Chapter 526

The pattern was too clean to be coincidence.

Shortly after the attack on Alioth Air Force Base by the Mandarin, one of the soldiers stationed there had traveled to New York. His final destination had been the exact center of the theater explosion.

There was no way that was accidental.

For one absurd moment, Tony wondered whether the poor bastard had simply been cursed by fate. Maybe Death itself had decided to stalk him, arranging for him to die in explosion after explosion, with the Mandarin conveniently cast as the executioner every time.

Ridiculous.

Tony Stark dismissed the thought almost immediately.

The soldier was far more likely to be a mole.

Perhaps he had personally carried out the bombing at the air base. Or perhaps he knew something about what had really happened. Either way, after the attack, his conscience might have gotten the better of him. He could have intended to turn himself in, or simply decided he wanted out before the whole mess swallowed him alive.

So he ran to New York.

And whoever was behind the operation clearly didn’t want a man with too much knowledge wandering around alive.

They arranged the theater bombing to silence him, then had the Mandarin hurriedly claim responsibility and label the entire incident another terrorist attack.

Tony stared at the evidence as the pieces clicked together.

It made sense.

Unfortunately, if his theory was correct, the trail led straight into the American military.

Military. Explosions. Tennessee.

Tony paced the room, muttering under his breath. Then his eyes suddenly sharpened.

"JARVIS. That explosion reached temperatures of three thousand degrees Celsius. Search for every other explosion with comparable thermal readings."

"Oracle Cloud Computing is online, sir. Connecting to the satellites. I’m compiling thermal data from the past twelve months."

The holographic display changed.

Hundreds, then thousands of points appeared across the projection, each representing a recorded thermal event that had reached three thousand degrees Celsius or higher.

Tony studied the cluster of markers.

"How many involved military personnel?"

The sea of points vanished.

Only one remained.

A label appeared beneath it.

Rose Hill, Tennessee.

"Only one, sir."

Tony pointed at the marker.

JARVIS immediately brought up the details.

"The incident occurred before any of the Mandarin’s known terrorist attacks. It was a bombing carried out by a suicide bomber. Six people were killed, including a U.S. serviceman named Charlie Davis."

"That’s it."

Tony didn’t hesitate.

A bombing involving a military serviceman. In Tennessee, a state that might very well contain the Mandarin’s base of operations. And the incident happened before everything else.

Could there be anything more suspicious?

More importantly, the timing suggested that this might have been where the entire chain of events began.

Tony’s mind returned to the theater explosion.

The temperature had been absurdly high. Three thousand degrees Celsius.

And there hadn’t been a single recognizable fragment of a conventional bomb at the scene.

That told him something important.

Whatever had caused the explosion hadn’t been an ordinary explosive.

It could have been some kind of experimental weapon the military was developing. Something had gone wrong during a test, producing an explosion far more powerful than intended and killing several people in the process.

Then someone had created the Mandarin.

A convenient terrorist figure who could take responsibility for the disasters and provide an explanation for everything that didn’t fit.

It sounded insane.

There were far easier ways to cover up an accidental explosion. A ruptured gas line. A faulty electrical system. Industrial negligence. Pick one and move on.

Why invent a terrorist mastermind and send the entire country into a panic?

Tony knew the answer better than most.

For years, Stark Industries had been one of the American military’s biggest weapons contractors. Tony had seen enough of the government’s darker side to know exactly how ugly things could get behind closed doors.

The U.S. military might present itself as the world’s foremost force against terrorism, but governments had never been above creating the problem when the problem happened to be useful.

If America wanted to send troops somewhere, there needed to be a reason.

You couldn’t tell the public that soldiers were being deployed to the Middle East because somebody over there had stolen the President’s favorite pressure cooker.

That wasn’t going to fly internationally.

It probably wouldn’t survive five minutes with the American public, either.

But if a terrorist organization suddenly appeared, declared war on America, and started killing civilians, then everything changed.

Now there was an enemy.

Now there was a reason to send troops.

And if Tony was right, the Mandarin might be exactly that kind of enemy: a terrorist organization created or manipulated to give the military a convenient justification for intervention somewhere it wanted to go.

Most ordinary people would have stopped digging at that point.

The implications were simply too enormous.

Keep investigating, and sooner or later, someone powerful enough might decide you knew too much.

Tony Stark was not most people.

They could do whatever they wanted.

But nobody touched his friends.

The U.S. military was supposed to scare him?

The President was supposed to be untouchable?

Apparently, someone had forgotten what Stark Industries was.

Tony Stark wasn’t just Iron Man. He controlled a massive corporate empire with enough influence to make Washington very uncomfortable if he ever decided to stop playing nice.

If they pushed him far enough, he could bring enough people into the fight to make an American president’s political career very short indeed.

"JARVIS, plot a flight plan to Tennessee."

He was angry, but anger didn’t make him stupid.

Everything he had right now was still circumstantial.

A theory was not evidence.

If he wanted answers, he had to go to Tennessee and find them himself.

"Well... now that we’ve investigated most of it..." Holmes spoke up.

Tony turned.

Sherlock Holmes, who had been enthusiastically pursuing the case from the beginning, suddenly looked far less eager.

"I think Watson and I should head home."

Holmes had suspected from the start that the case concealed something deeper.

He simply hadn’t expected the answer to reach this far.

The American military.

That changed everything.

Holmes had crossed swords with organizations like the CIA and FBI before. But in those cases, he had been dealing with individual officials who had become corrupted by ambition or obsession. They possessed authority, certainly, but they were not powerful enough to speak for their entire organizations.

This was different.

What they had uncovered could not have been arranged by some random mid-level bureaucrat.

If the theory was correct, the operation involved people much higher up the chain.

Someone with real power.

Tony Stark could afford to be reckless.

He was a billionaire.

He was Iron Man.

Holmes and Watson were ordinary men.

They had no armor. No army. No corporate empire. No way to survive a confrontation with people who could bury an investigation before it ever reached the light of day.

"We’ve gotten far enough," Evenson said.

He had already noticed the hesitation in Holmes’s expression.

There was no point forcing the issue.

"I’ll take you both home. But I have one piece of friendly advice."

Evenson looked directly at them.

"Forget what happened here today. We won’t be going out of our way to remember it, either."

Holmes’s expression remained grim.

He nodded.

As he passed Evenson on his way out, he stopped.

"It doesn’t sit well with me to end an investigation here."

His voice was quiet, frustration buried beneath every word.

"My deductions weren’t wrong. But..."

His eyes shifted toward Tony Stark.

"...I lost for reasons that had nothing to do with deduction."

There was unmistakable envy in his gaze.

"If I had even half of what he has, I wouldn’t be giving up here."

Evenson narrowed his eyes thoughtfully.

"Being a proper detective takes more than a sharp mind. You also need the means to support that mind and the physical ability to carry an investigation through."

Holmes glanced at him.

"Don’t be too quick to give up."

Evenson smiled faintly.

"There may still be a way forward."