The Cyclops Initiative

PART 1

“If I were you,” the marine said, “I’d think real careful about my next move. There’s a lot riding on this.”

Jim Chapel stared the man right in the eye. As usual, there was nothing there. Years of clandestine missions in the Middle East had given Marine sergeant Brent Wilkes total control over his facial expressions. The man just didn’t have a tell as far as Chapel could see.

And he was right — there was a lot at stake. Chapel glanced down at the table and did a mental calculation. Two sixes showing, and Chapel only had queen high. If Wilkes wasn’t bluffing, the game could be over right here.

Chapel sighed and threw his cards down on the table. He found that he couldn’t care less. “Fold,” he said.

Wilkes’s mouth bent in a fraction of a grin and he grabbed for the pot — nearly a full bag of potato chips. He stuffed them in his mouth one after another with the precision that marked everything he did.

Chapel had spent three months in the smelly motel room with Wilkes, as much as sixteen hours out of every day, and he still couldn’t get a read on his partner. Wilkes didn’t seem to care about anything except poker — he didn’t read, he didn’t watch TV, he just wanted to play cards. After the first week, Chapel had realized how outclassed he was and had refused to play for money anymore. They didn’t have anything else to wager with, so they’d played with potato chips instead. It didn’t seem to matter to Wilkes. He played the game to win, not to make money.

The floor around the marine’s chair was littered with a drift of empty potato chip bags. He ate each little crumb of chip that he won, scouring the table bare, but then he just dropped the empty bags on the floor, completely uninterested in keeping the room clean. At the end of each day Chapel picked up the bags and threw them out, knowing he would get to do it again the next day.

And meanwhile nothing whatsoever changed with the case.

They were holed up in the motel because a high-profile black marketeer had taken a room there, too. The motel was a place where he could meet and make deals with military personnel from the nearby Aberdeen Proving Ground. A lot of very expensive military hardware had gone missing from Aberdeen, and intelligence suggested it all came through this motel. Chapel had identified one Harris Contorni as the buyer, a former army corporal who had been dishonorably discharged. He’d gathered enough evidence to show that Contorni had connections to East Coast organized crime. Chapel had thought that once he identified the culprit his involvement with this case would be finished. After all, chasing low-level crooks like Contorni was way below his pay grade.

Instead he’d been ordered to see the case through. Which meant a semipermanent stakeout of the motel where Contorni lived. Chapel had planted listening devices all through Contorni’s room and phone and car and then he’d moved into a room three doors down and then Wilkes had shown up and Chapel had gotten the worst sinking feeling of his life.

His boss had given him scutwork to do. And then he’d assigned Chapel a babysitter just in case.

It was a pretty clear vote of no confidence.

And one he’d earned, he supposed. He’d screwed up badly the year before on a mission in Siberia. Put a lot of people in danger. Even though he’d fixed things, even though he’d completed his mission, he knew his boss, Director Hollingshead, must have lost a lot of faith in him.

“Wanna play again?” Wilkes asked.

“Not now,” Chapel said. He looked at the cards scattered across the table and realized he didn’t even care enough to pick them up and put them away. This case was turning him into a slob — breaking his lifetime habit of cleaning up after himself.

Months had passed with no sign whatsoever that Contorni was putting together another deal. Months of doing nothing but breathing in Wilkes’s air. Chapel was losing his edge. Getting rusty.

“All right,” Wilkes said. “You mind if I run down to the store, get some soda? All these chips I keep winning make me so dry I don’t even piss anymore. I just fart salt.”

Chapel waved one hand in the air, careful not to express disgust. It would just encourage worse behavior. Wilkes left without another word.

When he was gone, Chapel checked the laptop on the nightstand, but there was nothing there. Contorni hadn’t made a call in six hours, and though he’d driven approximately sixty miles in his car over the last twenty-four hours, he had gone nowhere near the Proving Ground. Nothing. As usual.

Chapel sat down hard on the bed. He considered doing some calisthenics, but the room already smelled like sweat and dirty laundry. Maybe later. Instead he reached into his pocket and took out his hands-free device. He stared at it for a while, knowing he was probably making a mistake, but then he shoved it in his ear and pressed the power button.

“Angel,” he said, “are you there?”

“Always, sugar,” she replied.

He closed his eyes and let himself smile a little. That voice… it was like having someone breathe softly on the back of his neck. It made him feel good like nothing else did anymore.

He hadn’t spoken to Angel in weeks. He’d missed it.

He had never met her. He had no idea what she looked like or where she was located. He didn’t even know her real name — he’d started calling her Angel and it just stuck, and now even his boss referred to her that way. He’d chosen the name because when he was in the field she worked as his guardian angel. If Chapel needed to look up the criminal record of a deadly assassin or just find the best route through traffic during a car chase, she was the one with the answers he needed. More than that, she had walked him through some very tricky missions. She’d saved his life so often he didn’t even keep track anymore.

She had become more than just a colleague to him. Among other things, she was the only woman in his life, now that his girlfriend had dumped him.

While he was working the stakeout, though, he barely got to talk to Angel at all. There was no need for her special skills on this mission, no need to occupy her valuable time with the running tally of how many poker hands Chapel lost or how many days had passed without new intelligence.

“Anything to report?” she asked. “Or are you just checking in?”

“Nothing,” he told her. He wondered what he sounded like to her. There’d been a time she respected him, even admired what he’d achieved in the field. Had her esteem for him dropped as she listened to him grow more and more dejected? “Any word from the director? Any new instructions, any hint of reassignment?”

“You know I would call if there was,” she told him. There was something in her voice, a cautious little hesitation. She was waiting to hear why he’d called.

It was too bad he didn’t have a good answer. He couldn’t very well tell her that he’d called because he was lonely. Every time the two of them spoke it cost taxpayer money. Maybe something more than that, too. He knew she worked with other field agents — even Wilkes knew who she was, though he said he’d only worked with her once, and briefly. Maybe right now she’d been in the middle of saving somebody else’s life and he was distracting her. Though he supposed she would have told him so, or just not answered her phone.

“What about that other thing I asked you to look into? Did you turn up anything more on Wilkes?”

“I’m still not sure what you’re hoping to find,” she said.

“I just want a better idea of who I’m working with here. I need to be able to trust this guy when push comes to shove.”

Angel sighed. “You know I can’t tell you much. He’s a Raider, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out.”

Chapel didn’t need any great detective skills to turn up that piece of information. Wilkes had a Marine Corps logo tattooed on his arm and the distinctive haircut of a jarhead. If he was working for Hollingshead’s directorate (the Directorate for Defense Counterintelligence and HUMINT, or DX), that meant he was special ops — specifically the United States Marine Corps Special Operations Command, MARSOC, the Raiders, the newest branch of secret warriors in SOCOM. He would be what the service called a critical skills operator, which meant he would be trained in everything from unarmed combat to language skills to psychological warfare.

All well and good. But there was something about Wilkes that bothered Chapel. The guy was just too self-contained. He never gave anything away, never spoke of himself, never so much as blinked at the wrong time or laughed at a private joke. Chapel had met plenty of vets with PTSD, people who were stuck inside their heads, reliving a bad moment over and over. They acted a little like that, but in Wilkes’s case there was something more. He didn’t seem like he was stuck. Instead he acted like a panther in a cage at the zoo. Watching the world through hooded eyes, giving nothing away. Waiting for something to happen. Maybe he had some dark secret he didn’t want Chapel — or Hollingshead — to know about.

“And you say his record is clean. No red flags anywhere in his file.”

“None,” Angel replied. “He served a bunch of tours with military intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq. When he got home, about three years ago, he was recruited by Director Hollingshead personally. He checks out — I vetted him myself.”

“And you worked with him, too, on a mission,” Chapel said.

There must have been a certain tone in his voice. “Are you getting jealous?”

Chapel forced a laugh. “Hardly.”

“You know I’m yours, first and last,” Angel said. “You were on mandatory vacation. A mission came up, and he and I were just free at the right time. Don’t worry, Chapel. Nobody’s replacing you in my heart.”

It felt damned good to hear that.

He just wished he was sure Director Hollingshead felt the same way.

Chapel respected and trusted his boss implicitly. He would even admit to loving the man, the way a soldier loves a worthy commanding officer. Hollingshead was fair-minded and he took good care of his people. But he was also a pragmatist.

If he was going to replace Chapel, then Wilkes was a perfect choice. Chapel was rushing toward his midforties, way older than any field agent should be, while Wilkes still had plenty of good years in him. Chapel had been badly wounded in combat, and in Siberia he had screwed up a vital mission by misjudging a foreign asset. Wilkes was tough as nails, smart as a whip, and had no bad marks on his record at all. It would just make sense to put Wilkes on the most vital missions and have Chapel make a more or less graceful descent into, say, an analyst position or have him work as a consultant or, God forbid, run stakeouts for the rest of his career.

If Chapel had been in Hollingshead’s place, he would make the same decision.

It didn’t mean he had to like it.

“Chapel, are you okay?” Angel asked. “You went quiet there.”

He shook himself back to attention. He realized he’d been sitting there ruminating while Angel was on the line. He was so comfortable with her, so utterly at home talking to her that he’d let his brain shut down.

“I’m… fine. I…”

Maybe it was time to lay his cards on the table.

His mouth was suddenly dry. He swallowed thickly and said, “I’m fine, Angel. I just need to know something. You and I have been through so much, I’m hoping I can count on you to tell me something even if you have orders not to.”

Angel didn’t respond. Maybe she was waiting to hear what he said next.

“I need to know — is my career over? Because it’s pretty much all I have left.” He shook his head, even though she couldn’t see him. “When Julia left, when… when Nadia died, I… I guess I started to wonder about what I’m doing. About what kind of life I can have now. I took my time and weighed things and I think, well, I think if I can keep working, if I can keep going on real missions, then it’ll be okay. All the sacrifices I’ve made, everything I’ve had to do, it doesn’t matter. Not if I can still be of some use. But if I’m being put out to pasture, I’m not sure I can keep—”

He stopped because there was a click on the line. A soft mechanical sound that could have meant anything. Maybe somebody else was listening in, or maybe Angel had just changed the frequency of her signal, or—

Three annoying beeps sounded in his ear. The tones that indicated a dropped call.

“Angel?” he said. “Angel, are you there?”

Angel’s equipment was the best in the world. There was no way she could get cut off like that, not just because of a bad cellular link or rain fade or anything like that.

“Angel?” he said again.

There was no reply.

When Wilkes got back, Chapel was still trying to raise Angel. He had a phone number for her, one he’d never written down, only memorized. There was no answer on that line. It didn’t even go to voice mail. It just rang and rang. He tried to get in touch with Director Hollingshead next, calling a number for a pet store in Bethesda that was a front for the Defense Intelligence Agency. The woman on the other end of the line listened to his access code, then told him to hold the line while she connected him.

At least he got an answer this time — the woman came back and told him the director was not available to take his call. Chapel knew better than to ask if he could leave a message. His access code had been logged — Hollingshead would call Chapel back as soon as he could.

Wilkes had returned with a two-liter bottle of soda and with his own phone in his hand. He kept trying to get Chapel’s attention, but Chapel just waved him away. If something had happened to Angel, if she was in trouble, he would move heaven and earth to help her. Nothing else mattered. Even his mission was less important. If Harris Contorni was in the middle of selling backpack nukes to Iran in his motel room three doors down, well, that would just have to wait.

Wilkes finally did get his attention by grabbing Chapel’s phone out of his hand.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Chapel demanded.

Wilkes didn’t reply. He just tapped Chapel’s phone screen a couple of times with one finger while unscrewing the top of his soda bottle with his other hand. Then he handed the phone back and took a long slug of cola.

Chapel looked down at his phone. Wilkes had opened an app that decrypted incoming messages from the Pentagon. What he read there made him swear under his breath.

“Poseidon” was Director Hollingshead’s code name for the month, which meant he’d sent for the two of them personally. The headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency were in Fort Belvoir in Virginia, less than an hour away. The two of them just had time to clean up and get their uniforms on before they had to leave.

All of which was fine — but the first line of the message was what made Chapel’s eyes go wide. They were being told to abandon their stakeout, just for a briefing? Something truly serious must have happened.

“When did this come in?” Chapel asked.

“Five minutes ago. Looks like you were too busy to notice,” Wilkes told him. He took another long pull on his soda, then capped the bottle and threw it on the bed. “What were you up to?”

Chapel tried to decide how much he trusted Wilkes. “Something’s going on with Angel,” he said finally. “Her signal cut out and I can’t get her back on the line.”

“Maybe it’s something to do with this briefing.”

Chapel shook his head. No way to know. “You take the first shower. I’m going to keep trying to reach her.”

Chapel had an office at Fort Belvoir — as did half the intelligence staffers in America. It was an enormous, sprawling facility packed with the headquarters of dozens of agencies and offices and directorates large and small. He’d worked there for ten years, back before his reactivation as a field agent, but that had been in the southern area. The NGA headquarters was in the northern area, a region of the fort he’d rarely visited. He’d never even seen the NGA building before.

He had no idea why he was being summoned there. Normally he would have called Angel to ask her — to get some idea of what he was walking into before the briefing began. But she still wasn’t answering her phone.

Wilkes played with the radio the whole way there, trying to find some news broadcast that might give them an idea of what had happened. There was nothing. Some freak wildfires in Colorado caused by a massive lightning strike. The governor of New Jersey was in trouble again for reasons so boring Chapel just tuned them out. There was nothing to explain why Hollingshead had canceled a six-month investigation just so two operatives could attend a briefing.

When they arrived at their destination, Chapel just took a second to look at the place. What he knew about the NGA was limited. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency was responsible for SIGINT and imaging, he knew that much — it was a clearinghouse for all kinds of intelligence ranging from satellite data to radio broadcast intercepts to paper maps of sensitive areas. Its mission was just to collect information that might be useful to other agencies, and as far as he knew it didn’t carry out operations on its own; it just provided support. He knew that it was supposed to have been vital in locating Bin Laden in Abbottabad.

Apparently the kind of support that paid off.

