Tony felt suddenly sick in the pit of his stomach, but he could not sever the connection. For years he had been haunted by Anna’s death, convinced that she had not in fact killed herself, and now it seemed as though the Mandarin was about to shed some light on the night she plunged into the Pacific.

  “Keep talking, Mandarin, but know that this could be the last story you ever tell.”

  “Vague threats once again,” said the Mandarin. “How utterly tedious.”

  “You got something to say about Anna, Mandarin? Let’s have it.”

  “In my memoirs I plan to spend some considerable time on this incident, for I believe it was significant to us both—formative, if you like. But for now, the abbreviated version.”

  The only word Tony could think of to describe the Mandarin’s expression at that moment was smug. Rhodey had a name for a face like that; he called it “punchably smug,” which Tony had never really gotten until now, probably because he was a pretty smug guy himself most of the time.

  “You have long suspected that Anna Wei’s life did not end by her own hand, and you were correct in this.”

  Tony got such a shock he almost lost control of the suit.

  “It was you? You killed Anna?”

  The Mandarin’s smug mask cracked a little in annoyance. “Please, Stark. I am speaking here. Relating. You are interrupting the flow. There is better to come—or perhaps worse.”

  Nothing from Tony. No snappy one-liner. That Stark was gone, and in his place was a coldhearted warrior.

  “This was no simple assassination. Preparation is everything,” said the Mandarin. “My illustrious countryman Sun Tzu said in The Art of War that ‘he will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.’ And so I prepared with great zeal and patience for this important assignment. I employed my spies and laid my plans.”

  “I thought this was the abbreviated version,” said Tony, his own voice sounding strange to him.

  “Ah, yes. Your arrival is imminent, so I should get to the point. Anna Wei was intensely loyal to you and to her adopted country, so it took all my ingenuity to trick her into working for me. I had a laboratory constructed in an underground compound and staffed exclusively with Americans. Miss Wei was removed from her apartment by what she believed to be S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives and continued her work on psionic control, not knowing that all the time she was perfecting my ring technology.”

  Poor, dear Anna, thought Tony. Kidnapped and tricked.

  “When Miss Wei’s work was complete, I tried to manipulate her into hacking the Iron Man suit, but she would not. Regrettably, she was of no further use to me then.”

  It was true, Tony knew. Everything made sense. He suddenly felt so angry that in legal terms his mental state at that precise moment would have qualified as temporary insanity.

  And still the Mandarin kept talking. “So Miss Wei is in fact dead, but she did not die by her own hand as the evidence pointed to. For I planted that evidence.”

  Tony’s heartbeat accelerated into dangerous territory and he could barely control himself enough to compose one short sentence.

  “I am coming, Mandarin.”

  The Mandarin chortled delightedly. “Oh, excellent delivery, Tony Stark. It would seem that my plan is already working.”

  Tony knew it was true, but he was past caring. The Mandarin had murdered Anna, and in the next few minutes, vengeance would descend from the skies.

  The Party Pack helmet put the Mandarin’s position somewhere inside a dead zone on a deserted stretch of the Thames’s shore outside London, England, four hundred miles southeast of Dublin.

  “Great,” said Prototony. “More docklands. We should find a bridge to melt. Whaddya say, T-Star?”

  “Where is he?” asked Tony coldly. “Exactly.”

  “No can do exactly. I’m only getting white noise. He must’ve set up one of his famous signal jammers there. My guess is that it’s a megablocker. That area has less signal than the Middle Ages.”

  “Where’s the dead zone?”

  “An abandoned structure on the wharf. Possibly a fish-processing plant. BTW, I love that word, wharf. I don’t get to use it often.”

  “So he’s in the plant?”

  “The helmet is in the plant.”

  “That helmet belongs to Stark Industries,” said Tony, and he accelerated toward the building.

