The Cyclops Initiative

PART 2

Brent Wilkes opened his eyes.

Above him he saw nothing but gray overcast sky. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was at first. There’d been a lot of light and heat and then he’d blacked out. There might have been a loud noise in there, too.

Iraq? That sounded like Iraq. At least the way he remembered it.

There must have been an explosion. That explained a lot of what he was feeling, and a lot of what he remembered.

It brought to mind one mission in particular, a mission in Fallujah. It was after the siege when more than half the city was just flattened. The DoD had sent a bunch of relief money to help the refugees there, a big briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills. The guy who received the briefcase, the local emergency management head, had taken the money across town and just handed it over to an al-Qaeda contact.

The money wasn’t recoverable, but they needed to save face. So they’d sent Wilkes in to kill the al-Qaeda guy. He didn’t like the mission, didn’t like the idea of just killing a guy, even if he was an insurgent. But he didn’t like a lot of his missions. He completed them anyway.

That might as well have been the unofficial Marine Corps motto, right there.

For three days he just followed the guy around. Wilkes was dressed up like a Blackwater civilian contractor — nobody would have bought it if he dressed like an Iraqi. The guy he was tailing made him less than an hour after he hit the ground, but it didn’t matter. Nobody wanted to start real fighting again, not with so little of the city left, so Wilkes and his target just danced around each other, each of them looking for a time and a place where they could bump off each other where nobody would see it happen.

On the third day, Wilkes took his dinner in a little restaurant built into the ruin of a hospital. They’d set up awnings and tables and pushed all the broken bricks and rebar into a pile to one side. The food was good, even though he had no idea what he was eating. His target pulled up outside in a limousine with three thugs with AK-47s, and it looked like time was up.

Then the target guy just stepped on something in the street that looked like a broken plate, just one more piece of debris. It was an IED, of course, which some local kid had put there to get Wilkes when he finished his dinner. The target got it instead.

Mission accomplished, and Wilkes didn’t have to lift a finger.

There had been light and heat and a shock wave that hit him so fast he didn’t hear it until he was already on his back in the rubble, staring up at a blue sky.

Just like now, except this sky was gray. Not a lot of gray days in Iraq, the way he remembered it. Gray days meant stateside. He was in America, he decided.

Right. New York. It all came flooding back. Angel. Chapel.

After an explosion, if you woke up on your back like this, you were supposed to just lie still. You might have a concussion or, worse, your neck could be broken and it would be hard to tell. Lie still and wait for help to arrive.

Wilkes heard a lot of shouting, somebody yelling for somebody else to freeze. “Okay,” he said. “No problem.”

There were people running around, yelling things back and forth. Something hit the ground hard and a piece of broken glass bounced off Wilkes’s cheek. Maybe there was going to be another explosion. Maybe there was another bomb.

Eventually a paramedic came over and looked at Wilkes’s eyes and asked him what day it was, who the president was. He complied and answered all their questions. That information wasn’t classified. Somebody else took his blood pressure.

“He’s okay,” they said. “One lucky son of a bitch.”

Which was pretty much how Wilkes had felt that day back in Fallujah.

“Just stay here. There’s an ambulance coming,” somebody else said.

“How do I look?” Wilkes asked. “Anything broken?”

The paramedic actually laughed. “No. And you’ve got the right number of arms and legs, still. But you’re covered from head to toe in cuts and bruises. We’re also worried you might have a concussion.”

“I’ve had worse,” Wilkes said. He sat up. The paramedic tried to push him back down, but Wilkes just shrugged the guy off. “I’ve got work to do.” He remembered when the robot came rushing at the trailer. He’d known something was up so he smashed his way through the blacked-out windows and out the back of the trailer. Looked like that had been the right move.

“You really need to be in a hospital right now. You could have internal injuries — hell, for all I know you’re bleeding out right now, I just can’t see it.”

He just waved one hand in the guy’s direction and headed back to the blast site. Not much left. All the computers and stuff were destroyed and just one corner of the trailer remained, sticking up in the air like a jagged spearhead. Angel was gone. Vaporized.

Well, most of her. In the short time he’d had inside, before the robot came, he’d noticed that one of the hard drives was missing from her server stack. Somebody had taken it.

Chapel. It must have been Chapel.

Which meant his mission wasn’t complete at all. And worse — he couldn’t trust the man who’d given it to him. The only way Chapel could have known to come here, the only way he could have beaten Wilkes to the punch, was if Hollingshead had fed him information he wasn’t supposed to have.

Well, that was kind of fucked up.

Wilkes walked away from the paramedics, who seemed to have other people to worry about. There were a bunch of things he needed to do. First and hardest was that he needed to call the Department of Defense and tell them Rupert Hollingshead was in league with the drone hijacker. That wasn’t going to go down well, but it had to be done. Then Wilkes needed to find the highest-ranking cop who hadn’t been blown up in the blast. He needed to start organizing a manhunt.

If he wanted to salvage anything from this mission, he was going to have to get that hard drive. Anything else was failure. Marines like Wilkes found the very idea of failure unacceptable.

He would get the drive, and if Chapel refused to hand it over, well …

Wilkes didn’t like what he would have to do then. He’d spent months in a motel room with Chapel, and while he thought the guy could be a little self-righteous, he was basically okay. Still. Wilkes didn’t like most of his missions. He completed them anyway.

Just like in Fallujah.

Chapel reached for the doorknob. He pushed the door open and stepped into the bedroom. And there she was.

“Hi,” she said.

He nodded.

She looked like she was in her early twenties. Just a little over five feet tall. Very cute, in a way nobody would ever call beautiful. She had a little turned-up nose and big eyes and very short hair that fell in bangs across her forehead. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that was too big for her. It had a picture of a Weimaraner on the front.

Her eyes were a bright blue he never would have expected.

“You, um,” he said, because what he was about to say was you’re real, which sounded pretty stupid even in his head. You’re human was just about as bad.

“Are you going to arrest me?” she asked.

Chapel bit his lip. “No,” he said. “No, Angel. No. I’m here to rescue you.”

And then he reached for her and she ran to him and they just hugged each other.

She was real. She was human. She cried a little. Chapel never wanted to let her go.

“I can’t believe you managed to save this,” Angel said, turning the hard drive over and over in her hands. “This could be really useful.”

Chapel didn’t want to talk about the hard drive.

They sat next to each other on the bed, their hands folded in their laps. So strange. He’d spent years with her whispering in his ear, her voice so real to him he could almost feel her breath on his neck. Now that she was right next to him in the flesh he felt like he’d never met her before, that they were just getting acquainted.

But then she would speak and it was all still there. The relationship they’d built up, as colleagues. As friends.

She kept looking at him out of the corner of her eye as if she couldn’t believe he was real, as if she’d never expected this either. Imagine that.

“I thought—” He shook his head. “What was that whole trick with the neural network all about?”

She smiled. “That was me trying to be clever. A while back, when I was working with Wilkes, he kept saying he didn’t believe I was a woman. That I was some fat guy in a stained sweatshirt who just wanted to fool him. Then he suggested maybe I was just an AI, not human at all. I thought the idea was interesting, so I downloaded the closest thing that actually exists — an Eliza variant. A program designed to fool someone into thinking they’re talking to a human being.”

“So when somebody came to find you in the trailer, and the computer started talking to them—”

“They would think that it was true, I was just an AI all along. Any half-competent computer tech would see right through it, but I figured it might give me a little extra time to get away.”

Chapel nodded. It was a good plan. Exactly the kind of thing the Angel he knew — the real Angel — might come up with. “You knew we were coming for you?” he asked.

“I figured out something was wrong pretty quickly,” she said. “All of my outgoing ports went dead — I was talking to you at the time, and suddenly you were just gone. I checked all my hardware and everything was working fine. I was certain I was being attacked. So I got out of there because I knew if they could do that to me, if they had the tech to shut me down, they could figure out where I was, too.” She shrugged. “Maybe, after working with you for so long, I just got paranoid. I was terrified they were going to come and kill me.”

“It isn’t paranoia if they’re really after you,” Chapel pointed out.

She laughed. Angel laughed. It was a sound that always made the hair stand up on his arms, and it did so then, too. “I hadn’t left that trailer in a long time. Being outside was… difficult. I had no idea what to do, where to go. I came here because I knew this address — you used to live here. And I thought Julia might help me.”

“It was a good call,” he told her.

“Thanks. But once I was here, once I was sure nobody was going to come bust down the door, I had no idea what to do next. Julia let me use her laptop and I was able to dig in enough to see that there was a secret warrant out for my arrest, signed by the director. I didn’t know who I could trust. I told Julia to call you — she really didn’t want to, but she could see we needed you. The problem was, for all I knew you were the one who was coming to grab me.”

“It was Wilkes — he was the one the director sent. But then he asked me to get you first. To make sure you stayed free.” He told her about the scrap of notebook paper Hollingshead had dropped in front of him. “He knows you’re being framed, but with the rest of the intelligence community against you, he also knew he had to play their game if he wanted to stay in the loop.”

“So he’s officially called for my arrest?”

“Officially,” he said.

She sat there lost in thought for a while. He didn’t push. Even though they were running out of time.

Finally she looked over at him and asked, “Chapel, what do we do now?”

He wished he had a real plan to give her. But all he could say was, “We keep moving.”

Chapel led Angel out of the bedroom and into the living room, where Julia was perched in front of the television. “I’m trying to get some news about what’s going on,” she said, “because I know neither of you can tell me.”

“It’s just better that you don’t know,” Chapel tried, but he knew Julia and he knew she wouldn’t just accept that.

“It’s bad, right?” Julia asked. She looked frightened. Chapel hated seeing her that way. “It must be, if Angel had to come out in the open. And it must be bad for you, too,” she said to him. “You’re not supposed to be here, are you?”

He’d forgotten how quick she could be. “It’s bad, yeah. But we’re going to fix it. Listen. I really want to thank you. You took Angel in when you didn’t have to.”

Julia stared at him. “Are you kidding? She saved my life once. You remember? When that guy from the CIA was trying to kill me, the one who couldn’t stop laughing? She got me out of that in one piece. I owed her.” She turned back to the TV. “Besides. Do you know what she was wearing when she showed up here? A jogging bra and yoga pants. If I turned her away, she would have frozen to death.”

Chapel turned to look at Angel.

“The last time I left my trailer,” she said, “it was warm out. I didn’t have time to check the temperature today.”

“The last time? When was that?” Julia asked. “Six months ago?”

“Maybe,” Angel admitted.

Chapel and Julia both stared at her then. But there was no time to ask any more questions. “We have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry. I really wish we had more time. Julia, I really wish we had a chance to talk. But the police will already be looking for us.”

Julia nodded. “Okay. What can I do to help?”

A wave of relief surged through Chapel. He’d known he could trust Julia, but things were tense between them and he wasn’t sure how she would feel about what he was going to ask for next.

“I need your car,” he said. Her eyebrows shot up and he was certain she would say no, so he tried to explain. “The bus and train stations are too risky — too many surveillance cameras. And there’s no way we’re flying out of here. I could steal a car, but if the owner reports it and—”

But Julia put a hand on his arm. “Go on, take it! You paid for half of it, anyway,” she said, smiling.

Chapel had forgotten that they’d bought it together. He’d driven it so rarely back when he lived in New York, and the title was in her name — he tried to minimize his paper trail — so he’d always thought of it as her car.

“You’d do anything for her, wouldn’t you?” he asked, glancing over at Angel, who was glued to the TV.

The hand on his arm moved up to his shoulder. “Not just her,” Julia said. “I need to tell you something. About how we… how things ended between us.”

She didn’t get the chance, though.

“Guys,” Angel said, looking over her shoulder at them, “you should see this.”

On the television screen red and blue lights flashed and cops moved back and forth behind yellow caution tape. The shot changed to show crowds of people standing outside the rail yard fence. It changed again to show police helicopters darting over Queens like a cloud of gnats.

“Police have cordoned off a neighborhood in Queens tonight as they continue the search for the person or persons involved,” a reporter announced. “Though information is scarce at the moment, we do know the explosion in a railroad facility earlier today is believed to have been caused by a bomb or other explosive device. The blast was loud enough to be heard in Long Island City, over a mile away. Six police officers were injured in the explosion, and two of them are in the hospital in critical condition.”

“Jesus.” Julia looked at the two of them as if she’d never seen them before. “Did you—”

“Somebody tried to kill Angel. They didn’t know she was already gone,” Chapel said. “I think. Maybe they just wanted to destroy her computers.”

“My trailer!” Angel said, because the scene on the TV had changed to a helicopter view of the scene.

“The police were investigating an anonymous tip when they approached this mobile home,” the reporter said. “The explosion looks to have been timed to injure as many of them as possible. New York One spoke with Lieutenant Charles Good of the city’s Hercules team, the police branch responsible for counterterrorism operations.”

Lieutenant Good was an enormous man with a bristly mustache and very tired eyes. He was dressed in full riot gear but had his helmet off for the cameras. “We are currently looking to interview a person of interest who was seen fleeing from the crime scene immediately after the explosion,” he said. Half a dozen microphones shoved closer to his face. “We don’t have a name yet but we believe we have a picture of him, which we’ll be making available to all news outlets. I want to make a promise to New York City. We’re going to find this guy. And we’re going to make him pay.”

The view on the TV changed to a static shot of a color photograph of Chapel’s face.

“Shit,” he said.

Julia ran around the kitchen, grabbing things. Bottles of water. A box of protein bars and some soy crisps. “I’ve got some cash, not much — I mean, can you wait here until I run to the ATM? I can get a couple of hundred dollars and… I know, you can take my jewelry, pawn it somewhere—”

“What about clothes?” Chapel asked.

“I think you left a couple of shirts here when you moved out, but I don’t know what I did with them. Maybe I gave them to Goodwill. Oh, God, why did I give them away? I guess I just didn’t want anything that would remind me of… never mind. Maybe I missed something.”

“I meant for Angel,” Chapel pointed out.

“Sure, sure, she can take whatever she thinks will fit her.”

Angel nodded and headed into the bedroom to pack a bag.

“There are some toiletries, you can take whatever I’ve got, I mean, you’ll smell like Lady Speed Stick but it’s better than — do you think you’ll be in the car for a long time? Or are you going to go someplace that has showers? Never mind — don’t tell me anything.” She put her hand to her neck as if she were taking her own pulse. “Medical supplies,” she said. “Knowing you, you’re going to need gauze and antibiotic cream and maybe a suture kit.” She shook her head. “All of that stuff is at my clinic, though. Do we have time for me to run to the ATM and my clinic?”

“No,” Chapel said.

“I found a shirt!” Angel called from the bedroom. The door opened and a balled-up blue men’s dress shirt came flying into the living room. Chapel caught it with one hand and started unfurling it.

“Oh,” Julia said, “you found — that one.”

“It was in her nightstand!” Angel called.

“I guess I did keep one, after all,” Julia said, and she blushed until her face was nearly as red as her hair. “Well, good, that’ll give you something to wear. That’s — that’s good.”

The shirt hadn’t been laundered. It was a mass of rumples. But it was less distinctive than the uniform shirt Chapel was wearing at the moment. He laid it over the back of the couch to let it air out for a minute.

“What about, I don’t know, my passport? Can you use that, maybe put a picture of Angel in it and—”

“Why did you keep this shirt?” Chapel asked.

Julia stared at it. Then she stroked one of the sleeves. “I always liked it. And… it still smelled like you,” she said.

Chapel frowned. “When you broke things off, I thought you never wanted to see me again,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re not the only one with secrets,” she said.

He reached over and put a hand on the back of her neck. Felt her hair run between his fingers. She shivered under his touch. He put his other arm around her, intending to draw her into a hug, but she moved her head and their lips met, her warm, soft lips, and he kissed her, and for a second that was all he needed to do. The only thing.

Thoughts crept back into his head, one at a time. The first was that he was never going to see her again. The second was that this was wrong, that it was over between them, that they didn’t kiss like this anymore.

Julia didn’t seem to have gotten that memo.

The kiss might have gone on a lot longer if Angel hadn’t come out of the bedroom just then, pulling a wheeled suitcase. “Guys,” she said quietly.

Chapel let Julia go. She moved back into the kitchen and started rifling through the cupboards again.

Time to get back to business. “Is that everything you want to bring?” he asked.

Angel nodded. “Just clothes and a toothbrush and a couple of things. I don’t need much.”