The NGA building was the third-largest federal building in the D.C. area. Only the Pentagon and the Ronald Reagan Building were bigger. Much of its size came from its unusual shape. From above — say, from a satellite view — the structure looked like two enormous concrete parentheses framing a central atrium like the world’s biggest greenhouse. The atrium was five hundred feet long and more than a hundred feet wide. It was big enough to have its own weather system. As the two of them headed inside, Chapel couldn’t help but look up at the massive span of arching trusses overhead that screened the sky.

The atrium was full of people headed from one side of the headquarters to the other, some in military uniforms, some in civilian clothes. None of them looked particularly scared or tense, but maybe they didn’t know what was going on either.

Wilkes was already moving ahead toward a security station that blocked the main entrance to the complex. Chapel rushed to catch up — then slowed down when he saw there was a metal detector station. Of course there was. If he hadn’t been in such a rush, he would have thought about that in advance.

“Just step through, sir,” the attendant said. She was a middle-aged woman with that look security professionals get, like they’ve seen literally everything and none of it was particularly interesting. “There’s a line behind you.”

He gave the woman a smile. This was always tricky. “I’m afraid I’m about to make your day more complicated,” he told her. “I—”

“No firearms are allowed inside,” she told him, running a practiced eye up and down his uniform. “No weapons of any kind. If you’re worried about your belt buckle, you can take your belt off.”

“It’s not that,” Chapel said. “I have a prosthesis.”

Her world-weary stare didn’t change. “You’ll have to remove it.”

He considered arguing but knew there was no point. So while everyone in the NGA stared he unbuttoned his uniform tunic and then stripped out of his shirt until he was naked from the waist up. In a government office building.

Anyone seeing Chapel like that would take a second to realize what was different about him. His left arm, after all, looked exactly like his right one. It was the same skin tone and there was the same amount of hair on the knuckles and the forearm.

That appearance ended at his shoulder. There his arm flared out in a pair of clamps that held snug against his chest and back. He reached over with his right hand and released the catches that held the arm in place, then pulled the whole thing off and put it in a plastic bin so it could be scanned.

As it ran through the machine, the attendant didn’t even look at him. She studied her screen making sure there were no bombs or weapons hidden inside the prosthetic. The fingers of the artificial hand ducked in and out of her x-ray scanner, as if reaching out of the guts of the machine for help.

At least a hundred people, most of them in civvies, had stopped to watch. Some of them pointed at him while others whispered to each other with shocked expressions on their faces.

Chapel had been through this before. He tried not to let it bother him. On the other side of the security barrier, Wilkes watched with a sly smile. He knew about the arm, of course — they’d been living together for months now. Most likely he just wanted to watch Chapel squirm. Well, Chapel did his best not to show his embarrassment.

When the scan was done and Chapel, sans arm, had passed through the metal detector, the attendant picked up the prosthetic and handed it back to Chapel. He started to take it from her, but she held on a second longer.

“Sir,” she asked. She looked like she was having trouble finding the right words. Finally she just said, “Iraq?”

“Afghanistan,” he told her.

She nodded. “I have a cousin. Had… had a cousin. He died in Iraq. Sir — do you think it was worth it?”

Chapel wanted to sigh. He wished he knew the answer to that one himself sometimes. It wasn’t the first time anyone had asked him the question, though, and he knew what to say. “I’m sure he thought it was. I’m sure he went over there to serve his country, even knowing what that could mean.”

The woman didn’t look at him. She just nodded and gave him his arm back.

By the time he put the arm and his uniform back on, Wilkes was nearly jumping up and down in impatience. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going to be late.”

They were given guest badges and instructions on how to find the briefing room. It was a little strange they were allowed to proceed without an escort, but Chapel supposed their security clearance spoke for itself. The two of them hurried through a series of windowless hallways and down several flights of stairs because they had no time to wait for an elevator. When they arrived at their destination, Chapel estimated they were at least one floor underground. He knew what that meant — he’d been in enough secure facilities in his time to know you put the really important rooms in the basement, where anyone inside would be safe from an attack on the surface.

Chapel pushed open the door and found himself in the largest, most high-tech briefing room he’d ever seen. Every wall was lined with giant LCD screens, some ten feet across, some the size of computer monitors. Currently they were all showing the same thing: a murky picture of a stack of shipping containers, with a deep fog or maybe a cloud of dust swirling between them. The view didn’t give him any useful information, so instead he looked at the people gathered in the room.

There were a lot of them. Maybe fifty. Half were dressed in military uniforms from every branch of service — even the Coast Guard and the National Guard were represented. Judging by the insignia they wore, Chapel, a captain in the U.S. Army, was the lowest-ranking man in the place except for Wilkes, who was a first lieutenant. He recognized some of the faces because they belonged to generals and admirals.

The other half of the crowd wore civilian clothes — conservative suits and flag pins. He recognized far fewer of them because he rarely dealt with civilian agencies, but he could tell right away they were all intelligence people by the way they kept glancing at one another as if they expected to be stabbed in the back at any minute.

Chapel definitely recognized one man in the room, a man in an immaculate navy blue suit with perfect white hair and deep blue eyes that could have drilled holes in armor plate. That was Patrick Norton, the secretary of defense. The boss of Chapel’s boss, and the leader of the entire military intelligence community of the United States.

“Shit just got real,” Wilkes muttered.

The two of them moved to the back wall of the room and stood at attention, waiting to be put at their ease.

It didn’t take long. Rupert Hollingshead came out of the crowd and shook both their hands.

The director didn’t dress like anyone else there. He wore a tweed suit with a vest and a pocket watch, and unlike everybody else he had facial hair — a pair of muttonchop sideburns that stuck out from either side of his wide face. He didn’t look like an intelligence professional at all. More like a genial old professor from an Ivy League university. He even had the mannerisms — the absent-minded attitude of a man lost in lofty thought. It was rare when Chapel didn’t see him smiling and nodding quietly to himself as if he were puzzling through an abstruse math problem.

Today, though, was one of those rare days. He’d never seen the director look so serious. The tweed, the smiles, even the pocket watch — those were all part of a costume, very carefully designed to put people at their ease and make them think he was no kind of threat. Today, though, his eyes gave him away. They had the laser focus of the man only his personal staff knew — the spymaster, the head of a secret Defense Intelligence Agency directorate. A man who was capable of sending field agents to their deaths, a man who could handle even the most grim situation report.

“Stand down, boys,” he said, in a voice that was not quite a whisper but was unlikely to carry across the room. “I’m sure you’re wondering why you’re here.”

“Yes, sir,” Chapel said. Wilkes just watched the director’s face.

“You two are here because I might need to send you on a new mission right away. Stay back here and keep quiet, all right? We’ll talk when this is done.”

Chapel very much wanted to tell the director about Angel’s dropped call and the fact that she’d been incommunicado for hours now. But this was neither the time nor the place. Even as Hollingshead stepped away from them, back into the muttering crowd, the briefing began.

A woman wearing a pantsuit — a civilian — stepped up to a podium on the far side of the room and asked everyone to take their seats.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I’m Melinda Foster, and I work for the NGA. We brought you all here to our offices as a kind of neutral territory. The NGA provides imaging product for both civilian and Department of Defense organizations, and the current situation is going to involve both sides of the intelligence community. My job isn’t to make policy decisions, though. I’m just here to give you the facts as we know them. Then we’ll open the floor to discussion.”

She picked up a remote control and clicked a few buttons. Behind her, on one of the big screens, a map of Louisiana appeared with a red star superimposed on the Mississippi delta. “This morning, just before six o’clock, the United States suffered a radiological attack.”

This wasn’t the kind of crowd that would easily erupt into chaos. Nobody jumped to their feet or shouted for more information. But Chapel could feel all the oxygen draining from the room as the crowd drew a deep and collective breath.

On the screen, a map of the Port of New Orleans appeared. “The night before, a cargo container came into this, our busiest port. It came with counterfeit paperwork. We’ve established it was full of low-level radioactive waste. I need to stress that does not mean weapons-grade radiologicals. Instead, we’re talking about the junk that gets discarded all the time by workers in nuclear power plants. Everything from scrapped computer components to contaminated safety equipment down to the gloves and protective clothing the workers used. All that stuff is considered as hazardous material and is normally processed along with spent nuclear fuel.”

A slide came up on the screen showing a pile of garbage that looked harmless enough, just as she’d described it.

“Radioactive particles can adhere to this material, so it needs to be disposed of carefully. But apparently some nuclear plant somewhere didn’t feel like paying to do that. So instead they just stuffed it in a cargo container and sent it overseas. Most likely it was being shipped to a developing country where it would end up in a landfill. This happens with distressing regularity. Along its journey, however, it passed through our port. That’s illegal — hence the counterfeit paperwork. Just before six A.M., this cargo container entered an inspection station in the Port of New Orleans. It went under a PVT gamma ray detection arch, a piece of technology we’ve installed in all our shipping hubs specifically to catch this kind of event. The arch did its job and logged a gamma ray detection event. Normally the cargo container would have been isolated in a quarantine facility and traced back to its origin. Today, however, we never got the chance.”

Foster clicked her remote again. The image on the screen changed to show a Predator UAV — an aircraft everyone in the room would instantly recognize.

“At the same time an MQ-1 aircraft was passing overhead. It was an old, demilitarized model, one of the first-generation drones. Civilian agencies and even law enforcement are using these now for basic surveillance functions. Local air traffic control was aware of the Predator, but nobody seems to have raised any red flags — they assumed it was a routine sweep. The port is monitored at all times by a variety of systems, including drones, and while this one didn’t have an official flight plan, everyone seems to have assumed that was just an oversight. Now, these drones don’t just fly themselves. Somebody has to actively control them from another location. So we know what happened next was not just a glitch.

“The drone descended at speed toward the port facility just as the cargo container passed under the PVT arch. It impacted the container with a considerable amount of force. The drone wasn’t carrying any weaponry, but simple physics was enough to catastrophically damage the cargo container. Its structural integrity was compromised and its contents were dispersed over a wide area. Some of the nonmetallic components inside, like those rubber gloves, were aerosolized in the impact.

“What that means is that a large quantity of radioactive material was dispersed across the port facility, in some cases traveling a quarter mile before it settled out of the air. Dust from the gloves and clothing may have been carried much farther. Preliminary analysis shows that a significant area of the port has been affected.”

She clicked a button and a new picture came up, this showing an overhead view of the enormous port facility. A red stain covered almost half of the view, looking like a spray of blood from a cut artery, to indicate the spread of radioactive material.

“The port was evacuated just after the event. There was only one direct injury — a Charles Mitchell, the operator of the PVT arch, was hit by flying debris. He was found dead on the scene. Meanwhile, we have hazmat crews all over the port trying to collect as much of the debris as possible. Though the overall levels of radiation are very low, it just isn’t safe to let workers back inside the facility until we can complete our cleanup.”

She clicked her remote and the view returned to the video Chapel had seen before — the dust-shrouded pile of cargo containers.

“Ladies and gentleman,” Foster said, “Mr. Secretary. The impact — the crash — of this drone was intentional. It was very well planned. What it boils down to is that terrorists have just exploded a dirty bomb on American soil.”

Half the room started talking at once then, people firing questions at Melinda Foster, others calling for immediate action. Chapel couldn’t follow all the rapid-fire discussions, and apparently neither could the room’s most important occupant.

The secretary of defense slapped the table with the flat of his hand. It was enough to get absolute, instant quiet.

In the silence he looked around the room, from one tense face to another. “The president has personally asked me to lead the task force on this. The director of national intelligence is on board — so all you civilians here, you’re working for me now. Everybody here is working for me until this is over. Understood?”

The room rumbled with agreement. There had been times in the past — September eleventh, for example — when the various agencies in the intelligence community had failed to work together and bad things happened. Clearly the president wasn’t going to let that happen again. The authority he’d given to Norton might be unprecedented, but nobody in that room was going to question it.

“We’re going to get whoever did this,” Norton said. “We’re going to make an example of them.”

The room briefly erupted in a chorus of assent, which stopped as soon as Norton slapped the table again.

“No one is leaving this room until we have a plan for moving forward. I need all of you working together — every agency, every organization, from this moment, is going to make this their top priority. What we’re talking about here is escalation. This is terrorism of a kind we haven’t seen before and we’re not going to let it get out of control. The world needs to know we won’t allow this to happen again. First things first, though. We need to know who’s responsible.” He turned and looked at one of the civilians — one Chapel didn’t recognize. “CIA. What groups do we think are even capable of something like this? Hijacking a Predator — could al-Qaeda do that? IS? The Khorasan Group?”

The civilian grimaced. “They’ve never done anything like it before. They stick to low-tech methods, mostly. But we can’t rule them out. A Predator is like any other machine. It’s designed to accept input from a remote user and it doesn’t care who that user is as long as they’re broadcasting on the right frequency, with the right encryption. It’s not smart enough to ask why it’s being told to do something.”

“But our encryption is the best in the world,” the SecDef insisted. Norton looked to another man halfway across the room. “NSA. Am I wrong in believing that?”

“No,” the NSA director replied, though he looked a little dubious. “Our stuff should be uncrackable. But we can’t rule out the possibility that some very smart hacker in, say, Indonesia or Taiwan discovered a new exploit or just got lucky or—”

Norton shook his head. “I’m hearing a lot of qualifiers. A lot of ‘we can’t rule this out.’ I want real answers. Have we picked up any chatter about this? Anybody talking about planning an operation with a Predator drone, anyone discussing a cargo container full of radioactive waste?”

“Nothing,” the NSA man said. “The terror groups have been quiet lately. Most of what we hear is about money problems and recruiting. Nothing like this.”

“At least that’s definite,” Norton replied. “Okay. Let’s hear from the military. Who did this Predator belong to?”

“That would be us,” an air force general said. “It was one of our fleet. I’ve taken the liberty of tracking it through the system, and I can have a document on your desk tomorrow showing every individual who’s ever flown it, maintained it, or inspected it. I can tell you right now that it’s been sitting in a hangar for the last year, under armed guard the whole time. It hadn’t been modified or repaired for nine months. Nobody physically altered it.”

“What was it doing in the air?”

