“That was a long-winded answer,” said Tony. “Can you try to be more succinct?”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” replied Diavolo Conroy. “I’ll keep it short and sweet if you don’t call me Dad again.”

  “Deal,” said Tony.

  The universe has certain rules. Among them are:

  He who owns a sharp tool will eventually cut himself.

  And:

  Laboratory accidents never result in super-hero-type powers.

  And most applicable in this case:

  He who laughs first gets caught.

  The first rule could be, at a stretch, applied to Tony Stark and the Iron Man suit, considering recent events.

  One notable exception to the second rule was currently swinging around New York City on spider webs, which did not bear thinking about.

  But unfortunately for Saoirse Tory, the last rule was to hold firm—in this case, she who laughs first.

  It happened like this:

  Saoirse’s head had been stuck inside the helmet for over three hours while she waited for the system to show some sign of life. Up to that point, there had not been so much as a welcome bong, so in spite of the inherent tension of her situation, Saoirse—stressed, dehydrated, and exhausted—found herself drifting off to sleep. As a result, when the helmet had leeched enough power from the gunship to reboot, Saoirse was startled and delighted by the sudden appearance of the heads-up display, and she let out a sound that was somewhere between a triumphant laugh and a yelp. This is a sound so common in Australia, where nature is so weird and wonderful that people are always being surprised and delighted, that they even have a name for it. Down Under, that sound is called a yelph, which only makes sense phonetically.

  So Saoirse yelphed, and unfortunately for her, she did it during those two seconds between metal tracks when Spin Zhuk’s ears were actually attuned to the world beyond her headphones. And even more unfortunately, the helmet’s seal that Saoirse believed would soundproof her headspace had been calibrated for Tony Stark’s thicker neck, so a few decibels of her squeaky exclamation slipped out under the seal and into Spin Zhuk’s ears. And to compound the yelph, one of her army boots scraped a wooden door panel.

  Spin whipped off her headphones and swiveled on the stool.

  “What is this?” she said to herself. “I am hearing unusual noise.”

  Her first thought was rats. Even though the Mandarin’s gunboat was kept spotlessly clean, she had found the Irish rats to be a tenacious bunch and also somewhat arrogant, often standing their ground when she approached and cheekily twitching their whiskers as if to say, I’m a rat. I’m here. What are you going to do about it?

  Usually, Spin let her boots do the walking and the talking, but in this case, if there was a rat in the cupboard, then it would be too high up to stomp, and the Mandarin would not approve of her shooting up his storage space. This is why Spin started speaking; she hoped the rat would hear her and scurry off someplace where she wouldn’t have to deal with it. She was not overly fond of rats.

  “I am coming in your direction, Mr. Vermin Rat. So if I was being you, I would pitter-patter away before I reach the door.”

  Inside the storage space, the Iron Man helmet’s motion sensors were automatically activated, picking up Spin’s sudden movement even through the plywood door, and Saoirse found that she could see and hear with greater detail and clarity than ever before. What she could see and hear was a Ukrainian super driver approaching her hiding place and apparently calling her Mr. Vermin Rat.

  Saoirse Tory had a prodigious intellect, but she doubted that even Albert Einstein could have come up with a plan in the few seconds allowed her. And the helmet had far from sufficient power to do much more than send out a ping and operate basic sensors.

  I am done for, she thought. Help me, Granddad.

  But the usually chatty spirit of her grandfather had no advice to offer, and Saoirse realized she was completely on her own.

  “Run away, Mr. Ratty Rat,” said Spin Zhuk. “Don’t make me do the wringing of your furry neck. I will do it without fearing the infection, because there is antibacterial gel in the restroom.”

  Spin doesn’t like rats, Saoirse realized, though it was no great thunderbolt of knowledge. After all, not many people did. Saoirse herself didn’t mind rats, but she hated mackerel, with their evil blue scales and the filmy membrane over their eyes.

  Saoirse did not consciously form a strategy, but she saw the fingers of her left hand reach out and scratch the inside of the door.

  Fingers! she thought. What are you doing?

