The Cyclops Initiative

PART 4

When the secretary of defense landed on your airstrip late at night, you didn’t tell him to come back in the morning.

Creech Air Force Base in Nevada didn’t look like much on the ground. Just a standard prefab building like a million others the military owned. The decrepit casino next door, with its flashing lights and the jangle of its slot machines, made the base almost invisible in the desert night.

Quite intentional, of course.

Patrick Norton and a small entourage of hangers-on were moved quickly inside and down a corridor lined with doors that were identified only by a series of numbers: GCS-1, GCS-2, and so on. The local base commanding officer, a colonel by rank, was kind enough to show them one of the rooms, since everyone in the group had security clearance. Inside each GCS, or ground control station, stood a tall server rack humming away and a tiny cubicle filled with flat-screen monitors. There were three chairs sitting in front of the desk. “Typically a flight is crewed by a pilot — the stick jockey,” each colonel said, with that conspiratorial grin military men got when they use jargon, “an aircraft sensor operator who mans the controls for the aircraft’s instruments — the sensor — and a flight supervisor who can make mission decisions in real time — the screener.”

Taking up a prime amount of desk space was a big, complicated joystick mounted in front of the monitor. The stick belonging to the proverbial stick jockey. It was considerably more advanced than most video-game joysticks, but it had fewer buttons — just one, in fact, an orange key located where the jockey wouldn’t accidentally brush against it.

“From this station,” the colonel went on, “we can carry out executive-level missions anywhere in the world. All flight data and telemetry is carried over dedicated satellite links, allowing our people precision control with a minimum of lag time, while the draw rate on our imaging systems is—”

Norton inhaled sharply and the man shut up. “Do you know why we’re here?” he asked. “I mean, specifically.”

The colonel turned red. No military man liked being forced to guess what his superiors wanted, though it was hardly a rare occurrence. “Mr. Secretary,” he replied, “I’m assuming this has to do with the recent drone strikes on New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco.”

Norton fixed the man with his gaze. “That’s right.”

The colonel looked into the middle distance. “Sir. It is true that approximately ninety percent of all UAV missions are flown out of this base, including all but a handful of combat missions in overseas operations. I can well imagine, sir, that you would be concerned about our security here.”

“I’m worried,” Norton said, “that the drones you have here on base, and all the drones you control out in the field, around the world, could be hijacked. Turned against their masters. Now. Tell me. Exactly how worried should I be?”

“Not worried at all, sir,” the colonel said. He was all but standing at attention. “It would be impossible for anyone to take control of one of my UAVs. Physically impossible. The GCS network is completely self-contained. It does not connect to the public Internet on any level. Even the satellites we use to stream data to and from the UAVs are dedicated devices, meaning no one can access them except from a GCS. Whoever hijacked those other drones was using a public server to gain access. They hacked into drones that were cleared for civilian or at least nonmilitary use, either in law enforcement or civilian intelligence. That just can’t happen here.”

“You’re completely protected, then,” Norton said. “Fireproof.”

“Yes, sir, we—”

“Excuse me,” someone said from the back of the entourage.

The colonel turned on his heel to look for the source of the interruption. “Ma’am? How can I help you?”

Charlotte Holman smiled and stepped forward. She held out one hand and waited until the colonel shook it. “This is very impressive security,” she said. “Very impressive indeed. But those of us in network intelligence really don’t like it when people talk about one hundred percent security. I mean, there’s always a way to get in, if you’re persistent enough.”

“Not when you have an air gap like ours.”

Holman’s smile just grew brighter. She’d hoped he would use that silly term. An air gap referred to a physical disconnect between one’s servers and the wider Internet, a literal space of dead air between possible connections. An air gap was supposed to be even more secure than a firewall.

Holman had been working for the NSA long enough to know what words were worth. “An air gap that — I’m sorry, I don’t want to bring this up, but I have to. An air gap that failed to stop your system from picking up a keylogger virus back in 2011.”

The colonel’s face went white. “That was a significant problem, yes, ma’am. A keylogger isn’t particularly dangerous — it wouldn’t let anyone control the UAVs — but we took it very seriously. And we’ve taken care of it one hundred percent. All our drives had to be erased and rebuilt from scratch, but we did it.”

“Did you ever find out how it happened? How you picked up that virus? How it crossed your air gap?”

The colonel chewed on his lower lip for a second. “Hard drives were being exchanged between ground control stations.”

“For what purpose?” Holman asked.

The colonel glanced at the secretary of defense, but Norton didn’t offer him any chance to escape. “We needed to copy map updates and mission video between stations. The easiest and fastest way to do that was to move drives between servers. Unfortunately that meant the drives could leave the GCS rooms. One of them was connected to a public Internet server for a short time. The user in question didn’t think he was exposing the drive to public access, but somehow the keylogger virus got onto the drive. When it was returned to the GCS, the virus spread very quickly through our entire system.”

“And why exactly was the drive connected to the Internet?”

The colonel stared down at his shiny shoes. “A stick jockey wanted to send video of a drone strike to his girlfriend. To impress her.”

“Did it work?” Norton asked. Behind him his entourage chuckled.

The colonel shook his head. “I couldn’t comment on that, sir. I assume she was not impressed when he was court-martialed and given a dishonorable discharge.”

Holman nodded. “But the point is, your air gap was subject to human error.”

“Not anymore,” the colonel said. He walked over to a server rack and pointed at the hard drives it contained. Each one was held down by a tiny padlock. “Hard drives can no longer be removed from a GCS. Under any circumstances. We learn from our mistakes.”

“Good,” Norton said. “That’s what I needed to hear. We cannot afford to have even one more drone go rogue on us.” The entourage nodded and mumbled in agreement. “All right, Colonel. We’ve seen enough here. Now perhaps you’ll be good enough to show us the Predators and Reapers you keep on base.”

“Certainly, sir,” the colonel said. He led the group out of the cramped GCS and back into the hallway.

Charlotte Holman was the last one out. Nobody noticed when she slipped a tiny black box out of her jacket pocket and stuck it to the back of the server rack. The box was no bigger than a matchbook, and it didn’t have any blinking red lights on its surface, nor a tiny antenna, nor any other outward sign that would indicate it was capable of feeding information into the GCS servers through the keylogger virus.

The virus that, despite all appearances, was much more than just a harmless keylogger. The virus that, despite all the colonel’s efforts, was still present on every hard drive in the air force base. The virus he was convinced they’d erased.

The virus that Paul Moulton had written for exactly this purpose.

“Let me just turn the lights off,” the colonel said as she stepped out into the hallway. He stuck his head into the GCS and took a quick look around, then flipped the light switch. Clearly he had no idea that his entire system had just been compromised.

The two of them worked in silence.

It took a long time to dig the grave. Chapel could barely bend over, the bandage around his midriff constricting every time he tried. Wilkes didn’t seem to have his heart in the job, though he clearly didn’t want Chapel to think he was a shirker.

It didn’t help that neither of them had a shovel. There was a trowel in the tool bag Chapel had stolen from the motel, and Wilkes had turned up a hoe from an old outbuilding behind the mansion.

They worked side by side for an hour and at the end they had a hole about six feet long and four feet deep. Chapel took Moulton’s legs and Wilkes took the dead man’s shoulders and they got him inside without any fanfare. Chapel wondered for a moment if he should say something, offer up some prayer. Moulton had tried to destroy every part of his life, but still. You were supposed to respect the dead.

But then Wilkes started shoving dirt over the body, flecks of it collecting on Moulton’s eyes and lips where they were still wet. Chapel looked away.

When the hole was filled in, they tamped down the loose earth as best they could. And then they just walked away.

Somebody would come. Someone from the NSA would come out here, probably as soon as they realized that Moulton had stopped reporting. They would come and they would probably find the shallow grave very quickly. Moulton would be dug back up and given a proper burial. Chapel had to believe that.

He scrubbed at his hands with a dry towel — there was no running water in the decaying mansion — and headed up the stairs. Wilkes followed right behind him. Up at the doors to the data center, Chapel turned and looked Wilkes right in the eye. Tried to stare him down. Make him falter.

It didn’t work. Wilkes was a poker player. He didn’t give anything away, not with his face.

Eventually, Chapel shook his head. He turned and opened the doors to the data center and stepped inside.

Angel sat at a workstation, paging through data on a big flat-screen monitor. Julia stood just behind her, one hand on Angel’s shoulder. She turned to look at Chapel with a question in her eyes.