The general looked like he very much wanted to shrug. But he must have known this wasn’t the time to admit he didn’t know something. “It was signed out last night, by official e-mail. Fueled up and launched just after midnight, eastern time.”

“By whom? Who signed it out?” Norton demanded.

“The CIA,” the general replied.

That started some real shouting. People visibly moved away from the CIA director, who kept waving his hands in the air demanding quiet, insisting he had a response.

“I guarantee you we did not sign out that drone,” he shouted over the babble. “Whatever paperwork the air force got was a forgery. Drone operations have to cross my desk, and I saw nothing like this. Whoever these terrorists are, they have access to CIA watermarks, that’s all, they have—”

“Sir,” a navy admiral said, raising his voice, “if we can’t figure out who it was, why don’t we just hit them all — punitive raids, keep up the pressure until one of the terrorist groups cracks—”

“That’s going to kill our reputation overseas,” one of the civilian directors insisted. “It’s going to make it impossible for our people on the ground to—”

“We can afford to lose some human assets,” the CIA director insisted, “if it means flushing these assholes out of hiding; I’m willing to sacrifice as much as half of my—”

“You’re talking about mobilizing every Special Forces group,” an army general shouted, “right at the worst possible time, when things in Syria are going to hell and we need more people than ever in Yemen—”

“Ah,” someone said, a quiet sound in the furor. “If I may.” No one paid any attention.

Nobody except the SecDef. He turned and looked straight at Rupert Hollingshead.

Little by little the noise dropped away. People noticed that Norton had switched focus, and they decided they needed to know why.

Hollingshead leaned back in his chair and cleaned his glasses with a pocket handkerchief. He made a flourish of the cloth, then stuffed it back in his breast pocket while we waited for the room to quiet down so he could be heard.

“Rupert?” Norton asked. “You have something?”

“I am hearing,” Hollingshead said, rising creakily to his feet, “a lot of sabers being rattled just now. A lot of people who wish to go and find and lynch every known terrorist just in case one of them was responsible.”

He smiled. It was his warmest, most genial smile, and Chapel knew it was one hundred percent fake. “Understandable, of course.”

“Clearly you disagree with that plan,” Norton said.

Hollingshead gave a contrite shrug. “I think it may be presumptive. A tad.” He walked across the room, over to the screen that still showed dust billowing around cargo containers, as if he’d noticed something there. He blinked through his spectacles at the image. “Since, after all, this was not a terrorist attack.”

The CIA director actually started laughing.

“What are you talking about?” the NSA director shouted. “Of course it is! Somebody hit us, some cowardly bastard who—”

Hollingshead lifted his hands in the air as if in surrender. Chapel knew his boss was just getting started, though. “Please. Just hear me out. We few, gathered here today, have been preparing for something like this ever since 2001. We have lost a great deal of collective sleep over the possibility of a dirty bomb attack. In all our scenarios and projections we imagined this as the worst possible way for terrorists to strike at us. And so we built up our defenses against such a thing. We organized all our efforts toward preventing any terrorist group getting their hands on nuclear material. But that’s just it, isn’t it? When one is in possession of a, um, hammer, well, every threat looks exactly like a nail.”

Norton’s brow furrowed. “Rupert, if you could get to the point soon, I’d appreciate it.”

Hollingshead smiled and even elicited a few sympathetic chuckles from the crowd. They weren’t quite enough to balance the glares he was getting from the CIA and NSA directors.

“Very well. I’ll give you three points, in fact. One. A terrorist attacks a public target. A visible target. Ms. Foster,” he said, turning to the woman who’d given the initial briefing, “have the gentlemen of the press been allowed into the port facility since the attack?”

Foster looked terrified at being called on. “No,” she said, “not… not as such. There have been some reporters out there — they saw the plume of dust — but they don’t know any details. The port’s security people told them it was a hazardous materials situation, but that was all. No specific facts.”

Hollingshead nodded. “Very well done. Best we don’t bring this to the public just yet. The port facility is off-limits to the public. Point one. Terrorists wish to gain media attention, to get the world to see what they’ve done. A terrorist attack is a statement, a message everyone has to listen to. At the moment, the net result of this attack is likely to be a two-minute segment on the local news broadcast in Louisiana. Not much of a coup.

“Point two: they always take credit. We’ve already heard there was no chatter about this. But that must also mean no one is crowing about their success. What terrorist group would be so tight-lipped?”

Norton looked like he was half convinced. “What’s your third point?”

Hollingshead nodded. “Subtlety. And intentionality. This attack wasn’t just meant to scare us. It was meant to quietly, but quite effectively, cripple us. Mister Secretary,” he said, blinking at a man who sat very close to the SecDef. Chapel realized after a second that he recognized the man — he was the secretary of transportation. Not somebody who would normally sit in on a top-level intelligence briefing. “You are here today because your office administers and oversees our port facilities, yes? Perhaps you can tell me what I need to know. How vital to American commerce is the Port of New Orleans?”

The secretary nodded, clearly excited to be included. “It’s one of our top priorities. Our only deepwater port with access to six railways, the highway system, cargo planes. Half of all our food travels through that port, every year.”

“I imagine that closing the port is going to cost us a great deal of money, even in the short term,” Hollingshead pointed out.

The secretary nodded and grinned. Then he seemed to realize this wasn’t a time for showing off and his face fell into a more serious cast. “It’ll cost a fortune just to reroute all the ships that were supposed to offload there in the next month. And the public is going to feel that cost. We’re talking about a rise in food prices, maybe as much as ten percent. And all kinds of goods go through that port, everything from luxury cars to medical equipment, all of that’s going to get more expensive, and—”

Hollingshead lifted one hand to cut the man off. “That’s a serious return on investment. One Predator drone in exchange for a massive disruption of American commerce. Mr. Norton, I’d like to suggest that this is far too subtle for any ham-handed terrorist to be responsible. I’d venture this was the act of a power that wished to hurt us economically. I will go so far as to claim this was an act of soft war.”

That got people murmuring, though many of the whispered comments were just people asking what soft war was. Chapel knew the answer. Soft war, or anti-infrastructure warfare, was going after an enemy’s supply routes rather than attacking their soldiers. You blew up their roads or cut their power grid, making it impossible for them to carry out an effective military strategy.

The CIA director jumped to his feet. “Of course you would suggest this,” he said, his face bright red. “You’re military intelligence. You want this to be the opening shot in some big theater conflict — you want—”

Hollingshead cut him off simply by standing up straight and setting his mouth in a hard line. The genial professor act was gone. Suddenly he looked more like an Old Testament prophet. “The last thing any soldier wants is another war. But when one comes along, he does not shirk his duty. Mr. Norton, if this was the work of Iran or North Korea or, God forbid, China—”

“You’re jumping to conclusions,” one of the civilian directors shouted.

“You have no evidence,” the CIA director insisted.

Hollingshead said nothing. He just looked at Norton, waiting for a reply.

For a while, as directors and generals bickered back and forth across the room, the SecDef simply folded his hands in front of him, almost as if he were praying. Then he drew in a very long breath.

“Give me a plan,” he said.

Hollingshead didn’t hesitate. “I have two operatives with me right now. I can get them to work immediately, investigating who did this. Give them twenty-four hours to dig. By all means let our analyst friends look into the terrorism angle — if someone claims responsibility or we hear any chatter, then, well, problem solved. If I’m right, however, we need to act decisively, right from the start.”

“Okay,” Norton said. “Do it. Whatever you need.”

Hollingshead moved through the room putting a hand on a shoulder here, whispering a word in an ear there, marshaling what support he could. Then he headed back out into the hallway, nodding for Wilkes and Chapel to follow. Once the door was closed behind them, he looked at his two men and then let out a long, chuckling sigh. “We have our work cut out for us, boys.”

“Yes, sir,” Chapel said.

The three of them headed toward the exit. Along the way Wilkes said, “Sir, you think it’s true? You think this is the start of a war?”

“Not for a moment,” Hollingshead confided. He stopped and glanced around, looking to see if anyone else was listening. “It’s possible, of course. When you spin a line of nonsense like that, you need to have plausibility on your side. But I just don’t see what quarter such an attack could come from. This was a technological attack — all of it done with computers. Neither Iran nor North Korea have the encryption know-how to do this. Russia and China might, but why would either of them want to start a war? Russia couldn’t win, and China would stand to gain nothing but losing their biggest market.” He shook his head. “No, this wasn’t state-sponsored. That much I feel sure of.”

Chapel frowned. “But then why make that case? Sir, you lied to the secretary of defense.”

“Sometimes it’s necessary. That room was headed in one direction only. They were going to turn this into another September eleventh. The country can’t handle that kind of panic again. I’ve bought us a little time during which people will be forced to make rational choices.”

“I don’t get it,” Wilkes said.

Hollingshead put a hand on the marine’s elbow. “Son, you’re too young to remember what it was like. On September eleventh, 2001, we were caught completely off guard. The nation had no plan in place for how to handle a terrorist attack on its soil. The result was pure pandemonium. Every agency rushing to action with no information or, worse, bad information. Intelligence organizations openly and viciously fighting over who got to respond and who was to blame. The end result was that we started two wars we couldn’t handle and squandered an enormous amount of blood and treasure. If we can forestall that this time — if we can fix things now, quietly, without letting fear overtake us, then we stand to do an enormous amount of good for the country. If we fail, we will spend the next ten years putting out fires and cleaning up messes and accomplishing nothing.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Wilkes said.

“All right.” Hollingshead led them toward the atrium and the street. “You two will have a car. Let’s head back to the Pentagon. We can reconnoiter at my office. The absolute first thing we need to do is get Angel working on this, tracking whoever hijacked that Predator.”

“Sir,” Chapel said, “that’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Oh?”

“I was on the phone with her this morning and we were… cut off. I can’t explain it, it sounded like the call was dropped. I haven’t been able to reach her since.”

Hollingshead gave him a long, questioning look, but Chapel had no more information to give.

“Blast,” the director said finally. He reached into his pocket and took out a hands-free unit. It looked ridiculous in his ear — like an anachronism, like a caveman wearing a wristwatch. He tapped at it convulsively, calling Angel’s name over and over. Eventually he gave up and put the earpiece away.

“Damnation,” he said, staring off into the middle distance. “This is bad. Very bad. Without her, we’re flying blind.”

“Sir, if I may speak candidly?” Chapel asked.

“Yes, of course, always. You’ve seen how Wilkes speaks to me.”

The marine didn’t even have the good grace to blush.

Chapel tried not to focus on that. “The timing is strange. When I spoke to her she sounded fine, but then she just dropped off the air — just a couple hours after the attack in New Orleans. I’m not a big believer in coincidences.”

“Nor am I. You think she’s in danger?”

“I think that finding out what happened to her might give us a clue as to who attacked the port,” Chapel pointed out.

Hollingshead nodded. “It does raise one massive headache, though.”

“What’s that?” Wilkes asked.

“It means we need to find somebody to help us, somebody who can do what she normally does for us. It means we’re going to have to go begging to the bloody NSA.”

Chapel shared the director’s opinion of the NSA, but really, having to go to any agency outside of the DIA was a problem. Technically, after 9/11, every agency and directorate and organization in the American intelligence community had been streamlined so they could work together — they were all on the same team, after all. A major reason the 2001 terrorist attacks had been such a surprise was that different agencies had all had parts of the puzzle, but nobody had been willing to share information. Each agency was treated like a separate fiefdom with its own jealously guarded secrets.

That was supposed to have changed. They were all supposed to be members of a happy family now. Unfortunately, the very competitive directors and spymasters of those agencies had seen the new rules not as a chance to integrate intelligence but an opportunity to one-up each other. The agencies competed for funds and for prestige all the time. The mass briefing back at Fort Belvoir had shown just how contentious that competition got. If the DIA needed help from the NSA, it would make the DIA look like it couldn’t get things done on its own. If it was the NSA that tracked the drone hijacker, not the DIA, then the NSA stood to benefit — in terms of larger budgets and more influence in the White House. Accepting that he needed the NSA was tantamount for Hollingshead to admitting defeat.

It was a measure of Hollingshead’s character that finding the hijacker was more important than his own reputation.

“Keep trying Angel,” Hollingshead said, leaning over the backseat. “Here. There are three numbers she always responds to.” He took a tiny notebook and a golf pencil out of one of his many pockets and scribbled the numbers down, then tore out the page and handed it to Wilkes. “Make sure you destroy that paper when you’ve got them memorized.” He sat back down in his seat and looked over at Chapel. “You’re sure she didn’t say anything that made you think she was in immediate danger?”

Chapel kept his eyes on the road. The NSA was headquartered in Fort Meade, back in Maryland, which meant driving through the never-ending gridlock that surrounded Washington. “She sounded more worried about me.”

Hollingshead slapped the dashboard. “I wish I’d known before I committed us. Oh, look, son, it’s not, ah, it’s not your fault — I didn’t give you a chance to talk back there.” He sighed and stared out his window. “All right, we’re still on the clock and we have a little time before we get to the NSA. We need to start thinking through how we’re going to find whoever struck the Port of New Orleans. We need a list of possible culprits.”

“Yes, sir,” Chapel said. This was good — it was good because it would make him think about something other than what had happened to Angel. He forced himself to push his brain down a different road. “You said before this was a technological attack — all done with computers. And we know the Predator’s control signal was heavily encrypted. That has to narrow down the search. If the same person intercepted and blocked Angel’s signal, that means even fewer candidates. Her encryption was stronger than the Predator’s. You said Russia and China might have that kind of technology.”

“They might. But in both cases it wouldn’t be something the average citizen could get their hands on. It would take military-grade equipment, or maybe something their spy services would have. We know neither of them wants to start a war.”

“But maybe that wasn’t the point,” Chapel pointed out. “Maybe the whole plan was just to hurt us economically. They would know we would suspect terrorists first — if they covered their tracks well enough, they’d have a chance of getting away with it and us never finding out.”

“We’ll put that on the list, then, but no — that doesn’t feel right,” Hollingshead said. “I’ll admit I’m no, ah, economist. Perhaps they wanted to, I don’t know, short some market for foodstuffs or monopolize some commodity. But a real economist, I’m sure, would point out what they had to lose. Hurting us might give them a tiny advantage, but would it be worth the incredible risk? If we do discover that this actually was soft war, we’ll have to respond with the more traditional sort.”