  However, Saoirse may have prematurely scolded her fingers, for Spin Zhuk stopped in her tracks.

  “I hear you, Mr. Vermin Rat. I am coming.”

  But she wasn’t coming. Spin Zhuk was walking in place so the rat would think she was coming—something a person probably wouldn’t do if she knew another human was watching.

  That is so weird, thought the girl in the cupboard pretending to be a rat, and then she kept scratching.

  Spin Zhuk scowled at the storage space, visualizing a cocky rat Irish-dancing inside there. Mocking her. Taunting her. Belittling her heritage.

  “I am not afraid of you, rat!”

  No more “Mr.,” thought Saoirse. The time for formalities is passed.

  “I am Spin Zhuk and I have fought hungry bears, so I am not afraid of a rat!”

  She drew her Sig Sauer from the holster on her shoulder.

  For a moment Saoirse was so scared that she forgot to scratch, but then she set two hands to the task, mimicking a couple of rats.

  But Spin was set on her course of action now and, with barely a tremble in her gun-free hand, reached up and yanked open the cupboard, hardly giving Saoirse time to pull back her hands and tuck them out of sight, as if that would do any good.

  “Aha!” said Spin, then immediately sighed in relief.

  Obviously, I am not as scary as a rat or two, thought Saoirse, but then to her surprise Spin proceeded to say:

  “Nothing. There is nothing. Just a stupid helmet rolling around.”

  Nothing? thought Saoirse. I may not be a rat, but I am something.

  It took Saoirse a moment to realize what was going on.

  All she sees are some life jackets and an empty helmet. Spin thinks the helmet rolled out of the bag.

  It was enough to make a near-hysterical person laugh.

  And why not? The helmet is soundproofed, and all Spin heard was my boot scraping the panel.

  So as Spin Zhuk reached up to close the storage compartment door, Saoirse did laugh, and also said:

  “‘Nothing. There is nothing. Just a stupid helmet rolling around.’ You’re a stupid helmet, Spin.”

  Which made no sense, but in fairness to her, Saoirse was under considerable stress.

  Spin froze.

  “I am knowing this voice,” she said.

  “What voice?” asked Saoirse automatically.

  “That voice!”

  Inside the helmet, Saoirse turned pale. “You can hear me?”

  “Yes, but you are supposed to be dead.”

  “I am dead,” said Saoirse, not quite able to believe the words coming out of her mouth. “This is your conscience talking. You will be visited by three spirits.”

  This nonsense snapped Spin Zhuk out of whatever rat-phobia fugue she had been in, and she reached inside the compartment and dragged Saoirse kicking and screaming out of her hiding place.

  “Silence, child,” said Spin, “because I must be killing you quietly. Over the side with you. It would be better if you went easily.”

  This seemed to Saoirse even more ridiculous than her “three spirits” statement.

  “Better for you, maybe!” she said and tried out a couple of the staccato punches to the belly that her grandfather had taught her.

  “I never met anybody who was so tough that they could take a couple of shots to the breadbasket and keep smiling,” Francis Tory had told her, but obviously he had never met Spin Zhuk, because Spin not only took the shots but seemed to absorb them without any adverse effects.

  “Over the side and no more complaining,” said Spin, as though trying to persuade a stubborn child to take her medicine. “I have many works to do.”

  Saoirse attempted to wriggle free, but Spin Zhuk had restrained much bigger people as recently as the previous Tuesday, when she’d had a run-in with a Russian kettlebell champion who had objected to Spin’s stealing his Humvee. So to the Ukrainian wheelwoman, a fifteen-year-old slip of an Irish girl provided little in the way of a challenge. Spin flipped Saoirse upside down, pinning her arms behind her back and pinioning Saoirse’s legs with her chin, of all things.

  Unfortunately, she neglected to secure Saoirse’s second-deadliest weapon, her mouth, which had a direct line to her ultimate weapon, her brain.

  Saoirse realized that Spin was agitated because Saoirse was supposed to be dead. Spin had sworn to her beloved chef that she had done the evil deed. If it turned out that Saoirse was alive, which it had and she was, then there would be trouble in the camp.

