Course of action: do not go down without a fight.

  Tony Stark’s startle reflex had always been somewhat exaggerated, or as Nick Fury had once put it: “Stark, you are jumpier than a sack of guilt.” Never one to ignore a potential asset, Stark had worked on this one through meditation and training until he could act with the speed of a reflexive reaction. Simply put: when Tony Stark felt the need for speed, he could move as though someone had stuck a pin in his behind.

  And Tony Stark felt that particular need right now.

  When the Iron Man armor folded, slotted, and whirred back, Stark’s captors were expecting to find a dazed industrialist who was soft and useless without his space-age armor. What they certainly were not expecting was a highly trained and motivated individual who flew out of the suit as though ejected.

  Cole Vanger stood closest to the “package” and had the smug grin wiped off his face when Tony Stark did not plead for his life but instead seemed to analyze Vanger’s armaments while flying toward him, preparing to turn them to his own advantage.

  “What?” said Vanger, and then, “Huh?”

  Then Stark’s head-butt had broken his nose and the industrialist’s thumbs were covering Vanger’s.

  Don’t do that, Vanger might have said if pain had not filled his skull, displacing any rational thought. You’ll ignite my flamethrowers.

  This, of course, was exactly what Tony Stark had in mind. Vanger’s flamethrower nozzles were mounted on his shoulders like the robotic parrots of a techno pirate, and at this angle they were pointed directly into the exposed guts of the Iron Man rig. Tony reasoned that if he couldn’t use the suit, then no one should be able to. All depended on the kind of fuel this guy had. Old-fashioned kerosene wouldn’t do much more than heat the plates a few degrees and maybe buckle a couple of them, but if he had something a little more gel-based in the tanks, then that could be it for the Party Pack.

  Tony pressed down on Vanger’s thumbs and then drew the man close, as if they were doing the rhumba. They were not dancing; it was simply that Tony had no desire to get his ears burned off by the jets of flame shooting over both shoulders.

  As it turned out, it didn’t matter what kind of fuel Cole “Pyro” Vanger was packing, because the flames had barely licked the suit’s innards when Freddie Leveque crashed into the pair, sending the jumble of limbs and trunks rolling across the chamber, which had positive and negative results for both sides.

  From Tony’s point of view, it was a darn shame that the flames did not get a chance to damage the suit, as, like any inventor, he hated to give away tech. On the other hand, the flaming arc that continued to spurt from Vanger’s flamethrowers did some considerable damage to his kidnappers’ equipment, frying two monitors entirely and sending the remaining men scurrying for cover.

  “Restrain him!” cried the chef, irritated. “What do I pay you báichıˉ for?”

  Tony held on to his presence of mind and located Leveque’s head, which was jammed into Vanger’s armpit. Fortunately, Tony’s foot was also in that vicinity, so he clipped Leveque’s forehead with the sole of one sneaker, wishing that he had opted to wear his hard leather loafers instead.

  And people say fashion isn’t important, he thought, scrambling over the stunned Leveque and assessing the building as he ran.

  One obvious exit along the ramp…There may be more men up there….They probably have orders not to kill me, but still, they might be a little disconcerted by the pyrotechnics….

  In Tony’s experience, disconcerted triggermen tended to be a little happy on their triggers. So he discounted the ramp option almost immediately and veered left toward the shadows.

  Be a stairwell, he broadcast at the shadows. Be a stairwell.

  And a stairwell there miraculously was. It was virtually unguarded, too, aside from the echoing smacks of footsteps descending from above, but Tony was already committed to that direction.

  I would rather take my chances with mystery footsteps than a room full of bullets, flames, and angry men, Tony decided.

  So upward it was. Tony raced up the spiral staircase two steps at a time, slipping more than once on the slick stone. Whoever was coming was coming down fast, and Tony decided he would take a breath and use the momentum of the mystery descender against him.

  So he stopped suddenly and ducked, figuring the man would go tumbling over his hunched form. But just as suddenly, the footsteps halted, as though the hidden person had caught on to his plan.