“So what else, then? Who?”

Hollingshead shrugged. “The problem with technology, of course, is that it’s always moving forward. Always innovating. We could be dealing with just one rogue hacker, for all we know.”

“Someone like Bogdan Vlaicu,” Chapel pointed out. Vlaicu was a Romanian hacker Chapel had worked with on a mission, once. He was a paranoid, morose man who was convinced he was constantly about to be killed. He was also the best computer genius Chapel had ever known, with the one exception of Angel. “He had access to Angel’s software, once, and he made pretty good use of it.” In fact he’d been a big part of why Chapel had screwed up so badly on that mission and gotten himself assigned to stakeout duty with Wilkes. “I know she upgraded her systems after we found out, but maybe he found another way in.”

“It’s possible. There are three or four other people in the world with those skills, people I’ve had my eye on,” Hollingshead said, “very dangerous people. But none of them would intentionally attack the United States, not like this — it just wouldn’t interest them to do so.”

“Unless they were paid well enough,” Chapel pointed out. Vlaicu had worked for both organized crime and for the Romanian and Russian governments in the past. He’d also helped a terrorist in Siberia, though that had been… complicated.

“So he and the others definitely go on the list, though finding them will be damned difficult. And then we’ll need to discover who they worked for,” Hollingshead said.

Wilkes leaned over the seat back. “No answer from any of these phone numbers,” he said. Chapel had expected as much, but it still pained him to hear it. “But while I’ve been playing secretary, I thought of something. What if it was internal?” he asked.

Chapel forced himself not to take his eyes off the road.

“What are you suggesting?” Hollingshead asked.

“Somebody needs to ’jack a Predator, well, they need to write all kinds of code, pull all kinds of crazy computer tricks.” Wilkes chuckled. “Unless they already had the key, right? The CIA is operations for a big chunk of the drone fleet. And back there, at the briefing, they said it. The CIA had logged out this particular Predator. Why make things complicated? What if the CIA staged this attack?”

“But why?” Chapel asked.

“Who knows?” Wilkes said. It sounded less like an admission of ignorance than that he just didn’t care. “I can think of a reason they’d want to take down Angel, though. You three — you, sir; Jimmy here; and Angel — you took down Tom Banks a couple of years ago. Gave the CIA a real bloody nose.”

“I suppose we did do that,” Hollingshead replied. “And revenge is a perfectly sound motive in this sort of thing. But there’s one problem. We took down Tom Banks and his directorate of the CIA quite successfully. He’s not there anymore, nor are any of his people. He was replaced by Harry West. An old friend of mine — in fact, he got the job because I personally recommended him.”

“So we can cross the CIA off the list,” Chapel said. “At least that’s something. I really don’t want to think this was an inside job — that somebody in the intelligence community dropped a dirty bomb on U.S. soil.”

“I imagine none of us do. Though part of our job is to take on the unthinkable,” Hollingshead said. He leaned forward and gestured through the windshield.

Up ahead a sign by the side of the road indicated that the upcoming exit ramp was only a quarter of a mile away. NSA EMPLOYEES ONLY, it read.

“Take this exit,” Hollingshead told Chapel. “They’ll be expecting us.”

Military vehicles sat on either side of the off-ramp, and an armed guard stood in the middle of the road, waving them in. Hollingshead rolled down his window and held up his identification and the guard just nodded. He gave them some quick directions toward their destination and then warned them what would happen if they wandered too far off course. Chapel made a point of following the directions exactly.

NSA headquarters, in comparison to the NGA building they’d just left, looked like a boring rectangular office building — nothing special. Of course Chapel knew that appearances could be deceiving. The glass panes that fronted the building were all one-way mirrors that had been coated with a film of copper so no one could bounce a radio signal through them. Information entered the building through a thousand conduits, but none ever came out.

The building stood in the middle of the largest parking lot Chapel had ever seen. An attendant came out and guided him into a numbered spot. “Kept it open just for you,” the man said with a big grin. “You’ll want to head into that white building there, the Visitor Control Center. Have a great day!”

Together the three of them headed into the indicated building, where a line of metal detectors and backscatter booths waited. Sighing, Chapel started to unbutton his uniform tunic again, intending to take his arm off before someone asked him to. Before he could get more than one button undone, however, a woman in a blue blazer came running up. “No need, sir, no need!”

“I have a prosthetic arm,” he told her, launching into a speech he’d used a thousand times before. “It’ll set off the metal detectors and—”

“Yes, Captain, we know,” she said, reaching for his good arm. “If you’ll just come this way. All three of you. We have a special detector suite warmed up. Don’t worry, Director Hollingshead, we know about your pacemaker as well, there’s no danger.”

Chapel gave the director a glance, but Hollingshead simply favored him with a tiny sympathetic shake of his head. Together the three of them passed into a series of gray felt-covered partition walls at one end of the security station. Chapel was certain he was being scanned as he walked through, but he had no idea what kind of detectors they used. At the far end they were given blue security badges embedded with tiny RFID chips embedded in the plastic. “Don’t worry about getting lost,” the woman explained. “If you end up someplace you’re not supposed to, those chips will sound an alarm and somebody will come to collect you. If you tamper with the chips, that’ll set off the alarm, too, so try not to touch them too much.” She gave them a big, warm smile. “Welcome to the Puzzle Palace!”

“Thank you, my dear,” Hollingshead said. His genial professor act was back in place. “If you could, ah, be so kind as to direct us…”

“No need,” she said, bobbing her head. “Just go over there to elevator bank two.”

Chapel frowned. There really should have been someone to meet them and take them to — well, wherever they were headed. When they arrived at the elevator bank, though, he saw why that wasn’t necessary. With a pleasant little chime the nearest elevator opened its doors. Stepping inside, he saw that one of the floor buttons was already lit. Obviously the floor they wanted.

Wilkes leaned over toward Chapel’s ear. “You know that feeling, when you’re being watched? You can feel it on the back of your neck?”

“Yeah,” Chapel said.

“Right now I got that feeling on the front of my neck, too.”

Hollingshead cleared his throat. “Boys, I’d appreciate it if you could try to remember that everything you say and do inside this building is being written down somewhere. Logged, as they say, for posterity.”

The elevator opened again on a broad lobby full of potted plants. No one was there to meet them, but at the far side of the lobby a green light appeared over a door. They headed through into a cavernous room Chapel thought looked like nothing so much as a deserted casino.

The lighting was subdued and mostly blue. The thick carpet under his feet was red with an abstract pattern of yellow lines. On the walls, massive display screens showed a rotating NSA logo. The ceiling was studded with black glass domes that he was certain hid cameras that tracked his every move. Instead of slot machines, however, the room contained dozens of gleaming workstations, each with a padded chair and a high-end laptop.

Two people waited for them at the far end of the huge room. One was a woman dressed in an air force uniform, while the other was a civilian in a sweater vest and khaki pants. At first Chapel thought the woman was very short, but as they approached he realized that it was just that although the civilian wasn’t very tall — probably six and a half feet — he was so thin; Chapel found himself thinking this was the tallest little guy he’d ever met. His hair was short but somehow messy, which just added to the impression. He didn’t make eye contact as the two groups came together.

The woman was perhaps sixty years old, with short, curly hair and warm eyes. She gave them a high-wattage smile and reached out with both hands for Hollingshead. “Rupert!” she exclaimed. “How lovely to see you again.” And then she actually pecked him on the cheek.

The director squirmed away as if a boa constrictor was trying to wrap itself around his throat. “Good morning, Charlotte,” he said. He turned and looked back at Chapel and Wilkes. “Boys, meet Colonel Charlotte Holman.”

Chapel came to attention and offered her a salute. Wilkes did the same after a moment’s hesitation.

“Oh, please,” Holman said, laughing. “No need for that. We’re all friends here. We’re very nearly family!”

Chapel held the salute. Eventually, a little awkwardly, Holman returned it. “At ease, Captain,” she said, shaking her head in amusement.

Chapel wished he had any idea whatsoever what was going on.

“Colonel Holman,” Hollingshead tried to explain, “is an old acquaintance. I didn’t actually expect her to come meet us here.”

“I’m the subdirector for the S1 Directorate. Customer Relations,” she told Chapel and Wilkes. It took Chapel a moment to realize that meant she was an interagency liaison. The NSA had no field agents like himself — it simply gathered information, which it then passed on to other organizations like the DIA. Holman, then, was responsible for that dissemination. He had forgotten that the NSA used business lingo to refer to its activities — the information it provided was referred to as its “products” and the security agencies it served were its “customers.”

“Normally on a case like this you’d be meeting with my director,” Holman told them, “but he’s still back at that incredibly tense briefing you came from.” She mocked a shiver. “Pretty scary stuff, huh?” She laughed again. Chapel got the impression she laughed a great deal, even about inappropriate things like a dirty bomb attack. “Rupert thought he was going to just come over here and somehow miss seeing me altogether, but I’m a little too sly for that.”

“Now, now, Charlotte, I had no intention of—”

“I can see by the looks on your faces you’d like to know what there is between us,” she said.

Chapel had to admit he was mildly curious.

“I’ll tell you, but it’s a secret, so, shush!” She mimed locking her lips with a key. “Rupert and I dated once upon a time.”

“Once being the operative term, I’m, uh, afraid,” Hollingshead said. “It was ten years ago. My wife had, well, passed and some… mutual friends. Set us up. As it were.”

“It was lovely,” Holman told them. “Who would have thought in this day and age there were any true gentlemen left? Rupert was wonderful. Such a shame it didn’t work out.”

Hollingshead was actually blushing. Chapel couldn’t help but be fascinated — he knew nothing at all about the director’s personal life. The man kept such things intensely private. He didn’t like seeing his boss in such obvious distress, but considering the reason, well—

“I wasn’t, er, ready,” Hollingshead said. “To. You know. Date again.”

“One day you will be,” Holman said, with a twinkle in her eye. “I’ll get my hooks in you yet, Rupert.” She laughed again.

Chapel knew, in an instinctive way, that this flirtatious persona was just that. If Rupert Hollingshead only pretended to be a bumbling absent-minded professor, Charlotte Holman was putting on just as much of an act. But it worked. He had just met this woman. She outranked him. Yet he had to keep reminding himself he shouldn’t trust her — she just seemed so harmless.

“Oh, where are my manners?” she said. “I still haven’t introduced Paul. Paul, please say hello to our friends from the DIA.”

The skinny guy in the sweater vest held out one hand for them to shake. He didn’t make eye contact, though. “Paul Moulton,” he muttered. “I’m an analyst in Tailored Access Operations.”

“One of our very best,” Holman said, reaching up to put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “When Rupert asked for our help, I knew Paul was exactly the man we needed. He’ll help you find this bad guy, be assured of it.”

“I’m afraid time is at a premium,” Hollingshead said. “Do you think we could, ah, get down to it?”

“Of course,” Holman said. She led them over to one of the workstations. Moulton sat down in the chair and logged in. Holman looked over at Hollingshead. “So tell us exactly what you’re looking for today.”

The way she said it left Chapel with no doubt she already knew, but she wanted Hollingshead to say it out loud. That way he actually had to ask her — which meant he would owe her something. He shuddered to imagine having to operate on the level these two took for granted. The endless games, the rivalries between agencies — he wondered what kind of brain it took to keep it all straight.

“Someone hijacked a Predator drone this morning. That is to say,” Hollingshead told her, “they fed it control data that was not authorized by any governmental or military body. We need to know who did it, that’s all. A physical location would be nice, but a name would be even better.”

Holman nodded. “I imagine we can do that. Funny, though. Normally you could take care of this yourself, couldn’t you?”

“The analyst I would usually turn to,” Hollingshead said, glancing away, “is unavailable at the moment.”

“How frustrating. Paul, can you bring up data on the drone fleet?” She turned to face Chapel and Wilkes. “Communications with the drones is all logged, of course, recorded and stored on Department of Defense servers. Paul — mirror your screen to display three, please.”

One of the big screens on the wall lit up with an image of the workstation’s desktop. Moulton opened an application that showed a list of files all dated in the last twenty-four hours. There were hundreds of them. “What you see here,” Holman said, “is computer code describing what the Predators were doing at a given time, whether that means shifting the inclination of an aileron or turning off their cameras or, for sake of argument, firing a Hellfire missile.”

“All these drones were in the air?” Chapel asked.

“No, most of those are just for UAVs still sitting in their hangars,” Holman explained. “They send a constant stream of updates and checklists back to command, even when they’re inactive, just so we can keep track of where they are.”

“I’ll highlight the active ones,” Moulton said. On the screen only a half-dozen or so listings changed to blue. “It’s one of these?”

Hollingshead put on his glasses and studied the screen. “There. The one that just stops at 05:51:14,” he said, pointing at the big display. Chapel realized that must be the moment when the Predator hit the cargo container and destroyed itself — putting it off-line.

Moulton isolated the listing and expanded it. It looked like so much gibberish to Chapel — just line after line of numbers and strings of letters he knew he would never understand.

Hollingshead walked over to the screen. “Here.” He pointed at a line that read 10.0.0.1. “This lists the IP address for the incoming commands, yes?”

Holman nodded. “That’s right.”

Chapel tried to remember everything he’d heard Angel say about IP addresses. He knew they were pretty useful. “If you know that, you can track the command back to whoever issued it, right? You can get their physical location.”

“You might,” Holman said, “except of course the hijacker would know that. So he went to the trouble of altering the IP address on his outgoing commands. 10.0.0.1 is a default IP address — just a placeholder. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“You can do that?” Chapel asked.

“It’s actually pretty easy,” Moulton told him.

“So…” Chapel shook his head. “So we’re seeing the actual code the hijacker used to control the Predator. But that code doesn’t tell us anything useful. They’ve hidden themselves and there’s no way to find out who they are.”

“Yeah, right,” the analyst sneered. “I can totally track them. They just went to enough trouble to make it interesting.”