He didn’t have anything remotely like an answer for her.

“Okay,” he said, not bothering to look at Wilkes. “Start talking.”

“It was three years ago that Hollingshead brought me in on this thing. I was back from my last tour, in Afghanistan. I guess you know by now what I am. My operational specialty.”

Chapel nodded, but said nothing.

“I got a call saying to go to such and such an office in the Pentagon. I went there and sat down and once he finished with all the song and dance, you know, cleaning his glasses, offering me a drink, all that stuff — I asked him who he wanted me to kill.

“He smiled and said nobody. He said he had a different kind of problem, one he needed me to solve. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about at first. I don’t think, back then, that even he knew all the details. But he was worried.

“He’s a man who knows how to keep his ears open, I’ll give him that. Like any good spymaster, he keeps tabs on his opposite numbers — all those directors and administrators and special deputies, at CIA and NSA and NGA and OICI and INR and all the other acronyms. He knows what they get up to, what operations they’re running. I suppose he needs to know that so he doesn’t end up stepping on their toes, like, by sending you out on a mission the CIA already has covered. There’s a constant flow of information between the agencies.

“Thing is, not all this information comes from official channels. Some of it is just chatter. Rumors, call them, or stuff that got overheard when maybe it shouldn’t have been. And back when this started, some of that chatter was starting to make Hollingshead very nervous. He had the sense that there were people in the intelligence community who were forming some kind of quiet alliance. A network with its own agenda, that crossed agency lines and didn’t report to anybody officially. It was a network he was definitely not invited to join.

“Every time he tried to get close to the people in the network, they would shut down. Some of them were more blatant about it than others. It was clear they had orders not to give him so much as the time of day.

“He wasn’t willing to use the word ‘conspiracy,’ when he told me about it. He still thought maybe it was just some totally legit thing, a way for agencies to share information without having to call official meetings. But he needed to make sure. That was where I came in. He had my whole file, details on every one of my missions. He said he needed a poker player. Somebody with incredible patience, somebody who could hide his intentions as long as it took. Somebody who could think three moves ahead.

“He told me about you, Chapel, and why you wouldn’t work for this assignment. He said you weren’t a good enough actor. Your style was all wrong. He didn’t want a commando, he wanted a sniper. He’d had Angel run through a bunch of personnel files, looking for the right man, and my name was the first one on the list.

“Which still didn’t tell me exactly what he wanted me to do. Turned out the answer was simple: pretend I didn’t like him.

“He made sure it looked like I had good reason. He talked to all the right people about how I was some kind of monster. How he’d recruited me because he didn’t like the idea of a trained killer ending up at the wrong agency. He told people he had no real use for me and just wanted to keep me where I couldn’t cause any trouble.

“My job was to make a little noise about how I felt like I was being treated unfairly. To spread some gossip about how I didn’t want to work for Hollingshead anymore, that I was interested in transferring out of his directorate. I had some old friends from back in Iraq, civilian contractors from Blackwater, a CIA guy I knew, and we would get together and play cards sometimes. That was where I started hinting that I was unhappy.

“Hollingshead figured that if he was spying on the conspiracy, it would spy on him, too. That whoever ran the thing would jump at the chance to turn one of his own people against him. Turned out he was right.

“It wasn’t anybody at the NSA who contacted me originally. It was my CIA buddy who worked as my handler. Not that he was ever real clear on what our roles were. He said if I wanted to get back at Hollingshead, he had a way. One that he swore up and down wouldn’t hurt national security, but actually make it stronger. He even suggested that Hollingshead was a problem, that maybe he needed to be taken out.

“It was all done with such a soft touch, I barely knew I’d been recruited. We were just two guys shooting the shit. It was months and months and months before he said he wanted to introduce me to his secret boss. I was going to meet a woman named Charlotte Holman. I was supposed to do whatever she said.

“For a long time, that just meant spying on Hollingshead. Feeding her data about his movements, about what he had you and Angel doing. In exchange, she said, she would see about getting me transferred. Get me a job somewhere I would be appreciated.

“Hollingshead made sure the info I gave her was real. That meant making himself vulnerable to her. But it also meant she started trusting me. She started talking to me about what she called the Cyclops Initiative. A plan, a big plan, that was going to make America safe for a very long time. I wasn’t allowed to know many of the details, but she said it was going to look very bad but it would be a good thing in the end.

“She said I was going to be a big part of that. A hero.

“It wasn’t until about a week before the attack on New Orleans that she told me she was going to need proof that she could trust me. She said things were getting critical, that she wanted to know if I was willing to take a more active role. I asked what that meant. She asked me if I was willing to help her take down Hollingshead’s directorate, bust it open at the seams. I said sure — I mean, I was supposed to hate the guy, right? Then she asked me if I was willing to kill some people. I didn’t need to ask for names, I knew who she meant. Hollingshead, Chapel, Angel.

“I said, no problem. That was what I was trained for, after all.

“I could see in her eyes she believed me. I’d come so far, implicated myself enough by spying on Hollingshead for her, that there was no going back. When I said I was willing to kill you, that was what it took for her to let me in. To really trust me.

“To start telling me what was going on.”

Julia got up and moved over to Chapel’s side. “This is how the intelligence community works? This is what you deal with all the time?”

“No,” Chapel told her. “Most of the time it’s just guys in offices, shoving paper around. Writing up security estimates and analyzing photographs. Every once in a while, though…” He shook his head. “When national security is at stake, people get a little nuts. You’re talking about the last bunch of people in America who still believe in the government. In its necessity, anyway. Threats to that government make the knives come out.”

Wilkes shook his head. “This isn’t just some internal beef, though. It wasn’t just you three I was supposed to be willing to kill. She told me a lot of stuff at that meeting. Suggested a bunch of things that might happen. She had to know, see. She had to know how I would react.

“She asked me, if her group organized an attack on civilian targets inside the borders of the United States, what would I do? I said I would assume she had a good reason. She seemed to like that.

“She laid it out for me. The whole thing with the cargo container full of radiological waste and the kamikaze drone. She watched me pretty close while she talked about it. I got the idea that if I winced or looked upset, then somebody would come bursting in and cap me right then and there.

“So I made a point of not wincing or looking upset.

“Once things were in motion, I had no contact with Hollingshead. I had to play this thing out. My orders were to get on Holman’s good side and stay there as long as I could. Dig into her organization as deep as I could go. I did manage to swing things a little for you guys. I told her that Angel really was an AI. Obviously Moulton didn’t buy it, but I think Holman was convinced. That meant I just had to destroy that hard drive, not actually kill Angel.”

“And me?” Chapel asked. “You shot me. Were you willing to kill me just to make things look good for your new boss?”

“Jimmy, please,” Wilkes said, looking pained. “You know my MOS. I shot you. I didn’t kill you. If I planned on actually killing you, you would be dead right now. No, I just needed your blood all over that place. I thought maybe Holman would be satisfied with that, given how many other things she had on her plate. But she got obsessed with it. With the idea you were still out there, still alive.”

“Which raises another question,” Chapel said. “Why us? Did we do something to her in a past life that meant we needed to be killed? Was it just because Hollingshead didn’t want to go on a second date?”

“What?” Julia asked, looking very confused.

“I’ll explain later,” Chapel told her.

Wilkes laughed. “That’s the funny part. When you talk to her, to Holman, or some of the people she introduced me to — all they want to talk about is Hollingshead’s DX department. He’s a goddamned legend out there. Maybe because of how he took down Tom Banks a couple of years ago. Maybe because of some of the missions he’s sent you on, Jimmy, the ones that actually worked. But they talk about him like he’s some kind of superhero, and they know that when there’s a superhero in town, the villains always lose. They decided to make the DX — specifically Hollingshead, Angel, and you — their scapegoats for one simple reason.

“They figured you were the only ones who could stop them.”

Chapel didn’t bother feeling flattered. He understood the real message there. “So they honestly think they’re going to get away with… what? Protecting the country? With selective drone strikes on domestic targets? How is that supposed to work?”

“Nobody bothered giving me the big picture. Just the operational parameters,” Wilkes pointed out.

Chapel looked away. “You say there were other people. It wasn’t just Holman and Moulton working against us. You said there was a whole conspiracy, a secret network inside the intelligence community. How big do you think this is? How far up does it go?”

