There was a lot for Jane to do in New York City.
It had been a little over a month since Project Insight had come crashing down from the sky, since she had pulled Steve from the river, since she had fled DC. She had a new mission now, one of her own choosing. She was going to burn HYDRA to the ground – every agent, every cell, every hidden laboratory. And New York was, as some of the Winter Soldier’s former support team might have put it, a target-rich environment.
She’d already gone to work. In fact, she’d already made the news, as the anonymous killer of an international cybernetics expert who lived in Manhattan. He’d been one of Alexander Pierce’s top scientists, the man who’d designed her upgraded prosthesis. He’d been the man who had pumped Jane full of paralytics and then cut her open at the shoulder and the skull, grafting wires and circuits into her nervous system while she was fully conscious, leaving her wracked by agonizing pain but unable to move or even scream.
She’d made sure that he would never touch her again.
Now she was lurking in Hell’s Kitchen, watching the house of her latest target. He was a double agent in the mayor’s office – also tied to some kind of criminal syndicate – and careful surveillance had revealed that his wife was away visiting a sister. That was good. Jane didn’t want to have to hurt anyone innocent, not if she could help it.
Silently, she waited, her eyes fixed on the house, only moving when she saw her target’s car pull up and park on the side of the street. He climbed out and and walked up his front steps, fumbling with his keys.
Jane tensed. Her plan was to follow him inside, to question him before she killed him, but just as he pushed his door open, there was the muffled crack! of a gunshot, and he dropped across the threshold, his keys falling from his hand in a jangle of metal.
Out of the corner of her eye, Jane had seen the flash of the gun, several dozen yards to her left, and now she could just make out a shadowy figure retreating over the rooftops. She climbed to her feet and followed.
Someone else was after her targets, and she needed to know who.