“The hijacker prevented us from doing this the easy way. And maybe if you were talking to anybody else, it would end there. But this is the NSA. We’ve been cracking codes since World War I.” Moulton turned around in his chair. “Whoever sent these commands, they thought they were anonymous. But you can’t ever really be anonymous on the Internet.” He glanced from one to another of them with little grunts of frustration as if trying to decide who might understand what he said next. “You leave… fingerprints, I guess, is a good analogy. I can’t get an IP address out of this code. But there’s still a path to follow.” He turned back to his keyboard. “This is going to take a few minutes.”

“Take your time,” Holman told him. “Do it right.”

Moulton nodded over his keyboard. He opened up another program, one that looked to Chapel like a giant and very, very complicated spreadsheet. He entered a mathematical equation in a field at the top of the sheet and then opened yet another program that showed a map of the world.

“I’m going to query our network analyzer. This thing’s like a packet sniffer on steroids.” He glanced around the room and then sighed. “Basically, um, I can’t just trace the signal back to its source. But because of how the Internet works, I can find everywhere the signal passed through on its way to the Predator. All the servers it touched on its way. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack by examining every piece of hay for how long ago they were next to the needle. Then by knowing where those pieces of hay were, you can home in on where the needle was, even though it isn’t there anymore.”

“If it works,” Wilkes said, “I don’t really care how it works.”

The analyst nodded. He clicked his mouse, and up on the screen thousands of red dots appeared on the map, spread out pretty evenly. “These are all the servers the signal passed through. Somewhere in there is your hijacker.”

He clicked his mouse again and then pushed back from the workstation to watch the big screen with the rest of them. Up there, a huge number of the dots disappeared, leaving Africa and Australia completely bare.

Chapel knew he would never follow what was actually happening, so he just watched the map. It was almost hypnotic to watch the dots fall away. As more dots blinked out, the process slowed down dramatically. Long seconds would tick by before another one dropped off the map. But the program kept running. Chapel estimated they were down to only a few hundred at most. Then, suddenly, every dot disappeared from Europe and Asia, leaving only those in the United States.

“The signal came from inside the country,” Holman interpreted.

A chill ran down Chapel’s spine. He remembered what Wilkes had said back in the car — that this might be an inside job. His mouth was suddenly dry. “Are we looking at somebody military, or a civilian?” he asked.

Holman looked at him with wide eyes. “What are you suggesting?” she asked.

Chapel shook his head. “Nothing yet. Just — Moulton. What do you think?”

“Hard to say — the fact that they passed through so many servers so quickly makes me think it’s military. Or at least they’re using military-grade software.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions yet,” Holman said.

The map changed to just show the United States. Then almost at once it changed again, to just show the northeastern corridor. One by one the dots kept going out. The map changed a third time to show the greater Washington, D.C., area, with red dots clustered around the Pentagon and Fort Belvoir.

Chapel took a deep breath. It looked like it was one of their own. The possibility had always been there. But at least now they knew, at least they could narrow down the list of possible culprits. And then Chapel could go and find the hijacker and put an end to this before things went too far. All right, that was acceptable. And he had to admit they couldn’t have done it without the NSA.

“This,” Chapel said as the lights continued to go out, “is some pretty impressive hacking.”

“Excuse me?” Moulton said.

“You’re quite the hacker,” Chapel said, smiling.

Moulton erupted out of his chair and jabbed a finger in Chapel’s face. “You take that back.”

“What? Listen, I didn’t mean—”

“I am not a hacker,” Moulton insisted. “A hacker exploits weaknesses. They break into things. I’m using tools that were designed just for this purpose.”

“I didn’t, uh — hey, let’s just—”

Hollingshead cleared his throat, quite distinctly. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if you’ll put this disagreement on hold, you might wish to look at the map.”

Chapel turned and looked at the screen. What he saw made him forget all about Moulton’s outburst.

Only one dot remained on the map. It was on the Pentagon.

Everyone in the room held their breath. They knew what that had to mean. The hijacking was an inside job. It wasn’t a debatable point anymore.

“Military, then,” Holman said, walking toward the map as if she wanted to see it more clearly. “Military. Or maybe a civilian contractor working for a military organization. Can we get any more details?”

“Sure,” Moulton said. He glared at Chapel one last time and then returned to his seat. He glanced at his monitor for a moment, then tapped a key and the view on the screen disappeared, replaced with a block of code that Chapel couldn’t read. “Here we go. The IP address you requested. It doesn’t look like the other one because this is an IPv6 address, which is … oh,” Moulton said. “Oh, this is — this is a little, um—”

“Delicate,” Holman said. “Rupert, I’m so sorry you had to find out like this, I assure you I had no idea—”

She stopped talking because Hollingshead had lifted his hands for peace. He had his eyes closed, and he looked like he was fighting to control himself.

“It’s us,” he said.

“What?” Chapel asked. “What are you saying?”

“That IP address is one reserved for use by the Defense Intelligence Agency,” Hollingshead said very quietly. “The hijacker is one of ours.”

Chapel was so stunned he had no idea what to say.

Wilkes didn’t have the same problem. “Give me a name,” he said.

Moulton did something that cleared his screen and then brought up a page of text — numbers and words, but none Chapel could make any sense out of. The IP address was highlighted in one cell near the middle of the sheet. There was no name associated with the address, just a sixteen-digit number.

“That’s a confidential employee identifier,” Holman said, pointing at the screen. “That’s the number for an operative who can’t be named, even in classified documents. Do you want me to look up who it belongs to?”

“No need,” Hollingshead said. “I recognize it. The person you’ve identified is known to me.” He opened his eyes. Blinked a few times. Then he looked at Chapel and Wilkes and took a deep breath. “No point in hiding things now. That’s Angel’s identifier. Angel is the hijacker.”

“No,” Chapel said. “No. No way it’s her. She wouldn’t do this.”

“Son, I don’t want to believe it either,” Hollingshead told him, reaching for his arm. “But we have to at least entertain the possibility—”

Chapel brushed off the director’s hand. “After all she’s done for you. Everything she’s done for her country. You won’t even give her the benefit of the doubt?”

“That’s exactly what I want to do,” Hollingshead said. He sighed deeply and looked around him. Every eye in the room was watching him. “We’ll have to bring her in. Today.”

Chapel shook his head. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Hollingshead was going to arrest Angel just because the NSA claimed she was a traitor? It was unthinkable.

“She can tell us her side of the story,” Hollingshead went on.

“Somebody’s framing her,” Chapel insisted.

It was Moulton who responded to that. “If they are, they’re doing an incredible job of it. It took every resource we had to trace her. If this was a frame-up, you’d think the false evidence would be easier to find.”

Chapel glared at the man. “You don’t know her.”

“Looks like maybe you don’t, either,” Moulton pointed out.

Chapel took a step toward him, ready to drag him out of his chair and beat the smug smile off the analyst’s face. Before he could get there, however, Holman stepped in and cleared her throat.

Two decades, half of Chapel’s life, had been spent learning to respect his superior officers. It had become just a reflex — if a colonel cleared her throat, you shut up and listened to what she had to say.

“None of us likes this, Captain,” she told him. “None of us wants to believe the hijacker was one of us, a member of the intelligence community. And right now we don’t have to. Until we have more information we don’t have to make any decisions.”

“My analysis is sound,” Moulton insisted.

“Paul, be quiet,” Holman said. She looked over at Hollingshead. “How do you want to proceed?” she asked.

The director looked down at the floor. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “Wilkes, go and get her. Head north. I’ll send you the coordinates for her location once you’re on the road.”

“What?” Chapel said.

Hollingshead looked up at him and those genial professorial eyes that twinkled so effectively behind his spectacles were gone. They’d been replaced by the eyes of a rear admiral of the navy, a man who had sent men knowingly to their deaths. A man who had never shirked from a hard decision. “Do you have something to say?”

Chapel bit down his first reaction. Tried desperately to get a handle on his feelings. “Sir. With all due respect. Angel and I have worked together for a very long time. Let me do this.”

“I’m afraid I can’t allow it,” Hollingshead told him. “You and Angel have a… complicated relationship. No, son. You’re the wrong man for the job.”

Holman coughed politely into her hand. “Should it really be anyone from DIA? There might be a conflict of interests here. Maybe we should contact FBI. They’re trained for this sort of thing.”

“I appreciate your input,” Hollingshead told her. “But if I can’t send Chapel to fetch her, I won’t send a complete stranger, either. Wilkes is our man.” He turned to the marine. “Go on, son. Your country needs you to do this.”

Wilkes straightened up into a salute. “Sir, yes, sir,” he said. Then with one quick glance at Chapel he was gone, headed back to the elevator that was already waiting for him, its doors open.

Chapel whirled around, his breath catching in his throat. “You know — you know what will happen once she’s in custody!”

Hollingshead just stood there, no expression at all on his face.

“Goddamnit!” Chapel shouted. He grabbed one of the chairs away from its workstation and threw it across the room. In the cavernous space it failed to collide with anything. Instead it just slid across the ugly carpet, its wheels spinning pointlessly in the air.

“Thank you,” Hollingshead said to Holman. “You’ve been most helpful.”

“It’s what we’re here for,” she said. Then a furrow crossed her brow. “Rupert, I am sorry. I didn’t think we would find one of yours behind the hijacking.”

“How could you have?” the director responded. “One should never be sorry for telling the truth. Now. If you’ll forgive me — and I hope especially you’ll forgive my rather overwrought agent here — I think we’ll be going. There’s a great deal I need to do.”

“Yes, of course,” Holman said.

Chapel wanted to scream. He wanted to pick the chair up and start smashing screens. He wanted to do — something, anything to make this not have happened at all. But in the end, all he could do was take his place behind Hollingshead as they started toward the elevator bank.

“Oh, Rupert,” Holman said just before their elevator arrived. “You know I’ll have to contact the secretary of defense about this, right?”

“I’ll call him myself,” Hollingshead told her.

She started to say something else, but then she seemed to think better of it. Instead she just nodded and watched them go.

In the elevator neither of them spoke. The silence continued as they made their way through the Visitor Control Center and back out into the parking lot. Wilkes had taken the car, so Hollingshead made a quick call to request transport. While they waited for it to arrive the director fiddled with something in his pocket. Chapel did what he could to contain himself.

In the end it didn’t work. “She won’t get a trial,” he said, barely whispering.

“I’ll make sure she’s treated fairly,” Hollingshead replied. “It’s out of your hands, son. Let this go.”

“Let it go? Are you kidding me?”

Hollingshead’s eyes flashed for a moment. “I am not in the habit of doing so.”

Chapel wouldn’t be warned off. He didn’t even care if the NSA was listening to every word he said. “They’ll take her to Guantánamo. Or someplace worse! They’ll interrogate her, over and over, until she cracks and confesses to something she didn’t do. They’ll make her a scapegoat and no one will care that the real hijacker got away with attacking us, and—”

“Captain Chapel,” Hollingshead said, and his voice cracked like thunder. “I’ve given you your orders. Are you questioning my command?”

Chapel could feel his heart beating in his chest like artillery fire finding its range. Every bit of his training and discipline begged him to shut up, but his head roared with anger. “She’s a hero. She’s saved my life countless times. If you treat her like this—”

“That’s enough.” Hollingshead lifted his chin and looked over at a Humvee that was heading toward them — clearly the transport he’d requested. “Captain, I’m temporarily relieving you from duty.”

“What the hell?”

The director kept his eyes on the approaching vehicle. “Effective immediately. Your behavior today has been inexcusable. Am I understood?”

Chapel fought for words. “Sir, I’m very sorry about throwing that chair, but—”

“I said, ‘Am I understood’?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hollingshead nodded. “Don’t attempt to contact me or my office. I’ll let you know when I think enough time has passed.”

The Humvee pulled up in front of them. The driver jumped out and ran around the front of the vehicle to open Hollingshead’s door.

Chapel felt like he might fall over.

Relieved of duty. For conduct unbecoming an officer.

It was just about the worst thing anyone had ever said to Chapel. He couldn’t believe it.

It also meant he had very little left to lose. “This has been coming for a while. You’ve been trying to find a graceful way to get rid of me, haven’t you? That’s what Wilkes was for. My replacement. I screwed up and now you’re just done with me, because one time I made a mistake. A mistake you also made, if we’re being honest—”

Hollingshead took his hand from his pocket. He shoved a finger in Chapel’s chest. “We’re done here, Captain. Very much done.”

Then he did something very strange. He opened his hand and a scrap of paper fell from it, a piece of paper no larger than an inch on any side.

Chapel moved quickly to cover the scrap of paper with his shoe. An old spy reflex.

Without another word Hollingshead climbed into the Humvee. Chapel watched it go. Then he made a show of bending over to tie his shoe, which gave him a chance to move the piece of paper into his pocket.

Beyond that he was too shocked and confused to know what to do.

Left to his own devices, stranded at NSA headquarters, eventually he ordered a cab. He had no idea where to go, so he just told the driver to take him to the nearest train station.

Only when they were under way and clear of Fort Meade altogether did Chapel feel safe to look at the scrap of paper. Holding it cupped in his hand, he read it over and over again.

There wasn’t much on it. A set of map coordinates — latitude and longitude for someplace in New York City, he thought. And underneath that a short message:

Chapel jumped off the train at Penn Station in Manhattan and ran all the way to the subway. Angel had taught him long ago that it was the fastest way to move around New York, if you didn’t have access to a helicopter. He got lucky and found a train just pulling into the station. He dashed through the opening doors and found the commuters inside staring at him as if he were insane. This being New York, they quickly averted their collective gaze.

He wasn’t surprised he looked crazy. He was feeling pretty crazy.

Those things he’d said to Hollingshead — they really were inexcusable. Especially since, apparently, the director still had some confidence in him. Enough to give him new orders.

Find her first — find Angel before Wilkes could get to her. And then … what? Chapel could guess that Hollingshead didn’t want Chapel to bring Angel in. They had both known what would happen to her, with the NSA providing evidence of her guilt. She’d be lucky if she didn’t end up waterboarded, worked over by the CIA until she gave them what they wanted to hear.