Wilkes lifted his shoulders dramatically. Let them fall again. “I don’t really know. I know Holman gets orders from somebody else. She’s a subdirector at the NSA. That suggests to me there are people at the director level. Maybe higher. As for how many of them there are, Hollingshead estimated that it included people in every agency. That’s one thing we’ve got to remember here. It’s not like every one of the ninety thousand employees of the NSA are in on this plot. It’s just small workgroups here and there.”

Chapel frowned. “Cells. Like a terrorist organization uses.”

“The comparison is pretty fucking apt,” Wilkes told him. “Considering what they’re doing.”

“Okay. But one thing I want to know — why break your cover now? Why come out of the cold right in the middle of things?”

Wilkes laughed. “Maybe because maintaining my cover would have meant killing you and the ladies here while Moulton watched? I let you guys get away from me once and Holman nearly ripped my head off. Maybe I could have come up with some way of keeping you alive here tonight, but she never would have trusted me again.”

“So instead you killed Moulton,” Chapel pointed out.

“It’s what I do.”

“It was stupid,” Chapel said. “We could have interrogated him. We could have learned so much from him.”

“Sure, during which time he could have found some way to contact Holman and tell her what happened.” Wilkes shook his head. “You have your way of operating, I’ve got mine.”

Chapel slammed his fist against a steel server rack, making it ring. The noise made Angel jump, but he was frustrated enough not to apologize. “Right now we’ve got no way of operating at all! We’ve got scraps of information that don’t add up. We have no idea which direction to jump, no idea how to hit these people where they’ll feel it.”

“I know one thing,” Wilkes pointed out.

“Oh? And what’s that?”

“What their next move is,” the marine said. “I know their next target.”

Chapel nodded slowly. “Yeah?” he said. “What are they going to do? Crash the stock market? Disrupt the Border Patrol? Close a major airport?”

“Nope,” Wilkes said. “They’re gonna assassinate Hollingshead.”

A carved wooden clock on an end table ticked away the seconds as the first rays of dawn came in through tall French windows. At one point a member of the custodial staff came into the room and stared at a painting on the wall for nearly a minute. Finally he reached up and tilted it a few degrees to one side, straightening it perfectly. Then he left.

Charlotte Holman and Patrick Norton sat through the whole thing, stiff-backed, on a white damask pattern loveseat that had probably belonged to Dolley Madison.

They had taken her phone away from her when she went through the security station. She was going quietly crazy.

Norton checked his watch. Again. Then he looked up at an unassuming door in the far wall. He turned to catch Holman’s eye. “Have you ever been this close, before?”

“To the Oval Office?” Holman asked. “No, no, I… I haven’t.”

Norton smiled at her. “It’s always the same. He always makes you wait. Actually, I’ve known three of them, and it was the same every time. They need to make sure you understand how things work. That you sit here at the pleasure of your commander in chief.”

Holman chuckled. “I wouldn’t have thought that was a point that needed to be stressed,” she said.

“The bigger the chief, the taller the totem pole,” Norton replied.

Holman was a woman of a certain age; all the same, the remark struck her as something distinctly out-of-date. The kind of casual remark you might have heard in this room fifty years prior. She considered whether she should say something, if only in the interest of friendly advice.

She didn’t get the chance. The door — the door — opened and they both had to jump to their feet. If the president walked into their room, it would never do for them to be seated.

But it wasn’t the man himself. It was his chief of staff, Walter Minchell, a trim, intelligent-looking man with a nearly invisible fringe of red beard. He raised one hand and gestured for Norton to come closer, even though there was no one else in the room. “He wanted me to convey his apologies,” Minchell said. “He’s too busy to speak with you directly.”

“Too busy?” Norton asked. “The country is falling apart and—”

“And that’s what’s keeping him,” Minchell insisted. “He’s got so much on his plate that he can’t do face time right now.”

“Young man,” Norton said, “you do understand that I am the secretary of defense? That he himself appointed me to handle the security of the country?”

“I understand,” Minchell said, “what he told me, and what he said I could tell you if you tried to bully your way in. He says he put you in charge of stopping this thing. But since then it’s only gotten worse. Hundreds of thousands of people in California with no power, no water — ships lined up outside of New Orleans crammed full of rotting food while grocery stores in the Midwest can’t stock their shelves. Half the Northeast locked down with a manhunt that has yet to produce a single captive.”

He glanced at Holman as he related this final fact. She made a point of not flinching.

“If,” Norton said, “the president has lost confidence in my abilities—”

“No,” Minchell said. “That’s not the takeaway here.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Norton replied.

The chief of staff scratched at his chin. “We need results, Mr. Secretary. We need them soon. You have got to start producing bodies. But in the meantime, the president is going to address the nation tomorrow night. Come clean with the fact that these are terrorist attacks and talk about what we’re doing to find the culprits.”

“That’s not the wise move right now,” Norton insisted. “If he would just meet with me so we could discuss this—”

“That’s exactly why you’re not meeting,” Minchell told him. “There’s nothing to discuss. You need to give him data. Anything you’ve got so it can go into the speech. Oh — and there’s one more thing. You’ll be the designated survivor on this one.”

Norton inhaled very slowly.

Whenever the president gave a major speech, one where the vice president was also present, he always appointed a designated survivor. A member of the cabinet who would not be allowed anywhere near the location of the speech so that if something terrible happened like, say, a terrorist attack, at least one top-ranking member of the executive branch would still be around to maintain control.

Being chosen as the survivor could mean one of two things. It could mean the president had faith in your ability to lead the country in case of his demise. Or it could mean he disliked you so much he didn’t want to see you, even accidentally, at a crucial time.

“I understand,” Norton said.

“Good,” Minchell told him. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work.”

Without even glancing at Holman, he disappeared back through the door.

“I’ll get you that data,” she told the SecDef.

Norton just turned on his heel and started walking away.

In the backseat, Angel held herself perfectly still. Her small body was crammed into the car door, and one of her slender shoulders propped up the majority of Wilkes’s considerable weight. He had fallen asleep back there, more or less on top of her. They’d been driving for hours like that.

Chapel watched her in his mirror. Angel’s face was frozen into the expression of someone who is trying very hard not to think about what was happening to her.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” she replied, in a clipped tone he didn’t like.

He decided he would pull over at the next chance he got. Let Julia drive, and put Angel up in the front seat. Maybe the marine just stank — Chapel remembered spending months in a motel room with Wilkes, and that the man didn’t have the best hygiene practices. But maybe it was something else. Angel looked a lot like she had when they’d forced her to get out of the car up on the ridge in Kentucky. Like she was being tortured.

He glanced over at Julia and saw a look on her face that was not entirely dissimilar.

“What about you?” he asked.

She took a long, deep breath. When she answered, she looked straight ahead through the windshield. As if she didn’t want him to see what was in her eyes. “I think that I saw Wilkes kill a man last night. Just… just shoot him in the brain. I think that ten minutes before that I was certain he was going to kill me. I think that I remember the way he tied us up, which was not exactly gentle.”

“He’s a bit rough-and-tumble,” Chapel admitted.

“He’s a monster,” Julia said. She glanced back over her shoulder, as if to make sure he was really sleeping. “He was acting a role, he says. Pretending to stalk us. Shooting you just to make it look like you were dead.” She shook her head and red hair bounced around her shoulders. “He’s crazy, Jim. I don’t know how you can even think about trusting him.”

“Because the alternative is letting Hollingshead die,” he told her.

There was nothing else, really, to say. Chapel needed allies desperately, and Wilkes had offered himself up for the job. Now that he’d killed Moulton, he said it was only a matter of hours — a day at the most — before his cover was blown. Before Charlotte Holman sent somebody else to track him down.

But in the meantime, Wilkes could be a powerful weapon. They knew where Holman would strike next, and a general idea of how she would do it. She, on the other hand, had no idea that she couldn’t trust Wilkes.

The plan had come together in Chapel’s mind almost instantly. It was simple, like any good plan. It was also incredibly dangerous. But that had never stopped him before.

First things first, though. They were going to need some equipment. It was Wilkes who pointed out where they could get it.

Chapel knew that Angel and Julia were terrified of their new teammate — and that they would never trust him. Chapel didn’t know if he could trust Wilkes, either. But he did know that with the marine’s help, there might just be a chance to come out of this alive.

So he headed east, driving as fast as he dared, straight through the night.

