In the dark room, only a desk lamp was lit. Nick Fury struggled to open his eyes as his muddled consciousness gradually cleared. He instinctively tried to move, only to discover that his hands and feet were restrained to the chair, leaving him utterly unable to budge.
"If you want to get any secrets out of me, you're going to be disappointed."
The Black director's voice was hoarse, his throat burning painfully. An unprecedented weakness swept through his body, perhaps from losing too much blood from his injuries, and he could only slump feebly against the chair.
He narrowed his eyes and looked ahead. A metal table stood opposite him, gleaming with a cold light beneath the lamp. A black figure stood beside it, perfectly still, like a silent statue.
This was the cold-blooded killer known as the Winter Soldier. S.H.I.E.L.D. had files on him: supposedly, he had carried out more than twenty assassinations over the past fifty years without a single failure. He had once worked secretly for the Former Soviet Union. After the Red Empire collapsed, he became a black phantom who did not exist.
"Director Fury, we don't want to know any S.H.I.E.L.D. secrets."
A gentle female voice drifted out, surprising Nick Fury slightly. The room was too dark for him to see that the person seated across the table was actually a woman.
"Is this how you invite someone out for coffee?"
The Black director gave a mocking laugh. As a veteran agent, his psychological defenses and resistance to interrogation were both top-notch. In other words, making him confess easily was practically impossible.
Even brainwashing would yield very little. Long ago, after the crisis of the Secret Invasion, Nick Fury had made his brain develop a self-defense mechanism. Put simply, he had installed a safety lock.