And she would. Eventually, she would name names. Because that was how torture — even “enhanced interrogation” — worked. You told your persecutors anything to get them to stop. You made things up, if you had to. Would she claim to be working for the Chinese? Or domestic terrorists? It depended on how they phrased the questions. At least she wouldn’t suffer for long. Angel was not a field agent and had never had any training on how to resist interrogation. It wouldn’t take long for her to break down.

Chapel had no doubt of her innocence. The NSA could claim she was responsible for the hijacking, but that just meant somebody had hacked into the DIA databases and stolen her identity.

Right?

That was supposed to be impossible — she’d said so herself, but—

As the train shot through the tunnels under Manhattan, Chapel forced himself to think like an intelligence operative. To actually look at this thing with logic and deductive reasoning. What if Angel was guilty? Just as a hypothetical?

It would explain, perhaps, why she’d gone dark. Why, in the middle of a conversation, she’d cut her own phone connection. Maybe she’d gotten some word that she was about to be arrested and so she’d disappeared. Maybe Chapel would arrive at the coordinates Hollingshead gave him and find that she’d run off with a briefcase full of foreign money. The fact that she’d been unreachable ever since didn’t look good.

Then again — the timing was off. Chapel had spoken to her a half hour after the Predator attack in New Orleans. She hadn’t sounded like somebody in a hurry or like someone who had just committed treason. She’d sounded like her old self. Unless they had some serious dramatic training, it was next to impossible for somebody in that situation to sound cool and collected. It was why they trained airport security guards to look for people who seemed agitated and sweaty. No matter how committed you were as a terrorist, you couldn’t hide your own body’s reaction to what was going on.

Angel had sounded breezy and unconcerned. And then she had just disappeared.

The other big clue to her innocence was that Hollingshead clearly believed in her. He’d risked a great deal sending Chapel after her, moments after he’d given Wilkes the order to bring her in. If Chapel’s new orders ever got out, Hollingshead would earn himself a cell right next to Angel’s in Guantánamo Bay.

So there were two things pointing to her innocence. Not that either of them would hold up in court.

Rationally — purely hypothetically — Chapel considered the possibility that Angel had carried out the attack… under Hollingshead’s orders. That the two of them were in collusion, paid by a foreign power to destroy the economy of the United States. Both of them traitors. And now, if Chapel helped Angel escape, he would be signing on with their cause, a patsy in their grand plan.

Complete bullshit, of course. Chapel had known Angel and Hollingshead for years. He trusted them a lot more than he trusted anyone else in the government. He would believe that half the U.S. Senate were foreign spies before he would accept that Hollingshead had betrayed his country.

He heard a chime over his head and looked up, half expecting to see a time bomb wired to the roof of the subway car. It was that kind of day. Instead it was just a prerecorded announcement. “The next stop on this train will be Queens Plaza,” the voice said.

Chapel nodded to himself. A ways to go yet — the coordinates were for a place way out on the edge of Queens, not far from JFK airport. He still had time to think.

But he was already sure of one thing. He was going to find Angel. Angel, the most important woman in his life, the woman he’d never actually met before. He was going to meet her face-to-face for the very first time.

And he was going to save her. No matter what that meant.

Apparently it meant breaking the law.

Chapel’s smartphone showed that Angel’s coordinates were located inside a railroad yard, a big triangle of Queens real estate surrounded by fences covered in barbed wire. Through the chain-link fence Chapel could see boxcars quietly rusting on sidings, endless stretches of railroad track curling through a wasteland of gravel where weeds sprung up uncut between wooden ties that had cracked and broken from years in the sun. A desolate, quiet place, normally, the stillness punctuated only by the occasional distant whistle or the sudden metallic thud of switches moving in their grooves.

Normally — but now it was lit with splashes of red and blue light, and the quiet was broken by the sound of police radios squawking back and forth.

It seemed Wilkes had done the smart thing. Normal protocol for a mission like this would be to maintain discretion. You didn’t want to give your target any reason to suspect you were coming, so you went in alone by the most devious route you could find.

Instead, Wilkes had called the cops before he arrived. He’d mobilized dozens of police cruisers to surround the area so that if Angel tried to run, she would find herself surrounded. It wasn’t how Chapel would have done it, but it made sense. Angel was no field agent. He sincerely doubted she was even armed. Why wouldn’t Wilkes make this easy on himself? Why not make it impossible for anyone else to help her? The marine was no fool, it seemed.

Chapel found a position where he could observe the terrain without being spotted, but it wasn’t easy. The cops had set up patrols that kept moving around the fence, checking for any sign of movement. Chapel had been forced to take up a position in an old empty water tank right on the edge of the rail yard. The metal wall of the tank had rusted through on one side, giving Chapel a chance to look out and see what was going on.

He checked the map on his phone again. The exact location seemed to be a trailer about a hundred yards away. It was the newest thing in this decayed section of the yard, but it hardly stood out. The paint on its aluminum sides was peeling and its wheels had been removed, the body of the trailer propped up on cinder blocks. It didn’t look like much, unless you noticed the thick bundle of cables that snaked through one of its windows. Those cables ran through a thicket of bushes and disappeared into the chaos of the yard. There were far too many of them to just provide power or even a standard Internet connection to the trailer.

It was exactly the kind of setup that Angel would need. A place that was out of the way and unlikely to be disturbed. Plenty of power and data access. And it was mobile if it needed to be — a helicopter could come in and pick up that trailer and move it to a whole different state on very short notice. When Chapel had first seen the coordinates, he’d been surprised. He used to live in Brooklyn, not an hour away, and he’d thought how crazy it had been that he’d been so close to Angel the whole time and had no idea where she physically was. But looking at the trailer, he realized she might have been moving around constantly.

Below him a policeman slowly passed by, scanning the ground for any sign of trouble. The cop wore full body armor and had a submachine gun slung at his hip. He didn’t even glance in the direction of the trailer. Chapel was pretty sure Wilkes hadn’t arrived yet, and that the police had been instructed to secure the area but not to take any further action. They might not even know that it was the trailer they were guarding.

Hollingshead might have stalled Wilkes, holding out on providing the coordinates for as long as he could. Or maybe Wilkes had just driven from Fort Meade up to New York and gotten stuck in traffic.

Either way, Chapel had a little breathing room. But not much. He needed to move now. Too bad that cop was down there. There was no way for Chapel to get out of the water tower and over to the trailer without being seen. There just wasn’t enough cover.

Chapel had no desire to add assaulting a police officer to his rap sheet, but it looked like there was no choice.

He waited until the cop was almost directly below him. Then he gently pushed against the rusted wall of the water tank. It peeled away like wet cardboard, but not without squealing loud enough to get the cop’s attention.

Six feet below, the cop looked up, right at where Chapel hid. Chapel just had time to register the look of surprise on the cop’s face.

If it had been a soldier down there, with a soldier’s training, he would have backed the hell up and reached for his weapon. He would have had plenty of time to get half a dozen shots into Chapel’s center of mass.

But it was a policeman with police training, and so his first thought was to reach for his radio and call in.

He never got the chance. Chapel leaped down on top of him, knocking the radio into the air. The cop just had time to get one arm up over his face before the two of them went crashing into the gravel. Belatedly the cop reached for his weapon, but Chapel was ready for that and brought his artificial fist down hard on the cop’s wrist, pinning it to the ground.

NYPD training wasn’t completely useless. The cop tried to roll over on top of Chapel, switching their positions. But Chapel was ready for that and dug his knee into the gravel and locked himself in place. The cop tried to punch at Chapel’s head with his free hand, his gloved fist headed not for Chapel’s nose or ears but for his throat in a blow that might have incapacitated or even killed an opponent — if it landed.

Instead Chapel grabbed the cop’s striking hand with his own good hand. They struggled for a second, purely a contest of strength. Chapel had been trained for this and he knew three ways to end this fight. The cop’s body armor ruled out two of them.

So he settled for the oldest, dirtiest trick in the book. He brought his knee up hard into the cop’s groin. Not exactly a fair tactic, but it worked.

The cop’s breath exploded out of him into Chapel’s face. His arms went slack for a second and Chapel let go of the cop’s hands, then reached up under the armored collar of his vest and found the carotid arteries.

He had no desire to kill this man. Instead he just put pressure on those arteries, cutting the flow of oxygen to the cop’s brain. That was a good way to give somebody permanent brain damage if you didn’t know what you were doing. Chapel, however, was trained by the Army Rangers in how to make sure that didn’t happen. He applied the pressure just long enough to make the cop lose consciousness.

As the cop’s head rolled to the side and his eyes fluttered up into their sockets, Chapel let go and slid off the inert body. Only then did he bother to look around to see if anyone was watching.

The coast looked clear. Chapel took the cop’s gun and his cell phone. Digging through the pouches on the cop’s belt, he found a pair of handcuffs. He dragged the cop the few feet over to the scaffolding that held the water tank. One cuff went easily around a support girder, and the other locked in place around the cop’s wrist. Chapel grabbed the handcuff key from the same pouch and threw it away into the gravel.

Then he went and found the cop’s radio. It was still on, though no one was currently broadcasting. He switched the radio off and then stomped on it until it broke.

Eventually someone was going to call the cop to get his location and status. When the cop didn’t answer, other cops would come looking for him. Chapel had no idea how long that would take, but there was nothing he could do about it.

He was just going to have to get Angel out first.

He walked across the gravel toward the trailer with a lump in his throat. Angel was probably his best friend in the world, if he thought about it. She had saved his life so many times, of course, but she’d also been his confidante, the person he talked to when he couldn’t talk to anybody else. The person who’d helped him through some very dark times, the person who’d given him great advice when he really needed it. Even if he hadn’t always taken it.

She had always believed in him. When he needed it the most, when he’d been so full of self-doubt he didn’t think he could go on, she had helped him find the strength.

And she had the sexiest voice he’d ever heard.

He stopped before the door of the trailer and tried to peer in through the window. It looked like it had been covered over with black paper, but maybe she had some way of seeing out, anyway. Maybe a hidden camera. He lifted one hand in greeting. “Angel,” he said, “it’s me. I need to come in. I swear I’m not here to hurt you or anything. Our — our mutual friend sent me to make sure you come out of this okay.”

He wasn’t worried that she would attack him when he opened the door. He just didn’t want to scare her. She must know by now that she was in trouble. She was tuned in to news feeds and government communication channels like nobody else. Knowing that he was coming to help might alleviate her fear a little.

Even if Chapel had no idea what their next move would be. That didn’t matter. Together they would figure something out. They’d always been an incredible team.

A short flight of metal steps led up to the door. He climbed them easily, then thumbed the latch. The door wasn’t locked. He swung it open and stepped inside.

There was no light in the trailer except the wan sunlight that streamed in through the door. At first he could see nothing. Eventually he started making out blocky shapes in the gloom, and then he saw little LEDs flashing at the far end of the trailer. Green and yellow lights on a router. A red light on a powered-down monitor.

He found a light switch and turned it on, then closed the door behind him. Now that he could see, he made a quick inventory of the contents of the trailer. There was a narrow camp bed made up with hospital corners. It looked like it hadn’t been slept in for some time. There was a little kitchen area with a microwave and a tiny sink. An even smaller shower with a pebbled glass door. The rest of the trailer was filled with high-end computer equipment, big black boxes all chained together with countless loops of Ethernet cable. There were six different monitors, none the same size, and three keyboards. There were server racks mounted on the walls and a projector hanging from the ceiling.

Sitting in the middle of all the computer equipment, propped up on a folding metal chair, was a small server rack with four slots for hard drives. All of them were busy chugging away, their activity lights strobing in the dark. On the front of the server rack’s face someone had attached a strip of masking tape, and written on the tape in permanent marker were the words:

Chapel didn’t understand. He refused to understand.

He refused to accept what he was looking at. It just couldn’t be right.

Sure, he’d had the thought once, years ago. Back when he was first starting to work with Angel and he’d spent far too much time wondering what she looked like, what kind of woman was behind that sexy voice in his ear. He’d jokingly considered the fact that she might actually be a three-hundred-pound man using a voice modulator. Or maybe even that Angel wasn’t a person at all, that she was …

No. It couldn’t be true.

He forgot all about the fact that he was running out of time. That he needed to get out of here before Wilkes arrived. He put the submachine gun down on the floor and walked over to the server rack where it sat on the folding chair. Squatting down, he read the piece of masking tape again, thinking maybe he’d misinterpreted it.

The server rack almost seemed to breathe, or maybe just to crackle with static electricity as he raised a hand to touch it.

When Angel spoke to him, his whole body flinched.

“Is someone there? This is private property. Leave now or I’m calling the police.”

It was the voice he knew so well, the one he’d flirted with, the one he’d told all his secrets. It came from a set of speakers mounted on top of one of the dead monitors.

He saw a microphone mounted above the largest of the keyboards. Leaning close to it, he said, “Angel? Is that you?”

“You’re in serious trouble, whoever you are. But you can fix it by turning around and leaving right now. This is your last warning,” she said.

“Angel — it’s me. It’s Chapel.”

“Chapel?”

One of the monitors flickered to life. It showed a plain gray window full of code he didn’t know how to read, making him think of the Predator drone activity logs he’d seen back at NSA headquarters. As soon as his brain made that connection he shook his head — no, it was nothing like that. There was more to Angel than just—

“Chapel, you weren’t ever supposed to come here,” she said.

“I know, but we were out of options,” he said.

“We? Who’s we?”

Chapel sighed. “I was sent here by… our mutual friend,” he said. It was a code phrase the two of them sometimes used when discussing Hollingshead. He didn’t want to name the director, not here. He was sure that everything he said in the trailer was being recorded. Somebody might be listening in, even now — maybe the person who hijacked the Predator. The person who was trying to frame Angel. Chapel tried to think it through, think about what he needed to do here. But he was still reeling from the discovery that Angel was—

“Angel, am I looking at you right now?” he asked.

“Chapel, you weren’t ever supposed to come here.”

He frowned. That was exactly what she’d said before. Not just the same words — the same inflection. The same emphasis.

“What’s a neural network?” he asked.