“Good. There’s going to be a roadblock. They’ll inspect the car and if they see a bunch of luggage, they’ll probably insist on a full search. But I think we’ll be okay. We can put that bag in the backseat; if we shove it down into the leg well, most likely they won’t even see it, and if they do, well, it’s just an overnight bag. It won’t be enough to arouse suspicion. This might work.”

“Won’t they recognize you from the picture?” Angel asked.

“Definitely. Which is why I’ll be riding in the trunk. They don’t know what you look like, which is the one thing we have going for us. When they pull you over, you have to act natural, Angel. You need to convince them you’re…” He tried to think of a good cover story. Simple, easy to remember, but something that would explain the suitcase. He was probably being overcautious but you tried to plan for everything that could go wrong. “Just a college student heading home to see your parents. Smile a lot, and act dumb. If it’s a male cop who pulls you over, don’t be afraid to flirt a little.”

“Uh-huh,” Angel said. “That I know how to do.” But something was wrong. He could see it in her face. “So your big plan is that I’m going to drive while you ride in the trunk.”

“Yeah. What is it? The car’s easy to drive, it’s a compact.” Her face didn’t clear, so he added, “It’s automatic, if you don’t know how to drive stick.”

“It would help if I even knew what that meant,” Angel said.

Chapel sat down on the arm of the couch. “You don’t know how to drive at all, do you?”

“Never got my license,” she admitted.

“Oh, boy,” he said.

Cars clogged the Holland Tunnel, creeping along through the stench of exhaust as they inched their way under the river and into New Jersey. Tempers flared and the sound of honking horns reverberated until the claustrophobic space became a resonating chamber, a crescendo of shrill noise that never stopped.

At the far end motorists breathed deep for the first time in hours as they crawled back up to the surface. As they emerged from the brightly lit tunnel into the dark of night, the lights of greasy spoon diners and countless gas stations dazzled their eyes. Only after they’d adjusted to the changing light could they see what lay ahead of them.

Between the tunnel and the turnpike, New Jersey had turned into an armed camp. Police vehicles were everywhere, blocking access and feeder streets, while hulking black riot tanks formed a bottleneck on the main road. Men with machine guns cradled in their arms waved down every car, while hastily erected signs warned motorists that their usual rights had been suspended. Every car was subject to search, every driver to processing.

Anyone even vaguely suspicious, anyone matching the subject’s description to the slightest degree, got hauled over to a big tent on one side of the road for further questioning, their cars towed out of the way and sequestered in an already-packed lot half a mile away just in case they were full of bombs.

The drivers had no chance to protest — and no possible way to back up or turn away from the roadblock. Men in the heavy black armor of Hercules units watched with stern faces as one by one the cars were squeezed through the cordon.

It was a cold night and the breath of the cops steamed in the air and got caught in all the whirling, flashing light. Dogs paced up and down the line of cars, sniffing at wheels, jumping in their harnesses. Cops used mirrors on the ends of long poles to look under every car, as if terrorists might be down there, clutching the undercarriage, trying to stay out of view.

One cop jogged over and tapped on the window of Julia’s car. “Just gotta take a look,” he said. “Roll down your windows, please. Driver’s license for the operator, and everybody in the car has to show me their hands. We’ll get you through this as soon as possible.”

The window rolled down and the driver peered out with a weak smile. The cop barely registered her features.

Female, shoulder-length red hair. Not the guy they were looking for. He leaned down to peer across her at the passenger. Younger female, short brown hair, her hands up as if she were being arrested. Cute. A kid like that was no terrorist.

The driver’s license came out.

Julia Taggart, resident of Brooklyn. The picture matched. The cop passed the license under an ultraviolet light and the seal of the State of New York lit up. Legit.

“You’ve got a bag in the backseat. Heading somewhere?”

“My sister and I are going to visit our parents in Atlantic City. We didn’t know if maybe we should stay there until this is over. Do you think there are going to be more bombs?” the driver asked.

“No information at this time, ma’am.” The cop glanced around the backseat again. Looked at the trunk.

A driver three cars back leaned on his horn, breaking the cop’s train of thought.

Whatever. This car was clean. “Okay, you’re good,” the cop said, and he slapped the roof of the car. “Enjoy your trip.”

The car’s window rolled back up, and it nosed its way onto the open road, headed for the New Jersey turnpike without any further ado.

For a long time they drove in silence. Angel kept looking back over her shoulder, though there was no sign of any cops back there. Maybe they were being followed, but Julia had no idea how you could tell.

This wasn’t exactly her line of work. If your schnauzer had kennel cough, she was definitely ready for that. She even knew how to properly shoe a horse. But when it came to running from the law, she was definitely a novice.

Not that she imagined Angel had much experience in it, either — at least not firsthand. “Anything to worry about?” she asked.

“No,” Angel said and sat down hard in her seat. She looked straight forward through the windshield. “I don’t think so. I think we’re clear.”

Very few cars were headed into New York, but Julia noticed how Angel kept squinting every time a car passed them headed the other direction. “You okay? Your eyes hurt when those high beams get you?”

“I guess I’m not used to this,” Angel confessed.

“There are a lot of things you’re not used to, huh?” Julia turned on the cruise control and eased her foot off the accelerator. “I couldn’t help but noticing, you’re kind of pale. And you said you hadn’t been out of your trailer in six months. I know I’m not supposed to ask questions, but—”

“It’s my job. I’m on call pretty much twenty-four seven,” Angel said. “So I don’t go out much. It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

“Really? I can’t imagine being cooped up in a little space like that for so long.”

“I had the Internet,” Angel replied, as if that explained everything.

Julia knew very little about Angel. When the hacker came to her door begging for help, she’d had plenty of reason to take her in, but honestly — they were almost strangers. She did know how Angel had gotten her unusual job. Once, in Julia’s hearing, she’d told the story to Chapel — how she had gotten into computers when she was a kid and then how she’d hacked into the wrong database, one belonging to the Pentagon. She’d been caught, but the military had been so impressed with her skills they’d given her a choice. She could go to jail for decades or she could come work for them.

It sounded like it wasn’t that much of a choice, after all. Being stuck in a trailer waiting for secret agents to call you asking for advice couldn’t be that much better than prison. But Angel had also said she loved her work.

“Do you have… trouble with being out in the open like this?” Julia said.

“Are you asking if I’m an agoraphobic?” Angel replied. She laughed. “Not exactly. But I was a weird kid. I didn’t like to play with dolls, and I didn’t care about clothes at all. But I wasn’t good at sports, so I couldn’t even be a proper tomboy. I didn’t have any friends, so I spent all my time in my room. That’s why I got into computers.”

“I’m sorry. That sounds tough.”

“I guess, but—” Angel shrugged. “Being online — it was so much better than high school. There people only cared about how you were dressed, what you looked like. And if you weren’t friends with the right people, then you were a loser and you were just screwed for life. But online … you could go anywhere, and what mattered was how smart you were. If you were funny or clever, or you figured out how to do something nobody else could do, then you were awesome. You were cool. I could never have had that in the real world. I was never alone after I got my computer. Any time, day or night, somebody was out there, wanting to talk or share files or whatever.”

And now she fulfilled that role for others, Julia thought. Playing the constant companion to field agents who relied on her brains to keep them alive. Julia knew what it meant to feel useful, to feel like you could help people. The animals she treated needed her — sometimes she was the difference between them living and dying. Angel must feel that way all the time.

Still.

“You must have missed out on so much, though. Parties and going to college and dating—”

“Please! Online gaming parties, online universities, and, frankly, I’m a girl who likes video games and knows how to use the Internet. When it comes to dating, I can take my pick.”

Julia didn’t know what to say to that. It made her think of a thought experiment she’d read about when she was taking a psychology class in college. If you spent your whole life locked in a room where everything was painted white, you couldn’t miss the color blue. It wouldn’t even mean anything to you if somebody tried to explain it to you.

She couldn’t help but feel sorry for Angel, though. She could date all the Internet geeks she wanted online, but if she couldn’t actually meet up with them in person, well …

Maybe there were some things she didn’t want to know about Angel. There was one thing, though, that had always bothered her. “Listen, if I’m not allowed to know this, that’s okay. But if we’re going to be stuck together on this road trip all night, I have to ask.”

Angel looked at her funny. Maybe she thought Julia was about to ask her if she was a virgin or something.

But that wasn’t it. “I know Chapel gave you your name. Angel, I mean.”

“Yeah. It started out as a code name, but it just stuck. Now everybody calls me that.”

“I’m guessing your real name is classified,” Julia said.

Angel sighed. “It is. But I guess that doesn’t matter anymore. It’s not like I work for the government now. I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to laugh. It’s Edith.”

Julia bit her lip. “Okay,” she said.

“They named me after my great-grandmother. She was a great woman — she was a flapper in the 1920s and she learned how to fly an airplane and she worked at catching spies during World War II. I wanted to be just like her and now I kind of am and I’m very proud of it.”

“Sounds like a great role model,” Julia said.

“She was. Now I’ve got to ask you something.”

“Shoot,” Julia said.

“I want to ask you,” Angel said, “never, ever to call me that name.”

“You got it,” Julia replied. She glanced over and saw Angel smiling from ear to ear and that was it — she couldn’t hold it in anymore. They both broke up laughing so hard Julia had to fight to keep the car in its lane.

Chapel had been a soldier before he’d been anything else. He had a soldier’s skills, including the most crucial of them all. He could sleep anywhere, at any time.

When they opened the trunk, he was barely conscious. It could have been a horde of cops out there waiting to take him by force and he wouldn’t have been able to resist. Instead, and luckily for him, he opened one bleary eye and saw Julia looking down at him.

“Sorry to wake you up,” she said, “but we kind of need to know where we’re going next.”

He sat up and rubbed at his face. He felt sore all over and he had a few new bruises from being thrown around the trunk since they left the apartment, but in a second he would be fine, ready for action again.

In a second.

“My mouth tastes like the bottom of a trash can,” he said. “This has been a very long day.” And of course it wasn’t over yet. They might have escaped the police in New York, but they were far from being safe.

“Come on,” Julia said, giving him a hand with getting out of the trunk. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and we can talk.”

“Maybe some dinner, too,” Chapel said.

Julia laughed. “Sure.”

The three of them headed into the rest stop’s diner. Even at midnight there were a fair number of people inside, fueling up before they got back on the road. The three of them grabbed a booth near the back. They had a good view of the windows and would see any police cars that pulled into the parking lot, and if they had to run, they were right next to the kitchen.

Chapel had trained for this kind of thing. Of course, his instructors at Ranger school had expected him to be on the lam in Afghanistan or Pakistan, one step ahead of the Taliban, but the skills carried over.

He also knew that he needed a lot of protein to keep him going. He ordered pork chops and sausage while Angel got a salad and Julia stuck to just coffee.

Once the waiter was gone, Julia leaned across the table and said, “So what’s the plan? I assume you have a plan.”

“I can do something with this, maybe,” Angel said, picking up the plastic bag that held her hard drive. “If I can—”

Chapel waved a hand to silence her. “I have a plan,” he said, looking Julia in the eye. She wasn’t going to like this. “They locked down New York pretty tight, but they just don’t have the manpower to do that for the entire eastern seaboard. Which means we can relax just a little. From now on, I’m doing the driving. As for you, we have to find a way for you to go home. We’ll call you a cab or find some nice truck driver to take you back. I’m sorry, Julia, but you shouldn’t know anything else.”

“Uh, actually,” Angel said.

Julia frowned. “As usual, your big plan is to keep me in the dark. Well, sorry, buddy. You’re stuck with me for a while longer.”

Chapel turned to look from one of them to the other. “What are you two talking about?”

It was Julia who answered. “I got a phone call about an hour ago. Back when you were napping in the trunk. You remember Marty, the guy who lives in the apartment right below me? He called to tell me the cops were raiding my place, tearing up my furniture, asking a lot of questions about me. He said they wanted to bring me in for an interview as soon as possible.”

“Damn,” Chapel said. “Julia — I’m sorry. That’s the last thing I wanted to happen.”

“It’s not your fault,” Angel said. “I’m the one who went to her for help. You wouldn’t have involved her if I hadn’t asked her to call you.”

Julia shook her head. “Worrying about whose fault it was doesn’t get us anywhere. Obviously I can’t go back to New York now. They’ll just arrest me on sight. And we can’t let that happen. I know what Angel looks like, and they would eventually get me to talk, one way or another.”

Chapel nodded. He’d forgotten how quickly she adapted to new situations. Yesterday she’d been a perfectly ordinary veterinarian living in Brooklyn. Now she was a wanted fugitive. For a civilian like Julia, that was a huge shift — but she was taking it incredibly well.

Of course, this wasn’t the first time it had happened to her. Chapel and Julia had met under similarly screwed-up conditions, way back when.

Something occurred to Chapel. “This doesn’t make any sense. They must have known that Angel and I were at your place somehow. But how? Nobody knows what Angel looks like, and I wasn’t spotted on my way in or out. This doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe they just knew that you and I used to be a couple,” Julia pointed out.

“But how? My name was never on the apartment lease, or the phone bill, or anything like that. No, the only people who knew about us were the people in that building, our friends, and — well, Angel here and the director. But he wouldn’t have sent the police after you. He’s on our side.”

“You’re sure of that?” Julia asked.

“Absolutely,” Angel told her. “He would never turn on us.”

Chapel wondered, if only for a moment. Hollingshead was a tough man. He made tough decisions sometimes. If it was the only way to protect the country, he would turn them in. But no — he had sent Chapel to save Angel. Telling the police about Julia would only damage that operation. It hadn’t been the director.

“So nobody in law enforcement or intelligence knew to look for you,” Chapel told Julia. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, there was one other guy,” she said. “He was definitely in intelligence. The one who told me to dump you.”

Chapel opened his mouth to protest. But then he realized what she’d just said.

“I’m sorry,” Angel said. “Who?”

The second Wilkes landed on the Pentagon helipad he was surrounded by soldiers. Maybe as an honor guard or maybe to take him into custody, he couldn’t say. He noticed there were no marines among them.

They saluted him but refused to answer any questions. They moved him through security and into the building in a hurry, then took him down an elevator to the F Ring, the first layer of underground offices. He’d never been in that section before. Not like he would have a chance to get lost, since the soldiers kept him from moving in any direction but where they wanted him to go.

They took him to a door with no sign on it, not even a room number. He knew what that meant. Anybody who had business through that door would already know where it was. If you didn’t have business there, you were in deep shit.

The door opened and a one-star general peered out at them. He looked at Wilkes and nodded.

Wilkes threw him a salute, of course. Then he stood at attention until he was told to come inside. He knew when to show respect.

The people in the room beyond certainly deserved it. Patrick Norton, the SecDef, was in there. So were a lot of other high-ranking people he didn’t recognize. Other than Norton, he knew only Rupert Hollingshead and Charlotte Holman and Paul Moulton.

The general who had opened the door cleared his throat. “First Lieutenant Wilkes,” he said. “We have some questions for you. You will answer them succinctly. Then we will give you your orders. Once you receive your orders, you will carry them out immediately. You will not ask any questions while you are in this room. You will not address anyone in this room other than myself. Anything you overhear in this room is considered a matter of national security and may never be repeated. Is this understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Wilkes said.

The general nodded. “Earlier today you initiated a manhunt for a field agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Namely one Chapel, James. You provided a photograph of the field agent to local law enforcement agencies. Is this correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Wilkes said.

“This despite standing orders not to provide such agencies with any information regarding active field agents under any circumstances. Can you explain why you violated those standing orders?”

“Sir, it was essential to find Chapel as quickly as possible. I had discovered that he was in collusion with the subject I had been sent to apprehend.”

“Everyone here has been briefed on your mission, Lieutenant. You can be a little less succinct, now,” the general said.

“Thank you, sir. I was ordered to apprehend one DIA analyst code named ‘Angel’ and bring her in for interrogation. It turned out my target wasn’t a human being but an advanced computer system. When I arrived at the target coordinates, I found Captain Chapel already on the scene, tampering with the computer, even though he had been ordered to stay away. While he was there, person or persons unknown attacked me and agents of law enforcement. In the ensuing chaos Chapel fled the scene. I ascertained that he had removed a piece of hardware, a hard drive, from the Angel computer. It is my understanding that this computer was instrumental in the attack on the Port of New Orleans yesterday, and most likely also the attack on my person today. I believed Chapel was colluding with terrorists. I felt the only chance I had to move forward with my mission was to detain Chapel and regain access to the computer hardware. To this end I provided the photograph, but not Chapel’s name or any other pertinent information.”

