Natasha Romanova, the retired Black Widow, arrives in Moscow
and starts looking for old acquaintances but can find none of them. Alex
Sterelny was the man who trained her in ballet but the Bolshoi has never heard
of him. Nothing is the way she remembers it. She cannot find anyone for Martin
Ferris’ list of contacts either. Then she recognizes a supposedly vacant
building. She breaks in at night and recognizes the room where, as a child, she
was drugged and made to watch ballet. In her anger, she wrecks the place….
In Langley Virginia, Max Hunter and Kestrel are trying to
get cooperation from a CIA man who rudely refuses and Kestrel barely prevents
Hunter from beating the man up. After they leave the CIA man calls Natasha’s partner
Phil Dexter and informs him that North Industries is active….
Aboard a yacht off the Florida coast, millionaire CEO Ian
McMasters who is paying to have former Black Widows killed, rebukes his hired
gun Vassily Ilyich Ulyanov because his former KGB killer failed to assassinate
Natasha. McMasters has brought in the North Institute to do the job….
Natasha, traumatized by her discovery, is found by a pair of
security guards. She goes mad and fights them but an old man rescues her and
leads her away; he is Grigor Ivanovich Pchelintsov, professor of
psychotechnics, and recognizes her as a Black Widow. She is forced to trust him
and he decoys the guards and leads her to a secret but comfortable apartment.
Over tea, he reveals she is one of 27 Black Widow deep-cover agents deployed in
China and the West back in the old days. He tells her they underwent complex
psychochemical conditioning, making them believe they were happy children,
trained in ballet, grateful to the Motherland. Nat draws a knife and intends to
kill him unless he tells her what Medusagen is. He doesn’t know and directs her
to the biotech lab in the Urals. She demands he take her there, 2000 miles
away, carjacking a vehicle and asking him to tell her everything he knows about
her conditioning, even though a chemical deterrent was added to prevent the
Widows from thinking too closely about their pasts. Her response: “I’ll cope.”