"There's a Level 6 tracking program on the USB drive. Once we use it, our location will be exposed."
After leaving the hospital, Captain America and Black Widow went to a computer mall. No matter how capable the two of them were, without a computer, they couldn't exactly decode the contents of the USB drive by holding it in their mouths, could they?
But doing this carried risks. As soon as they plugged in and activated the USB drive, their location would be exposed. According to Natasha, they only had nine minutes. It was incredibly dangerous... my ass!
Honestly, it was hard to know what to say. Perhaps Pierce had put all his energy into the grand plan and neglected the minor details. If he had realized how useful traffic cameras and facial recognition systems could be in a manhunt, and strengthened that infrastructure, these two people being hunted by the world's largest intelligence organization would have been pinned to the ground long ago, unless they had spent the whole time hiding in the sewers.
In any case, their time was still tight, and the USB drive kept working against them. It contained an AI protection program that continuously rewrote itself and revoked Natasha's read commands.
Come to think of it, even when Nick Fury had used S.H.I.E.L.D.'s internal supercomputer, he had failed to decode the contents of this USB drive. If Natasha could crack it with an ordinary laptop, then S.H.I.E.L.D.'s computer supplier must have ripped them off for a fortune back then.
But as the saying went, there was always a way around an obstacle. Natasha took a different approach. While she couldn't crack the files, she could use a special tracking program to triangulate where they had come from.
The person who had developed this program was