  There was no time for delay, as the other men had gathered themselves and were hustling in his direction; so Tony, having quickly considered his options, decided to keep going.

  Stay down, he told himself. Never be where you’re supposed to be.

  On he went, rounding the corner at high speed, ready to roll the man across his back, sending him crashing into his comrades like a human bowling ball. That would surely buy Tony a few more seconds to figure a way out of this ruin.

  But no one went tumbling over Tony Stark’s dipped shoulders. Instead, Tony came nose to toe with a pair of green-laced, scuffed army boots. A bemused voice floated down to him.

  “Never be where you’re supposed to be, right?”

  Tony looked up to see green eyes gazing down at him, framed by a mop of red curly hair.

  “Hello, boss,” said the girl.

  Tony knew that voice well. It traveled with him everywhere.

  “You sound like Friday,” said Tony. He rapped experimentally on the steel toe cap of one boot. “But you’re real. I don’t understand.”

  “Wow,” said Friday. “Tony Stark doesn’t understand. I should take a photo.”

  And then she shot him in the neck with a trank so big that Tony was knocked immediately back to the 1980s.

  “Duran Duran, Dad,” he mumbled. “They’re a band. Hello.”

  He keeled over backward, tumbling down the stairs he had so craftily raced up.

  Not craftily enough, it turned out.

  The last thing Tony felt before he passed out was puzzlement, and that would be the first thing he felt when he woke up.

  Well, technically the second thing. The first would be pain.

  If Tony Stark had been offered the choice of waking up or staying down in the shadows for a while, he would absolutely have picked the latter. Stark had been knocked senseless enough times to know that the waking up part was always a rough ride, especially when the cocktail of trauma and drugs that had put him out in the first place was extreme.

  His buddy Rhodey had said once, “You know, Tony man, every time you take a hit, you lose a few IQ points. Keep this up and soon you won’t be a genius no more.”

  To which Tony had said, “You mean soon I won’t be a genius anymore, genius.”

  And then Rhodey had gotten offended and they’d ended up wrestling in the den and putting a hole in a P. J. Lynch oil painting that was worth more than a top-of-the-line sports car.

  Tony felt his consciousness bloom inside the darkness of his head now, and with the bloom came three kinds of pain: sharp, dull, and aching.

  What’s happening? he thought. Oh my god. My head is exploding.

  The puzzlement persisted all the way into consciousness, and Stark found himself wedged under a bunk bed in the corner of a windowless room with moss-covered stone walls and a barred door.

  Outside the door sat Friday, on a blue plastic chair that must have come from a kindergarten classroom somewhere. She was dressed in rainbow leggings and army boots, and her red curls fizzed over the collar of an oversize combat jacket.

  “Do you like your cell?” she asked.

  Tony presumed this was rhetorical and did not answer, deciding to use his energy to crawl out from under the bunk.

  “Really, Friday?” he said at last, in between gasps of air. “You had to stash me under the bed like some kind of troll?”

  “You put yourself under the bed, boss,” retorted Friday. “I’d have a shrink look into that. I know the S.H.I.E.L.D. psychiatrist has been dying to get you in a padded cell for years. But I asked you about this cell. Maybe you don’t like it, but you should appreciate its design. The classic prison cell. Basically unchanged for centuries. Four walls and a door. In functional terms, this room is like the spoon. It can’t be improved upon.”

  Tony rolled onto his back. “I’ve been in prison cells before, Friday. Maybe you heard?”

  “Afghanistan?” said Friday. “I did hear. The whole world heard. A billionaire is imprisoned for a month and the entire planet goes crazy. But this time is different.”

  “Yeah, how so?”

  “Why don’t you tell me, genius?”

  Tony sat up, scratching the bristles of his laser-cut goatee. “How is this incarceration different? Let me see. I would guess you have learned from the mistakes of my last captors, so you won’t be asking me to build anything dangerous.”

  “Correct,” Friday confirmed. “We already have what we need from you.”

  “The suit, I suppose.”

  “Suppose what you will.”