Wilkes had a smartphone that he could still use. It made life a lot easier for them. He found a motel in a quiet part of town, a nice enough place that was clean and where the staff were happy to take cash. “Gotta love Yelp reviews,” he said.

Angel seemed happy enough just to get out of the sunlight and into a dark room where she could lie down for a while. Julia, on the other hand, asked far too many questions. “Where are you going?” was the hardest one to answer.

“We need to acquire some supplies. Some stuff that’s hard to get,” Chapel told her.

“Like what?”

Chapel glanced over at the car. Wilkes was in the driver’s seat, his hands on the wheel. As still and quiet as a robot waiting for instructions.

“Like guns,” he told her. It had been way too long since Chapel had access to a firearm. He’d managed to survive so far without one, but they were headed to some dangerous places now, and a gun at his side would make him feel a lot better.

Julia scowled, though. “And why exactly can’t you take me with you?”

He knew she wasn’t philosophically opposed to the idea of firearms, though she didn’t particularly like them, either. He had a good reason for leaving her behind on this mission, though. “For one thing, somebody needs to be here with Angel.”

“She can take care of herself.”

Chapel shrugged. “Maybe. But remember the buddy system? Didn’t they ever teach you that in school?”

“I remember the last time you called me your buddy,” she said.

He smiled, remembering that too.

“Yeah, I get it,” she said. “None of us should be alone at any time. If government thugs show up and try to drag her away, at least I’ll be able to call them names. But I don’t like the idea of you running off with Wilkes like you’re long-lost friends. I don’t trust that guy.”

“I know.” But Chapel kind of did. Sure, the guy had killed Moulton instead of keeping him alive to get information out of him. Sure, Wilkes had shot Chapel. But that kind of thing made sense, in the world the two of them inhabited.

Chapel had relied on Angel and Julia so far because he’d had no choice. They were civilians, though, and neither of them had Special Forces training. Wilkes was the kind of partner Chapel was supposed to work with.

“It’s going to be fine,” Chapel told her.

“Promise me he won’t kill any more people just because it’s convenient.”

“I can’t make a promise for anybody else. I’ll promise to ask him to promise.”

Julia growled in frustration. Then she grabbed Chapel around the neck and pulled him into a deep, long kiss.

“I’m not going to lose you again,” she told him.

“You couldn’t if you tried,” he told her.

Then he headed over to the car. Before he even got to the passenger-side door, Wilkes had the engine running.

“I count three guys. Two out front by the door, each of them with a suspicious bulge in their coat pockets. One over at the loading dock, and he’s got a shotgun right out in the open, not even caring who sees it.”

“Four,” Wilkes said.

“What?” Chapel asked.

The two of them were lying prone on the tar-paper roof of an old abandoned building in a largely abandoned part of town. Across the street from them lay a two-story warehouse that was still in operating condition: its rolling metal doors were intact and not too rusty, and though its windows were bricked over, there wasn’t much graffiti on the walls.

Back before the first drone hijacking, back in what felt now like a previous lifetime, Chapel had found this place by following Harris Contorni around. He had been convinced it was where Contorni kept his stock in trade, namely a bunch of military hardware he’d stolen from the nearby Aberdeen Proving Ground. Chapel and Wilkes both had staked out the warehouse, as well as Contorni’s motel room, for months without finding any real evidence that would stand up in court. But there had been enough circumstantial details to make Chapel certain he was right about Contorni.

Now they were banking everything on that certainty. And on their ability to take Contorni down without the both of them getting killed in the process.

“You’re sure? Where’s this fourth guy at?”

Wilkes handed Chapel a pair of tiny binoculars. “Down the street, in a window over that restaurant supply shop.”

Chapel peered through the binoculars. Damn it. Wilkes was right. The restaurant supply shop was closed and no lights showed inside the second floor of the building. But just visible through one open window was a man smoking a cigarette. Chapel could see the barrel of a high-powered sniper rifle hanging over the windowsill.

Shit, Chapel thought. If he’d gone running in there thinking it was just the three guards he’d seen, the sniper would have picked him off before he even reached the front door.

Chapel had worried he was getting too old for all this. That Hollingshead had brought Wilkes in to serve as his replacement. Well, maybe there was a point to that worry. Maybe it was time for him to retire.

But not today.

“You can take the sniper, right?” Chapel asked.

When Wilkes’s face was perfectly at rest, it already looked like he was sneering. Now he positively leered. “Yeah, I think I can handle that.”

Chapel nodded. “When you’re done, give me some kind of signal. Then move down here fast. I’ll take the guy with the shotgun, then we handle the two at the front door together.”

“Got it,” Wilkes said.

Chapel looked at the shotgun guy through the binoculars. “Just remember not to kill anyone if you don’t have to,” he said. But when he lowered the binoculars, Wilkes was already gone.

Damn. The guy was good.

The signal was pretty obvious when it came. The sniper disappeared from the window across the street. His lit cigarette flew out the window to fall into the street, and his rifle was pulled back inside. Then Wilkes leaned one arm out of the window and gave Chapel a thumbs-up.

Chapel was already behind the warehouse, close to the loading dock where the man with the shotgun stood guard. Now it was his turn.

There are only so many ways to disarm an alert guard who is carrying a shotgun. None of them are particularly safe. Chapel decided to go with the most direct method. Moving fast but very quietly, leading with his artificial arm as a kind of shield, he ran across the loading dock and just barreled into the guard as hard as he could.

The man went sprawling — he hadn’t seen Chapel coming. The two of them rolled onto the concrete of the loading dock, grappling and trying to get to their feet. The guard never quite managed to get up, but he didn’t let go of the shotgun, either. Chapel got one hand on the barrels, but the guard knocked his other hand away. He brought the weapon around, trying to cram it into the space between the two of them.

The guard was young and strong, and though Chapel was on top of him and knew a dozen ways to render the man unconscious, the shotgun was a major advantage on the guard’s side. Before Chapel could stop him, the guard had both barrels jammed up under Chapel’s chin.

There was something to be said for experience and training, though. Before the guard could pull his triggers and blow Chapel’s head off, Chapel reached down and slipped the catch of the break action. The barrels swung away from the firing pins, just as if the weapon were in the middle of being reloaded. The guard tried to pull the triggers but nothing happened.

He seemed surprised by this. Surprised enough that Chapel was able to grab the shotgun away from him and smack him across the head with it. The guard rolled away, his hands going to his head. Chapel got an arm around the man’s neck in a sleeper hold and squeezed until the guard fell unconscious.

He would have liked to have tied the man up, just to be sure he was out of action, but there was no time for that. Chapel grabbed the shotgun, locking its barrels in place and cocking its hammers, then raced around to the front of the building.

Just in time. Wilkes was walking across the street, his silenced pistol held out in front of him, while the two guards at the door were already reaching for their own weapons. Chapel leveled the shotgun at them. “Hands down,” he said.

The guards were smart enough to comply without making much noise. Wilkes came forward and disarmed both of them. He shoved one pistol in his pocket, then tossed the other one to Chapel. He didn’t bother looking down at it — he could tell from the way it felt in his hand that it was a Glock 9 mm. He shoved it into his pocket, never letting the barrels of the shotgun move away from the two guards.

“How many people inside?” he asked.

“Why the fuck should we tell you anything?” one of the guards asked. “You know what’s going to happen to you? You know you’re already dead, right? We work for—”

Wilkes kicked the man in the stomach, hard. He went down.

Chapel turned to the second guard. “How many people inside?” he asked.

“Our boss and one guy,” the second guard said, lifting his hands to show he was cooperating.

Chapel nodded. To Wilkes, he said, “Did you frisk these two for backup pieces?”

“Doesn’t look like they’ve got any,” Wilkes pointed out.

“Check for ankle holsters,” Chapel told him.

As it turned out, neither of the guards had a second gun. But the one Wilkes had kicked did have a knife tucked into his shoe.

“Okay,” Chapel said. “The two of you are going to walk ahead of us. You know what human shields are, right? I’m guessing you can figure it out. You walk inside there with us right behind you. The best way for the two of you not to get shot is for you to keep very, very quiet. We all clear on this?”

The guards just nodded.

The door was locked, but one of the guards had the key. He opened the door and stepped inside. The warehouse was well lit and full of metal shelves, all of which were full of long, flat cardboard boxes.