The general nodded. “After initiating the manhunt, you made a phone call to the office of the secretary of defense. In this call you made a certain implication. Will you repeat it for us now?”

“Yes, sir.” Wilkes looked across the room and made eye contact with Director Hollingshead. “I accused my direct superior of giving aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States.”

The room was so quiet Wilkes could hear the ventilation system ticking over. Every eye in the room was staring right at him, many of them in disbelief.

Well, he’d taken this job to protect his country, not to make friends.

“I did so under the aegis of Presidential Policy Directive 19,” he said, which was the only thing that could save his ass. In the old days, talking like that about a superior officer could get you court-martialed.

“What are the specifics of your accusation?” the general asked.

“There was no way Captain Chapel could know the location of the Angel system unless Director Hollingshead gave him that information. Clearly he’d been sent to remove Angel and take it into hiding. If I’d been a little slower in getting there, he would have succeeded and nobody would have known what he did. And our investigation into the drone hijacking would have become impossible.”

The SecDef put a hand on the table in front of him and gripped its edge like he thought he might collapse. “Rupert,” he said, in a small voice. “Is this true?”

This was where it could get bad. If Hollingshead denied the charge, it would be his word against Wilkes’s, and there was only one way that could play out.

But instead the director stood up, wiped his glasses on a handkerchief, and replied, “It is.”

Norton frowned. “Do you have a good reason why you would do such a thing?”

“No, sir,” Hollingshead replied. His face might have been made of stone. It was clear he had nothing more to say on the matter.

The SecDef gave him a good long while to change his mind. When he didn’t, Norton said, “I think maybe you should go to your office now and wait until we’ve decided what to do next. Don’t you?”

Hollingshead put his glasses back on. “Sir,” he said, and then he walked out of the room without even looking at anybody.

Wilkes had to respect the director. That couldn’t have been easy. It almost made him feel sorry for the old man.

Almost.

When Hollingshead was gone, it was like somebody had flipped a switch. Suddenly everybody was talking at once. Norton quieted them down by raising his voice a few decibels. “This is the last thing we need. We’re dealing with a terrorist attack — maybe two terrorist attacks now, after this thing in New York — and all we’re doing is fighting among ourselves like dogs on a street corner.”

Charlotte Holman raised one hand. “Sir, if I may — that could very well be the point.”

Norton glared at her. “What do you mean?”

“The original attack utilized an air force Predator drone signed out, spuriously of course, by the CIA. Now we have the DIA implicated. The terrorists must be laughing behind their hands. How many agencies can they tie up in knots before they’re done?”

“I notice the NSA still passes the smell test,” Norton replied.

“Do we? We provided the intelligence product that led to Angel.” She shook her head. “You see? If something goes wrong, we can be blamed as well. These people are very good. I think we need to remember that we trust each other. If we don’t, who can we rely on?”

The SecDef nodded. “What’s your recommendation?”

“I’d like to take over this search for Angel. Of course, the NSA doesn’t have any field agents, but our analysts are the very best. If you’d be willing to second someone to me, someone I can put on the ground, my associate Mr. Moulton here can steer them in the right direction. The most important thing is moving forward. If we can secure whatever’s left of this Angel, we still have a chance of finding the terrorists.”

“You have a field agent in mind?” Norton asked.

“Lieutenant Wilkes,” she said.

That caused a little stir.

“We’ve established that the DIA is working against the common good,” Norton said. “And you want to use one of their agents?”

Holman smiled. She looked over at Wilkes and nodded at him. “He took a big risk here, accusing Director Hollingshead. It’s clear where his priorities lie — he’s more interested in serving his country than playing politics. More important, he’s already up to speed. No reason to bring in anyone else — we would have to tell them everything, and the fewer people who know what’s going on, the better.”

Norton stared at Wilkes for a second. Wilkes stayed at attention. Finally, Norton got up from his seat and headed for the door. “Okay,” he said. “Everybody else, with me.”

The room emptied out in a hurry, leaving only Wilkes, Holman, and Moulton behind.

When the door was closed, she walked over to Wilkes and put a hand on his cheek. “That was very well done,” she said. “Angel, Chapel, now Hollingshead. How long have we been working to get rid of the three of them?”

It was Moulton who answered. “A little over thirty-six months.”

Wilkes allowed himself a brief smile. “You really sure Hollingshead was such a threat he needed to be taken down like that? He never impressed me much.”

“Rupert does a very good job of hiding his light under a bushel. Believe me, if anyone could have stopped what comes next, it would have been him.” She walked over to where the SecDef had sat and touched the back of his chair. She looked like she wanted to sit in it, to see what it felt like. “I know your now-former boss pretty well. Though he can still surprise me on occasion. I would never have believed that Angel was an AI, not in a thousand years. He’s always been a firm believer in human intelligence.”

“I know what I saw,” Wilkes said.

Holman steepled her fingers in front of her and nodded. “We at the NSA have proven time and again that computers are better at this sort of work. It looks like Rupert finally came around to that understanding as well.”

Wilkes had no interest in any of that. “You’re supposed to give me orders, now, ma’am,” he said.

She gave him a very warm, very bright smile. “Of course. Well. You were looking for Chapel and Angel’s hard drive. Carry on.”

Wilkes saluted and turned toward the door.

She wasn’t finished, though. “When you find them, make sure nobody else ever can,” she added.

“Yes, ma’am,” Wilkes replied.

Julia looked terrified as she told her story. Chapel could only imagine how she must have felt back when it was happening.

“I only saw him twice. The first time, he came to see me at my clinic. This was back when we were living together. You were out on a mission — I had no idea where you were or when you were coming back, or if you were coming back. When he showed up, I could tell right away he was some kind of spy or whatever. He just had that — that smug thing.”

“Smug?”

“Oh, come on,” Julia said, running her fingers through her hair. “Don’t pretend like you don’t get the same way, sometimes. He had that attitude, that look on his face. Like he knew a bunch of secrets and that made him better than everybody else. You all get that look sometimes. It’s insufferable, to be honest.”

Chapel’s eyes went wide. He’d had no idea he gave that off.

“So I could tell he was — from the intelligence community, let’s put it that way. And I was sure when he walked into the clinic, absolutely sure he was coming to tell me you were dead. That it was a courtesy call.”

“That must have been horrible,” Angel said.

“Yeah. Well. I felt like I was going to throw up, just seeing him there. Or maybe I was going to break down and start crying and I wouldn’t even be able to explain why to my patients. My boyfriend was dead and I wouldn’t even be able to tell my closest friends. It was something I always dreaded. But then he came into one of the examination rooms with me and he told me right off the bat you were still alive. He must have known what I was thinking. He said he’d been sent to talk about our relationship.” She glanced over at Chapel. “Yours and mine, I mean.”

“Somebody from the government came to give you dating advice?” Chapel asked.

“I was so relieved I think I laughed at the idea. He agreed it sounded funny. But then he told me I was going to have to break up with you.”

“What?” Chapel asked, loud enough that diners around them turned to look.

“He had a whole speech about why it had to be done. I could tell even he didn’t believe it, but he wouldn’t answer any questions. He said that I was a liability and I could get you in trouble. He said I was compromising your effectiveness in the field.”

“To be fair,” Angel said, “that’s not all bullshit. We do prefer to work with agents who have no significant connections back home. It makes them—”

“Hold on,” Chapel said to her. “Julia — you’re saying this guy came from the government and he told you to break up with me? I thought you did it because you were sick of being kept in the dark all the time.”

“I was,” she replied. “I was absolutely miserable. Who knows? I might have broken things off anyway. I definitely wasn’t ready to marry you.”

Chapel closed his eyes. That didn’t help. All he could see was an engagement ring in a little padded box. Sitting on the front hall table of Julia’s apartment while she walked out the door.

He forced himself to stay in control. “What did you tell him?”

“To go fuck himself, of course,” Julia said. “That was when he started with the threats. No, no, don’t get like that,” she told Chapel, who had been about to jump out of the booth. “He didn’t threaten to hurt me. He threatened your career. He said if I didn’t break up with you he would leak your name to the news media. He would out you. He talked about how many enemies you had, how many people would love to get their hands on you, and if your name was in the public record, there was nothing to stop them. He said if I didn’t dump you, I would basically be sentencing you to death.”

Chapel put a hand over his mouth. He had to, or he knew he would start shouting.

“I couldn’t let that happen. So I agreed,” Julia said.

Chapel couldn’t reply, so Angel had to. “You said you met him twice,” she said.

Julia nodded. “The second time—” She stopped and looked at Angel as if she wasn’t sure she should say this in front of the younger woman. But then she shook her red hair and said, “The second time was a couple of months later. He came and showed me a photograph. It showed you, Jim. On a balcony, standing with — some other woman. And you had your, you know. Your hand in her panties.”

All the blood rushed out of Chapel’s body and he felt like he might collapse. Nadia. Julia had seen a picture of him with Nadia.

It was the last thing he’d ever wanted Julia to know about. The very last.

“I was… well. I didn’t like looking at that picture. I mean, I’d dumped you, in a pretty bad way. It’s true. And it wasn’t like you ran right out and found a replacement; I know some time passed. But it made me… it made me uncomfortable. Can we just leave it at that? It made me angry, too.” Julia turned her face away. “He said he wanted me to know I’d made the right choice, breaking up with you. I think he wanted to make sure I didn’t have any second thoughts.”

Chapel counted to ten in his head. Then he reached for Julia’s hand. She pulled it away. “Listen,” he said, “do you want the details? I’ll tell you all about her—”

“Jesus Christ, no!” Julia said, looking at him with flashing eyes. “I don’t want to know. Your life — after I broke up with you — that’s — that’s—”

Her eyes shimmered with tears that refused to fall.

“Who did he work for?” Angel asked. “This mysterious guy. Did he give you any idea of who he worked for?” When Julia didn’t respond right away, she said, “Come on, this is important. Did he give you any kind of clue?”

“I asked if he worked for Hollingshead. He said no, and it was funny I would even think that. He said he worked for a different agency. That he was a civilian. That’s all. I told him to go away and never bother me again and he just smiled — he always smiled, I hated that smile — he smiled and said he was sure we’d see each other again.”

“I can confirm he didn’t work for the DIA,” Angel said. “I would have known about this.” She looked at Chapel. “We didn’t do this to you.”

“To him?” Julia said. “They didn’t do this to him at all. They did it to me.”

Angel drew back into her seat like she was afraid Julia would attack her. “Never mind. I didn’t mean anything by that.”

Chapel shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Julia. That must have been terrifying.”

“A little. But I’m kind of used to it. Spies telling me cryptic things. Acting shifty.” She crumpled a paper napkin in her fist and looked out the window.

Chapel had forgotten that her parents used to work for the CIA. It was how she’d gotten mixed up with him in the first place. A CIA lawyer used to come over to their house once a month when she was a kid, just to make sure her parents hadn’t been subverted by foreign spies.

“You think he was with the CIA?” he asked.

“Not really,” Julia said. “I tried tricking him into admitting just that, once, and he looked… contemptuous. Like I had insulted him. But he was definitely an intelligence guy, and an American.”

Chapel nodded. “So somebody from some agency screwed with our personal life. Then later, somebody framed Angel, somebody we’re pretty sure was also part of the intelligence community.”

“You think there’s a connection there?” Julia asked.

“Two attacks on us, coming so close together? I’m certain of it. Whoever is behind the drone hijacking is the same person who pressured you. Clearly there’s a conspiracy to take us down — and it’s working.”

“Are you sure about this?” Julia asked.

Chapel glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then tried the handle on another car door. Locked. He tried to make it look like he was just walking past the car toward the next one in the lot. Tried the handle. Locked.

Angel answered Julia’s question. “If the police are looking for you, they’ll have looked up your license plate number. There’ll be an APB out for you. We need a new car.”

Chapel tried another door handle. Locked. The tricky part was testing the handles gently. Most of these cars had car alarms. If he pulled too hard, he would set them off, and the owner would come running out of the rest stop looking to see what was going on.

“Damn,” Julia said. “I loved that car.”

“Switching cars here makes sense, too,” Angel went on. “When they find your car here, they’ll know we headed south from New York. But they won’t be able to tell if we were headed for Pennsylvania or Maryland or Delaware.”

Chapel tried another handle. Locked.

“Where are we headed?”

Chapel answered her. “Pennsylvania. I have a friend who lives south of Pittsburgh. He’ll take us in, for a while anyway.”

The next car was locked, too.

“You’re sure about this friend? Wouldn’t it be safer just to keep moving?”

“I am absolutely sure that my friend won’t turn us in,” Chapel said. He wasn’t prepared to make any promises beyond that. “And, anyway, we need a place to sleep, and a base of operations so we can start fighting back. Running is just putting off the inevitable. We need to figure out who was behind the drone hijacking and everything else if we’re going to have a chance of clearing our names.”

“I can help there,” Angel said. “I mean. I could.” She tapped her hard drive with her fingernail. “There’s data on here that might tell me who was behind the drone attacks.”

Chapel nodded. “That’s fantastic, Angel. That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.” He tried another car and found it locked. Of course. Who would leave their car unlocked in a rest stop in New Jersey? He tried another car. Again, locked.

“You’re smiling. You found one?” Julia whispered.

“No. But for the first time since this all started, I feel like I might have a plan. I feel like there’s something we can actually do, instead of just running away. And the first thing we need for that plan is—”

A car handle yielded under his fingers. The door popped open on its hinges.

“And of course, you know how to hot-wire a car,” Julia said.

Chapel’s smile got bigger. “I do.”

“Give me another one of those energy shots,” Chapel said.

Angel frowned. “You know these are terrible for your heart, right? They’re just pure caffeine. They won’t even keep you awake much longer. You’re going to crash no matter how many of them you drink. You should pull over and take a rest.”

Chapel glanced into the backseat. Julia was sprawled out back there, her plum-colored coat pulled tight across her shoulders. He had always loved to watch her sleep. It meant she felt safe.

“In a bit,” he said.

Angel flipped off the top of the little plastic bottle. It wasn’t a brand he recognized, just some knockoff they’d sold back at the rest stop. He had no idea what was in it. Chapel knocked it back anyway, grimacing at the foul taste. Back when he was in Afghanistan, when he pulled long duty, he used to chug cans of energy drink, carbonated lizard spit laced with all kinds of herbal nonsense. They’d tasted like watered-down, sweetened battery acid. These energy shots went down a lot faster, but somehow they still managed to taste worse.

Almost at once, though, he felt his vision tighten up, felt his focus come back. For a long time now he’d been staring at the double yellow line on the road, pretty much the only thing his headlights could pick up. It got dark in Pennsylvania. A lot darker than it even got in New York, or Virginia for that matter. Maybe it was all the trees.

Talking helped him stay awake, too. And talking to Angel had always made him feel like things were going to be okay. Especially now, in the dark, when he couldn’t really see her. It almost felt like the old days, when she was watching over him from somewhere far away, able to see everything on her screens, always ready with good advice. When she was just a voice in his ear.

“You really think you can do something with that hard drive?” he asked her.

“Maybe, sugar. Maybe. Whoever hacked me and made it look like I was piloting that drone, they were good. So good I wasn’t even aware it was happening. But they must have left tracks behind. If I can get a really good look at the activity logs on the drive, maybe I can find something. Something we can follow back to where the attack really came from. If I can figure that out—”

“Then we can find them. And at the very least we can find some proof that can clear our names. And this’ll be over.”

“Possibly,” Angel said. “But it’s not going to be easy.”

“My friend, the one we’re going to stay with. He’ll have a computer. You can log in there.”

Angel sighed. “I’m going to need more processor power than you get in just some commercial laptop. More speed. What I have in mind is risky. The NSA tracked me down once — when I go online again, there’ll be nothing stopping them from finding me again. If we do this, if we try to track the data, they’ll know where we are.”

“We’ll worry about that when it happens. And we’ll find you some good hardware, something to work with. Okay?”

“Sure,” Angel said, though she didn’t sound convinced. “Chapel — did I do the right thing?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Running away. Maybe — maybe I should have just turned myself in. Then you wouldn’t be in trouble like this. And then I ran to Julia’s place, and now she’s in it, too.”

