Myrmidon

CHAPTER TWO

“I’m guessing,” Rupert Hollingshead said, pouring himself a drink—he’d already offered Chapel a beer, which had been declined—“that you weren’t just afraid of the pain. After all, son, you’ve been shot so many times now, a few needle pricks couldn’t possibly compare.”

“No, sir,” Chapel said. He wished he could stand at attention. Whenever he disobeyed an order, his immediate impulse was to stand up and receive his punishment. But Hollingshead must have known that—the man was a master at reading people—and he must have also known that the best way to make Chapel squirm was to invite him in for a nice, friendly chat.

Hollingshead was all smiles and firm handshakes when Chapel had come in for this meeting. He was dressed in a tweed suit, and the thick glasses he wore made his eyes look big and merry, amplifying their twinkle. Rupert Hollingshead had been an admiral in the navy once. Now he ran one of the most secret directorates in Military Intelligence, which made him Chapel’s boss. Chapel had never seen the man in uniform. He’d never seen Hollingshead act much like a command officer in the armed forces. If pressed, Hollingshead would claim he’d never much gone in for all the brass and dress blues and medals, that he was more comfortable dressing like an aging Ivy League academic. Chapel had begun to believe the man had chosen his relaxed if elegant appearance simply to put people off their guard.

“Please do sit down,” Hollingshead said, gesturing at a leather couch. His office had been a fallout shelter under the Pentagon once. Now it looked like the common room at a private club for rich bankers. It had a fully stocked bar and a burbling, tasteful fountain and overstuffed armchairs. Chapel often forgot, while he was there, that he was at least fifty feet underground. Only the lack of windows in the office reminded him.

Chapel sank into the couch and tried to look relaxed. “My grandfather—” he began, but Hollingshead interrupted him.

“Sergeant Hiram Chapel,” the old man said. “I’ve seen his record. Good man by all accounts. Distinguished himself in Italy. Took out a pillbox on his own, with the rest of his unit pinned down on a beach.”

“I never met him,” Chapel admitted. “Just heard stories, from my father. I don’t know if he was any kind of saint—to his dying day, my father was terrified of his old man’s belt—but I was raised to believe he was a hero. And that he died to keep us safe from the Nazis. Now you’re asking me to wear a swastika on my arm for the rest of my life.”

Hollingshead didn’t dither on about tattoo removal or getting the thing covered up. He just nodded and sipped at his drink. After ruminating for a while, he set his glass down, and said, “You know how sensitive this is, son. That’s the damned hardest part of this job, sometimes. I have the authority to tap into the largest pool of human resources in this country—the entire armed forces—yet time and again, I find I can’t do it. The more people know about this job, the more likely it is one of them ends up talking to a journalist. And we can’t very well have that.”

“No, sir,” Chapel said. It was true. Normally, Chapel hated the cloak of secrecy that wrapped around all his missions, but in this case, he knew it was crucial.

A few months earlier, he had discovered a plot by former KGB elements to ship surplus guns—mostly AK-47s—to America, for sale to extremist groups and political nut jobs. The program had started as an official effort by the Soviets to undermine the American government. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian mafia had taken over the operation, but nothing else had changed. Chapel had closed off the pipeline—the man who ran the whole operation was dead—but that didn’t change the fact that there were thousands of cases of Russian assault rifles inside the borders of the United States, and they were in the hands of the worst possible class of criminal.

If word got out that the Russians had been arming American domestic terrorists, if even a single news outlet got hold of the story, it would start a nationwide panic overnight. And if that happened, Congress would be forced to react. And if Congress chose to demand action, the military would have to get involved. There was no telling how far it would go. In Hollingshead’s estimation, war with Russia was a serious possibility.

The only way to stop all that was to make sure nobody ever heard about what had happened. And that meant recovering the guns, every last one of them.

And since Chapel, Hollingshead, and Angel were the only people in America who knew the whole story, they were the only ones who could fix it.

Hollingshead sounded apologetic. “If there were anyone else I could send, I would. There are plenty of men in the ATF and the DEA who would wear those tattoos if it meant helping their country. Plenty of them already do, and I doubt they complain much about it. Good men, heroes like your grandfather.”

“Those men are undercover cops. Specialists in infiltration,” Chapel pointed out. “I’m no actor. You could dress me up like a skinhead, but I wouldn’t fool anyone for a minute.”

Hollingshead nodded again.

Chapel knew this was his only chance to make his case. “I’m not trying to get out of doing my job. But there’s another way we can make this happen. I’m sure of it.”

“Very well,” Hollingshead said. “Let’s hear it.”