  So Saoirse yelled, “I am alive! Saoirse Tory is alive!”

  Spin immediately realized her mistake and blocked Saoirse’s mouth with the handiest stopper, which happened to be her own fist—a fist that had little stifling effect on the Iron Man helmet. And this was how the Mandarin found them both when he strode onto the bridge.

  It was such a bizarre tableau that the Mandarin could not help laughing.

  “This is curious,” he said, wiping an imaginary tear. “Two living girls where there should be one. What I would like, Miss Zhuk, is for you to kindly explain to me, without frills or evasions, exactly what is happening here.”

  “Yes, chef,” said Spin, obviously nervous. “There were some circumstances—”

  This was as far as she got before the Mandarin lunged with extraordinary speed across the bridge, forcing the Zhuk/Tory combo against the bulkhead. But that was not the worst of it. The worst was that four of the Mandarin’s dreaded rings were now jabbed painfully into Spin’s left cheekbone.

  “Choose,” he said to Spin Zhuk.

  “Please, chef,” said Spin, trying to turn her face away, but she was pinned to the jolly photo of a fisherman drinking a beer, a photo that had always seemed out of place on this vessel built purely for war.

  “Miss Zhuk, you have lied to me and, even worse, failed me. Choose a ring and let fate decide whether you live or die.”

  Spin’s eyeballs swiveled as she tried to somehow see the rings pressed into her cheekbone. It was impossible, and she could not escape the chef’s grip. He was a master of many martial arts. Spin had once witnessed him disable an entire special forces unit without spilling the cup of jasmine tea he was drinking. Granted, the cup had a lid, but it was still an impressive feat. Spin had seen all ten rings in operation that day and knew that many of them had a fatal sting.

  One unleashed an ice blast.

  Another was a mento-intensifier, allowing mind control.

  There was a flame blaster.

  A white-light electromagnetic energy manipulator.

  An electric-shock emitter.

  And others she could not remember now.

  “Which finger, Spin?” asked the Mandarin. “Or should I choose for you, perhaps?”

  “Index,” blurted Spin, and there was a tinge of animal desperation in her normally even tone. “Index, chef.”

  “I just want you to know,” said the Mandarin softly, “that whatever happens now, our slate is clean.”

  Spin Zhuk took what was possibly her last breath and held it. The Mandarin put his thumb on the scanner at the back of his index-finger ring, sending two tiny spikes into Spin Zhuk’s cheek. Spin felt them and knew what was coming.

  “Oh—” she said, and probably intended to follow that up with some choice swear words, but the surge of five thousand volts through the Mandarin’s ring put all thought of speech out of her mind. Every muscle in Spin Zhuk’s body tensed so violently that she cracked her jaw and two teeth before passing out on the deck. The Mandarin was insulated from the shock by his ring and stepped back quickly so as not to be in the current circuit, but Saoirse got enough of a shock to propel her across the bridge as though she had been swatted by a giant.

  Leveque had just stepped onto the bridge in time to see the punishment being carried out.

  “Mon dieu,” he said. “Ze electro blast. I ’ate zat one. It leaves ze mark.”

  The Mandarin shook his hand to cool down the ring, which always overheated a little.

  “Freddie, I do think you are actually trying to provoke me. Be a good fellow and make sure Miss Zhuk has not swallowed her tongue while I feed our stowaway to the fish.”

  Leveque was disappointed that he would not be allowed to jettison the extra cargo, but he had the good sense to keep it to himself.

  “Oui, chef. Immédiatement.” He felt it safer to stick to his native tongue in case another mispronunciation slipped out.

  The Mandarin crossed the bridge and was about to grab Saoirse’s leg to drag her out when he heard a voice that was not Saoirse’s coming from the region of her head.

  The helmet was receiving a transmission.

  “Hang on, kid,” said the voice, leaking out through the now fully charged helmet’s neck hole. “I’m coming to get you. Stay hidden and stay safe.”