“You’re innocent, Angel. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But if I did turn myself in, if I let them question me, then — then they’d see I wasn’t guilty, right?”

He thought about Angel being shoved in some fetid cell. Being interrogated by men shouting questions at her while they made her walk in circles until she couldn’t stand up anymore. He imagined her being waterboarded.

He knew what happened to people who were accused of being terrorists. Whether they were innocent or not.

“No, Angel. The right place for you is here in this car. With me.”

“You never even asked me if I did it. If I hijacked that drone. The thought didn’t cross your mind, did it?”

“Not for a second,” he told her.

The sun had yet to rise, but streetlamps illuminated the suburban lane well enough. It was a long street lined with big houses set well back on spacious yards — the kind of street Chapel thought had disappeared after the housing boom. The lawns were all mowed down to stubble and bordered by privacy fences so that each house stood on its own discreet lot, each with its own stand of trees, a paved driveway, and a quaint brick or stone walkway to its porch. Each house had its own tasteful mailbox with flags pinned back like the ears of a faithful hound. Each house had wooden siding painted a different shade of off-white and a door painted dark red or dark green, to give the house character. It was probably the tidiest little neighborhood Chapel had ever seen. It looked like the people who owned those houses periodically came out and dusted their own curbs.

Only one thing spoiled the effect. An old man in a green cloth jacket was crawling along the gutter, his straggly beard touching the pavement.

Chapel switched off the car and jumped out. That green jacket spoke to him. He rushed over and squatted down next to the crawling man. “Excuse me,” he said. “You look like you could use a hand.”

“No, no,” the man said. His eyes were bright red as if he’d been weeping, but he smiled for Chapel. He lay down in the road and propped himself up on his elbows. “I’ll admit, my method of locomotion may appear unorthodox. But I assure you I’m making excellent progress, good sir.”

The man stank of cheap liquor — not the juniper smell of gin or the sweet stink of rum but more like the acrid bite of pure rubbing alcohol.

Julia came and knelt down next to the crawling man. She checked his pulse — he did not resist — and frowned. “He’s not in good shape,” she said, “though maybe that was kind of obvious.”

“Sir,” Chapel said, “you’re wearing an army jacket. Are you a veteran?”

“I have that honor,” the man said. “Though my coat is but a loaner. First Battalion, Third Marines. A pleasure to make your acquaintance, young man. And you, my dear — simply a pleasure to be in your pulchritudinous presence.”

Chapel tried to remember the last time anyone had called him “young man.” He shook his head and told the man, “I really think we should help you here.”

“Third Marines,” Julia said. “Why does that sound familiar? Wait a minute. Rudy? Is your name Rudy?” She looked up at Chapel. “Do you remember Atlanta? When that CIA guy tried to kill me?”

“You’re kidding me,” Chapel said. But now she mentioned it — yeah, it was definitely the same guy. Rudy had been wandering around an underground mall in Atlanta and he’d asked them for money. He’d ended up helping to save Julia’s life.

In way of thanks, Chapel had given him a phone number to call, a way to reach out to somebody who might help him get his life back on track. Help him stop drinking. Judging by what street he was currently crawling across, it looked like he had called that number — but it hadn’t been enough.

“I will never forget that lovely red hair,” Rudy said. “Though I can’t quite make out your face. I seem to have misplaced my glasses, dear. Do you see them anywhere?”

Julia glanced around. “No, sorry.”

“Ah, well. Perhaps you’ll give me a kiss, then.”

She laughed. “It’s definitely Rudy,” she said.

Chapel tried to get hold of the drunk vet’s arm, to help him sit up, but Rudy shrugged him off with surprising strength. He tried again, but stopped this time because the door of the nearest house banged open and a woman came storming out to scowl at them.

“You leave him alone,” she said. She was a hair under five feet tall and might weigh a hundred pounds if she put on heavy work boots. Her hair was tucked up inside a satin cap but despite the hour she was already dressed in a conservative pantsuit. “He’s gonna drink like that, hey? He’s gonna crawl his way back to bed. Maybe you think you’re doing him a favor. You think you’re doing him a favor?”

“Dolores, hi, I—”

“Did I just ask you a question? Did you answer it?”

“No, I — no,” Chapel stammered.

“No, I, no, exactly,” she mimicked. “I know you, don’t I? But don’t ask me to remember where from.”

“Your wedding,” Chapel said.

She snorted in derision. “Like there weren’t two hundred people there. I made the guest list, so I ought to know. You a friend of Top?”

“I’m one of his boys, actually,” Chapel said.

Dolores’s face didn’t change, but she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. It was clear that Chapel had produced the right password or given the right sign. She glanced at Julia and then over at the stolen car, where Angel still waited. She made a gesture for Angel to come over. “You’d better come inside. I’ll make you some breakfast — don’t expect croissants, though. Pancakes are easier.”

“Thank you,” Chapel said.

Dolores shrugged and headed back into the house. Chapel followed her. Julia waited for Angel to catch up before she went in.

“Do you understand what’s going on here?” she asked.

“Maybe twenty-five percent,” Angel said. Then she looked back at Rudy, who had managed to crawl his way into the driveway. “Maybe fifteen.”

The inside of the house was not exactly what Chapel had expected. The furniture was cheap, mostly pressboard covered in chipped veneer. The upholstery had split in places and was held together with duct tape. There was a television in the living room, but it was an old-fashioned box type, not a flat-screen. The walls were bare of decoration.

As run-down as it looked, the room was spotless. The duct tape on the cushions looked like it had just been applied. The carpet showed the tracks of recent vacuuming.

He found it all strangely comforting. This is the kind of place a soldier might live, he thought. The neatness, the lack of ornament or pretension—

“It’s a shithole,” Dolores said, “but it’s paid for.”

Chapel kept his mouth shut. He’d only met Dolores once before, but he knew better than to try to make pleasantries or — far worse — disagree with her.

She headed through the house, toward the kitchen, but Chapel stopped in the living room and looked up the stairs. He could hear people moving around up there, and now some of them appeared — two men and a woman, all dressed in T-shirts and jeans. They all had the same crew cut — including the woman. And all of them were wounded.

One of the men was missing both legs below the knee. He had a pair of replacements that were little more than metal poles that ended in tennis shoes. The other man was hairless and all of his exposed skin was pink and rough and Chapel knew he must have been in a fire. The woman had a trim, athletic body but she had an inch-wide scar running from her forehead down into the collar of her shirt.

Another man came onto the stairs while Chapel stood there, this one with a white plastic hand.

All four of them stared at Chapel with a look he knew pretty well. It was the look he wore on his own face when people he didn’t know saw him with his arm off. A wary expression, because you just didn’t know how they would react.

Chapel nodded to the four of them, then nearly jumped when he heard something bounding toward him. It turned out to be a dog, a big mutt with scars on his head and only three legs. A pair of actual dog tags jangled at his collar.

The dog ignored Chapel and ran straight to Julia, who erupted in laughter and excitement. “Hey there, fella, hey there,” she said and bent down so the dog could lick her chin.

Chapel left her and Angel to the dog and followed Dolores into the kitchen. “I wasn’t expecting to see so many people here,” he said. “I thought it was just you and Top. And I guess Rudy.”

“I wasn’t expecting visitors while it was still dark out,” she told him. “I figure we’ll both find a way to cope.”

Chapel grinned for a second — then let his mouth fall open when he saw they weren’t alone. Another guy with a crew cut was standing by the kitchen counter, breaking eggs into a large bowl. He had an artificial arm, a yellow resin prosthesis that ended in what Chapel knew was called a voluntary closing hook — a complicated mechanical hook fashioned from stainless steel. Clearly he’d had it for a while, as he was breaking the eggs without actually squashing them.

“It’s okay, I’m used to people staring at it,” the man said, making it sound as if this was not okay at all.

“Hi,” Chapel said, trying to get back on the right footing. “I’m Jim.”

The wounded man swung around and stuck his hook out at Chapel. “Ralph. Nice to meet you — want to shake?”

Dolores squealed in anger. “Ralph, you have a bad night?” she asked. “That why you’re down here so early making a mess in my kitchen?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ralph said.

“You think that means you can be rude to my guests?”

“No, ma’am.”

“It’s all right,” Chapel said. He reached over and shook Ralph’s hook, even though it meant getting raw egg all over his fingers. He considered showing Ralph his own prosthesis, then thought better of it. It might make the man jealous — Chapel’s arm was generations beyond what Ralph wore — but also it would mean he would have to take his shirt off to prove it. “Listen, Dolores, I really need to talk with Top. Is he around?”

“He’s upstairs naked and snoring in his bed, where everybody ought to be this time of day. But it sounds like you’ve woken up the rest of the house. I’m sure he’ll be down soon. In the meantime — you want orange juice or coffee?”

After all the energy shots he’d consumed, Chapel was clear on that. “Juice, please. Do you mind if I, uh, ask a question?”

Dolores went to the refrigerator to get a family-sized carton of orange juice. She poured him a glass and put it on the table. “You want to know who all these people are. You should have already guessed. They’re Top’s boys. Just like you.”

“You know Top?” Ralph asked. A lot of the anger left his face in the same moment.

Chapel nodded. “When I came back from Afghanistan, I was in a hospital for about six months. Top did my physical rehabilitation. I don’t mind saying, I was pretty much finished before I met him. I was considering suicide, frankly. Top taught me how to live with my… injuries. He did more than that. He taught me how to live in general.”

“All the boys in this house could tell you the same story, or one close enough nobody gives a shit,” Dolores said. “Rudy was the first. He showed up here one day in a sorry state, drunk to the gills and barely able to talk. Top and I took him in, because what else were we going to do? He was a marine, once. Nobody else wanted to help him. Not the VA, not any hospital. So we put him in a spare room and let him dry out. We figured it would just be for a few days. I got him into an AA program, got him doing his twelve steps.”

Chapel couldn’t help himself. “It looks like they didn’t work.”

“He falls off the wagon sometimes. I can’t lock him in his room — this isn’t a prison or even a halfway house. Some nights it’s more than he can handle, the memories, the things he did in Vietnam. So he goes out and gets drunk. He knows we won’t carry him inside but he also knows we won’t kick him out.”

“Those are the rules,” Ralph said.

Dolores nodded. “That’s right, Specialist. We help him as best we can. And we make sure he doesn’t sleep under a bridge and maybe he eats a meal or two every day. You can’t fix a broken man — that’s something he has to do on his own. But you can give him a chance.”

“What about the others?” Chapel asked.

“They came, one by one. Top never says no. We’re full past capacity now, but we don’t turn anybody away. Most of them, their families couldn’t handle the PTSD. The screaming in the night, the anger problems. I’m sure you know how that works.”

“I do,” Chapel said, staring at his glass of juice. He’d gotten his own PTSD under control — most of the time — but it hadn’t been easy.

“If they can’t live someplace else, they can live here,” Dolores said. “As long as they need it.”

“That’s — incredible. Incredibly generous,” Chapel said.

Dolores shrugged. “They sacrificed something for their country. An arm, a leg, a chance at a normal life. Now that’s generous. We just do what we can. I just wish we had the money to buy a bigger place. If the boys can hold down a job, they help out a little with money. Some of Top’s boys do better than others — those that don’t live here, I mean. They help us out too, as much as they can.”

Chapel had a feeling he knew who one of those donors was. Top had been a master gunnery sergeant in Iraq. The men who served under him had been his original boys. When he started working as a physical therapist, all his patients got to be his boys, too. A lot of people owed Top more than they could ever pay. Rupert Hollingshead was one of Top’s boys. It was why he’d given Chapel a job, back when they first met.

“Forgive me, Dolores, but you’re a civilian, aren’t you? You never served in the military.”

“Only because when you sign up they don’t let you choose if you want to be a general or an enlisted,” she pointed out. “If they’d been sensible enough to put me in charge, I would have accepted their offer.”

Chapel smiled. “I don’t mean anything by it, except — I can see why Top started doing this, taking in his boys when they needed him. But why did you agree to it? You didn’t have to do this.”

“Maybe not. But there is no more persuasive man on earth than Top. He talked me into marrying him, didn’t he? He could talk a fish into moving to Death Valley because the real estate was so cheap.”

Chapel had to admit she was right about that.

It wasn’t long before Top came down for his breakfast.

Top was not a tall man, though he had a barrel chest and thick neck muscles that made him look as powerful as a horse. He was not a particularly good-looking man, a fact accentuated by the scar tissue that surrounded one of his eyes. He was missing one arm and hadn’t bothered to put on a prosthesis. He was also missing a leg, and so he came down the stairs one step at a time, carefully placing an artificial foot on each riser.

Despite all this — and not because of it — the second he appeared in the living room the whole atmosphere in the house changed. People stood up and turned to face him. The dog stopped pawing at Julia’s face and came to attention.

Top smiled at the wounded veterans gathered in the living room. “Well, if isn’t another damned beautiful morning in Pennsylvania,” he announced.

“Sir, yes, sir!” the vets said in chorus.

Top turned to look at Julia, still down on the floor next to the dog, and then at Angel, who was sitting in a corner making herself very small in an armchair.

“An especially beautiful morning,” Top said, with a wide, amiable grin.

“I heard that!” Dolores shouted from the kitchen.

“If you were gonna divorce me for looking at pretty girls, I’d already be the unhappiest man in the world, baby,” Top called back.

It was enough to make Angel blush. Julia laughed.

“I figure at some point, somebody’s gonna actually introduce me to our new friends here. So I won’t bother to ask,” Top said. “And who’s that in the kitchen?”

Chapel stepped out into the living room. He threw Top a salute. “Reporting for duty, sir,” he said.

“Captain Chapel,” Top said, looking him up and down. “I’d call you a disgrace to your uniform if you were wearing one. Your hair’s out of place, soldier, and you look like you haven’t shaved this morning. Look like you didn’t sleep last night, either.”

“Yes, sir,” Chapel said. He outranked Top, as such things were normally measured. But in this house it was clear who gave the orders.

“Frankly, your appearance is an insult to me, my lady wife, and every soldier in this house. Do you have anything to say in your defense?”

“No, sir,” Chapel replied. He was still holding his salute, since he hadn’t been told to be at ease.

“You’ll come over here and face me when I chew you out, soldier.”

Chapel marched over to Top until they were standing face-to-face. At which point he just couldn’t hold it together anymore. He exploded with laughter and Top did too, and the two of them embraced in a very warm hug. It had been way too long.

“Damn, Cap’n, it’s so good to see you I think I might cry a little,” Top said. “How’ve you been keeping? You still swimming with one arm like a crazy fish?”

“Every chance I can get,” Chapel said. “Listen, I—”

“The redhead out there is Julia, right? The one you said you were going to marry?”

“That’s right, although it didn’t quite work out. We—”

“And the brunette? What’s her story?”

“She’s a… a work friend,” Chapel said.

“Well, she’s welcome here, then. Any friend of yours at least rates breakfast on me.” He nodded at the roller bag Angel had set down next to her chair. “A clean bed, too, if she wants one. You just dropping her off, or are you staying tonight, too?”

“I don’t know,” Chapel said. He felt his shoulders sag. “Maybe this is just a quick pop-in. I was hoping… well, I was hoping we could stay here for a bit. I didn’t realize you already had a full house, though. It’s damned good to see you, but maybe we should just be on our way.”

“Let me tell you a little something,” Top said, as if Chapel hadn’t spoken at all. “Every veteran of an American war is welcome in this house. No questions asked. Even that flea-bitten mutt, you know where he came from? He was working K-9 teams in Iraq. They trained him to sniff out IEDs. You believe that? When I was over there, they would send us some new gizmo every week. A magno-thermo-dynamic sniffer spotter wide-spectrum doodad that was supposed to tell you where the roadside bombs were without fail, so fresh out of the lab they still had that new car smell. We tried every one of them, ran through the manuals and all the checklists, and you know how well they worked?” He stuck out one finger in the air and then he pointed at his missing eye, arm, and leg. “But Angus there, that dog. They spent maybe one percent of the budget of one of those gizmos on training him. He even volunteered to take a lousy pay grade — one little biscuit for every bomb he found. But damn if he didn’t have a one hundred percent success rate.”

“You’re telling me your dog is a veteran,” Chapel said.

