You might be wondering: why didn't President Maya just hand the black box over to Happy directly? Because that guy was Tony's bodyguard, Happy—and this was his very first assignment.
Put simply: Maya was a greedy, careful little troublemaker.
Hand the black box to Happy, and even a total idiot like Tony would figure out Spider-Man had real superpowers. But Tony's ODM gear was genuinely gorgeous, and it had her itching.
Back before all this, even though she coveted Tony's equipment, she still had plenty of scruples. She couldn't just go snatch somebody's stuff. But tonight—well, Tony himself had proposed the exchange. She was just politely accepting his offer.
Handing Happy a ball of yarn at the end? President Maya felt she hadn't deceived Tony at all. Whether Tony could read between the lines was, well—a separate matter entirely. Not her problem.
Okay, fine. A small fragment of her scruples had just cracked off.
The second Happy managed to escape the swarm of reporters, Tony's call came in on cue.
"Happy, what the hell? You can't even handle a simple task?!" Tony raged.
"Boss, this one's not on me. That Spider-Man is too cunning. I tried to trade gear with him and he handed me a ball of yarn. I got pissed, obviously, so I went to teach him a lesson—"
"And then he taught you a lesson instead? Are you kidding me? You're ex-Special Forces! You were top-ranked private security, the best of the best! You can't beat one skinny lab tech, and you expect me to trust you?"
"I feel so wronged, boss…"
That night Tony was cemented in the public mind as Spider-Man. That night Happy took the worst professional beating of his life. That night, Harvard Professor Fowler and host Helen checked into the Hilton hotel and…
Afterward, Helen asked: "Darling, how did you figure it out? You read Tony Stark's mind perfectly!"
"You don't think I was brilliant just now too?" the big soft-bodied Professor Fowler grinned.
"Oh, stop—you were magnificent… now tell me, please!"
"My predictions were all total B.S. First prediction: Spider-Man would show up tonight. I didn't even have thirty-percent confidence, to be honest. If I was right, great. If I was wrong, whatever—the audience wouldn't remember by then, because we were deep into the 'why is Tony copying Bruce Wayne and playing superhero' discussion. Didn't you notice? The viewers had already decided Tony was Spider-Man in their minds."
"So you were just swinging blindly and hoping to connect? Then is Tony really Spider-Man or not?" Helen's expression shifted to thoughtful.
This time Fowler answered with absolute certainty: "He's not. That Spider-Man tonight—he's the real one. His appearance actually proves Tony's story."
"How?" Helen asked, astonished.
"Because Tony Stark has no reason to care whether the public misidentifies him as Spider-Man. As long as he keeps denying it, nobody can do anything. In fact, being mistaken for Spider-Man is good for him—Spider-Man saves people. Spider-Man is currently the only legitimately heroic superhero out there! If Spider-Man were a supervillain, more than one bodyguard would've shown up tonight…" In that moment, Fowler really did carry himself like an Ivy League scholar.
Helen was getting more and more enamored. She stopped caring about his fat gut and snuggled right back up to him. "Darling, you're so clever. So how do you know Tony isn't really Spider-Man?"
"Hehe—that part's dead simple. The real Spider-Man doesn't need an auxiliary helmet. And his ODM gear is far more refined and advanced than Tony's own rig. If Tony already had gear that sophisticated, would he risk his life on a sub-par version? He's a billionaire. And yesterday—if not for the blessed ancestors of the Stark line—Tony would be lying in a funeral parlor right now instead of a German hospital bed!"
Uh, the Harvard professor was genuinely sharp. But he'd still walked straight into a certain unscrupulous President's trap.
Helen seemed to remember something and exclaimed: "Right! Spider-Man's black box was thinner and shorter—maybe a fifth the size of Tony's. Tony's equipment really was inferior to the other guy's! And what was that helmet even doing? Wasn't it just a safety helmet?"
"It's not just protection. It's also a signal collector. My university has similar projects, though nothing as polished as Tony's."
"So why would Tony send someone to impersonate Spider-Man and meet with the real one?"
"Don't forget—Tony Stark is a genius weapons designer. Eight to one, he's eyeing the other guy's tech. Shit, nobody in the Stark family has ever been a decent human being. Old Stark was like this. Young Stark's the same." Fowler was halfway through an answer and suddenly cursing.
Helen smartly didn't pursue that thread. She switched angles: "Then why did you insist Tony really is Spider-Man?"
"The peak viewership tonight hit 38.6 million. You know what that says? It says the audience wants Tony to be Spider-Man! I'm half an insider. Whatever the audience wants to hear, that's what I say!" Fowler was completely shameless about it.
Helen (internally): Is every Ivy League professor this impressive? A few hours and he's already got our playbook down?
Meanwhile, President Maya hadn't gone straight home. She was currently flying toward a downtown high-rise, carrying two silver cases.
And she'd taken care to activate Shadow Escape.
Moving fast along strands of yarn attached with Shadow Touch, President Maya reached the glass facade of the tower. Extending her sensing range, she located the "New Equipment Testing Lab" on the 28th floor.
Needless to say, President Maya took off running sideways across the glass wall. When she reached the lab area, she held the left-hand silver case in her Shadow Touch and lifted the right-hand one with both hands.
Then something strange happened. Sixteen invisible screwdrivers seemed to materialize along the silver face of the case. Sixteen screws unscrewed themselves with a soft whirr and floated up into the air.
A thin thread of shadow slipped inside the case. After a few soft clicks, a signal emitter—a red LED pulsing at a regular interval—flew back out.
President Maya didn't reach out to catch the tracker, and she didn't smash it either.
Instead, she extended her senses to the lab's wastebasket. Then the latch on the interior window pulled itself out. The glass pane slid down about 2 cm (0.8 in), opening a narrow gap.
Soon, a grease-stained tissue lifted from the lab's desk and drifted through the gap into President Maya's hand.
Magnifying her senses, Maya very carefully pressed the tracker once into the grease stain on the tissue.
Then the tissue floated back inside and landed back on the desk. The window slid closed. The latch clicked back into place.
Once President Maya had reattached the screws on the silver case, she sprinted straight down the glass wall and finally deposited the tracker in a garbage can beside the tower. Oh—and before leaving, she made sure to crush it with Shadow Sewing.
This pretty underwhelming Shadow Sewing wasn't much of an attack, but it was more than enough to wreck a small precision device.
Schemes upon schemes. President Maya was now playing the same game herself.