Two men were standing in the middle of the maze of shelves, checking things on clipboards. Neither of them had weapons in their hands. One of them was Harris Contorni, whom Chapel recognized instantly.

Unfortunately, Contorni recognized him as well. Before Chapel could even shout for the black marketeer to drop to the floor, Contorni broke and ran around a line of shelves, out of view.

“Damn,” Chapel said. He shoved one of the guards aside and started racing after Contorni.

“We don’t need him,” Wilkes called out, but it was too late.

Chapel had already come around the end of a line of shelves and was staring down an aisle at a Gatling gun.

“I just want to talk to—” Chapel said, but before he could even finish his sentence, Contorni opened fire.

Technically, to be accurate, it was not a Gatling gun, since those hadn’t seen service since the Spanish-American War. Instead it was a much newer, much more deadly weapon, an M130 self-powered Vulcan rotary cannon, with six long air-cooled, gas-fired barrels capable of pumping out six thousand 20×202 mm rounds per minute. It was capable of tearing a jeep to pieces, shooting down enemy bombers, or turning human beings into red jelly. It was designed to be mounted on a fighter jet.

As a burst of rounds sped toward Chapel far faster than he could dodge, he was only barely aware of the fact that Contorni was firing a weapon that was just balanced precariously on a wheeled dolly — it hadn’t been bolted down or secured in any way.

Three bullets did hit Chapel, though all of them tore through the silicone flesh of his artificial arm and none of them drew blood. Those bullets escaped the weapon with enough velocity and momentum to knock the entire gun sideways and then backward until it was spraying bullets into the wall and then the ceiling of the warehouse. Eventually the entire assembly — barrels, receiver, feed system, and ammunition drum, weighing approximately three hundred pounds, fell backward off the dolly and rolled on top of Harris Contorni, who gave out a little shriek and then let go of the trigger mechanism.

The noise of the weapon discharging was enough to make Chapel’s ears ring. That passed quickly enough. The surprise he felt at finding himself still alive and mostly in one piece took a lot longer to process.

By the time he could move again, Wilkes had come up beside him, a pistol in either hand, both of them pointing at the ceiling.

“What happened? You okay?” he shouted.

Chapel looked over at Wilkes. Then he looked back at Contorni, who was still wrestling with the M130, unable to get out from under it. He opened his mouth to say something. Reconsidered that thought. Closed his mouth again.

Pinned to the floor, Contorni finally shouted, “One of you assholes gonna help me out here, or what?”

“Your men all ran off, once they heard the shooting,” Wilkes said. “They were smart. You, on the other hand, tried to kill an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency. You do understand what that means, don’t you, Harris?”

They had Contorni tied to a chair in an office at the back of the warehouse. To his credit he made no attempt to struggle or get free. “I’ve got so many lawyers on my payroll they’re gonna name a library for me up at Columbia Law,” Contorni insisted. “I was defending my property, wasn’t I? I had no idea who broke in, just that they got past my security. I was afraid for my life.”

Chapel shrugged. “You’re right. We don’t need this guy.” They had, after all, come here looking for weapons. Not to charge Contorni with any crime.

Wilkes didn’t seem to get that, though. He pressed the barrel of his silenced pistol against Contorni’s cheek. “I might start by blowing your teeth out,” he said. He moved the pistol down to Contorni’s chest. “Then again, maybe we just puncture a lung.”

Chapel fought to keep his face under control. This was not at all how he’d imagined the operation would go down. “Wilkes,” he said, “just—”

“Just kill him?” the marine asked. “I could. But then we wouldn’t get to find out why he’s been lying low the last couple of months.”

“I know people,” Contorni insisted. “I know the kind of people, if you kill me here, they’ll come find you. Find you when you’re asleep and—”

Wilkes pressed the barrel of his pistol against Contorni’s arm and pulled the trigger.

The black marketeer howled in panic and distress, and Chapel had to look away. He knew perfectly well that Wilkes had at most just grazed Contorni’s skin. He would get a nasty powder burn, but the wound was unlikely to even scar.

Given what Wilkes had been threatening, though, it must have felt like a real gunshot wound.

“For months now,” Wilkes said, “this dickweed and I have been watching you. Tracking your every movement. We know what you do for a living, Harris. We know you steal guns from the Proving Ground and then sell them to whoever has the money. Street gangs. Hit men. White power groups. But the last couple of months, you haven’t so much as sold a bayonet to a Civil War reenactor. You want to explain why?”

Contorni was still howling. Chapel could barely hear Wilkes over the noise. Somehow, though, the screams turned into words. “Knew you — were there — not stupid — enough to—”

“You knew we were watching you?” Wilkes asked.

Suddenly Chapel was very interested in this interrogation. “How?” he asked.

Contorni calmed down enough to explain, a little. “There was this, this guy, this little creep, I only saw him one time. Came to the place where I, where I get my breakfast. Sat down in front of me. Told me the DIA was on my trail. Told me your names, gave me pictures of you. I saw you at the motel and—”

“This guy, was he wearing a sweater vest and a tie?”

The look on Contorni’s face was answer enough.

Wilkes didn’t bother asking Contorni any more questions. He kicked over the black marketeer’s chair and left him there, his cheek pressed up against the concrete floor, still whimpering.

Chapel and Wilkes left the office and closed the door behind them so they could talk. “Moulton wrecked our case,” Wilkes pointed out.

“I guess he wanted to make you resent Hollingshead even more, by making your assignment as boring and pointless as possible.”

Wilkes nodded. “I knew that guy deserved a bullet.” He walked over to the nearest shelf and grabbed one of the cardboard boxes stored there. He put his weapon in his pocket, then cut open the box using the knife he’d taken off Contorni’s guard. “Time to go shopping,” he said.

Chapel was not particularly surprised to see that the box contained M4 carbines. Standard gear for the kind of soldiers stationed at the Proving Ground. He lifted one and made as if to offer it to Wilkes, but it was hardly what the mission called for. Wilkes grunted and went to another shelf, this one with larger boxes. “What do you like, Jimmy? Combat shotties? Grenade launchers? You can pretty much take your pick.”

“I usually just carry a handgun,” Chapel replied. He headed over to another shelf and started examining the boxes there. They were all marked as containing stereo equipment. “Something with some stopping power but a nice magazine size. If you come across any SIG Sauer P228s—”

He stopped because he heard Wilkes laughing.

Coming around the side of a shelving unit, he found the marine standing over a very large box full of Styrofoam. Sticking up out of the packing material was a device made from what looked like lengths of green pipe welded together.

“Is that what I think it is?” Chapel asked.

Wilkes had a huge grin on his face. “Harris!” he shouted. “Contorni! You don’t screw around, do you?”

Chapel was laughing despite himself by the time they got back to the motel. Wilkes’s sense of humor could be a little coarse, but sometimes you just needed to blow off a little steam. After running for his life for days on end, it was good to feel a little safe, too, even if he knew that he was about to throw himself right back into the path of the oncoming train.

Julia was watching TV when they came in. “You should see this,” she said, working the remote control to raise the volume. “Things in California are getting worse, not better. They say there’s a virus in the power grid, and it’s spread as far north as Seattle and down to the border with Mexico. The government can’t say when they’ll get it fixed, and meanwhile people are rioting in the streets. Plus, there’s been a run on bread in the Midwest — a loaf of that processed bleached garbage stuff was going for twenty dollars this morning! The country’s about to collapse.”

“Lucky the good guys are on the case,” Wilkes said.

“This is serious,” Julia told him.

“And we’re serious, too,” Chapel said. He’d brought a six-pack of beer. He cracked open a can and handed it to her. She stared at it like he’d just handed her a live lobster, but after a second, she seemed to rethink her position and she took a long sip.

They called Angel, and she came over from the room next door. By then Chapel had a road map of the area around Washington spread out on the bed. It was time to get planning. He offered Angel a beer, too. “Probably our last chance to relax before this thing is all over.”

“We could all be dead tomorrow morning,” Wilkes pointed out.

“Thanks, I’m good,” Angel told him. “Did you see the thing on TV about the president’s speech?”

Chapel was too busy smoothing out the map to pay much attention. “Does he think that he can calm people down by talking to them?”

Angel shook her head. “The pundits say that, given the number of staffers working on it, this is going to be more than just a call for peace. They think he’s going to announce something big. Like maybe that the power outages and the food prices are the work of terrorists. One guy even suggested he was going to declare war on China.”