“Honorably discharged with a Purple Heart,” Top said, beaming with pride. It was the same look that crossed his face when one of his patients managed to stand on his or her own feet for the first time in six months. “He came home and they put him with some nice family and six months later he had fleas and kennel cough and the family wanted to put him down. They said he refused to eat, and he kept waking ’em up at three in the morning barking like the whole house was full of insurgents. In short, because I know you army types have trouble paying attention during briefings, my dog is a veteran with P-T-S-D.” He pronounced each letter as if he were saying the dog had received a doctorate in particle physics from Harvard. “You know how hard it is to work with a dog with PTSD? They can’t tell you when they’re flashing back, or that nobody gets what they’re feeling. You can’t tell them they’re home and they’re safe.”

“If anybody could help a dog like that, it’s you,” Chapel said.

Top nodded, just accepting that without comment. “Now. Tell me what you’re looking for here.”

Chapel bit his lip. He looked around at the veterans gathered in the room. They were all staring at him. He couldn’t afford to speak plainly, but he owed Top an explanation, definitely. “The three of us — Angel and Julia and me — we’re in trouble.”

Top leaned back in his chair and scratched at the burnt skin around his false eye. “Trouble, like cops? Or worse?”

“Worse,” Chapel admitted.

Top nodded. “You have any idea why I jawed on and on about my flea-bitten dog?”

“I think I might,” Chapel said.

“That dog is one of my boys. When he came here, it was so bad Dolores and me, we wore flea collars our own selves. That dog bit me three times, and I ain’t got a lot of flesh left to get bitten off. You know why that dog is still here?”

“He’s one of your boys,” Chapel said.

Top nodded. “And so are you. You just wasted ten minutes of my life asking a question you already knew the answer to. That’s all right, gave me a chance to talk about my dog. I love talking about my dog. Now let’s talk about what we’re going to do to get you and those ladies out of the shit.”

Wilkes’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

He picked it up and looked at the screen. The call was coming from a number listed as (000) 000-0000, which he knew meant it had to be Moulton. Only the intelligence community had the tech to truly mask a number but still let it connect.

He glanced out through the side hatch of the helicopter at the New Jersey landscape, at the turnpike and its feeder roads, at the trees down there just starting to turn blue as the sun thought about maybe getting around to rising above the horizon.

He considered just tossing the phone out there.

Instead he swiped the screen and put it to his ear. “What?” he said.

Moulton sounded pissed. “I’ve been trying to reach you for twenty minutes,” the analyst sputtered. “You need to put in your earpiece. We need to be in constant contact.”

Wilkes reached in his pocket and pulled out the hands-free unit they’d given him. “I was trying to get some sleep,” he said.

“You can sleep when this is over. Look, when Angel and Chapel are on a mission, he never takes his earpiece out. The two of them are always working together, talking things out, figuring out their next move—”

“You want us to be more like Chapel and Angel?” Wilkes asked. “Think about that. Think about how well it worked out for them.”

He could hear Moulton seethe through the phone.

The helicopter was already settling down in a rest stop parking lot. Wilkes figured he knew why — he didn’t need Moulton to explain it all. “Let me guess. You found Julia Taggart’s car.” Wilkes had wasted an hour trying to locate her in New York before the cops had bothered to tell him her driver’s license had been scanned as she passed a roadblock outside the Holland Tunnel. It had given him something to work on, but for most of the night the helicopter had just been flying passes over the New Jersey Turnpike, looking for her license plate.

“Yeah, it’s sitting in a parking lot in—”

“In a rest stop in New Jersey. Yep. I assume you told my pilot where to take me.” Wilkes leaned forward to look at the pilot in the cockpit of the helicopter. He gave the man a thumbs-up. He put his legs down on the chopper’s floorboards and started to climb out through the hatch. “How long ago did you find the car?”

“An hour ago,” Moulton said. “But according to the surveillance cameras, it’s been sitting there most of the night.”

“Yeah?” Wilkes said. He glanced out, across the lot. A couple of police cruisers were sitting near the entrance to a diner about two hundred yards away. “So they’re already gone. We missed them.”

“Well, sure. They had a huge head start,” Moulton said. “And we wasted time bringing you to the Pentagon for that farce of a debriefing.”

“Okay,” Wilkes said. “I’m going back to sleep.”

“What?”

“You’re boring me to the point where I lose consciousness,” Wilkes said.

“You’re not going to question anybody? You’re not going to even talk to the cops on the scene?”

“No reason to. I already know what they could tell me. Our targets aren’t here anymore. I know Chapel, and I know how he was trained. He stole another car and they left. The big question is, which direction did they go, and I’m guessing the locals can’t tell me that.”

Moulton laughed derisively. “I can’t believe this. You won’t even get out of your aircraft? Assistant Director Holman brought you in on this because we needed somebody in the field, somebody who could work this case and—”

“No, she didn’t,” Wilkes said.

“What?”

“When you got assigned to work for me, did you even bother to look at my military record? Did you see what my operational specialty was when I was in Iraq? You need to understand something, Moulton. I’m not like Chapel. His job is to go into bad places and do all the subtle crap. Maybe pay off some warlord or sabotage a nuclear reactor or steal some documents we need. Spy shit. You take a second now, look at what they had me doing in Iraq.”

“Oh,” Moulton said when he’d finished doing as he was told. “You do wet work.”

“Nobody calls it that, dingus,” Wilkes told him. “We call it F3.”

“What does that mean?”

“Find, Fix, Finish. What I am is a self-guided missile. You tell me where to go, and then you set me loose. So I’m going back to sleep unless you can give me a target.”

Moulton sounded almost apologetic when he responded. Maybe he was just scared. “Okay. Okay — I have something. A car was reported stolen from that rest stop last night. Early this morning, actually. I’ve got the plate number and… and…”

“Still not telling me what I need, buddy,” Wilkes said.

“Hold on! There’s something here. That plate number was recorded by an automatic speed trap in… Pennsylvania. They’re headed west. I’m going to get some satellites on this, do a full scan for vehicle tags and—”

“Wake me up when you have something,” Wilkes said, and then he ended the call. He shoved the phone in his pocket. Then he leaned forward to look at the helicopter pilot. He rolled one finger in the air, the hand signal to take the chopper up again. “West,” he shouted, over the noise of the helicopter’s rotor. “Head west until I tell you to stop.”

Then he put his feet up, his head back, and closed his eyes.

They needed to get rid of the stolen car.

As they headed out into the fresh light of day, Chapel felt like his eyeballs were vibrating in his head. He needed to sleep, and soon. But if the government was searching for them, then it was just a matter of time before they found the car. With the sun up it would be that much easier for them. Julia came along to help him, though he could easily have taken care of it alone. It seemed she had something to say to him.

She kept quiet, though, as he leaned under the dashboard and fiddled with the wires that would start the ignition. The car sputtered to life and he put it in drive right away before it could stall out.

“We need a place where it won’t be seen,” he told Julia. “Preferably someplace covered, so it can’t be seen from the air. They’ll find it eventually, no matter what we do, but we don’t want to make it easy for them.”

She nodded. “So like a parking garage? No — no, that wouldn’t work. The attendants would find it and call the police. What about an abandoned house? One with a garage?”

“As long as nobody saw us breaking in, that would be great,” Chapel said. “That’s a risk, though.” He headed out onto a wide stretch of road surrounded on both sides by strip malls and big box stores. “Even if we can just ditch it under some trees, that would be a big help.”

They drove for a while in silence, both of them craning their necks around for the right spot. It was Julia who found it. “There,” she said, pointing at the overgrown parking lot of a deserted minimall.

The lot was empty, and far too visible from the street, but Chapel pulled into it anyway and then drove around the back of the run-down buildings. “Oh, perfect,” he said. There had been a drive-through bank back there, with a concrete overhang that would shield the car from satellites. He put the car in park and leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes for a second. He finally felt safe.

“We’ll need to strip the license plates, right?” Julia asked. “I remember you’re supposed to do that when you abandon a car.”

Chapel nodded without opening his eyes. “We’ll need to file off the VIN numbers too. They’ll know the car was stolen, but it’ll take longer to trace it back to its owner then.”

“I feel sorry for whoever owns this car,” Julia said, with a little laugh. “I mean, I know we had no choice. But I keep imagining them coming out of that rest stop and realizing they’re going to need to get a cab home. That’s got to suck.”

Chapel opened his eyes and looked across at her. He realized he hadn’t given a second’s thought to that. He was on a mission — at least, it felt like he was on a mission. If he’d been in Uzbekistan or Somalia, stealing cars would just be standard operating procedure. Why should it be different here in the States? And yet, once Julia pointed it out, he couldn’t help but feel like a criminal.

Still. “I would do a lot worse things to keep you and Angel safe.”

Julia hugged herself and looked down at her lap. She nodded, but she looked as if she was deep in thought.

“I know this is scary,” he told her. He reached over with his good hand and ran the backs of his knuckles up and down her arm.

“That’s the funny thing. It’s not,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said. She kept looking down, like she didn’t want to meet his eyes. “If it was just me out here. I mean, if I was running from the cops on my own, if it had been up to me to get Angel to safety, I think I’d be shitting myself.”

He laughed, and she smiled. But she still wasn’t looking at him.

“But it’s not me. This isn’t me doing all this. Oh, I don’t mean it like I’ve lost my mind and I’m disassociating or anything. It’s more like there are two of me. There’s Julia Taggart, DVM, who comes home from work every night and eats fat-free frozen pasta and maybe stays awake long enough to watch some reality show about fashion designers. That woman could never do these things. But then there’s also a Julia who comes out only when she’s with you. When people are chasing us and I’m always worried one of us is going to get shot and everything is so much more intense. You’d think I would hate being that Julia. You’d think after the first time I would never want to be her again.”

“But… what? You like the adrenaline rush?”

“No. That doesn’t last,” she said. “What happens is — different. I change, somehow. I know you’re relying on me to be strong. To handle this. And so I do. I step up and I get a lot tougher all of a sudden. For a couple of days, I get to be a badass.”

He smiled. “That was what made me fall in love with you,” he said. “You were stronger than anybody I knew. I needed you to be that badass and you were.” Here it was. The little thought he’d been thinking ever since she kissed him back in her apartment. The secret, tiny hope he’d kept burning just in case.

The idea that maybe things weren’t over between them.

“This Julia, the badass Julia, is going to get herself killed someday,” she said. “She’s going to think she’s better at this stuff than she really is. And it’ll mean her death.”

“No,” he said, his heart sagging in his chest. “No, that won’t happen. I’d die before I let anyone hurt you.”

“That’s a promise you can’t make. Badass Julia wants to believe you. Julia Taggart, DVM, knows better. She wants to be at home where it’s safe and she has her own bed to sleep in, and she keeps reminding me — this isn’t going to last. Even if things do work out, even if we clear Angel’s name and somehow it’s safe to go back to Brooklyn… then it’ll just be over. I have to be careful making decisions right now.”

“Sure,” Chapel said.

“For instance, Badass Julia wants to just attack you right now. Pretend like we never broke up and make out with you right here in this stolen car. Because that’s the kind of thing Badass Julia would do. But of course, that’s a terrible idea. Just because something is exciting and reckless and—”

She turned her face to look at him and didn’t get to finish her thought.

The look in her eyes was one he remembered all too well. He hadn’t seen it in a long time. He leaned across the seat and she leaned into him and their lips met, hard enough that their teeth clicked together. That made them both laugh, but it didn’t make them stop kissing. He reached around behind her and pulled her close and she put her hands on his chest and his fingers sank into her hair and the smell of her, that incredible, intoxicating perfume filled his entire head. She broke away but just enough to kiss his jaw, his cheek, to bite his earlobe. God, he’d missed this. He leaned down to kiss her neck and he felt her tremble, felt her responding to his body, to his heat. He reached down with his good hand and cupped her breast through her thin shirt, felt the lacy outline of her bra and then her nipple, felt it harden under his thumb—

And then cold air slapped him across the face as she pulled away, wrenching her door open and stumbling out onto the asphalt and broken concrete. As his senses reeled and he tried to figure out what had just happened, he felt the car rock slightly. She was leaning up against it, breathing hard. Maybe a foot and a half away from him. But the moment was over. She might as well be on the far side of the moon.

He took a second to let his pulse slow down. Then he climbed out of the car on the driver’s side. “We need to get those license plates,” he said.

“Yeah. Definitely,” she said, and she rubbed at her mouth with the back of one hand. “I’ll take the back. You take the front.”

“Deal.”

The CQ-10 Snowgoose didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a drone. It had a stubby little body only nine feet long, ending in a single propeller, and no wings. It kept aloft by dangling from a broad white parachute that glittered in the moonlight. It didn’t move very quickly and it didn’t look like it carried any weapons that might hurt anybody. In fact, it wasn’t designed to be a weapons system at all. It had three square bays built into its side that could pop open and drop supplies — food, survival gear, blankets — to people who were, say, stuck in an avalanche or in the middle of a forest fire.

Due to an extremely unlikely error in its logistics chain, this one had been loaded with a different sort of cargo.

It passed over a power plant just outside of Oakland first, a busy gas-burning plant that provided San Francisco with much of its power. The Snowgoose bumbled along in the sky like a giant white bee, high up enough that no one could have seen it from the ground. One of its cargo boxes popped open and an object the size and shape of a hockey puck tumbled out, a hockey puck with its own tiny parachute. The Snowgoose didn’t even slow down — it had other places to be.

The hockey puck it had left behind drifted slowly down toward the power plant, bobbing this way or that on little gusts of wind. Just as it reached the height of the plant’s tallest smokestacks, the hockey puck exploded into millions and millions of pieces, just as it had been designed to do.

It was known technically as a BLU-114/B submunition, and it was designed for an extremely specific mission. Devices like it had been used over Serbia and Iraq, and they were sometimes called “soft bombs” because they were designed not to hurt human beings but only to cause damage to infrastructure. When it exploded, it sent all those tiny pieces of itself raining down across the power plant in a dense cloud that was sucked into the plant’s air intakes and ventilation systems. The pieces were each only a fraction of an inch thick, and they were quite harmless on their own — just strands of carbon fiber that fluttered through the plant, landing wherever they fell. Some happened to land on transformers or turbines and other pieces of high-voltage machinery. When they touched these machines, they glittered and sparked as they conducted electricity where it wasn’t supposed to go. In the space of seconds, hundreds of short circuits arced across the power plant, liberating enormous amounts of energy. Some of the transformers caught on fire. Every one of them touched by carbon fiber failed in a dramatic way. Around the plant alarms sounded and fire suppression systems switched on, only to stop almost instantly as they too were shorted out.

The plant’s turbines chugged to a stop. Its furnaces roared pointlessly in the dark as all of the incredibly complicated machinery just failed to function. Every light in the plant went out at once.

High above and far away now, the Snowgoose carried on its appointed rounds.

The loss of a single power plant would be a hardship for San Francisco, which sat on a peninsula and had relatively few connections to the larger power grid. But the blackouts that had plagued California in recent years had forced the municipal authorities to improve those connections, and even as the gas-burning plant went off-line, massive switching systems registered the drop in power and compensated by pulling electricity from other sources — from coal and nuclear plants around the state, from hydroelectric plants in Yosemite National Park. At this early hour, the city’s energy demands were at their lowest, and very few people in San Francisco, even those who were already awake, would notice anything more than a brief flicker in their lights.

Unfortunately for them, the Snowgoose still had two more hockey pucks in its cargo bay. The first one hit a substation north of the city, a fenced-off lot full of transformer towers like the spires of a futuristic cathedral. The submunition blanketed the substation with carbon fibers, and for a split second, lightning jumped in every direction as one after another of the transformers shorted out and went dark.

The third submunition exploded over a switching station farther inland. The station was already overloaded as it tried to take the strain off the damaged power grid, pulling in power from more directions than it ever had before. A massive current passed through the station, maybe enough to have melted electronic components on its own. The Snowgoose wasn’t taking any chances, though, and it flooded the station with its tiny fragments just as it had the power plant and the substation. The arcs of electric current the fibers elicited this time were strong enough that part of the station exploded, sending hot metal debris flying over a residential neighborhood and starting half a dozen house fires.

Within minutes every light in San Francisco went dark. Those buildings that had on-site backup generators — hospitals, police stations, military installations — were flooded with red emergency lighting, and administrators and officials worked hard to prevent local catastrophes, but they were hampered by the fact that all the cellular networks were down and communications were almost nonexistent.