  The fish factory had been abandoned for so long that it had adopted the muddy color of its surroundings, as though the Thames’s murk had leeched into the building’s concrete. In a way it was perfectly camouflaged; from the air it was almost invisible, and casual observers from a passing aircraft would have seen nothing but another stretch of shore. The riverbank itself had been eroded by toxic discharge, and Tony’s atmospherix told him that the water was not fit for consumption or even bathing. Needless to say, there was little in the way of marine life. In fact, the only residents in this backwater stretch of the Thames were discarded shopping carts, bicycles, and a cluster of laptops, yawning open in the shallows like hungry alligators.

  Of human life there was no sign on this side of the river, but the opposite bank was loaded with traffic and office buildings.

  “I’m going in,” said Tony.

  “I thought you might, T-Star,” said Prototony. “I’m guessing we won’t be doing the penguin?”

  “No. Full speed, nose first. Heat up the weapons.”

  “I’m nearly afraid to ask, but which ones?”

  “All of them,” said Tony.

  The line between hero and villain is a fine one, and Tony had always managed to stay on the right side of it. Sure, he had made a few tough calls but always for the right reason. Now, with hatred for the Mandarin wrapped around his heart and mind like a parasite, that line seemed faint and unimportant. What was a man if he could not avenge his loved ones? What was morality in the face of real justice? Tony had seen enough to know that the only real justice was the kind you took for yourself. And at that moment he had no real plan beyond saving the girl and making the Mandarin suffer. How far that suffering would go, he could not say.

  Tony was two seconds from blowing out the roof panels when he was distracted by the sudden arrival of machine-gun fire, which rat-a-tatted against his titanium-alloy armor, jerking his head to the right with the force of impact.

  “Armor-piercing rounds,” said Prototony.

  “Not this armor,” grunted Tony, shaking off the impact. Though not fatal, it had certainly been jarring enough.

  “People are really mean, you know that, T-Star? There’s none of this kind of thing at the Cannes Film Festival.”

  More shots flew up from below, this time from the right, spinning him left.

  “Locate the shooters,” said Tony. “Do it now.”

  He was not worried about the bullets disabling the Iron Man Battle Suit, but it was disturbing that the Mandarin had people in place down there.

  I have flown right into the middle of plan B, he realized.

  Tracer rounds flew up from below, their pyrotechnic composition burning brightly in the afternoon gloom, and Tony found himself in a swarm of bullets, his dive slowed and nudged off course by the assault.

  These guys are good shots, he thought. I am officially annoyed.

  “How many?” he asked.

  “I count three—one in front and two at the rear corners.”

  “Show me the first,” said Tony, and Prototony threw up a live feed of a burly man wearing a smog mask and flight goggles. Most of the man was inside the Mandarin’s blocker footprint and remained hazy even to the camera.

  “He’s got something on his back,” said Tony. “What is that?”

  Prototony attempted a zoom, but the image remained stubbornly fuzzy. “If I had to guess, T-Star, I would say a picnic basket.”

  No sooner were the words out than the man executed a vertical liftoff, jet stream bubbling in his wake.

  “Or on second thought,” said Prototony, “it could be a jet pack.”

  The Mandarin’s man kept firing as he flew, displaying admirable control of both his weapon and his jet pack and forcing Tony to engage in evasive maneuvers.

  “Gimme a tight spiral sequence,” Tony ordered. “Take this guy down before he hurts someone.”

  Prototony took the wheel, so to speak, corkscrewing Tony around the armed man and analyzing his technology as they drew nearer.

  “He’s running on jet fuel, T-Star. Highly explosive. Plus he’s carrying five hundred rounds in a belt and four incendiary devices.”

  So blasting the guy was out. Not that Tony cared much at this precise moment about the fate of one of the Mandarin’s goons, but an out-of-control crash trajectory could take the flying thug over the river and into the middle of civilian territory.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get up close and personal.”

  Tony took the reins and angled himself toward the man, matching his speed and arc. Still the man fired his automatic weapon, until one of his own bullets bounced off Iron Man’s chest plate and hit him in the shoulder.

  “Moron,” said Tony, without an ounce of pity in his voice. “Time to land.”

