CHAPTER 26

How Ivan loved machines. All machines. In Ivan’s veins ran the blood of a born engineer. His father, too, had been destined for engineering greatness. A Stark had derailed that plan. Ivan would get it back on track.

As the race began, Ivan got ready, putting on his harness and two whips. When the time was right, he fired up the whips. The track maintenance worker’s coverall he’d been wearing burned off his body from the intense heat coursing through the harness as he strode directly toward the track.

His left-hand whip slashed through the chain-link fence under the grandstand as if it weren’t there, leaving a gouge in the sidewalk. He came to the safety barrier bordering the track, a three-tiered metal railing, and cut through it with two flicks of his wrists as one of the cars thundered by. It was, as the Americans liked to say, showtime.

Viewers in the hotel restaurant couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Someone had invaded the track and was using a kind of electrified rope to hack away at the passing cars. He was big, with long, lank hair and a kind of metallic exoskeleton frame that linked his two—ropes? cables? whips?—to a glowing light at the center of his torso.

Cars were swerving and piling up around the invader as they tried to avoid him. “That can’t be good,” Pepper said. She focused on the invader. He wore what looked suspiciously like a miniaturized Arc Reactor. Where could he have gotten it?

Happy walked in. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Where’s the football?” she said quickly. He held it up—an aluminum briefcase lacquered in the same deep red as the Iron Man suit. They had given it the code name “football.” It was shackled to his arm.

Pepper told Natalie to get Tony’s plane warmed up and ready to take off, and then turned to Happy. “Let’s go.”

Hurrying to the limo, Pepper said, “Give me the key.” Happy held out his arm so she could reach the lock on the football as they ran together out of the hotel and toward the VIP lot.

Left behind in the restaurant, Natalie spoke into her cell phone. “He’s going into turn ten.” She looked around to make sure no one was watching. “He is extremely vulnerable at the moment,” she said.

She was, too. Her support network was a long way off, and it would be very easy for a misunderstanding to escalate, compromising her mission. That could not be allowed to happen.

Natalie held the phone, listening for another moment, and then said, “Understood,” and hung up. Then, as Pepper had ordered, she dialed her phone again, to make sure the Stark Industries plane was ready to go when Tony was.

Oblivious to the disruption on the track, Tony was having the time of his life. He had just passed Hammer’s car with a grin and a wave.

Suddenly, he saw the cars in front of him veer crazily away from something in the center of the track. Just before one of the cars disappeared in a fireball, Tony could have sworn he saw a man… and something sparking, like live wires.

The fireball cleared, and Tony saw that there was a man on the track, walking against the direction of the race. From his hands dangled a pair of whips that glowed and sparked as he flicked them against the concrete.

The car in front of Tony braked and swerved. Tony stayed behind it, using it as a shield. A flickering line of energy shot out and split the car in half. The two pieces, spitting vapors and flame, tumbled into the crash barrier. Now Tony really stood on the brakes. He hauled on the steering wheel, felt the car skid, and watched in what felt like slow motion as the man flicked one of the whips toward Tony’s car.

The whip sheared through the chassis and split the car into two pieces, which flipped and slid along the track, coming to a stop upside down. Tony popped the steering wheel loose and tossed it out onto the track so that he could wriggle out of the driver’s seat. His helmet had cracked in the crash, and he stripped it off. The remains of his car rested between him and the guy with the whips and the metal exoskeleton, but right then he reached the wreck and slashed it into small pieces, shouting in Russian. Tony waited for just the right moment, then grabbed hold of the nearest bit of wreckage and swung it at the back of his head.

Tony put everything he had into the swing. It was a good one. The blow landed solidly… but had no visible effect.

The man roared like an animal and slashed at Tony, but Tony was already off and running for cover. All he saw were pieces of race cars, beautiful machines turned into expensive junk.