Within an hour the blackouts had begun to spread. Unable to handle the necessary switching functions, substations across California shut themselves down automatically to protect their vital components. Others were shut down manually because nobody knew what was going on and the men and women who operated those stations were terrified of the power surges that had led to the blackout of 2003. By the time the sun came up, Los Angeles had power only in a few scattered areas. There was no part of California that didn’t feel the pinch. Train stations shut down, delaying millions of passengers. Server farms up and down the coast were taken off-line, and even where people had sufficient power, the Internet and telephone networks slowed to a crawl. Police flooded the streets of the cities to direct traffic and try to ameliorate some of the chaos.

Meanwhile, the Snowgoose found a flat spot on the long hilly ridges of the Las Trampas Regional Wilderness in Contra Costa County. It set down gently on its landing skids, then sat and waited patiently for its masters to collect it. Its work was done.

It was a long walk back to Top’s house, but when they arrived, Chapel and Julia found the place deserted. The front door was unlocked but no lights were on inside, and Chapel couldn’t find anyone in the living room or the kitchen.

Then he heard a rhythmic thumping sound coming from the basement, and he froze in place. Thud-thud-thud. One-two-three. Over and over again.

“Wait here,” he told Julia, wishing, and not for the first time, that he had a weapon. He went to the door that led to the basement stairs and eased it open. There were lights on down there, and the sound was much louder now, and accompanied by gasping breaths. It sounded like someone was being beaten down there.

Chapel sprang into action. If Angel was down there, if she was in trouble—

He rushed down the stairs, with no idea what he would find, knowing perfectly well he could be running into a trap. What he saw instead brought him up short.

The basement was as big as the first floor of the house but completely open. Bare concrete walls were hung with flags and banners showing the Marine Corps and Army logos. Most of the space was full of battered old exercise equipment — weight benches, Nautilus machines, and a huge punching bag hanging from a hook in the ceiling.

Suzie, the scarred vet he’d seen on the stairs earlier, was working the bag hard. One-two-three, one-two-three, dancing around it, slamming her fists against the canvas. Sweat slicked her face and neck, and her skin was bright red with exertion, making her scar stand out pale white against her skin. When she saw Chapel, she stared at him as if she’d caught him peeping through her bedroom window.

“Something you wanted?” she asked.

“I, uh, I’m just looking for—”

“Chapel,” Angel said, then, and he swiveled around to look for her. She was on the far side of the basement, sitting crouched over an antique desktop computer. The screen showed a television feed from CNN. He saw people running in a street somewhere warm. Then the view switched to a map of California, with a huge red stain expanding away from San Francisco. “You need to see this,” Angel said.

When Suzie was done hitting the bag, she moved to a stationary bike and started pedaling like mad. Her eyes stayed on Chapel the whole time.

“She’s okay,” Angel told him. “She just has trust issues.”

Chapel looked back up the stairs and told Julia to come down. “Where’s everybody else?” she asked.

“They all went out to their jobs. Suzie’s only here because she got fired from the last place she worked,” Angel explained.

“Asshole manager kept grabbing my butt,” Suzie told them. “Told me I should feel lucky any man wanted to touch me. What else was I supposed to do?”

“She broke his fingers,” Angel explained.

“That’s… harsh,” Chapel said.

“Sounds about right to me,” Julia said, with a smile.

“She gets it,” Suzie said, never letting up on her pace.

Chapel shook his head. “You said I needed to see something,” he told Angel.

“Yeah, here,” she told him. She clicked through some tabs on her browser and brought up the map he’d seen. It showed California as a series of power grids, with red areas denoting where the power was down and pink areas showing areas that had reduced electricity. Only about a third of the state was still green to indicate it had full power. “It’s worse than it looks. There are hospitals all over the state that are airlifting patients to Nevada and Arizona. There are no traffic lights in Los Angeles, none at all. They can’t even get accurate information out of San Francisco because everything there is dead, and meanwhile the outages and brownouts are spreading north, into Oregon. Every time they try to bring a switch back online it causes shorts in a dozen other places and the problem just gets worse.”

“That’s awful,” Julia said. “But what does it have to do with us? I mean, I feel for all those people. But we’re kind of in a bad situation ourselves, here.”

Chapel thought he might know what Angel was trying to show them. “Do you have any idea what happened?”

“That’s just it. This shouldn’t be possible.” Angel brought up another map. It showed a single red dot near San Francisco. “There was a fire at a power plant, here. The power system is built to handle that. There’s all kinds of redundancies and fail-safes built in. But then these two locations went down, just a few minutes later, and all hell broke loose.” She tapped a key, and two more red dots appeared on the map. “There’s not a lot of information coming out of the state — even the governor can’t seem to get a press conference together. What Internet is still working out there is buzzing about this, though.”

“I can imagine,” Chapel said.

“There’s a lot of debate. A lot of conspiracy theories, and dumb people who think they know something. I was able to find some people who actually work for the utilities commission, though, the people in charge of keeping the lights on — and they all agree. They never even bothered considering a grid failure like this. Those two locations, a switching station and a substation, had to fail at the same time as the power plant for a blackout like this, and nobody had ever thought they could have three bad failures like that at the same time. They’re calling it a freak accident. A billion-to-one chance.”

“I take it you don’t like those odds,” Chapel said.

Angel squirmed in her seat. “I mean, it could happen that way. Just because something is incredibly rare doesn’t mean it’s impossible.” She scratched violently at her head. “I have a hunch,” she said, as if she were admitting she was addicted to heroin.

“I trust your gut,” Chapel said.

“Well, I don’t!” Angel pushed herself away from the computer and sighed in frustration. “When I’m overseeing a—” She glanced in Suzie’s direction. “When I’m doing what I do,” she said, this time in a whisper, “I don’t let myself have hunches. Hunches can be wrong, and then they can get people killed. Normally I would corroborate any suspicions I had by digging into the data. I would hack in there and get the reports from the people on the ground, the people trying to fix the power grid. I would look for discrepancies and outliers and I would build a profile to—”

Chapel put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said, because she was getting agitated to a frightening point.

“I feel so useless. Without proper equipment all I can do is guess here.”

“So what’s your guess?” he asked.

“I think somebody studied that system until they found the vulnerability, and then they hit those three locations with pinpoint accuracy. I’m guessing some kind of drone strike, though don’t ask me what kind.”

“A drone.”

“Again,” Angel said, “that’s just a guess.”

Chapel nodded. “First the Port of New Orleans. Then your trailer in New York. Now the power grid in California. All drone attacks. I’d say you’ve got your profile right there.”

“What does all this mean?” Julia asked.

“It means,” Angel said, “that whoever framed me, whoever got us in this mess, is still at it. And if I had to guess—” She shuddered in revulsion. “I don’t think they’re done yet. I think there will be more attacks.”

“So what happened in California, that was intentional?” Top asked. His good eye scanned around the kitchen table, looking at Chapel and then at Angel. Behind him Dolores was busy putting away groceries, but Chapel could tell she was listening in.

“Angel thinks it could have been done with a drone,” Chapel said, summing up the very long explanation he’d given Top. “That seems to be their MO.”

Julia, Chapel, and Angel had spent the day trying to make sense of what they knew and what they thought might be going on. They hadn’t gotten much further than Angel’s hunch. Now Top and his boys were coming home from their various jobs. There’d been a lot of discussion about how much they would tell Top. Chapel had finally decided they had to give him all the information they had, since they were going to need his help.

As for Dolores and the boys — which included Suzie — they didn’t need to know as much. Chapel had a plan for what to do next, but it was definitely something to keep as close to the vest as possible. The big problem with that was that as the house filled up, any expectation of privacy dwindled. Out in the living room Ralph had come home and flopped on the couch. The second he’d arrived he’d started up his video-game console and was busy blowing away scores of Nazis in some war simulator. It seemed like the last thing a vet with PTSD might want to do to relax, but Ralph seemed to be enjoying himself.

The noise of the game — a constant string of explosions and gunshots — at least made it less likely that the conversation in the kitchen would be overheard.

“These drone jockeys. These the same people looking for you?” Top asked.

Chapel nodded. “Definitely.”

“Who are they?”

Chapel smiled and shrugged. “We’re still trying to figure that out. The only thing we know for sure is that the strikes were an inside job, carried out by somebody in the U.S. military.”

“The armed forces aren’t supposed to attack America, last time I checked,” Top pointed out.

“I don’t want to believe it either. But the NSA tracked the original hijacker back to the Pentagon. That means somebody in the military, and probably somebody in intelligence, because only somebody in intelligence would have access to the kind of computer tech to do all this. We think it’s just one guy, or maybe a small group, but we just don’t know how deep it goes.”

Top glanced across the table at Angel. “And she’s some kind of computer whiz. Gonna find out the whos and whys for you.”

“We can’t find a way out of this mess until we have information. She’s going to get it for us, yeah. It’s what she does, and nobody does it better.”

Angel smiled and looked down at her hands.

Top opened his mouth to say something. Then he closed it again. He leaned back in his chair and reached out to touch Dolores’s arm. “Baby, you mind asking Ralph to turn down all that noise? I can’t think.”

Dolores turned around and looked at Chapel, not Top. It was clear she knew what Top was really asking for — that she leave the room so she didn’t hear what he said next. She barely shrugged as she headed out of the kitchen.

As soon as she was gone Top leaned back over the table and stared at Chapel wide-eyed. “And that means you need to rob a bank?” he asked.

“We’re not going to rob one,” Chapel said. “Just break into one. We need the biggest, fastest computer we can get and banks have those. I know it sounds crazy, but we’ve worked it out as best we can. There’s a bank branch about twenty miles from here, one that’s not going to have much security after hours. We get in, Angel uses their computers for a couple of minutes, and then we leave.”

“Security,” Top said, frowning. “I know something about you, Captain Chapel. I know what kind of training they gave you in Ranger school. You can get past alarms and whatever, sure. But I’m guessing they won’t make it that easy. There’s no bank I ever heard of didn’t have an armed guard sitting by the door all night.”

Chapel nodded. “Right. But in Ranger school they taught me how to deal with guards, as well. That’s one reason I’m telling you all this. I need your help. I don’t plan on hurting anybody — I hope you know me that well. But I’m going to have to convince any security guards to stand down.”

“You might try that winning smile of yours,” Top suggested.

“I need you to loan me a gun,” Chapel said.

Top pushed back from the table, shaking his head. He got up and went over to the counter and started putting away the groceries Dolores had left there. “Not going to happen,” he said.

Chapel got up and moved over to his side. “I’m serious about not hurting anybody. Give me a pistol with no clip, if you have to. Give me an old handgun that doesn’t even fire anymore. I need this, Top.”

“Son,” Top said, not looking at him. “You think I would say no, now? After that fine speech I gave you about my dog? No, I’d give you a rocket launcher if I had one, because I know who you are and I know you’d do the right thing with it. But I can’t give you a gun tonight. For the simple reason I don’t have one.”

He turned and faced Chapel eye to eye. “I got a house here full of highly trained men and women with anger issues, with night terrors, with PTSD coming out both pant legs. Some of whom are what you might call a high suicide risk. You understand that? You think I would bring a firearm within five miles of this place?”

Chapel leaned hard against the counter. This was a real problem. There was no way he could break into a bank without some kind of weapon. The guards would just open fire the second they saw him. One thing he’d definitely learned in Ranger school was that an unarmed man facing a man with a gun was always going to lose.

“Damn,” Chapel said. He glanced into the living room and saw Angel watching him from her chair. She needed him. He was going to save her, but that meant getting her into a bank. “If I had any better ideas…”

As if to underscore his predicament, the noise from the living room rose to a sustained pitch just then. Ralph must have been taking on a Nazi pillbox with a machine gun, judging by the sound.

Chapel tried to think of what to say next, what to do next, but the noise of the game just seemed to rattle around inside his head. He was surprised when Angel jumped up out of her chair and ran toward the television. Was she going to ask Ralph to mute the sound? That might be helpful, or—

He heard her talking to Ralph in the other room. He couldn’t hear the reply, but she was asking him about his video-game console, about what generation it was and whether he had a certain accessory for it. Chapel had never had any interest in such things and wasn’t sure what she was talking about.

When she poked her head back into the kitchen, though, her eyes were bright. “Um, excuse me,” she said. “Can I say something?”

“Of course,” Chapel told her. “What is it?”

“I think I just had one of those better ideas.”

They drove past the big box store three times, just to make sure it was as deserted as it appeared. It sat well back from the road, at the far end of a well-lit but empty parking lot, surrounded on three sides by thick stands of trees. The big sign out front that read CIRCUIT BARN was lit up, but metal security gates had been pulled down across the plateglass windows that fronted the store and it looked like there were no lights on inside. Chapel had kept an eye out for police cars or any sign that someone was watching the store, but he’d seen nothing.

“You really think this’ll work?” Julia asked.

Chapel shrugged. “I think we can get inside without setting off any alarms, yeah. I figure in a neighborhood like this they probably don’t worry too much about robberies, so they’re not likely to have a lot of security cameras. I think we’re good.”

“I was actually asking Angel, about her side of this,” Julia said.

Chapel turned around to look at Angel in the backseat. She nodded.

“Good enough,” he said.

He parked Top’s car outside a Chinese restaurant a block away. The three of them headed around behind the restaurant and then made their way through the trees that screened the Circuit Barn lot. There was a chain-link fence back there, about six feet high, installed so long ago that tree branches had woven through the gaps between the chain. There was no barbed wire on top of the fence, so it was easy enough to climb up and over.

On the far side, still inside the cover of the trees, he gestured for the two women to wait a minute. He studied the back side of the Circuit Barn and saw about what he’d expected to find, a place for Dumpsters and a loading dock where trucks could bring in the store’s merchandise. The loading dock had a big rolling door, but he knew that would be hooked up to the store’s alarms. Another, smaller door opened into a patch of weeds strewn with old cigarette butts and decaying coffee cups. He guessed that was where the store’s employees took their breaks. That was their way in.

He took one last glance around for security cameras, just in case, but he didn’t see any. Then he waved Julia and Angel forward, and the three of them gathered around the employee door.

“There’s almost certainly an alarm on this door,” Chapel said, “so we’ll need to be careful, but—”

Angel squatted down next to the door lock and pointed a little flashlight into the crack between the door and its frame. “Anybody have a stick of gum?” she asked.

“I do,” Julia said, looking surprised. She rummaged in her purse, then handed the gum to Angel.

The younger woman unwrapped the gum. She handed the stick back to Julia but kept the foil wrapper. “Give me that screwdriver,” she said, and Chapel handed her the flathead driver he’d brought.

For a minute Angel worked at the door, carefully folding the foil wrapper into just the right shape and then wedging it into the doorframe with the blade of the screwdriver. “The way the alarm works is there’s a wire in the door and a wire in the frame, and when they meet, an electric current flows between them. If you open the door, you break that current and the system knows the door is open, so it sounds the alarm. Then there’s another pair of wires for the lock. Same basic principle, but in reverse — if the current is flowing, the door stays locked, but if the current is broken, it unlocks automatically. The foil in there now will send current from the alarm wire to the lock wire so both systems think they’re intact when in fact,” she said, and pulled the door open, “neither of them are.”

Chapel peered into the darkness behind the open door. “Where did you learn how to do this?” he asked.

Angel laughed. “Sugar, I spend all day, every day on the Internet. You get bored, you start looking at random pages. You pick up a few things.”

Julia shot a look at Chapel and mouthed the word sugar. He shrugged in response. Angel had called him that a million times before when he was on a mission. Just never face-to-face before.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re in. Let me go first.” He ducked inside, into a stockroom, where only a single bulb burned in the ceiling high overhead. He took in the rows of shelves holding boxed electronics, but just then he had other things to worry about. Moving quickly but silently he worked his way through an employee break room, the management offices, and then out onto the sales floor, where hundreds of television sets stared blankly back at him. There was no sign anywhere of a night watchman, no sign that anybody had been inside the store since it closed for the day.

When he was sure of it, he let himself breathe again. Then he headed back to where the women were still standing outside. “We’re good,” he told them. He took a prepaid cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to Julia. He showed her how to switch on its walkie-talkie mode, then turned on a second one for himself. “You’re standing guard,” he said.

Julia nodded. “Anything I’m looking for in particular?”

“Just let us know if you see anything at all. If anybody pulls into the lot, if somebody starts looking at our car, if you hear anything — just let me know. Angel, you’re with me.”