“A neural network is a computational array designed to mimic the process by which living nervous systems process information. Instead of running programs line by line, the network distributes information through a series of weighted—”

“Enough,” Chapel said, and she fell silent. He placed his good hand on top of the server stack. Its warmth radiated up through his palm, the way he would have felt warmth if he’d touched a human being. This was just too weird. “Tell me the truth, Angel. Do you exist? I mean, are you a human being? Or are you some kind of artificial intelligence that I’ve been talking to, some computer program designed to fool me into thinking—” He couldn’t finish that sentence.

She was his best friend in the world. Maybe the only friend he had left. And she wasn’t even real. Just some virtual woman created to gain his trust, designed — written — by some computer programmer, given that sexy voice because they knew how Chapel would respondto it—

“Chapel?” she said.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said very softly.

“Chapel?”

Another screen lit up. It showed more lines of code, scrolling down the screen far faster than any human being could read them. Then a third screen came to life, but this time it showed a video feed.

“Chapel, someone is outside,” she told him.

He studied the screen. It showed the gravel yard outside the trailer — he could see the old water tank in the distance and he imagined the camera must be located just outside the trailer’s door.

Maybe a dozen police in riot gear were approaching, taking their time about it but doing it right. They all had their guns up, ready to shoot anything that moved. In front of the pack of cops was a man in an army uniform. He didn’t seem to be armed. The camera’s resolution wasn’t good enough for Chapel to make out his facial features, but he didn’t need to.

Wilkes had arrived.

“Chapel, you weren’t ever supposed to come here,” Angel said.

“Yeah, you figured that out, huh? Well, it’s true. I’m not here in any kind of official capacity. You remember this guy?” Chapel said, tapping the screen that showed the video feed. It felt weird, like he was tapping her on the shoulder. “You remember Wilkes?”

“I worked with him once,” Angel said.

“Yeah. Well, he’s here to arrest you. I don’t know what he’ll do when he finds out what you are.” No time for carefully picking words now, he decided. “I was supposed to find you first. Get you to safety. I don’t even know what that means now. I mean, our mutual friend must have known what I would find, right? But what did he expect me to do? Unplug you and carry you out of here?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Angel said.

Chapel frowned. Was she just maintaining plausible deniability? It was funny. The whole time he’d worked with Angel, she had sounded like a real, living human being. Now he’d seen what she really was, he wondered how he’d never guessed. Talking to her felt exactly like talking to a computer.

“I have to do something here,” he said. “Before Wilkes can get to you. I have to get you out of here.” But how? The server rack with her name on it looked like it probably weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. He could carry it, but he wouldn’t be able to run at the same time.

The question of how he would get it past twelve cops and a DIA agent without being seen wasn’t even worth considering. That just wasn’t going to happen. But maybe there was something he could do. “I’m looking at a server stack with four hard drives in it,” he said. “What’s on each of these drives?”

“Drive A contains database files. Drive B contains programs to handle queries, short-term memory storage and basic personality functions. Drive C is long-term memory storage. Drive D contains control functions for the neural network. Do you need a directory of all files contained on these drives?”

Chapel shook his head. “No, no — listen, Drive C contains your memories? Is that right? They aren’t stored anywhere else?”

“Drive C is dedicated to long-term storage,” she said.

It would have to be enough. He would lose her personality — well, maybe they could rebuild that. Maybe not. But if he let her fall into the wrong hands, they would take her apart until there was nothing left at all. “I’m going to have to turn you off,” he told her.

“Chapel, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. Because it really did feel like he was about to perform amateur brain surgery on his best friend. But he had no choice. He reached behind the server stack and yanked out the power cable. All the lights on the front of the stack went out. So did all three monitors. Cooling fans spun down with a sound like the last breath escaping from a pair of dying lungs.

Chapel’s hand shook as he reached for the button that would release Drive C. It popped out of the stack on hidden springs and almost jumped into his hand. It was a thin metal case about eight inches on a side, warm to the touch. He slid it inside his uniform tunic. It made his chest look bulky and lopsided but there was nothing he could do about that.

With the screens dead he had no view of what was happening outside the trailer. The windows had all been covered with thick black paper that let no light through at all. He took a risk and scratched at the corner of one window until the paper came up and a beam of light speared into the room. Through the little hole he’d made he could see the gravel yard outside. He could just make out the figures of Wilkes and his escort. They were very, very close.

Then someone’s fist banged on the door and he knew he was out of time.

“NYPD! Open up,” a cop shouted. “We have a warrant to enter these premises.”

Chapel spun around, looking for any other possible exit from the room. He didn’t see any. There was a hatch in the ceiling, designed to give the trailer a little ventilation, but it wasn’t nearly wide enough for him to crawl through.

He considered hiding under the camp bed or in the shower stall, but that was foolish. The cops wouldn’t just forget to search the place.

No, the only way out of the trailer was through that door.

So he reached over and worked the latch, then swung it open, careful to keep out of sight. There were a lot of cops out there with a lot of guns. He didn’t want to give them any reason to shoot.

“I’m unarmed!” he shouted.

He heard Wilkes laugh. “You know, when you say that, it’s kind of funny. Come on out of there, Chapel. You know why I’m here.”

Chapel put his hands up and stepped into the doorway. The cops all had their weapons pointed at his chest.

“Down on the ground!” one of them shouted, but Wilkes shook his head.

“Let it go. This is one of the good guys.”

The police didn’t move from their firing positions, but at least none of them barked any more orders at him.

Wilkes came up to the stairs that led into the trailer. He gave Chapel a big, shit-eating grin. Chapel knew that look from his days growing up in Florida. It was a southerner’s way of saying I don’t even need to fuck with you, because you’ve managed to get yourself up to your ass in alligators all on your own. It wasn’t a sentiment he could argue with, just then.

“I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing here,” Chapel said.

“I can probably guess,” Wilkes said. “Anyway, it’s none of my business. You can explain to the boss when you see him. I’m sure he’ll be fascinated.” He peered in through the doorway. “She in there?”

“Yeah,” Chapel replied. “Though she’s not exactly what you’re expecting.”

Wilkes nodded. “Just come on out of there so I can get by.”

Chapel walked down the stairs and moved to one side of the trailer. As he watched Wilkes step inside, he thought maybe he’d finally get his chance to escape. The cops had no orders to detain him — maybe he could just slip away.

That hope died when the cop who had been shouting orders before came up and stuck the barrel of his gun right in Chapel’s face. Chapel could see sergeant’s chevrons on his collar. “Don’t move,” he said.

“You heard the man — I’m on your side,” Chapel said, keeping his hands high.

“Is that what you told Peters?” the cop asked. He jerked his head backward, toward the water tower. And the unconscious cop who was handcuffed to its base.

So much for just slipping away quietly.

Wilkes was inside the trailer long enough for Chapel to get nervous, wondering how long it would take someone to notice the bulge in his tunic where he’d stashed Angel’s memory drive. Long enough to start thinking about what was really going on here. Hollingshead had asked him to come here, to get Angel before Wilkes could arrest her. But Hollingshead must have known what Angel really was. Why hadn’t he given Chapel better instructions? Chapel was just assuming that the memory drive was important. That Hollingshead needed it for some reason and couldn’t let it fall into anyone else’s hands. But why? Was there something stored on the drive, something crucial to the investigation into the drone hijacking? But why not let Wilkes recover it, then, and share its contents with the rest of the intelligence community?

Hollingshead must have his reasons, and Chapel owed the man enough that he was inclined to just go along blindly. But what if he had made a mistake here? What if he’d grabbed the wrong drive? His orders, inasmuch as they were orders, were to recover Angel. But now that Chapel knew she was just an artificial intelligence, what did that even mean?

He was overthinking this. He needed to focus on getting away from here before anybody thought to search him. “What’s your name, Sergeant?” he asked.

The cop still had his weapon aimed right at Chapel’s chest. Chapel wondered if the hard drive would stop a bullet. “Don’t talk,” the cop said.

Chapel sighed. “Just trying to be friendly. Listen, do you know who we are? Or did you just get a phone call from Washington saying a federal agent needed to commandeer your unit?” That was probably more likely, in Chapel’s experience. “Do you have any idea why you’re here?”

“We’re providing support for a federal operation. I don’t even want to know the details,” the sergeant said. “He’s going to come out of there and tell me I have to let you go, isn’t he? Even though you assaulted one of my men.” He looked disgusted.

“I have no idea what he’ll do,” Chapel said, which was the truth. He and Wilkes had never come to like each other, even after months holed up together on the stakeout. Protocol said Wilkes should save Chapel from the cops just because it was good practice not to let your fellow spies get interrogated. But Hollingshead’s directorate had never been very strict on protocol. “Look,” Chapel said, “is it really going to hurt so much just to tell me your name?”

The cop frowned. “You want a name? Larry Peters. That’s not me, that’s the guy you beat up on your way in. I doubt you asked him what his name was before you cuffed him to that water tower. I’ve worked with Peters for six years. He’s had my back more times than I can count. He’s a good man.”

“I’m sure he is,” Chapel tried, but the sergeant wasn’t finished.

“He’s got a wife. Baked cookies for me once, the first time I got shot. If I have to go home and tell her that her husband is in the hospital, or maybe that he’s paralyzed because he got in the way of some fed—”

“He’s okay,” Chapel said. “I know how to incapacitate someone without injury.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Chapel didn’t know if there was a right thing. The sergeant was getting angry, working himself up. Never a good thing in a man who was pointing a gun at you. “You’d better hope your friend in there comes back out in a good mood. You’d better hope he gives me a very good reason not to press charges—”

“Sir!” It was one of the other cops. “Sir — you might want to—”

The sergeant whirled around to face his man. “What is it, Fredericks? Can’t you see I’m busy with our prisoner?”

“Sorry, sir, but — it’s — well—”

“What the hell is that noise?” the sergeant asked.

“That’s what I was trying to talk to you about,” the cop replied. Then he pointed across the gravel yard at the robot that was noisily trundling toward them.

It was mounted on heavy treads, and it was the size of a very large dog. It had two grasping arms and a rudimentary sort of head — just a pair of cameras on a metal stalk, and what looked like the edging attachment from a vacuum cleaner. It carried a long metal pole in front of it that looked to Chapel like nothing so much as a fishing pole.

And it was coming straight toward them at high speed.

“What is it?” Chapel asked.

One of the cops answered. “That’s our bomb disposal robot. We brought it out in case the trailer was booby-trapped. The bomb squad guys must have gotten bored and took it out for a spin.” He laughed. “Those assholes are always playing pranks, ’cause they’ve got nothing better to do.”

“Any second now they’ll make it do a donut,” another cop added, “and then it’ll say ‘Johnny Five is alive’ or just ‘Wall-Eeee’ or something. Those guys are nuts.”

The robot’s treads spun out over the loose gravel, sending up a billowing plume of gray dust in its wake. It did not stop or do a donut or say anything.

“What’s that pole on its front?” Chapel asked. “The part that sticks out.”

“Remote detonation arm,” one of the cops said. “Sometimes when you find a bomb, the best thing you can do is just clear the area and set it off where it is.”

“All right, that’s enough,” the sergeant said. “No talking to the prisoner.”

Chapel shook his head. “Wait. Just wait a second. Remote detonation — the way you do that—” He’d seen bomb removal robots in Afghanistan. When you found an IED in the road out there, you had to call in the bomb people, and nine times out of ten they would send one of their robots. He remembered that they got rid of the IEDs by blowing them up there, too. And the way you did that was to detonate it by hitting it with a charge of explosives.

He peered across the gravel at the approaching robot, at its remote detonation arm. There was something clamped to the end of the pole, a big wad of something white and shapeless.

Semtex, Chapel thought. Plastic explosive. Maybe a pound of it, or maybe more.

And the robot kept getting closer, headed right for them. No — headed for the trailer—

“Wilkes!” Chapel shouted. “Out of there now! Everybody scatter and get your heads down!”

There was no time to stop the thing — it was moving too fast. Still, some of the cops turned and faced it with their submachine guns, looks of confusion on their faces but they could feel it, feel that something very bad was about to happen. Chapel started to run. The sergeant shouted for him to freeze and lifted his weapon to his eye.

Chapel figured he would just have to take his chances.

He ran.

It didn’t take long for the robot to cross the last stretch of gravel and ram into the side of the trailer. Chapel didn’t so much as turn his head to look back, so when a second later the shock wave lifted all the gravel under his feet and threw him to the ground, he wasn’t quite ready. He fell hard on his hands, scraping silicone skin off his artificial wrist, squinting his eyes shut as the dusty gravel pelted his face. It turned out to be a good thing he’d been knocked down. He heard debris whiz past him fast enough it would have taken his head off, felt hot pieces of metal bounce off his back. The noise of the explosion was loud enough that it deafened him, leaving his ears ringing and his chest burning as the air was ripped from his lungs.

Down on his knees in the gravel he reached for the hard drive hidden in his tunic. It was fine — his body had sheltered it from the blast.

Only then did he look back.

Part of the trailer remained intact, a jagged corner of aluminum sticking up at an angle. Debris was everywhere, some of it smoldering on the gravel — green chipboards and shards of black plastic and twisted, unidentifiable pieces of metal. He didn’t see much blood. The cops in their body armor must have listened to him and gotten their heads down — only the sergeant looked injured, a big gash running down one of his cheeks. He was staring at something only he could see.

Chapel saw no sign of Wilkes. Had he made it out of the trailer? It didn’t look good.

Poor bastard. Chapel might not have liked him much, but he was a fellow silent warrior. An intelligence operative. Even his family would never know how he died, the sacrifice he’d made to stop the hijacker.

The sergeant turned and looked at Chapel. His eyes still weren’t focusing, but he seemed to be getting over the shock of the blast. He looked like he was shouting, but Chapel heard his voice as only a whisper. “Somebody,” he said. “Somebody arrest… get that…” It was like he only had a thin stock of words left to him and he was burning through them fast. “His fault,” he managed. “Somehow.” Then he waved one arm in Chapel’s direction.

The cops who had recovered faster started to get up, started to reach for their weapons. Chapel got shakily to his feet. He felt like every bone in his body had been disconnected from all the others, like if he moved too fast he would just dissolve into a big pile of Jell-O. Little spots kept dancing in front of his eyes.

