Chapter 1638: Tracking an Acquaintance, and Green Eyes

After setting everything up, Luke bought some fast food and ate on a stone bench in D.C..

The drone’s range was very limited here.

However stupid the government could be, it wouldn’t allow drones to fly around the heart of America.

The squad was now using an encrypted ground network to communicate with each other. The surveillance range was far less comprehensive than what the drones could do.

Luke could only do it himself.

Compared with the drones, he could detect more with his personal abilities.

Suddenly, Sharp Nose picked up a familiar scent, but it was very faint.

It drifted over from an alley dozens of meters away, and were only specks of scent molecules.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Luke had a deep impression of the scent, he might have overlooked it.

He stood up and bit into his burger as he strolled toward the source of the scent.

That person wasn’t an enemy or a rookie. Luke wasn’t in a hurry.

Soon, he passed through an apartment building and entered an alley next door. He saw a small entrance in the distance.

His eyes flickered. Wasn’t this D.C. Central Hospital?

Black Egg had “died” in the E.R. here.

If that was the case, it made sense for that person to appear here.

After entering the hospital building, however, he dismissed this thought.

The scent suggested that the person had only been here for 20 minutes.

Nick Fury had been “dead” for almost two hours. Why was this person here?

Agents didn’t do meaningless things. Nick Fury was very important when he was alive, but if he had really become a corpse, it wasn’t necessarily worth it to come back here.

Luke soon found the owner of the scent — the Black Widow, Natasha.

The person who grabbed her and pushed her into a corner was another acquaintance — Captain Steve.

Luke was amused. Sure enough, things weren’t that simple.

He didn’t show his face. He simply listened to the conversation between the two people ten meters away with Elementary Sound Wave.

A moment later, the duo left together.

Luke thought for a moment before he told Frank and Tony about it.

Both parties simply replied, “Copy that.”

They only needed to know what was going on, and Luke didn’t need them to do anything.

Luke slowly followed Steve and Natasha, and only stopped when they put on disguises and stole a Chevrolet pickup.

Of course, it was only the Level 2 clone that stopped following them.

This strongest clone had to stay in D.C. in the event that something major happened.

So, Luke could only have his Level 1 clone follow the pickup.

Luke and Steve had met many times, but they weren’t that close.

If he took the initiative to approach them, they would definitely be suspicious, and even more time would be wasted.

In any case, he had heard their conversation while tailing them earlier, and was clear on where they were going.

Steve and Natasha’s target was Camp LeHigh in New Jersey, which was only a little more than 200 kilometers from D.C. and which might lead to Hydra.

At that time, Luke could get his clone to act in the dark and earn experience and credit points.

If there really was an emergency in D.C., it would only take the clone a few minutes to fly back at full speed.

…

Steve and Natasha reached the barracks in the evening, and opened the door to an underground base.

Luke, who had arrived half an hour earlier, was carefully searching the base.

This underground base used to belong to SHIELD, and had been abandoned for more than 20 years.

From a preliminary check earlier, it was true that nobody had been here for years, yet the lead which Natasha and Steve had was related to this place.

Secondly, the power and ventilation in this underground base were fully functional, and there was a lot of power.

The power supply was coming from a nearby farm, but for a detective like Luke, this was suspicious.

After all, when the police arrested suspects for growing weed at home, they would check the electric meter first most of the time.

Electricity was indispensable in modern life and work. Too much electricity being consumed would easily arouse suspicion.

It was thanks to Tony’s arc reactor that Luke was able to power his research work and keep it secret.

It was unlikely that this abandoned base had an arc reactor.

To generate its own electricity, it would need its own power station as well as an ample power source (water, wind or coal). That was even harder to keep secret.

A drone silently watched Steve and Natasha find a hidden elevator, enter a password and descend.

Then, in a computer room full of a bunch of ancient computers, the first thing that caught their attention was an eye-catching USB drive.

Compared with other dusty old computers and storage equipment, this drive was clearly a product of recent years. It was also connected to an old computer.

Deep in thought, Natasha took out a silver USB from her pocket.

This USB was the reason why Nick Fury had been “killed” and why Steve was wanted by SHIELD.

Before Nick Fury “died,” he had given it to Steve and told him not to trust anyone.

When Steve returned to SHIELD, he had hidden the USB in a hospital vending machine for fear of Hydra discovering it.

In the end, it was the cunning Natasha who had picked it up.

Of course, Natasha wasn’t Hydra, so she helped Steve find the data point of the USB — this old computer room.

At that moment, she plugged in the USB, and the old computers around her lit up and got to work.

A notification popped up on an ancient monitor. “Activate system?”

After a brief hesitation, she typed “Yes” on the keyboard and pressed ‘Enter.’

The computer whirred even faster, and the monitor glowed with a green light as it put together a blurry human face.

The ancient monitor could only display green on the black screen, so the face was hideous.

Luke’s eyes lit up.

He liked to fiddle with old things the most, but he had never played with an antique computer like this before. It looked quite interesting.

However, the face directly called out Steven and Natalia’s names and ages, and revealed its own name — Arnim Zola.

He had been a scientist under the Red Skull in World War II, and a backbone of Hydra.

But Dr. Zola was actually Swiss, and had died of lung cancer in 1972.

However, the green ghost face claimed that it was Dr. Zola.

Before Dr. Zola died, his mind or whatever had been stored in the computers here, turning him into an “it.”

Underground, Steve and Natasha were both shocked. On the surface, Luke’s eyes were practically glowing green.

When Zola revealed his identity, Luke immediately sent an emergency communication request to Tony.

Tony immediately picked up. “Did something happen?”

Luke simply sent him the video taken by the drone and said, “It seems there’s still a gap between Jarvis and a real A.I.?”