The two of them crept inside. Angel headed down the rows of shelving units in the stockroom, running her finger along the rows of boxes. Chapel winced, thinking of all the fingerprints she was leaving behind. He knew that was the least of their problems, though — breaking and entering was a much less serious crime than treason.

It didn’t take her long to find what she needed. “Over here,” she said.

Chapel came to stand next to her. He saw immediately what she’d found. One entire shelving unit was stuffed full of identical merchandise, big colorful cardboard boxes advertising the latest, hottest video-game system money could buy. There must have been three dozen of them sitting there, waiting to be put out on the sales floor.

“Jackpot,” Angel said.

Chapel found a couple of box cutters in the stockroom and the two of them got to work, furiously slashing open the boxes and pulling out the video-game consoles. “Don’t even worry about the peripherals,” Angel said. “All we need are the actual consoles and their power supplies.” As Chapel laid out the devices in neat rows, Angel headed down another aisle and came back with dozens of Ethernet cables cradled in her arms.

“Back before the war, you weren’t allowed to sell these consoles to Iraq because they were classified as supercomputers,” Angel explained. She tore open the plastic bag of a cable with her teeth. “They’re not like normal computers, though, because they have different requirements. You wouldn’t want to use one of these to check your e-mail, probably. What they do have is top-notch graphics cards. They need them to be able to render games at sixty frames per second. We’re talking about billions of floating point operations a second. Which, by happy accident, turns out to be the same kind of operations you do while trying to break hard-core encryption.”

“Seriously?” Chapel asked.

“Uh-huh. The NSA buys graphics card by the boatload. Here, do it like this.” She plugged a power cable into one of the consoles, then an Ethernet cable into one of its ports. “They’re also exactly what I need for the kind of data mining we’re talking about.”

As usual, Chapel just nodded along, understanding a tiny fraction of what she told him. This was her field of expertise. He just needed to follow orders and stay out of her way.

“The game consoles need robust connections, too,” Angel went on. “To allow for multiplayer games with minimal lag. So these Ethernet connections are the best you can get. You know what a LAN party is?”

“LAN stands for, uh,” Chapel said, trying to remember. “Something something network.”

“Local area network. A LAN party is when a bunch of kids get their machines together in the same room and they connect them up in one big network so they can all play the same game at the same time. Which is good — it means these consoles will work well together when I put them in a serial network. They have great WAN connections, too, because they want you to use your video-game console to stream video and download patches and DLC for the games and…” She stopped and looked over at Chapel. “I’m just babbling now,” she said.

“If it helps you focus, babble away. Just don’t give me a pop quiz about all this when we’re done.”

Angel smiled. She plugged a cable into a console and then set it down on the floor. “We make a great team, don’t we?” she asked.

“Just going on the fact that I’m still alive after all the missions we worked together, I’d say yeah,” Chapel confirmed. He smiled back.

She looked at him then in a way he didn’t know how to read. Over the years of listening to her voice he’d come to know her moods, the private jokes they shared. But seeing her face-to-face was like meeting a whole new person. He didn’t understand what it meant when she tilted her head to the side while smiling at him. Or what it signified when she started scratching at her neck and looked away in a hurry.

He had no idea how to respond.

“Anyway,” she said, “let’s start plugging these together. I’m going to need a pretty serious router, but there’ll be one of those around here somewhere.”

“Sure,” he said. “I just keep plugging them together like this?”

“Yeah,” she told him. Then she laughed. “It’s kind of fun, giving you orders for a change. I could get used to this.”

Chapel moved around the stockroom as fast as he could, collecting all the bits and pieces Angel needed — power strips, the fastest laptop he could find, a bewildering array of cables of different pin numbers and lengths. For somebody who had just figured out the difference between USB-A and USB-B connectors, it was a harrowing process.

When it was done, though, he had to admit Angel had created something impressive. She sat on the floor with the laptop, its ports connected by a thick bundle of cables to twenty of the game consoles. These formed a ring around her, each of them wired to each other and to the store’s Internet connection. Finally she attached her hard drive — the one he’d rescued from her trailer — to the laptop and switched everything on.

With a whirring of fans and a high-pitched drone like an entire hive of bees buzzing at once, the network came to life.

Angel got to work instantly. “I’m going to need to write some code, here. The consoles don’t want to work as dumb processors. They’re designed to prevent that kind of tampering, so I’ll need to bypass their built-in operating systems.” She opened a dozen windows on the laptop screen and started typing. “Luckily I don’t need to start from scratch. I can grab a bunch of libraries of code off the Internet and then jerry-rig everything together.”

“And then you can — what? Use the hard drive to…” Chapel shook his head, trying to remember what Paul Moulton had done. “Build a network analyzer?”

“That’s one way, but if I’m right about something, it won’t be necessary. I think we caught a lucky break.”

“How so?”

“Whoever framed me took over my system when they hijacked the Predator over New Orleans. They got root access and zombified my servers, but they never bothered to log me out as an admin, so—”

“Sorry, Angel. My head already hurts. Can you simplify that?”

She looked up at him with a smile. “Considering how often this kind of stuff comes up, you really ought to learn a little about computers.”

“Sure. Maybe when the police aren’t chasing us, though.”

She laughed. “Okay, sugar. Let me try to break it down. They took over my computer when they hijacked the Predator. They used my system to send commands to the drone and make it crash, right? It would have been really easy for them to lock me out of my own system at the same time. But they didn’t. They wanted to be clever — too clever — and so they did it all in such a way I didn’t even know it was happening. In fact, they didn’t cut me off until hours later, when you and I were on the phone, right?”

“When your call just dropped,” Chapel said, remembering how panicked he’d been when it happened.

“Yeah. Now, if they’d been smart, rather than clever, they would have taken over my system just long enough to crash the drone, then they would have shut me down altogether and severed the connection. But they didn’t. They were in my computer for hours.”

The whole time she spoke she kept her fingers moving over her keyboard, her thumb driving the trackpad. “Now, if you really want to hide an Internet connection, your best bet is to do what you need to do very, very fast. Every second their computer and mine were connected my server logs were recording that connection. The records are anonymized with all the packet headers stripped out, but… sorry!” She lifted her hands. “Too much computerese, I know. I guess — think of it like fingerprints. To hijack the drone they had to leave one smudged, partial print on my system. It would be next to impossible to get a match from that. But like a burglar who hangs around the house long after he’s grabbed all the silverware, they stayed connected to my system too long. Which means they left hundreds and hundreds of partial fingerprints all over.”

“And while one print on its own is useless,” Chapel said, seeing where this was going, “if you can compare hundreds of them—”

“Exactly. I can get a little bit of information out of every print and combine it to get one crystal clear print that will give us a good match for our culprit. Well, theoretically.”

“But — wouldn’t they have known they were leaving so many clues?” Chapel asked.

“Maybe. Probably. I mean, whoever this was, they were very, very good. They should have known better.”

Chapel frowned. “So why would they make such a simple mistake?”

“My best bet is that they didn’t just hijack the drone. That they were doing something else while they were in there. Given the amount of time it took, I’m guessing they were reading all my drives. Copying them.”

“So they have access to all the information you had stored? What would that give them?”

“A lot. A lot of info about DIA operations, missions, resources. Names, phone numbers, whole dossiers of employees.” Angel shook her head. “It’s bad. But at least, if this works,” she said, gesturing at her screen, “we’ll know who they were.”

She clicked the trackpad and her screen cleared, windows closing one by one until none remained. Then she opened a new window and hit a single key.

All around her, the video-game consoles chugged and grumbled, their fans whining as they worked to keep their processors from overheating.

On Angel’s screen an endless stream of characters scrolled down so fast Chapel couldn’t read them.

She leaned back and rolled her head back and forth, stretching her neck muscles. “From here the program runs on its own,” she said, “but it’ll take a while.”

Chapel nodded. “Anything you need? Anything you want me to do?”

“I can think of a couple of things, sweetie,” she said.

Chapel’s eyes went wide. He looked down at her, sitting there on the floor, and tried to figure out what she’d meant by that. Her face looked completely innocent, and her eyes wouldn’t meet his. He decided he’d misinterpreted her words. After all, with that sultry voice of hers anything she said was going to sound a little suggestive.

“How about something to drink or eat?” he asked. “There were some vending machines in the break room.”

“Caffeine,” she said. “Definitely. Hacker fuel.”

“You got it.” He was surprised how relieved he was to leave the stockroom.

Wilkes squatted in a dark field, shying rocks at a nearby pond. He could skip them three or four times in a row, but it was hard to see in the dark and he wasn’t sure if he’d managed to get five yet.

Behind him, his helicopter sat lightless and silent in the field, like the world’s largest dragonfly hunkering down for the night. The pilot would be asleep. The guy had tried to start a conversation with Wilkes once, a couple of hours ago. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

Downtime. Wilkes despised waiting. He had learned to handle it, over the years. It was something they didn’t officially teach you in the Marines, but you picked it up. You learned to keep yourself simmering on low heat, never quite managing to relax fully but not letting nerves eat up your focus, either. Wilkes had started his career as a sniper, which had meant long, long hours of lying on his belly on sharp rocks, fighting to stay awake, to keep his eyes open. Because no matter how good his cover was, there was always the chance that somebody had spotted him. That he was going to have to move in a hurry.

Moulton’s voice in his ear was like a buzzing insect at first. As the various parts of Wilkes’s brain came back online, the noise resolved into meaningful words.

“ — Pittsburgh,” the little geek was saying over and over. “I’m seeing a massive spike in Internet traffic in a place that ought to be dark. Somebody’s online in an electronics store that’s supposed to be closed this time of night. Somebody who shows three points of similarity to Angel’s profile.”

“This solid?” Wilkes asked. “You got a solid lead this time?”

“That’s kind of what I just told you,” Moulton said. “Were you listening? We have a saying in the NSA. SIGINT never lies.”

Wilkes didn’t answer. He stood up, his knees popping a little because apparently he’d been squatting down by the pond longer than he thought.

Uptime.

He felt the adrenaline kick in. Felt his body come back to life, like he’d been frozen and now he was thawing out.

“Give me coordinates,” Wilkes said.

“I can do better than that — I’ve got a floor plan for the store, I’ve got satellite pictures, I’ve got—”

Moulton kept talking. He was good at it.

Wilkes listened with half an ear as he thumped on the canopy of the helicopter. Inside, the pilot looked around him like he didn’t know where he was.

“Grab your socks, buddy,” Wilkes said while the pilot just blinked.

“It was definitely an inside job,” Angel said. She slurped cola and pointed at her screen. “Whoever is pulling the strings, they had help.”

“How can you tell?” Chapel asked.

“I keep a pretty serious lock on my stuff,” she told him. “Well, I mean, I used to, I guess. It’s all gone now. But if you’d asked me a week ago who could hack into my gear, I would have said nobody. Here,” she said, clicking the trackpad to pause the text scrolling down her screen. “I had a firewall up here that nobody should have been able to get through. I mean, it should have been physically impossible. Considering all the sensitive data I had, it would have been insane to use anything less secure. But when the attack came, my security software didn’t even register the intrusion. There’s only two ways that could happen. One would be that someone broke into my trailer, actually stormed the place, and ripped the keyboard out of my hands while I was still logged in. I know that didn’t happen.”

“So what’s the other way?” Chapel asked.

“There’s a backdoor. There’s always a backdoor. I wasn’t working just for myself, see, so there had to be a way in for emergencies. Just in case I dropped dead of a heart attack or got hit on the head and forgot all my passwords or something. There was always a short list of people who could override me — Director Hollingshead, for one.”

“You think he did this?” Chapel asked.

“No.” Angel shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

Chapel frowned. “In an investigation like this, sometimes it’s valuable to consider everybody a suspect, even if you know they’re innocent. Just — as a hypothetical.”

She looked up at him and he knew instantly that she was holding something back. “It wasn’t him,” she said. “Just trust me on this.”

“Somebody could have gotten to him. Blackmailed him or found a way to persuade him they needed access—”

“It wasn’t him,” she repeated. “I’ve got my reasons for knowing that. Please, don’t push me on this. Just accept it. It wasn’t Hollingshead. Anyway — it wouldn’t need to be. There are other people on the list. People who might need to get into my systems without having to ask for permission. I mean, obviously the president could have done it. Or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they would have clearance.”

Chapel nodded. One of the first things you learned in the army was that everybody had a boss. Everybody. Your commanding officer answered to a major or a colonel somewhere. They answered to generals, who answered to generals with more stars. Everybody answered to the president, and even he had to answer to Congress or the Supreme Court, sometimes. Which meant that any order you got could be countermanded. “I would like to assume that the commander in chief isn’t attacking his own country,” Chapel said.

“We’ll keep that one as a hypothetical,” Angel said. She clicked her trackpad, and the text started scrolling again. “Anyway, even if it was somebody on that list, they could have been hacked and not know it, just like I was. But it would take somebody in the intelligence community to pull that off. Even the Chinese don’t have the technology to break 256-bit encryption; that’s something that our side just figured out, and—”

The cell phone in Chapel’s pocket squawked at him. He shot a look at Angel. She suddenly looked very frightened. Well, maybe he looked the same way.

He lifted the phone to his ear. “Julia?” he said. “Did you see something?”

Her voice was just a tinny whisper when she replied. “I thought so. I guess — no. I saw something moving in the trees, but it was just a raccoon. It was — yeah. That was definitely a raccoon. Sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“That’s all right,” Chapel said. “I’d rather have a false alarm than not get a real one. You okay out there?”

“Fine. A little chilly. How’s it going inside?”

“We’re making progress. Okay. Signing off,” Chapel said.

He put the phone back in his pocket.

Angel laughed, though not because anything was funny. She was just relieved. “Unless the drone hijackers have figured out a way to weaponize raccoons, I guess we’re okay.”

Chapel nodded. “Good to keep on our toes, though. What else can you tell me about the people who hacked you?”

Angel shrugged her slim shoulders. “They’re good. Really good. Even if they had backdoor access to my system, I was online at the time. I should have been able to tell there were two users active. I would have noticed a lag — the computer would have slowed down as it tried to serve two users at once. I would have felt there was something wrong.”

“But you didn’t? Is that possible?”

“This is kind of genius. They actually overclocked my processor. Made it run faster, just to compensate for any apparent lag. I would never have thought of that. But it tells me two things. One, that whoever did this knows computers inside and out. They aren’t just good at hacking, they’re legendary.”

“What’s the other thing?”

“They knew me, too. They anticipated what I would do, how I would react, while they were inside my system. I don’t think this was anybody I know personally, but they’ve studied me. Watched me, probably for a long time. Chapel, that just sends chills down my spine. It means—”

Chapel’s cell phone squawked again. Angel fell silent instantly as she stared at his pants pocket.

“Just another raccoon,” Chapel said, because he didn’t want to panic her. He took out the phone and lifted it to his ear. “Julia?” he said.

There was no response. The phone didn’t even hiss or crackle in his ear. Which meant that Julia had switched off her phone altogether.

Or somebody else had done it for her.

Chapel leaned gently on the bar that opened the fire door at the back of the store. He peered out into the gloom of the loading dock but he couldn’t see anything. He definitely couldn’t see Julia.

He pushed the door open a few more inches. A pair of women’s shoes appeared just at the edge of his view. He leaned out a little more and saw Julia down on the ground, her face covered by red hair. Her cell phone lay on the pavement a few feet away.

Somebody had stomped on it. Its case was cracked until bits of green circuit board poked out.

Chapel fought to control his emotions. Julia might be dead out there, or just unconscious. Either way, whoever had attacked her was still—

The door jumped out of his hands as someone yanked it away from him. Chapel reacted without thinking, ducking low in a crouch and exploding outward, right into the legs of his opponent. He didn’t care who it was — a cop, a Chinese assassin, whatever, he had to take them down fast so he could go check on Julia.

But whoever it was, they were ready for him. They stepped aside like a matador evading a charging bull.

Chapel knew right away that he’d misjudged his charge, that he was going to end up sprawled on the ground — momentum alone would carry him there. So instead of trying to get back to his feet he swiveled at the waist and reached out to grab at his attacker’s legs. The attacker was too fast and he only managed to get a handful of pant leg, but it was enough to pull the attacker off balance.

Even before Chapel hit the ground he brought his knees up, protecting his chest. As the attacker reached down for him, Chapel felt his shoulder hit the pavement. With his free hand he reached up and grabbed, not even caring what he got, just knowing he needed, desperately, to get his attacker down on the ground with him.