Chapel looked up when he heard that.

“It was just some crackpot,” Angel said, blushing and looking away. “But that’s out there, now. People are talking about it.”

Chapel shook his head. He didn’t have much use for speeches as a rule. Politicians talked, because that was their job, even when they had nothing real to say. But if there was even a hint of retaliation—

“The president won’t attack China just on principle,” Julia insisted. She looked to Wilkes. “When you were burrowing your way into this conspiracy — was there any sense that this Initiative or whatever was taking orders from China?”

“No, everyone involved kept insisting what a patriot they were. The kind of people who argue over who’s wearing the bigger flag pin.” He shrugged. “I don’t know who’s at the top of this, though. Could be Beijing. But if it is, they’ve covered their tracks pretty good.”

Chapel chewed his lower lip. There were wheels within wheels here, games within games. Bringing China into the mix was probably just disinformation — a way to point the blame away from Holman and her Cyclops Initiative. It didn’t matter what he knew, though. It mattered a great deal what the public believed.

Well. Nothing he could do about that. “No matter what, our move has to be rescuing Hollingshead. So let’s look at that.”

Wilkes nodded. He drained his beer can and tossed it in the corner of the room. Then he leaned over the map and stabbed it with one finger.

“They forced him out of his offices a while back. Tried to make him resign, but the latest I heard was he was just acting like he was taking some vacation days.”

Chapel looked where he was pointing. It was a little bump of land sticking out into the Potomac River, just south of Ronald Reagan airport. “There’s something there,” he said, trying to remember his Washington geography. “Boats. A marina, I think.”

Wilkes nodded. “Let me guess. He never told you where he lived, did he?”

“That was never something I needed to know,” Chapel pointed out.

“He spends most of his time at work, up at the Pentagon. But he sleeps on a yacht down there. He’ll be there right now. But it’s not as easy as coming alongside in a rowboat. Holman pulled a snow job on her boss, the NSA director. She wanted to put Hollingshead in a cell so he could be interrogated. The secretary of defense vetoed that — which did not make her happy — but her boss did authorize her to monitor Hollingshead’s communications and movements twenty-four seven. He also put a bunch of guards around the old guy. MPs, drawn from Pentagon staff, if I heard right.”

“Any idea on how many of them, or where they’re posted?” Chapel asked.

“That wasn’t ever something I needed to know,” Wilkes said.

Chapel nodded. “Give me your smartphone. I need a better map of that marina. If I can see all the access roads and good hiding spots, I can figure out how they’ve constructed their security. And then I can think about how to get in.” He looked up at Angel and Julia. “We should get some rest, too. I’m going to need all of us to pull this off. We won’t leave until after dark, so we have a couple of hours downtime.”

Wilkes stretched his arms. “Sounds good to me. Wake me up if the Chinese start nuking us or something.”

Chapel was too busy working the smartphone to reply. After a minute, Angel came over and took it away from him because she thought he was using it wrong. “Google Maps isn’t going to show you what you need,” she told him. “You want a real street map, the old-fashioned kind. Let me show you how to access those.”

It was good to be back to something approximating normal.

The nation’s fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles had gone through quite a workout in the last twenty-four hours. Every aircraft had been grounded and checked out by a team of mechanics, their hardware stripped down from nose to tail and checked for any sign of unauthorized maintenance or sabotage. Those drones that were not considered vital to national security had been physically grounded, the mechanics actually removing their propellers and emptying their fuel tanks so they could not be commandeered by anyone.

Of the thousand-odd drones that would normally be airborne on a night like this, ranging from tiny hand-launched spy craft like toy helicopters to strategic reconnaissance drones big enough to look like passenger jets, only a handful were allowed up in the air.

Some of the drones had to stay airborne, by order of various agencies. There were those which were part of ongoing criminal investigations, and those tracking the borders for drug smugglers and illegal immigrants. These were allowed to go aloft again, but only with extra supervision in their ground control stations. Then there were the armed drones that circled various high-value resources day and night: crucial airports and satellite uplink sites, the “backbone” facilities that kept the Internet running, Camp David and the White House. Those drones were there to prevent another 9/11 — if someone tried to fly a commercial aircraft into a collision course with the sites, the drones would shoot the terrorists down before they could reach their targets.

Those drones were vital to national security.

They now belonged, every one of them, to Charlotte Holman.

Thanks to the secretary of defense’s getting her inside the air force base, she could take over any or all of the military drones whenever she pleased.

Had she been greedy, had she commandeered all the Creech drones airborne that night, she would have been detected right away. Fighter jets with human pilots would have been scrambled to take the drones down, and within an hour or two the threat would be eliminated.

But she was not greedy or careless or stupid. She and Paul Moulton had worked all this out quite carefully. In the end she chose only two drones, releasing the rest of them from her clutches. All but two of them would perform their scheduled patrols and then return to their bases without doing anything suspicious.

Of the two she did commandeer, one was an MQ-9 Reaper, a slightly larger, slightly heavier descendant of the old Predator class. This Reaper carried a single Hellfire missile slung under its belly, and its single, ever-vigilant eye was tasked with watching the skies around Washington, D.C. Holman sent the machine a program to replace its existing flight plan and it accepted the change without comment. For the moment, its controllers in Nevada would remain unaware that it no longer belonged to them. They would only get a few minutes’ warning once the new program went into effect.

The second drone that Holman chose was something a little more special. An MQ-1C Gray Eagle, one of the newest and most advanced UAVs in the fleet. The Gray Eagle was designed to stay aloft for as long as thirty-six hours without refueling, hiding miles up in the sky where it couldn’t be seen before swooping down at the last minute like its namesake to deliver death from above. This one was outfitted with four GBU-44/B Viper Strike guided bombs that could use GPS to find their targets with a level of precision Hellfire missiles could never beat. It also had an electronics package to combat enemy jamming countermeasures.

This particular Gray Eagle was tasked with keeping station well out at sea east of Washington, cutting long circles over the most commonly used shipping lanes. Its purpose was to intercept any foreign threats that might try to harass American cargo vessels. It would serve this purpose as expected, to the letter, for nearly twenty-four hours to come. At a specified time, however, it would switch off its control transponders and follow a simple program, a few dozen lines of code, that Paul Moulton had written weeks ago.

Holman waited for the Gray Eagle to confirm that it had uploaded her new program and filed it away in its long-term memory. Then she cut the link between her computer and the servers at Creech. Just to be safe, she erased all her own logs and then uninstalled the proprietary software she’d used to contact the drones.

Once that was done, no one could ever prove she’d been in contact with the Reaper or the Gray Eagle. Of course, it also meant she couldn’t change their programs now even if she wanted to. From this point, there was no turning back.

Wilkes came back after an hour’s nap and grabbed a couple of pistols from the supply they’d taken from Contorni. “You’ve got all the details straight?” Chapel asked him.

The marine rolled his eyes. “Still not sure why we don’t just kill Holman. But, yeah, I know what I’m supposed to do. And you’re the boss.”

“I outrank you. And Hollingshead needs us to do it this way,” Chapel insisted.

Wilkes just nodded and headed out. From the window of the room, Chapel watched him grab a taxi and head north on the highway. “Okay, we just have to trust he’ll do his part. Angel — are you ready to go?”

“Sure,” she told him. “There’s an Internet café about two miles north of here. I can do everything from there.”

He nodded. “If you suspect, even for a second, that they’re on to you, that the NSA knows you’re online—”

“I’ve learned my lesson,” she told him. “And I know how to cover my tracks.”

“Okay. Stay in the other room until it gets dark. Then get to work.”

“Got it,” Angel said. But she didn’t leave immediately. Instead she searched his face with her eyes, as if she needed to know something desperately important.

“Something on your mind?” he asked.

She frowned. “I know you’d do a lot to save the director,” she said.

“Sure,” he replied.

“I want you to know — if it was me, I would die for him. If I could, I would take the bullet.”

Chapel thought for a moment before responding to that. “I hope he knows how loyal you are.”

She shook her head. “I need to know if you would do the same.”

Chapel glanced over at Julia. She raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“You mean, am I willing to put myself in danger to protect him?” Chapel asked.

“No,” Angel said. “I mean, if it comes down to trading your life for his, will you do it?” She looked away from his face. “I know it’s a strange question. But I–I’ve got my reasons for asking. For wanting him to be safe.”

