While on assignment, in the middle of interrogating Georgi Luchkov, Romanoff received a call from Agent Coulson informing her of her next mission. She was to approach Banner, and enlist his aid in locating the Tesseract, a dangerous object that had fallen into the wrong hands. Even though the thought of Banner's immensely powerful alter ago terrified her, Romanoff carried out the assignment with aplomb and soon had Banner on board.