It almost worked. The other man should have taken a step forward as he reached for Chapel and that should have let Chapel flip him.

Instead the attacker took a step back, steadying himself.

Which left Chapel lying on the ground, looking up at the man who towered over him.

“Wilkes?” he said, completely taken by surprise. “You’re dead.”

The marine gave him a quick shrug. “Shit, somebody coulda told me.”

Chapel shifted his weight, getting both his arms free. If he could distract Wilkes even for a split second, he could kick the man’s legs out from under him. He could—

Wilkes took another step back. Then he pulled a handgun from his belt. A compact SIG Sauer 9 mm with a silencer screwed onto the barrel. “Just cool down, Jimmy. Okay?” he said, as he leveled the gun and pointed it at Chapel’s face. “We’re going to do this by the numbers. You keep your hands visible. I know there’s no point tying you up, ’cause you’d just slip your plastic arm off or pull some kind of magic trick like that. I’ve read some of your after-action reports.”

Chapel knew when he was beat. If he was standing, if Wilkes weren’t so well trained, maybe he could have wrestled with the marine and gotten the gun away from him. But that wasn’t going to happen now. “What did you do to Julia?” he asked.

“Just knocked her out. She’ll wake up with a nasty headache in a while, but if she’s lucky I won’t be here by then. She didn’t even see me coming.”

Chapel blinked. “So she didn’t see your face.”

“Yep. Which means she comes out of this okay. Now, get up. Slowly, buddy. We both know the rules.”

Chapel did as he was told. He got his knees under him, then put one foot down on the pavement, keeping his hands in the air. He turned around and let Wilkes pat him down.

“Not even a derringer in your boot, huh?” Wilkes said when he’d finished his search. “Figured you would have found a weapon by now. Never know who’s going to sneak up on you in the dark. Okay, Jimmy. Let’s go inside. I’ll be right behind you, but not close enough to touch. Understand? Say yes if you think you got this one figured out.”

“Yes,” Chapel said. “Listen, Wilkes — did Hollingshead send you to bring me in? Because there are some things he needs to know.”

“Open the door for me,” Wilkes said.

Chapel opened the door and held it while Wilkes braced it with his foot. Then the two of them stepped into the stockroom. Chapel’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness outside and now he could barely see in the dazzling light. Wilkes would probably be in the same boat, but Chapel knew that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to get out of this without getting himself shot.

“No, it wasn’t Hollingshead,” Wilkes said. “The old man’s been relieved of duty. Probably going to catch an espionage charge off this, if not full-on treason.”

“What? He had nothing to do with this!”

Wilkes didn’t respond to that. “Keep moving. Straight ahead. I’m thinking you have Angel in here, and I need her, too.”

“So who are you working for?” Chapel asked. He needed to know if he was about to be arrested — or killed.

“Charlotte Holman,” Wilkes told him.

“The NSA?”

“We’re going to wrap up this conversation now, Jimmy,” Wilkes said. “You go ahead and keep moving.”

Chapel did what he was told.

This was bad. This was very, very bad. The jig was up, and he would spend the rest of his life in jail. There was no way he could fight Wilkes, nor was there any way he could run, not without being shot.

There was only one bright spot in the whole thing.

As Wilkes marched him into the middle of the stockroom, into the circle of video-game consoles arrayed on the floor, there was no sign of Angel.

She’d been smart enough to get away.

At least one of them had.

“You go stand over there, against those shelves,” Wilkes said. Then he stepped over the ring of video-game consoles and prodded the laptop with his shoe. “Interesting setup here. You organizing another drone attack?”

“Angel had nothing to do with those,” Chapel said. “She was framed. The thing in California, with the power station — she couldn’t have done that.”

“She could have programmed the drone to do it in advance, put it on a timer,” Wilkes said. He shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t give a crap. I’m not here to solve a big mystery, Jimmy. I’m not a detective.”

“Then why are you here?”

Wilkes gave him a big shit-eating grin. Then he squatted down next to the laptop, the gun still trained on Chapel. He picked up the hard drive attached to the laptop. Standing up, he lifted the hard drive until the laptop dangled in the air by the cord that connected them. He gave the hard drive a good swift yank and it came free, the laptop crashing to the floor.

“This is it, huh? What you stole from that trailer. The last part of Angel.”

Chapel said nothing.

Wilkes dropped the hard drive. It hit the concrete floor with a bang. He lifted one booted foot and stamped down hard on the metal box. Something inside it cracked. Then, perhaps for good measure, he lowered his pistol and put two bullets into the casing.

Even with the silencer the gunshots were loud enough to make Chapel’s ears ring. The noise echoed and reverberated around the stockroom.

It was almost enough to mask the sound of someone grunting in frustration behind Wilkes.

Almost. Chapel forced himself not to look over there. If Wilkes hadn’t heard it, he didn’t want to draw the marine’s attention to the fact that Angel was still in the stockroom, hidden behind a shelving unit.

It turned out not to matter. Almost before the echoes had finished bouncing around the room, she gave another grunt, loud enough that anyone could have heard it.

Wilkes didn’t waste time speaking. He brought the pistol back up to point at Chapel, but turned his head to look behind him.

Just in time to see the entire shelving unit, ten feet high and packed with boxes of electronics, come crashing down on him.

Boxes and video-game consoles went everywhere, sliding across the floor. Wilkes let out a sound that was half gasp and half cry of rage as he disappeared from view.

Where the shelving unit had been, Angel was revealed, standing there breathing hard and looking terrified.

“Go,” Chapel shouted at her. “Get Julia — get out of here!”

He could hear Wilkes moving around under the pile of debris. A pile of blister-packed toner cartridges slid off the heap like an avalanche down the side of a cardboard mountain. There wasn’t much time.

Angel still stood there, looking like she had no idea what she’d just done.

“Go!” Chapel shouted again.

This time she took the hint, sprinting toward the fire door.

Chapel approached the debris pile carefully, not knowing where exactly Wilkes might be under all the boxes and broken electronics. He could hear the man moving, trying to escape. He might be badly injured down there. Or merely incapacitated for a second.

Boxes shifted and heaved, and for a second Chapel expected Wilkes to come rearing up out of the mess, howling like a wounded bear. That didn’t happen, though. The boxes settled, finding their own level. Chapel couldn’t hear Wilkes anymore. Had the marine passed out in there? Was he dead?

Chapel reached down carefully and pulled a box off the top of the pile.

The 9 mm appeared in the gap. Chapel could see one of Wilkes’s eyes under the debris.

The pistol fired. The noise and the muzzle flash blinded and deafened him and he could only stagger backwards, away from the attack.

It took Chapel a second to realize he’d been shot.

It wasn’t the first time Chapel had caught a bullet.

In fact, he knew the feeling all too well. Shock would keep most of the pain away until he ran out of adrenaline and his body had to accept what had happened to it. Shock couldn’t spare him the wave of nausea and weakness that spread through his guts, though.

He put pressure on the wound with his artificial hand and tried to breathe. He needed to think, he needed to plan—

He needed to run.

The pile of boxes was already moving, shifting, as Wilkes struggled to get free. Wilkes was still alive and conscious and armed down there, and any second now he would jump up and finish what he’d started. Chapel ducked around the side of the debris pile, desperately hoping Wilkes didn’t just shoot him again as he passed by. He headed through the stockroom, not looking back, and crashed into the push bar of the fire door with his good arm. Hitting the door sent a wave of pain through his chest, but he ignored it and kept moving.

Outside, on the dark loading dock, he saw nothing that could help him. Julia was gone — Angel must have woken her up and gotten her out of there. The two of them could be sitting in the car just a hundred yards away, waiting for him. He hoped not. For one thing, he wanted them gone so they would be safe, so that they would be far away from Wilkes. For another thing, getting to them would mean climbing over the chain-link fence again.

Wounded as he was, that wasn’t going to happen.

Behind him, inside the store, he heard something heavy crash and fall. That would be Wilkes working himself free.

Chapel studied the terrain around him. Behind the electronics store lay a long stretch of undeveloped woodland, a dark forest that would offer some cover. He started running for those trees, knowing they were his only chance.

Halfway there the pain showed up to the party. It was like his nervous system had just realized he’d been shot and was replaying the experience to see what it had missed. Lancing pain shot through his side. Muscles from his groin up to what remained of his left shoulder twisted into knots, and red spots flashed before his eyes. He doubled over, wondering if he was going to throw up, wondering if he was just going to collapse in a heap right there, right then.

No. He refused to just stop now. Chapel gritted his teeth and forced his legs to get moving. They weren’t injured, after all.

Bent nearly double, he half walked, half ran into the trees. Darkness flooded over him, but he told himself that was just because the branches of the trees were blocking out the moonlight. It had nothing to do with his brain desperately wanting to pass out and sleep through the pain that only kept getting worse.

Behind him he heard the fire door slam open. Chapel ducked low to try to avoid being seen.

A bullet smashed through a thin tree branch just over his head, showering him in chips of wood and bark. Apparently Wilkes could see him just fine.

That was the impetus he needed.

Chapel ran.

Keeping one hand on his wound, Chapel waved the other in front of him, fending off low branches and preventing himself from running headlong into a tree trunk. He could see almost nothing at all, just the occasional flash of dark sky or the silhouette of a tree limb like a talon grasping at his face.

The ground behind the electronics store sloped gradually downward, and up ahead Chapel could hear running water — a creek or a stream or something. He had no idea how far these woods extended, or what might lie on the other side. If he lived long enough to get there, he would worry about it then.

Behind him he heard Wilkes’s heavy boots crunching through drifts of fallen leaves left over from the previous autumn. Chapel probably made as much noise himself, but it was lost under the constant roar of blood in his ears and the sound of his own breathing as it howled in and out of his chest.

He had no idea how far behind Wilkes might be, or how long it would take the marine to catch up to him. He had no real idea, even, of how much ground he was covering, or whether he was just crawling along at a snail’s pace. He kept moving forward because stopping or slowing down meant his death, that was all. It was the only thought in his head.

Behind him — right behind him — Wilkes stepped on a branch and it exploded under his boot with a noise very much like a gunshot. Chapel rolled to the side in case the killer was about to pounce, thinking he would head sideways and maybe lose Wilkes that way. Instead, he slipped in the mud and went sprawling forward. His good right hand swung out before him, looking for anything to grab.

It found nothing. Chapel’s feet slid out from under him and the ground just seemed to give way.

The creek he’d heard had dug a narrow but deep ravine through the soil of the forest, and Chapel had blundered right over the edge of a steep slope. He could do nothing to stop or even slow his fall — he could only curl into a ball as he bounced off rocks and exposed tree roots, hurtling down into the defile. Above him he heard Wilkes cry out, “Holy shit,” and the only thought in Chapel’s head was, That about sums it up.

Sliding down the loose dirt of the slope, he came up very short as a fallen log caught and stopped him. His head bounced off the rotten wood hard enough that his vision lit up with a bright light. He felt skin come off his cheek as it rasped against the rough log. Icy water filled his shoe and his mouth was full of mud.

Okay, that sucked, he thought — when his brain was capable of anything but silent shrieks of pain and fear. Now get up.

Get up.

His body refused to obey. He couldn’t even lift his head. Chills ran up and down his spine, but he felt too weak to even shiver.

“Chapel?” Wilkes called out, from high above. “Jimmy? You down there? I know I heard you fall down there. You want to just give up now?”

Chapel couldn’t have replied, even if he wanted to.

“I just want to talk. Honest.”

He couldn’t tell if Wilkes was being sarcastic or not. He was pretty sure that talking wasn’t the only thing on the marine’s agenda.

“Come on, Jim. I could just start shooting in the dark down there. I could just hose you down with bullets. I mean, it would be a waste of good lead. But I bet I could hit you at least once. And I’m guessing one more would finish you off. Why don’t you just talk to me, instead?”

Chapel realized suddenly that his eyes were closed. His injuries had exhausted him to the point where he could have gone to sleep right there on the edge of the creek.

Talking was out of the question.

It was possible that he did pass out. It was hard to tell the difference between unconsciousness and the dark, cold place he was in. He was certain time got away from him, drifting through his awareness like smoke. An hour? Thirty seconds? Who knew how long it was before he heard something else.

When the sound did come, it was a scatter of pebbles and twigs raining all around him, as if Wilkes had gotten frustrated and just chucked a handful of the forest itself down at him. One rock hit his leg hard enough to sting, but still Chapel made no sound.

“Well, shit,” Wilkes said.

And then Chapel heard boots crunching through leaves, and the sound was moving away from him. Receding.

Wilkes was just walking away.

Maybe he thought Chapel was already dead. Maybe he thought Chapel had crawled off, out of his reach. Chapel had no idea what the marine was thinking.

He didn’t much care, either.

He waited a while longer — not that he had much choice. Marshaling his energy, conserving his strength. Sure.

When he did finally move, his first attempt was pretty feeble. He just rolled over onto his back. That didn’t achieve much, but it let him take an inventory of his various injuries. He felt like he had a lot of new bruises, but nothing had broken in the fall. That was good.

His gunshot wound was still bleeding. That was pretty bad.

Staying down, keeping out of sight might be a good way to avoid being shot again. But if he did that, he was just going to bleed to death. He needed to move. His body was adamantly against the idea, and it had a pretty firm veto to work with, since he wasn’t going anywhere on sheer brain power. But he had to move.

Damn it, he had to move.

His body disagreed.

It was his foot that cast the lone dissenting vote. It was freezing in the stream and it really wanted to get out of the water. Eventually it twitched enough that his whole leg moved and pulled the foot free.

It was something. It was something to work with. Chapel forced himself to move his other leg as well, and then to roll up into a sitting position, leaning against the fallen log. He sat there panting for a while, after so much exertion.

He had another ally. His artificial arm didn’t recognize that his body was in shock or that it wanted to shut down. It had its own energy supply and it moved when he wanted it to, damn it, not when it felt like it. With his legs and his prosthetic arm he forced himself to lunge upright, to get on his feet.

Good, he thought. Better. Maybe — maybe he had a chance.

Then he realized what he was going to have to do next, and it made him want to break down and cry.

He was at the bottom of the stream. He had no idea where the stream went or how far he would have to walk along its course to get anywhere. Looking back, he saw the slope he’d fallen down. Cliff might be a better term. Climbing back up there was way beyond his capacities.

That just left the other side of the stream. There was a slope there, too. It looked a lot gentler than the one he’d fallen down, a lot more climbable. But that was a relative concept considering the state he was in.

When life gives you a lot of bad choices, he told himself, take the lesser evil, right? He tried to convince himself of that as he splashed across the stream and more or less fell against the far slope. He reached up with his artificial hand and tried to find something to grab, something he could use to haul himself upward. He found an exposed root that would make an excellent handhold. He grabbed it in both hands and pulled.

If he hadn’t know there was an armed assassin somewhere nearby, he might have screamed. It felt like he was being torn in half. The wound in his side blared with agony, and blood spurted from the neat hole in his skin.

Before he could let himself think about it, he scrabbled to get his legs under him, to find anything solid in the slope that he could use as a foothold. A big rock gave him a little purchase. He used it. He would use anything he could get.

He reached up. Found another root. Pulled—

“Jesus,” he whimpered. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” The pain was so bad he couldn’t keep quiet.

He reached for another handhold. No way he was stopping now.

Little by little he pulled himself up. Kicked his shoes into the mud, grabbed handfuls of grass, pressed himself against the slope every time he started to slide back down. Inch by inch he climbed.

And then somehow he reached the top. He pulled himself up onto ground that was firm enough to hold his weight and he was there, he was at the top.

On the far side of the defile stood more trees. More dark woods for him to grope his way through, with no indication they would ever end.

He’d come too far to give up. He kept moving, his head bobbing, both arms waving in front of him to ward off branches and tree trunks. He stumbled, he staggered, but he kept moving, kept fighting for another step, another.

One of his feet kicked something very hard and unyielding. He dropped to all fours and felt it. It had the pebbly, rough texture of asphalt.

He’d found a road. He couldn’t see it, couldn’t tell where it went, there was no light to make anything out, but—

Then, suddenly, there was far too much light, and the screaming noise of a car horn going off right next to his ear.

It was all he could do to lift his artificial arm in the air and wave it, to try to get the driver’s attention, to make them stop in time.