One car lay upside down at an angle that would provide brief cover, leaking gas all over the track. Tony had an idea. He dove under the car, yanked off the gas cap, and scrambled away from the splash of fuel. He got clear just as the man was close enough to strike.

The superheated whip slashed down through the car’s engine and into the pool of fuel on the track surface. The explosion that followed blew the car to unrecognizable pieces and sent Tony pinwheeling into a wall of hay bales at the edge of the track. He got to his feet and looked back toward the dissipating fireball.

There was the man, walking through the flames as if they weren’t there and coming toward Tony as though he were the only thing in the world that mattered.

“I see Tony!” Happy cried out. The thing about Monaco was the race was right through downtown, so the hotel was literally close enough that they almost could have run faster. Happy had just crashed through the gate and onto the track—going the wrong way. There were hulks of destroyed cars, pit crews running onto the track to save drivers, spectators rushing up and down the stands in waves. There was fire on the track, everywhere.

Happy lost sight of Tony. A fireball on the track hid everything. Happy accelerated that way.

There was Tony again.

Happy took in the situation all at once. Tony was half-buried in a collapsed pile of hay bales on the inside of the crash barriers, trying to get up. A big area of the track near Tony was on fire. Through the fire came the big nutcase with the laser whips, cracking them on the pavement and grinning.

There was one thing to do, and Happy did it. He cut the wheel hard and hammered down on the brakes, sending the limo into a drift and smashing the bad guy into the railing with the back end. The limo slammed hard into the crash barrier, crumpling the railings and setting off the air bags. It had pinned the guy to the wall.

What to do next? Happy wondered. His shattered window fell apart and he noticed the boss approaching the limo. Pepper was screaming at Tony to get in the car, Tony was shouting back at her to give him the case.

Happy, meanwhile, kept gunning the engine to hold the maniac with the whips at bay. As Tony reached for the case, the car lurched. The man reared up from behind it and, with a barbaric yell, whistled one of his whips past Tony’s head, splitting the nearest door in two. The second whip tore through the armored hood of the car as if it were aluminum foil. Tony spun away. The man slashed at the car to free himself. He hacked away at the hood and the engine compartment, his whips even slicing through to shred the seats into the backseat.

From the limo, Pepper called out, “Tony!” She slid the football across the slick pavement in his direction. Then she and Happy just ducked and hoped that Tony would take care of the situation before the car, with them in it, was carved up to scraps.

Incredibly, the lunatic, who was wearing an RT on his chest, had hacked away enough of the front end of the car that he was almost loose. He shoved free and stalked through the wreckage after Tony.

Tony entered a code into a pad next to the football’s handle. It chirped its acceptance. He opened the case and placed one foot in either half. A light, portable version of the Iron Man suit, the Mark V, built itself from the boots up around Tony’s body. It wasn’t the same as the full apparatus, but it was still a formidable piece of body armor.

The Mark V finished assembling itself just in time. The first crack from an energized whip left deep scoring in the suit’s shoulder. Tony dodged the next several swings and goggled at the RT on the man’s chest. How is that possible? Tony thought. Even the Department of Defense had no idea how Arc Reactor tech worked. Who was this person who had just shown up in Monaco and started wrecking the place with RT-powered whips?

A whip sparked across Tony’s torso, coming dangerously close to his own RT. Tony grabbed the arm holding the whip and flung the man into the smoking wreckage of two cars. When he got up, Tony had powered up the repulsors, and fired.

The man deflected the blast with one of the whips. That was something Tony had never seen before. In his brief moment of surprise, he left himself open. The maniac flicked one of them around his neck and jerked him to the ground. But that was where he overreached. Tony caught the whips, feeling them short out various circuits in the gauntlets. He swung the guy up and around, and drove him into the pavement. Then, before he could get up, Tony tore the RT from the whip wielder’s chest and looked at it. He couldn’t quite believe what he saw.

Police swarmed the downed lunatic, who laughed the whole time they were dragging him away. “You lose,” he said over and over, in an accent. “You lose.”