of where he operated. What he had made clear, over years of increasingly public activity, was what happened to people who brought problems to his front door uninvited.
Killian had seen the Chitauri invasion footage. Everyone had, at this point—the full recording of Smith Doyle holding the center of Manhattan essentially alone while the Avengers handled the perimeter. He'd watched it four times with his analysts, trying to find the ceiling. They hadn't found one.
"Sir," one of his men said. "According to field reports, Smith Doyle personally went to the Stark villa and left with Pepper Potts. Maya Hansen departed with them at the time."
Killian's fist came down on the desk.
The surface cracked through the middle and both halves separated, the fractured wood exposing the steel frame beneath. His skin was running hot—the Extremis baseline temperature that came with successful adaptation, the constant low-grade heat signature that the serum's best subjects carried permanently. He was the proof of concept the research had been building toward: full regenerative capacity, thermal projection, flame generation on command, and none of the instability that turned lesser subjects into ordnance.
He breathed through the anger and made himself think.
Pepper Potts and Maya Hansen were both inside a compound that his best assets—Extremis subjects who could melt steel and survive building collapses—would approach as kindling approaches a furnace. Smith Doyle didn't use a suit. He didn't rely on external technology. His power level, whatever the precise number, had been sufficient to end a Chitauri invasion single-handedly without taking visible damage.
Sending anyone in there was not a tactical option. It was an execution order with extra steps.
And Maya—he'd known her long enough to understand that she was principled in the particular way that scientists sometimes were, where the principles stayed quiet until the work crossed a line they'd drawn years ago and never mentioned to anyone.
The question was how much she'd already said.
Killian looked at the tracking screen for another moment, then turned away.
"We leave her," he said. "She's inside that building. We can't reach her and we can't afford to try." He straightened his jacket over the cracked desk. "What we can do is hope she understood what she was walking into when she left."
He paused.
"And Maya—if you've already talked, we'll settle it later. But if you still have the sense you were born with, keep your mouth shut and walk out of there when you can."
He said it to the room, knowing she couldn't hear it.
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