“We all want him to be safe,” Julia said. “I only met him once, and I still want that. Are you asking Jim—”

“Chapel knows what I’m asking.”

And Chapel thought maybe he did. He tried to think of the best answer to give her. “He’s my commanding officer,” he told her. “I’ve sworn to obey him and to protect him to the utmost of my abilities. He’s a man I admire, too. Someone I believe in. So… yes. The answer to your question is yes.”

Angel said nothing more. She just nodded and stepped outside, closing the door gently behind her.

Once she was gone, it was just Chapel and Julia in the motel room. “What was that all about?” Julia asked.

“No idea,” Chapel said, which wasn’t strictly true. He had an idea. It just seemed too crazy to credit.

Julia shook her head. “Whatever. We’ve got some time before we move out. When was the last time you ate something?” she asked.

Chapel looked away from the window and frowned. “Not sure.”

She grabbed a plastic bag from the bed and lifted it in the air. “Sandwiches,” she said. “Straight from the local gas station.” She opened her eyes very wide. “Yum.”

“In the army we learned the secret of eating bad food. You just tell yourself it’s fuel for your body. That it’ll make you less tired all the time.”

“And does that work?”

“No. But it gives you something to talk about besides how crappy the food is,” Chapel told her.

She laughed and tossed the bag of sandwiches at him. It wasn’t a great throw, and he had to lunge out of his chair to make the catch. Which turned out to be a lousy idea. Down on the floor on one knee, he had to hold himself perfectly still until the dark spots cleared from his vision and he could breathe easily again.

“What is it?” Julia asked, kneeling next to him. “Talk to me.”

“Just… a wave of pain,” Chapel told her. “Nothing too serious.”

“From your bullet wound?”

He gave her a weak smile. “I might have been a little acrobatic when we went to get the guns. I kind of had to tackle a guy.”

Julia helped him up onto the bed and then started unbuttoning his shirt. “I’ll take a look. I don’t think you opened my sutures, but let’s see.”

“I’m fine,” he told her. It was even true. The pain had passed, and he was breathing all right again. Nothing to worry about.

She got his shirt off and then she unwound the bandage around his midriff. She palpated the wound and then she looked up at him. “I think you’re okay,” she said.

“I could have told you that much.” He stood up and unlatched his artificial arm. Inside the shoulder there was a retractable cord that allowed him to plug it into any wall socket to charge its batteries. He had it set up on an end table before he’d even thought about what he was doing. It just needed a charge. It hadn’t even occurred to him that Julia might be freaked out by watching him do that. But of course she’d seen him do it before, back when they lived together.

This time, though, she came over and studied the arm as if she’d forgotten it wasn’t real. “Are these bullet holes?” she asked.

He bent over it with her and prodded at the silicone flesh. “I guess so.” The Vulcan cannon back in the warehouse, he thought. He’d thought it was just a miracle he hadn’t been torn to pieces. It was hardly the first time the arm had saved him from otherwise certain death. “Huh.”

She turned and looked at him. After a second, he started to move away, but she grabbed his face and held on.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Memorizing what you look like. So if you get killed tonight, I won’t forget.”

“Julia,” he said, “you can’t think like that. I can’t make you any promises that I’ll be okay, but—”

“Shush,” she told him. “I wasn’t looking for any. I know what you’re going to do tonight. I know it’s dangerous. I also know it has to be done.”

“I know that I’ve hurt you in the past,” he told her. “Disappearing on missions when you couldn’t even know if I was alive or dead. That’s no way to live, and—”

“Are you even listening to me?” she asked.

He focused on her eyes. “Yes,” he said.

“I’m saying it’s okay.” She let go of his face. “You’re right. It sucks. The not knowing. The waiting for you to come back. Taking your shirt off and finding new scars all over you.” She rubbed at her eyes. “I don’t like it. But it’s the price I have to pay for being in love with you.”

He leaned forward until their foreheads touched.

“I’ve been asking myself,” she said, “what would have happened if that asshole Moulton hadn’t come between us. Whether I would have broken up with you on my own. I mean, that was a real possibility.”

Chapel closed his eyes. “I told you then, I would do anything you wanted. I would take a desk job. I would come home every night at six and cook you dinner.”

“If I wanted that, there are plenty of guys in the world who could give it to me,” Julia told him. “No. I wanted you. And I still do. Jim — I made a lousy mistake when I broke up with you. Will you have me back?”

“You know I will,” he told her.

He kissed her, deeply, putting his arm around her shoulders. Pulling her close to him, unable to contain what he was feeling.

She reached down and unbuttoned his pants.

She turned her head to the side and he kissed her neck, his lips grabbing at her pale skin, his tongue darting out to touch the freckles in the vee where the top button of her shirt was open. She reached up and opened her shirt farther. He slipped his hand up inside her shirt from the back and slipped the catch of her bra.

That made her laugh. “Most guys can’t do that with two hands,” she said.

“Practice,” he told her.

She shimmied and shrugged and her bra fell down across her arms. Her breasts spilled out before him, just as he remembered them, firm and beautiful. He kissed the tops of them, touched his lips to her nipples until she shivered. She reached down inside his pants and grabbed his cock and it stiffened instantly. He buried his face in the warmth of her stomach, kissing around her belly button, making her laugh again. Reaching down, he unbuckled her belt, but clearly she didn’t have the patience to let him strip her. Jumping off the bed, she danced on one foot as she kicked off her jeans, then pulled down her panties in one quick yank so that she wore nothing but the open shirt.

He reached for her, but she pushed him back onto the bed. “Lie down,” she told him. His hand stole between her legs, but she slapped it away. “No need for that,” she said. “I’m ready. Just relax and let me do this, okay?”

“Sure,” he said, smiling up at her.

She pulled his pants off, one leg at a time, nearly falling over as they came free, positively giggled as she jumped up on the bed and kissed his chest, then his hip. Bending low, she kissed the tip of his cock, then opened her lips and took him deep into her mouth. She knew exactly what that did to him and he groaned, his head tilted backward against the pillows, his hand grasping at the sheets. Apparently he was more than ready, too — if she didn’t stop that he was going to come in her mouth, but he didn’t want that, he wanted more. He reached down and grabbed at her.

“Enough,” he gasped. “No more—”

She pulled away and laughed and then swung one leg up over him until she was straddling him, her hands planted on his chest. She slid her hips backward, then a little forward, her wetness gliding along the length of him and he ached to be inside her. He needed this, needed the confirmation of what she’d said, that they could start again. That they could be partners again.

She kissed him, deeply, her breasts crushed against his chest. Then she sat back up. Reaching behind herself, she grabbed his cock.

“Just tell me you’ll love me forever,” she said. “That’s all I’m going to ask.”

“Always,” he told her.

She lifted away from him for a second, then sat down again and his cock slid inside her, so deep inside.

“Oh, God,” she breathed. “I almost… forgot how… how good…”

“Yeah,” he groaned.

He expected her to thrust against him, to grind her hips against his body, but instead she just stayed there, hovering on top of him, his cock just inside of her, so hard he could barely stand it. Then she moved with excruciating slowness, sinking down until he went deeper and deeper, the tiniest bit at a time. His eyes opened wide and he saw her shaking, her shoulders quivering with how good she must be feeling. Her eyes were closed but her mouth fell open, red hair framing her perfect lips.

“Oh, Jim,” she said. “Can you — is this — okay?”

She slid just the barest fraction lower on him, but every slight motion, every tiny increment was so much more intense than he expected it to be. “I’m fine,” he said through gritted teeth. “You just — you do what you need.”

“This is — this is going—” she gasped as she slid lower, even deeper, “going to make me come. I’m going to… I’m going to…”

And then she sank all the way down on him, collided with him, and he could feel how much he was filling her up, filling all of her, and she cried out, literally screamed as her whole body vibrated on top of him. He reached up then and grabbed her to support her, then to bring her down closer until she was lying on top of him, her head buried in the crook of his neck as her hips started to move, really move now. And he knew it wouldn’t be long before he joined her, before he came too. She groaned a little every time she slammed her hips against him, held her breath as she slid back and he could tell she was lost inside that rhythm, that even if he called her name she wouldn’t hear him, couldn’t hear, and he was so close, and—

The door of the room banged open and Angel stuck her head inside, her face wide open in fear. “I heard a noise,” she said before she’d even registered what was going on.

On top of him, Julia froze in place. “Shit,” she breathed against his neck.