  He wrapped the injured man in a bear hug, reaching behind him to crush his fuel line. The jet pack fizzled, and Tony was able to fly the guy down into a mud bank, leaving only his head sticking out.

  “That should hold him till the police get here,” he said. “Now for the other two.”

  “They’ve flown the coop,” said Prototony. “I’m tracking them across the river, toward downtown.”

  Tony actually growled in frustration. The Mandarin was, true to form, prepared to put bystanders in harm’s way just to buy himself a few minutes. Well, Iron Man had a trick or two up his sleeve—or in his shoulder panel, to be accurate.

  “We need to shrink-wrap these guys while they’re still over the river.”

  Shrink-wrap was slang for the cellophane virus slugs that a bright young Stark employee had come up with for nonlethal takedowns. Once the slug impacted, the virus spread and coated the target with a restrictive layer of cellophane. The cellophane was porous enough to allow shallow breathing, but it had been known to squeeze so tightly that it cracked ribs. On the bright side for the jet-packers, the coating was also buoyant for thirty minutes, until it began to dissolve—probably a little less than thirty minutes in the Thames’s acidic water.

  “Shrink-wraps in the pipe, T-Star,” said Prototony. “Two targets, both wearing some kind of jammers. It’ll have to be visual targeting.”

  Tony hovered, watching the men move closer to a densely populated area.

  “Agreed. Visual targeting.”

  “So we’re going after these guys?”

  “No,” said Tony. “You are. Transfer yourself into the first missile’s onboard systems and then switch out before impact.”

  “Boss, I can’t leave you alone,” objected Prototony. “While an AI must obey the orders given by its human, those orders can be countermanded when such orders would allow the human to come to harm.”

  Tony would have been touched if he wasn’t so insanely angry. “Really? Earlier, you couldn’t wait to get out of the suit. Anyway, those are Asimov’s laws, not mine. I’m not big on rules myself.”

  “Come on, T-Star. We’re a team now; don’t send me away. You know that after the final detonation, I’ll need a lab reboot.”

  “Sometimes a team has gotta split up to take down the bad guys, right? We’re in the field now. T-Star and P-Tone, taking out the trash. You ground the jet squad, and I save the girl.”

  “Ten-four, partner,” said Prototony, unable to resist this sudden burst of buddyness. He transferred his consciousness to the weapons systems, specifically to the first of two c-virus mini-missiles, which he launched from the Iron Man shoulder ports.

  Tony waited until he saw the mini-missiles streak toward their targets, and then he turned his full attention to the fish factory.

  I’m coming, Mandarin, he thought. The past has caught up to you.

  Jet-packer number two was all about the coolness.

  I cannot believe how cool I must look just flying up in the sky and stuff, like one of those dinosaurs with wings. A pterodactyl. Yeah, that’s it. Pterodactyl Terry.

  The man’s name was indeed Terry—Terrance McGoomber. He was a Londoner and had long been one of the Mandarin’s second-string operatives in the East End. He had worked his way up through a dodgy security firm and a few years of arms smuggling before the Mandarin bailed him out of a jail in Taiwan.

  And now here I am flying a jet pack. How cool is that?

  “How cool is this?” he shouted in sheer joy, pumping a hundred rounds into the river below him and scattering a flock of haggard gray seagulls.

  Terry really should have kept his mouth shut, because the c-virus shell hit him in the side of the face and sent him spinning onto the riverbank, where the cellophane quickly crawled over his body like an aggressive translucent octopus. And because of his wide-open bragging mouth, he ended up swallowing a large blob of the material and was constipated for a month.

  Jet-packer number three got a little farther, because she was made of more dogged stuff than Pterodactyl Terry. In fact, she was Terry’s fiancée and was in proud possession of a fake diamond engagement ring and the quite splendid name Summer Berry, which would be enough to make most men fall in love, and Terry was no exception. Summer and Terry were supposed to be starting their honeymoon on this very day, but the Mandarin had messed up those plans by calling in his B-team to stake out a stinking fish factory on the Thames. The place had no conveniences. Even Starbucks hadn’t bothered to set up shop out there. Summer was fed up, but she kept that to herself. The Mandarin didn’t approve of lip, and the money he paid would see them through the first ten years of their marriage.

