On the trail of the Zephyr Agent unaccounted for at the end of the previous issue, Winter Soldier James "Bucky" Barnes visits the site in San Francisco where the killer was kept in stasis. There, he discovers A.I.M. agents scavenging the premises. Bucky takes them down and finds the stasis tube shattered, likely by an earthquake some time earlier. The question is, where is he now and why has no one heard from him?
Twelve years ago: an Earth tremor freed Leo Novokov from the tube and, amnesiac, he wandered naked into a parking garage where he murdered a policeman and stole his uniform. Leo lived on the streets as a drifter, surviving by any means he can and trying to orient himself to the new world he is in. When the superheroes started making the news, Leo felt drawn to them and headed to New York where he continued his under-the-radar existence. Then, three months ago, he spied the classified ad which caused his mind to clear…. He contacted his controller Boris Kolchek who had been placing the ads since he discovered Leo missing. Leo murders the man, then embarked on a war of his own: seeing the news coverage of the exposure of Captain America as the Soviet agent Winter Soldier and his trial for treason, Leo determines to kill his old mentor for betraying him (by leaving him in stasis: Leo is unaware that Bucky only recently recovered his memory of the Zephyr agents’ existence). As Leo prepared for his mission, Bucky was sent to the gulag, then killed during the events of FEAR ITSELF. But watching the funeral on TV, Leo realized that Barnes was still alive and had dropped off the grid. Then he conceived a scheme to draw him out of hiding….
Bucky and SHIELD have been on the trail of the missing agent; Bucky remembered the classified ad protocol and the murder of Kolchek was discovered. The word comes in that Fred Davis, the now-elderly second Bucky has been shot to death in his home. Bucky heads to the scene with Black Widow and Jasper Sitwell to find a message scrawled on the wall over the victim, "Only one Bucky left." And spying from across the street Leo has drawn out his target….