One of the cops managed to stagger toward him and shout something Chapel couldn’t really hear. His ears were still buzzing from the explosion.

But then another of the cops looked up in the air and shouted “Shit!” and started dancing backward. The others looked up and followed suit.

The pebbled glass door of the shower from the trailer — still miraculously intact — was spinning in the air above them like a thrown playing card. As soon as Chapel saw it, it was like the law of gravity had been momentarily suspended but now was going to be enforced with a vengeance. It came down hard on the gravel and shattered in a white cloud of glass fragments that shot out in every direction.

Chapel knew a lucky break when he saw one. The cops were distracted. He dashed for the water tower. His living arm felt weak and near useless, but he’d learned to trust his artificial arm in situations like this. He jumped and hauled himself up onto the tower, then over the fence.

All before the cops even thought to start shooting.

On the streets of Queens nobody noticed one dazed-looking man in a tattered army uniform. They were too busy watching the parade of fire trucks and ambulances and police cars that tore down every street, converging on the train yard. Chapel kept his head down and kept moving, knowing he had a little breathing room — but not much — before the local authorities started looking for him. The cops back at the trailer had gotten a good look at him and his description would go out to every unit in the borough before long. Without Wilkes to vouch for him, they would have no reason not to pick him up. And once they had him he would be stuck in jail for a while. Normally, Angel would have been able to spring him — but right now she was switched off. He couldn’t rely on his government credentials, either, since he’d been officially relieved from duty.

No, if he was caught now, he would be on his own. And the cops would have lots and lots of questions, questions he couldn’t answer.

He needed to get as far away as he could, as fast as he could, but that presented a problem. He had no idea where exactly he was or how to get back to the subway station. Queens had a weird street grid with avenues, roads, streets, and places all identified by number, and the numbers tended to run into each other so you could easily find yourself on Thirtieth Place, which ran parallel to Thirtieth Street to where it met Thirtieth Avenue. Added to that, all the street addresses were given as a pair of numbers that roughly corresponded to the nearest Avenue (usually), so an address could be 30–29 Thirtieth Avenue on the corner of Thirtieth Street. Even Chapel’s smartphone was going to have trouble with that.

First things first, though — he needed to get cleaned up. Eventually someone was going to notice that he looked like he’d just survived a bomb blast, and they would call the cops just to be helpful. Chapel ducked into a coffee shop off one of the avenues, intending to buy a bottle of water so he could use the restroom. He didn’t need to bother. All the employees of the place were standing by the plateglass windows, looking out at the street.

“Hey,” one of them called out to him as he headed for the back of the shop and the restroom.

Chapel froze. “Yeah?”

“You see anything?” she asked. She was a young woman with freckles wearing a stained apron. She didn’t even give Chapel’s ruined clothes a glance. “There’s nothing on the news, and Twitter just says there was an explosion.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. We’re gonna close up in a minute and go look for it.”

This was New York City. A city still haunted by September eleventh, but also a city where people ran toward explosions and attacks and horror so they could get a good video of it on their phones.

“Just need the bathroom,” Chapel said, and before the young woman could respond he pushed through the door of the men’s room and locked it behind him.

The silence in there was enough to make his ears ring again. But he could breathe.

He studied his face in the mirror, looking for any sign he’d been cut or bruised in the blast. He’d been lucky. As close as he’d been to the explosion he seemed to have escaped any serious injury. The main damage was to the silicone wrist of his artificial arm. It looked like someone had cut into it with a butcher knife. He prodded the wound with his good fingers, seeing how deep the gash went. It wouldn’t damage his prosthesis, but it did make him look like an android that had unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide by slashing its wrist.

That made him think of the bomb squad robot, and the hijacked Predator. Robots turned into suicide bombers. There had to be a link there — whoever hijacked the drone must be the same person who blew up Angel’s trailer. But why? What were they trying to cover up? They’d already framed her — not that anyone would have listened to her if she did have secrets to share. She wasn’t even human.

Damn it. He was wasting time. He could do the detective work later. Right now he had to get out of New York.

He took off his tunic, carefully laying Angel’s hard drive on the edge of the sink. There he got a nasty surprise. The entire back of the tunic was shredded. Luckily the shirt underneath was intact.

He took off his tie as well. Nothing he could do about his uniform trousers with their distinctive gold stripe. He washed up as best he could, getting the grime off his face and teasing most of the gravel dust out of his hair. Then he turned and looked at the hard drive. He needed a way to conceal it.

He found a plastic bag in the trash. He wrapped the drive in what remained of his tunic and stuffed the resulting bundle inside the bag. He glanced at himself in the mirror. It looked like he was just some guy in an ugly shirt carrying a bag full of old rags. He wouldn’t stand out so much now. There were other ways to track him, though.

He took out his smartphone and stared at it for a while.

Anything he did with the device could be traced. The police were probably already getting a warrant to tap his phone. Maybe the hijacker would trace him as well — anyone who could frame Angel like that definitely had the capability. The phone was a liability. But it was so damnably useful.

Nothing for it. He started prying open the back of the case so he could get the SIM card out when it started to ring.

Chapel was still jumpy from surviving the explosion. He nearly dropped the phone in the toilet. He shook his head. Come on, keep it together, he thought. He flipped the phone over, knowing that whoever it was, he didn’t dare answer it. He was just going to power the phone down and then—

It was Julia.

Julia was calling him. Right now.

“Shit,” he said, under his breath. As if she might hear him.

Julia.

There had been a time, once, when he and Julia had spoken on the phone every day. Except when he was on missions, of course.

That had been the problem. He was always going off on missions. Disappearing without any warning. She could never know where he went, or when he was coming back. If he was coming back. If he had died on one of his missions, she wouldn’t even get to find out how. Chapel had always assumed that Hollingshead would let her know that he had died, but even that couldn’t be guaranteed. Chapel’s life revolved around secrets. Julia had been forced to pay the price for that.

He’d thought he could fix things. He’d thought he could give up his work, get a desk job.

Marry her.

It hadn’t worked out.

He hadn’t spoken with her on the phone, or seen her, in nearly a year. He’d moved out of her apartment. Moved out of New York. Tried to find some other reason to live than for her.

Julia. He had never loved a woman as much as he’d loved her. He doubted he ever would again. He knew she didn’t feel the same way.

Julia.

The phone was still ringing. He shouldn’t answer it. He couldn’t.

He used his index finger to swipe the screen, completing the connection. He pressed it to his ear and just waited, still not really believing it would be her voice on the other end.

“Jim?” she said. “Jim, are you there?”

This was a mistake. This had to be a mistake. Whatever she wanted—

“I’m here,” he said. Jesus. He could have said hello, or sure, or… or anything else. “Julia,” he went on. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

“Jim, are you okay? Listen, I can’t really talk.”

“I can’t, either,” he said. He closed his eyes and sat down on the bathroom floor. “Normally, I’d be so happy to hear from you, I mean, I know we left things kind of—”

“Not now.”

He opened his eyes. “Um, okay,” he said. Better, really, if they didn’t start anything right now. Better if they never did. Julia was in his past, a part of his life he was never going to visit again. He would never see her—

“You have to come to my place,” she said.

“What?”

“As soon as you can. Please, Jim. This… this isn’t about us.”

Then she hung up. Broke the connection.

Chapel stared at the phone for a long time. The screen stayed dark. She didn’t call back. He didn’t dare call her back. Even though he needed to explain what a terrible idea it would be for him to visit her just then. How it would just put them both in danger.

Eventually he took a deep breath.

He had to get rid of the phone.

As long as the phone could draw power from its battery, he could be tracked. There was no way to remove the battery from this model of phone without special tools. The phone had to go. He ejected the SIM card — it was the only part he could keep. The phone went in the trash, the SIM card in his pocket.

He stepped out of the bathroom to find the coffee shop deserted. The baristas had left, presumably to go look for the chaos over in the rail yard. They’d locked the door behind them, but it was easy enough to open it from the inside.

He headed down the avenue, pausing only to ask directions to the subway station. The man he asked was distracted enough not to even look Chapel in the face.

Chapel had worried that the trains might not be running. In the case of a terrorist attack, the subway was one of the first things to shut down. But a train did come, a train headed for Manhattan. He could ride it down to the Port Authority. Get a ticket on the next bus out of town, regardless of its destination. It was the only smart thing to do. Whatever Julia wanted, it could wait.

The stations flew by. Fifty-Ninth Street. Seventh Avenue. Forty-Ninth Street. The train pulled into Times Square. His stop.

This train would keep going, he knew, through lower Manhattan and then into Brooklyn. It would go right to Julia’s apartment, with or without him.

While he stood there, unable to act, unable to think, the doors slid closed and the train pulled away from the station. It looked like he’d made up his mind.

A police car sat halfway down Julia’s block. Its lights and its engine were off, and the policeman inside was just sitting there, writing something on a form. Maybe he was just writing up a parking ticket.

Maybe he’d been assigned to watch Julia’s place and arrest Chapel if he showed his face. Chapel couldn’t take the chance.

Luckily, he knew another way in. He’d lived at Julia’s apartment once, and he knew the blocks around it. He’d had to slip away unseen from the apartment building more than once before.

Her building had a basement where the tenants did their laundry and where the building manager kept his office. In the alley behind the building a short flight of stairs led down to an entrance to that basement. That door was supposed to be kept locked at all times, but the building manager was a heavy smoker and he frequently ducked out the back to get his fix. He left the door unlocked during the day because it was just too big a hassle to constantly lock and unlock it.

Chapel slipped inside, into the all-too-familiar smell of fabric softener and mildew. He saw no one as he headed up the fire stairs to the second floor. Before he knew it he was there, standing outside Julia’s door.

His living hand was sweaty. He felt unsteady on his feet and it had nothing to do with the shock of the explosion back at the train yard.

This was dumb. This was colossally stupid. Every second he spent in New York City increased his chances of getting picked up by the police — and that would mean failing his mission. They would take the hard drive away from him, the last piece of Angel. They would dissect it and study all its secrets and he would have let Hollingshead down, would have compromised national security, would have thrown away his freedom for… what? One last chance to see the woman he loved?

He reached up to knock on the door, but before he had the chance, he heard the chain and the dead bolt being opened from the other side. Julia must have seen him through the peephole. She threw open the door and there she was.

She was beautiful. So beautiful. Her red hair was tied back with a piece of ribbon that failed to keep strands of it from falling down and framing her soft features, the hint of freckles on the tops of her cheekbones, the crow’s-feet that were just starting to form at the corners of her eyes. She was wearing a T-shirt and a baggy pair of jeans, but the way she stood, Chapel could see the curve of one hip up against the door.

So many things came rushing back, so many memories, that he had to close his eyes and just stand there for a second. Which meant his other senses drank her in. The smell of her shampoo hit him and—

“Jesus, get inside already,” she whispered. He opened his eyes and saw her peering down her hallway, looking to make sure he hadn’t been followed.

He stepped inside and she locked the door behind him.

“You look a little shaky,” she said.

“Someone just tried to blow me up,” he told her. Julia knew all about his work and the risks involved. She didn’t look surprised.

“Sit down. I’ll get you some water. Or do you want tea?”

He looked around the apartment, taking in the fact she’d changed all the furniture. She’d put up new prints on the walls, big framed photographs of various dog breeds. Julia was a veterinarian and she loved dogs, but she wasn’t allowed to have one in the apartment, so she settled for pictures of them everywhere.

She’d gotten a new couch, a cream-colored leather sectional. “This is nice,” he said, because he wasn’t ready to start talking. He didn’t want to know yet why she’d called him and told him to come over.

“It’s even nicer when you sit on it.”

He sat down, putting the bag containing the hard drive on the floor by his feet. He looked up. And then, for the first time since he’d arrived, their eyes met.

She started to turn away, but then she stopped and looked straight at him. Neither of them spoke. Eventually the beginnings of a sad little smile curled up one corner of his mouth. There was so much history between them.

“Shit,” she said.

“Yeah,” he replied, because he knew what she meant. “Listen. When I left here, when—”

“When I dumped you, you mean. Right before you were going to propose.”

He laughed. He’d forgotten how direct she could be. “I know we said some things, things that—”

“Jim, we can’t do this. Not now.”

He frowned. “We can’t talk about what happened?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he said.

“You got here fast,” she said.

“I came straightaway. How did you know I was in New York?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t. I assumed you were down in D.C. or someplace. What were you doing here? Wait, sorry. Dumb question. You were getting blown up. Which means you were working, and I can’t ask you about it.” She lifted her hands in a gesture of resignation. “I’ll get you that water now.”

As she headed into the kitchen he called after her, “If you didn’t want to talk about us, why did you call me?”

She didn’t answer. But in the silence, Chapel heard a soft noise come from the bedroom, a muffled little click. It sounded like someone had just closed the lid of a laptop in there.

He jumped to his feet, already reaching for his gun. Except it wasn’t there. He was unarmed and suddenly very alone. He headed toward the bedroom door, but before he could reach it, Julia came running out of the kitchen.

“There’s somebody else here,” he said.

She nodded. She looked scared. Had the police forced her to call him? Had they used her as bait so they could arrest him here?

He couldn’t believe she would go along with something like that. Not Julia. But there was someone else in the apartment and she hadn’t told him when he came in. She’d been hiding this third person from him.

He walked over to the bedroom door. Then he glanced back at her. “Is there something you want to tell me?” he asked.

“Jim,” she said, “before you go in there — you have to tell me something. I know you aren’t supposed to. But you have to. You have to tell me why you came to New York.”

“That’s got nothing to do with you,” he said, staring at the door. If there were cops in there, if this was a trap, they might come rushing out at any moment if they thought he’d seen through the ruse.

His best bet was to just run. Get out of the apartment as fast as he could, get away before the cops could close in and take him.

“You have to tell me, Jim,” she said again. She pushed herself between him and the bedroom door.

He reached for her slim shoulders, intending to move her out of the way. She planted her feet. This was about to get bad, he thought.

But then the bedroom door cracked open behind her. Whoever was back there spoke.

“It’s okay, Julia. He’s not the one they sent to get me.”

It was the sexiest voice Chapel had ever heard. And one of the most familiar.