  I’ll do the job, thought Summer as she crested the Thames bank and took aim at a wedding party outside the Duck and Dive Pub. But if my wedding day is ruined, so is everyone else’s.

  This was the last semirational thought she would have for a while, because at that moment the c-virus slug struck her square in the back of her helmet, splurging onto the communications module. Just before she got wrapped up tight and deposited in four feet of sludge by the riverbank to be pecked at by desultory seagulls, Summer could have sworn she heard a tinny voice say, “Mission completed, T-Star. P-Tone, peace out.”

  As an aside, the wedding couple below became minor celebrities when they recorded the entire attempted attack and even fished Summer out of the sludge. The bride was heard to say, “This was the best wedding ever. Beyond my wildest dreams.” And the groom would later go on to win Celebrity MasterChef.

  Tony blasted through the factory’s skylight and did a quick circuit of the building, too fast for anyone without a target locking system to get a bead on him. He needn’t have bothered with the fancy flying, because the Mandarin was lounging on a totally out-of-place purple velvet sofa set squarely in the center of the main chamber, apparently paying little attention to the drama he had caused. Saoirse sat beside him, looking equal parts surly and terrified, which is a hybrid expression that only teenagers can pull off. Between them sat the Party Pack helmet, its expression only slightly less bored than the Mandarin’s.

  This was confusing behavior on the Mandarin’s part. Surely he should be doing his little combat disco dance or at the very least holding Saoirse by the throat and threatening to kill her if Tony came any closer. Tony ran a thermal imaging scan but could not penetrate the Mandarin’s blocker. There were no other visible threats, which almost certainly meant that there were hidden threats somewhere.

  Tony throttled back and touched down ten feet from the man who had murdered his friend. He knew that were it not for Saoirse, he would simply blast over and throttle the terrorist. But his respect for the man’s sneakiness gave him pause. So he simply stood there fuming, waiting for the Mandarin to launch into his monologue. He did not have to wait long.

  “Thank you, Mr. Tony Stark, for your respect,” said the Mandarin, clinking those accursed rings off each other like some kind of deadly executive toy.

  “Respect?” said Tony. “You think I respect you?”

  “You respect my intellect and my abilities. Otherwise I think you would have already tried to kill me.”

  “I respect Saoirse and her intellect. And I bet a low-life murderer like you will have set up some kind of trap where the kid gets it if I do anything. Am I right?”

  “You are on the right track,” admitted the Mandarin. “I wish to finish our combat from the island. But not like this. Not while you wear the suit.”

  “Man to man, right?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Now why would I do that?”

  The Mandarin rapped on the side of Saoirse’s head, which is about the most annoying thing you can do to teenagers aside from telling them to calm down.

  “Tell him, child,” he said. “Tell Mr. Tony Stark why he must fight me.”

  Saoirse lifted her chin and Tony could see now that whatever the Mandarin had done to her, she had put up a fight. Her face was scraped, both eyes were puffy, and she was missing a front tooth.

  “Big Mr. Mandarin tagged me with his stupid ring,” she said belligerently, showing it on her finger. But just below the belligerence there was an undercurrent of desperation. “It’s got some kind of tightening mechanism.”

  Tony flexed and a dozen smart missiles sprouted on his shoulders.

  “An interesting reaction,” said the Mandarin. “You plan to burn the ring. Unfortunately, that would kill the wearer, too. I doubt your missiles are so smart they can target just one ring.”

  “Tell me what’s in it!” he demanded.

  “A shaped charge coded to my biometrics. If I die, she dies. There is also a proximity alert, and a timer. The girl has about five minutes to live, much less if she attempts to leave this building. My signal jammers don’t affect my own technology.”

  “Five minutes?” said Tony. “If you wanted this showdown, then why the jet-pack guys?”