  “And you’ll keep me isolated?” Tony guessed.

  “Right again. No chance for any mind games.”

  Tony wiggled his fingers in the style of Stephen Strange. “Yeah? Maybe I’m playing a mind game right now.”

  “I’ve been inside your mind, remember? None of your clever manipulations will work on me.”

  “Unless they’re already working.”

  “Now you’re being childish.”

  “Now you’re being childish.”

  Friday sighed. “You don’t get it, do you? You’ve got nothing. Every stitch of clothing has been removed. We wanded your hair and bones. They even yanked out that crown on your molar in case there was a tracker in there.”

  Tony noticed that he was wearing a black sweat suit with gold stripes down the arms and legs.

  “This is actually quite cool—in a retro kind of way. Can I keep it?”

  “Of all the things you could ask me, that’s what you pick? What’s the matter, Tony? Too insecure to admit that you’re baffled?”

  This struck home, but Tony did not allow so much as a flicker of that insecurity to show on his face.

  “Friday—if that’s your name, which I’m guessing it’s not, since you’re real now and all. Flesh and bone, as it were. Tell me, does your mother know that you run around in the evenings kidnapping billionaires?”

  Friday stood, a bored expression settling on her face. “Okay, boss, if that’s the way it’s going to be. I would have liked you to understand what’s happening here, because it’s important to me, but this mission is time sensitive, so if you want to fool around doing the whole Tony Stark thing, I’ll see you later.” She flicked a sarcastic salute at the man who was obviously not her boss anymore and headed for the stone steps.

  Tony had participated in enough high-powered boardroom strategizing to recognize a bluff when he heard it. Friday was just dying to tell him what was happening, so he pulled himself to his feet and gave her an incendiary remark to drag it out of her.

  “You won’t see me later, Friday. You’ll see me sooner. And I might have to dock your pay.”

  Friday spun on her heel. “You are such a dimwit in so many ways. You’ve been outplayed, Stark. Accept it.”

  “Is that what this is all about? Outplaying me? Seems like a lot of effort. So all I gotta do is say uncle and we’ll call it a day?”

  “No!” said Friday. “It never had to go this far. I gave you your chance, remember?”

  There was fire in the girl’s eyes, and Tony got the feeling that he had somehow driven her crazy, which wouldn’t be the first time he had done that to a person. But this one was just a teen.

  “I don’t know you, kid. We’ve never met.”

  This riled Friday even more. “We’ve never met? We’ve never met? The two of us haven’t encountered each other before?”

  Tony was genuinely mystified. “You’re just asking the same question different ways. Have we met, or haven’t we?”

  “I gave you a way out of this,” said Friday, eyes wide. “I put the file in your manicured hands. Port Verdé? Ring any bells in that big vain head?”

  Tony saw an opening. “Do you mean big-veined head? That’s because my brain needs more than the average blood supply. It’s a by-product of being a genius.” Then he stopped being what only he considered funny and his face dropped.

  “Port Verdé. Oh.”

  “Yes,” said Friday. “That’s right, buddy. Oh.”

  “The orphanage. I remember now. Then you must be…”

  Friday slow-clapped. “The intern. And finally, the penny drops. The mist clears. The genius takes his head out of his—”

  “That situation is not my fault. I had nothing to do with that,” Tony objected.

  “You sure didn’t,” said Friday. “Port Verdé might as well have been another dimension as far as Tony Stark was concerned. After all, what are twenty orphan girls and an aid worker in the grand scheme of things?”

  Tony was done joking now. Port Verdé had been a tough choice, the kind that kept him awake at night.

  “That’s not fair, kid. I gave that request serious consideration. I even talked to S.H.I.E.L.D. But Nick Fury threw me out of his office.” Even as he said it, Tony knew that Friday would see that excuse for the crock of lameness it was.

