Clint Barton couldn't have described what he was feeling—a tangled mess of impressions, all hitting at once.
The blonde was an enemy—but an enemy who couldn't die yet. He was deeply grateful that she'd been saved.
Facing the person who had haunted his earliest nightmares, he braced himself and called back down: "Coming right now!"
He didn't wait for the elevator. He bolted down twenty-four flights of stairs and arrived at the 95th floor. A quick scan of the corridor led him straight to Bella's room.
"I'm CIA." He held his credentials out for her to see. "This woman is a critical suspect we were in the process of apprehending."
The name on the badge read William Brandt—obviously an alias. Bella didn't comment. She simply told him to take the woman and go.
But just before Clint Barton reached the door, she spoke.
"Have we met somewhere before?"
"No." Flat and immediate.
Bella smiled slightly. "You've awakened a strange visual ability—it comes from your bloodline. There's more in there, if you're ever interested..."
Clint Barton shut that down without missing a beat: "Thank you. I'm fine. I don't need anything. And thank you again for the help. Goodbye."
He slung the unconscious blonde over his shoulder and walked out at a brisk, deliberate pace.
"The Mentor was trying to recruit him?" Gavin Banks had maintained such a low profile through the whole exchange that he'd been practically invisible. The moment Clint was gone, he materialized from the corner of the room. "Seems like someone who's awakened some form of Eagle Vision."
"Only just figured his ancestor was probably a notable Assassin," Bella said. "But he's clearly had professional intelligence training—he may not need the Animus for any of it." She let it go.
She wasn't sensing any danger from her own instincts, and her divination reading came back clean.
What she never could have predicted was that later that same evening, a Russian nuclear submarine launched a missile at the continental United States.
It was Ethan and his team who stopped it—in the final moments, they secured the blonde woman, countermanded the launch order, and averted what would have been the most catastrophic event in modern history.
The missile hit the water. Aside from injuring a middle-aged man who happened to be out on his yacht, it caused no other harm.
Ethan Hunt had saved the world and pulled humanity back from the edge of nuclear war—and was immediately hammered by the military, the US government, and the CIA from every angle.
Bella learned all of this the next morning through Natasha's call, and it scared her half to death.
Her reaction was roughly the same as the Pentagon's, the American government's, and the CIA leadership's reactions combined: Ethan Hunt was undeniably capable. His courage and judgment were beyond question. But his mindset was the problem.
He was terrifying.
You knew about this and you didn't tell anyone? You couldn't have looped in your organization and let them prepare? Intercept with fighter jets. Launch a countermissile. If nothing else, shoot down the Indian satellite being used to relay the launch command—how complicated would that have been? There were a dozen options available to a government.
But Ethan Hunt hadn't said a word to anyone outside his own small team.
If he'd just given his chain of command even a brief heads-up at any point during the operation, the launch could have been stopped by entirely conventional means. The US and Russia maintained ambassador-level diplomatic relations. A single phone call would have been enough. So what exactly was so hard about it?
Ethan Hunt didn't trust the system. He'd insisted on playing the lone hero.
By sheer fortune, he'd succeeded. But what if he hadn't?
The US military and CIA were furious. The IMF was dissolved on the spot. Nick Fury also recalled Clint Barton—the young man had sharp eyes and looked competent enough on the surface, but clearly still needed more time in the oven.
Bella was rattled by the near-miss. But with the missile at the bottom of the ocean and the world intact, in an era where only outcomes mattered, she had nothing to say about it.
She was still in Dubai, negotiating with the former chief instructor of the Soviet Union's elite forces over the terms for training her soldiers.
Svetlana Belikova seemed intent on establishing dominance from the first breath. Her bearing was sharp, her voice strong and sure.
"I've been away from hands-on work like this for a long time. If you want me to personally train your soldiers, those soldiers need to follow my orders throughout the training period."
Bella had positioned herself as an aide for the meeting, notebook in hand, looking very much like she was diligently taking notes.
Gavin Banks had been pushed to the front of the table to run the negotiation.
The middle-aged Assassin's voice was cool, and his message was colder: "Agreed. They will follow your orders without question. I'm comfortable accepting up to a 20% casualty rate during training."
Svetlana Belikova weighed that privately. People volunteering to work on her behalf meant a few losses here and there wouldn't trouble her. This was good news. If things went sideways later, she could shift the blame to these people and keep her reputation in East Slavic intact.
"I appreciate the gesture of goodwill," she said smoothly. "But simply doing a few favors for me doesn't justify my direct personal involvement. Frankly, I gave up on the monotony of training work twenty years ago."
The core message was simple: the compensation wasn't sufficient. Doing errands for her wasn't enough. She was a political figure now, not an instructor-for-hire—and she expected to be compensated accordingly.
Gavin Banks didn't address compensation directly. Instead, he added to the list of demands: "Three hundred soldiers trained to Spetsnaz standard. We also require the establishment of a military base and a military airfield in East Slavic—and the East Slavic Republic will provide sanctuary for anyone bearing our token, including new identity documents and clean border crossing records."
Svetlana Belikova listened without expression. She knew the other side was making a deliberately inflated opening offer—which meant the compensation they were prepared to offer her would be equally substantial. She wasn't afraid of a long list of demands. A short list would have worried her far more.
Gavin Banks laid out the terms he and Bella had settled on in advance: "In exchange, we can supply whatever weapons and equipment you require—fighter aircraft, artillery, rifles, submarines. Everything short of nuclear weapons. Name it and we can provide it."
The Templar Order was obsessed with the future—funneling enormous funds and human capital into building the Animus and hunting down Isu technology. The Assassin Brotherhood had always taken a different view.
After the Soviet Union's collapse, the Brotherhood had quietly absorbed a considerable stockpile of weapons and equipment. They had also acquired fighter aircraft production lines and various military manufacturing facilities.
By Bella's calculations, the Brotherhood's Soviet-era inventory could fully equip a mechanized division, two artillery regiments, and an air wing.
Soviet-era hardware, even a decade later, was still competitive—rugged and reliable, with quality guaranteed. The Brotherhood's weapons supply was never the problem. The problem was people. People who could actually use the weapons.