  Far from being irritated by Tony Stark’s insistence on continuing to breathe and insert himself in the operation, the Mandarin was actually pleased that he would have another crack at the millionaire. He had hated to see his prey escape—though he was not yet certain how it had happened—for it was his habit to crush the very soul of his adversaries in the moments before he destroyed their bodies. He’d had a very particular soul-crushing message for Tony Stark. The thought that he might yet deliver this message lifted his spirits considerably—so much so that he was glad Spin would survive the rings.

  The Mandarin squatted beside Saoirse and waited for Stark’s next message, which came a few seconds later.

  “Use your brain, kid,” said the faint voice. “Stay low and keep that big mouth shut.”

  The Mandarin smiled again. The child was staying low, no doubt about that.

  “And yes, Stark,” he said aloud, though the billionaire could not hear him, “she does have a big mouth, but it will be staying shut for quite a while. Perhaps forever.”

  It occurred to the Mandarin then that in American movies this would be precisely the moment when the bad guy indulged in a maniacal laugh. Because the idea amused him, he allowed himself a brief guffaw.

  “Ha-ha-haaaa!” he cried, shaking his fist for good measure.

  The creepiest thing about the moment was not the laugh itself but the way the Mandarin cut it off like a faucet when he grew bored with the notion.

  “Come, Tony Stark,” he said to the helmet. “Come and hear what it is I must tell you before I end your life. Perhaps the hearing alone will be enough to stop your heart.”

  Saoirse had awoken just in time to catch the movie-villain laugh, and she knew that had it been an actual movie, she would have turned it off immediately. But this was no movie; it was life. And sometimes the truth was stranger than fiction. This was one of those times.

  The Tanngrisnir

  Diavolo Conroy was often asked whether he had Italian ancestors, given his unusual first name. He would lie and say that he had been named for the brigand in the novels of his mother’s favorite author, Alexandre Dumas. Diavolo lied because the truth was too embarrassing to relate. The truth was that Diavolo Conroy’s mother had met her husband-to-be over a pizza in Rome and as a tribute to her new favorite meal had chosen the Italian name for her firstborn. The irony was, as his father later told him, that the meal had been a flatbread, not a pizza at all, and for double irony points, his father also confided that the flatbread in question had not actually been a Diavolo but a Neapolitan. So it was not a story Diavolo got into if he could help it, as it was impossible to come out of it with his dignity intact.

  I suppose it could have been worse, he often thought. If Mammy had eaten pastry that day, I might have been named Croissant Conroy.

  He decided now, behind the wheel of the Tanngrisnir, that if he survived the day he would share the story with the Stark fella, because he’d been dying to tell someone for years and Tony Stark seemed like he would enjoy a good irony-heavy tale.

  In truth, Diavolo was only ruminating on this old story in the first place because he was trying not to think about the ordeal that surely lay ahead.

  “Oh my god,” he said aloud. “My life is flashing before me.”

  And everyone knew what that meant.

  “Now, now, Diavolo boy,” he told himself. “Don’t be getting the trousers in a twist. It’s perfectly natural to muse on formative events before an engagement.”

  That was something he’d picked up during a psychology of conflict lecture when he’d been doing his master’s at UCD.

  In fact, that wasn’t the full sentence in that lecture. He usually tried not to recall the full sentence, because it was too painful, but he could think about it now that it might be his last chance. The full sentence was: “It’s perfectly natural to muse on formative events and lifelong regrets before an engagement.”

  Regrets—he had a few.

  The main one being that he and his wife Siobhan (pronounced Shive-awn) had never had a child of their own. They had tried everything, and nothing did the trick. Diavolo adored his wife and his life, and they both believed that a child would make things just about perfect.

  If I make it through this, thought Inspector Conroy, I’m going to sit down with my darling Shiv and discuss adoption.

  Had Tony Stark been there, he would doubtless have pointed out that Diavolo’s pet name for his wife was also American prison slang for a concealed blade. So it was just as well that Stark was off rescuing Saoirse. The last thing Diavolo Conroy needed in his life right at this moment was another joke about Conroy first names.