  “Oh, sure,” said Friday in a voice that could not have been frostier if she had been wearing ice boots and sitting at the South Pole. “Nick Fury said no. And when Nicky says, ‘Jump,’ Tony says, ‘How high?’ That’s a load of horse dung, boss. You’ve been running solo ops for months. I planned some of them. But only to clear up the Stark mess, never to help people out—other than yourself, obviously.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” objected Tony. “There is a very delicate political balance in Fourni. Iron Man can’t just go barging in there waving the stars and stripes. The new president is doing everything he can to stabilize the country, and I have to give him a chance to do that.”

  “My sister can’t wait for the country to stabilize, so Iron Man will be going to Port Verdé to kick a gang out of an orphanage and rescue my sister. Only this time Tony Stark won’t be behind the wheel, because he’d rather go to a pop star’s party.”

  “Rock star,” Tony said absently, because something else had occurred to him. “Never call Wolf a pop star. He starts howling at the moon.”

  Friday was almost dumbstruck. “Are you even listening to me? Do you even know what’s going on here?”

  Tony snapped back on. “Okay, Friday. That’s not your real name, I know, but I can’t remember that right now, so don’t get all offended.”

  “It’s Saoirse Tory,” said the girl who had been Friday. “Seer-sha. In Irish it means freedom, which my sister doesn’t presently have. But soon she will, thanks to your suit.”

  Tony gripped the bars. “Seer-sha, right. I remember now. Listen, Saoirse, these people, the men…they found you, right? Not the other way around.”

  “Wrong!” said Saoirse. “I found them. I knew that I couldn’t do this alone. So I recruited a team.”

  “You recruited them on your own?” Tony persisted. “Think, kid. This is important.”

  “If you must know, boss, I recruited Mr. Chen, who, unlike you, is a real philanthropist. He used his contacts to sign up the other three members of our team.”

  Tony felt sick to his stomach. For a moment he had hoped that all this was simply a kid trying to take international law into her own hands, but it suddenly became all too clear that there were shadowy forces at work.

  “Saoirse, listen to me. These guys, they don’t care about your sister. There’s an environmental summit eighty miles from here. You know that. Do you think that’s a coincidence?”

  Saoirse smirked. “Mr. Chen said that you would try to sow doubt in my mind. We had to get you over here, and that was the best way. I volunteered you for the gig.”

  “I thought the Irish president invited me.”

  Saoirse’s smirk graduated to a full-grown smile. “Yep, that’s what you thought. In fact, the president accepted your kind offer, boss.”

  Tony returned the smirk. “When you say boss, it feels like you mean something else entirely.”

  “I always did,” said Saoirse.

  “Are you a hundred percent sure the summit diversion was your idea?”

  Saoirse thought about it. “Mr. Chen may have been the one who mentioned it, but I was the one who followed through. I hijacked your system and set the whole thing up. Nothing works without me.”

  “Nothing up to this point,” said Tony. “Which was why they needed you.”

  “They need me because I am the plan. Listen, boss, I am not falling for your mind games, so why don’t you give it a rest?”

  Tony pushed his face as far through the bars as possible, giving himself a temporary face-lift. “Kid, I’m begging you. Let me out of here right now. If you don’t, we’re both dead. And that’s just for starters. This Chen guy is not who he says he is.”

  “I know exactly who Mr. Chen is,” said Saoirse, with a cocky expression Tony recognized from countless photos of himself. “I ran background on him times infinity, okay? I know computers, Tony. Look what I did to the famous Stark OS.”

  “You may know computers, kid, but you don’t know people.”

  “Ha!” said Saoirse. “I don’t know people? Me? You had a person in your ear for the last few months and you thought it was a robot. And let me tell you, I am so glad to be out of your head. Because I have met some jerks in my time, but you are king of that hill. You are the top of that heap. Manicures and facials. I never met anyone so shallow.”

  “That is quite possibly true,” admitted Tony, “but it is not the point right now, kid. The point at this moment is that you have hacked a very dangerous weapon on the eve of an environmental summit that could change the world.”

  “Dangerous weapon, sure,” said Saoirse, pooh-poohing the idea. “It’s the Party Pack. In forty-eight hours it will be expensive junk.”

  “You can do a lot of damage in forty-eight hours,” said Tony.