Angel’s mouth closed with an audible click as her teeth came together. Without a word she turned around and headed out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her.

“Damn,” Chapel said. He started to wriggle his way out from under Julia, trying to remember where his pants were.

“We could just finish,” Julia said.

But the moment was lost, and she must have known it. With a sigh she rolled off him, and together they hunted the floor for his underwear.

Barefoot, and with one sleeve of his shirt flapping empty behind him, Chapel rushed around the motel looking for Angel. She wasn’t in her room — the door was hanging open and she didn’t answer when he called inside, nor when he looked. He padded along the sidewalk toward the little coffee shop the motel used as a restaurant, but all he managed to achieve by peering through its windows was to freak out a waitress. He waved in apology and moved on.

Finally he found Angel at the back of the motel, on a little patch of concrete bordered by gray and dusty weeds. She was standing by a vending machine, trying to force a taped-together dollar through the bill acceptor slot. It kept spitting the bill back at her.

“Angel,” he said, quietly. Not getting too close. He could hear Julia coming up behind him, but he waved his hand at her to tell her to slow down, to keep her distance.

He could tell that Angel was upset. Her shoulders were shaking, and when she turned to look at him, a tear fell out of her right eye.

“Angel, listen. It’s not what it looks like—”

Confusion and anger wrestled across her features. “What?”

Chapel cursed inwardly. “I mean. Okay, yes, you saw what you saw. But I don’t want you to think — I mean, I hope you don’t think that—”

“I did see what I saw. I can’t unsee it now,” Angel told him.

Chapel bit his lip. The absolute worst thing that could happen now was for him to get in a big fight with Angel. For one thing, somebody might see them — even worse, someone might think this was a domestic dispute and call the police. If they were caught now, Hollingshead didn’t stand a chance.

Even if nobody saw them, he needed Angel for his plan. If she decided she hated him and wanted nothing to do with him—

“I can see you’re upset,” he said.

“You’re damned right I’m upset,” Angel told her. “The director is about to be assassinated and you two don’t seem to care, you’re too busy fuh… too busy fu-f-f-f—”

“Fucking,” he said. No point evading it now

Angel nodded and looked away. Her cheeks were bright red.

This was what Julia had warned him about. Angel had a crush on him, and seeing him with another woman had destroyed her. “I am so sorry, Angel. But I want you to know why.”

“Why you’re fuh — why you’re with her?” Angel asked, shaking her head. “That, at least, I get. She’s beautiful and and curvy in the right places, and you have history, and—”

“You’re beautiful, too,” Chapel told her. “You’re sexy, too.”

Angel made a sound like she was about to start retching right there in the parking lot. “Oh my God,” she said.

“Angel, it’s okay,” he said, stepping closer to her, holding out his hand. She winced away from his touch.

“Oh my God.” Angel made the retching noise again. It was an awful hitching sound in the back of her throat that changed over time, becoming softer, becoming …

Laughter.

She leaned over, putting her hands on her knees. She couldn’t stand up from laughing so hard. Chapel had no idea what was going on.

“Oh my,” Angel said, but she couldn’t finish the exclamation because a new paroxysm of laughter seized her like a fit. “Oh my God. You thought — oh my—”

Chapel had no idea what to do except wait it out.

Eventually she managed to speak an entire sentence. “You thought I was jealous of you two.”

“Yes,” Chapel admitted.

“You thought — what? That I wanted to be with you? Like… like that?” She shook her head in disbelief. “Listen, Chapel. I know we flirt. Over the phone.”

“Yes,” Chapel said again. “We do.”

Angel fought to control herself. “There’s something you need to know. I flirt with you like that because it’s safe. Because I thought we were never actually going to meet in person, and anyway I knew you would never, you know, try anything. The truth of the matter is, Chapel, I really, really do not now nor have I ever wanted to have se — s-s-s-s—”

“Sex,” he supplied.

Angel nodded in gratitude. “Relations with you. I’m sorry. It’s not personal. But I have zero interest in, you know. Touching your special places. Or anything like that.”

Chapel considered what she’d said earlier. About Julia’s curves. “So you’re — that is… are you jealous of… Julia?”

“You mean, do I want to do that with girls? No, definitely not.”

“I don’t understand,” Chapel said.

Behind him, Julia made an exasperated noise. Clearly she wasn’t going to stay out of this any longer. She came up beside Chapel and took his arm. “She doesn’t want to have sex with anyone,” Julia told him.

“Not, you know. Typically,” Angel said.

Julia turned to Chapel. “Don’t you see? She was still in puberty when they started locking her up in those trailers. She never had a chance to figure things out.”

“You mean,” he said, looking back at Angel, “you’ve never—”

“Please don’t finish that sentence,” Angel asked him. “My stomach is feeling weird enough already.”

He nodded and shut his mouth. He was having a hard time believing all this, though. Angel had the sexiest voice he’d ever heard in his life. He’d gotten through a lot of dark times listening to her purr in his ear. And some of the things she’d suggested over a telephone line had been — well, now that he thought about it, he supposed she’d never said anything truly dirty. She’d never been graphic or detailed in her flirting. She had just said things that might be… suggestive, if you were in the right frame of mind to hear them that way. If you wanted to hear them that way.

“I flirt,” Angel explained to him, “but it’s kind of just… I don’t know. Experimental. I liked hearing how you reacted to it.”

“Even though you couldn’t understand why you liked that,” Julia prompted.

Angel’s mouth pursed in anger. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said.

“No, of course not,” Julia assured her.

“I’m fine,” Angel insisted. “I am absolutely fine.”

“Of course you are,” Julia said.

Chapel scratched at his head. “So when you walked in on us, you ran away—”

“Because I was grossed out,” Angel said. “Look, I enjoy the occasional hug or whatever. But when things get — you know. Sticky.” A wave of revulsion made her shiver. “I can’t handle it.”

“Okay,” Chapel said. “Look, enough said, all right?” He looked back at Julia. “Let’s all just pretend this never happened.”

Angel nodded agreeably.

Chapel moved closer to her and lifted his arm, thinking he would give her a quick hug to end things. But she shied away, putting her hands up to ward him off.

“No offense,” she said, “but right now, you kind of stink of it.”

He backed off.

Without saying anything more, Julia produced a couple of nearly fresh dollar bills from her pocket. Angel got the soda she wanted — something sweet with lots of caffeine, her favorite — and left without saying another word. When she was gone, Chapel leaned up against the vending machine and tried not to let his confusion completely overcome him.

Julia put a hand over her mouth and shook her head back and forth. “Jim, I’m so sorry—”

“Looks like you misread some signals, there,” he told her.

She looked toward Angel’s room, as if there would be some sign there to help her understand what they’d just heard. “Whoever did this to her …” she said.

“What, you mean hiding her away in trailers her whole life? It was that or send her to prison,” he said. “Anyway, she’s agoraphobic. She wants to live like that.”

Julia shook her head. “Sure. It makes her feel safe to be inside, away from people. But you don’t treat an alcoholic by locking them inside a bar.”

He had to admit she had a point.

“She’s missed out on so much,” Julia said. “If I ever find out who did this to her, who made her what she is — I’m going to tear their balls off.”

Teaming up with Wilkes had one major advantage: he had a credit card.

In fact, he had an unlimited corporate card from the NSA. The card was issued to a company called “Interstate Holdings,” but it drew on the endless coffers of one of the biggest black budgets in the country. It had been given to Wilkes when he was sent out to hunt for Chapel and Angel, and nobody had cut it off yet.

As a result, when Chapel headed out of the motel and south on the highway toward Washington, he was driving a slightly better car than he’d had before. Julia had the old beater that Ralph had bought for them, since she had her own destination to get to.

If they were going to save Hollingshead, they needed to approach the problem from several different angles. They had to split up.

The biggest issue they faced was that they didn’t know how it was going to be done. Originally Holman had wanted Wilkes to kill the director — she’d told him as much, maybe as a test to see what he was willing to do for her. But after Wilkes failed to kill Chapel in Pittsburgh, she had lost some of her faith in the marine. She’d told him she had a contingency plan in place and that he shouldn’t worry about it.

Which could mean just about anything. One of the MPs guarding Hollingshead might be a plant. Or they could have a sniper ready to shoot the director from half a mile away. The only real piece of data they had was that it was supposed to happen at midnight.

The plan they’d eventually come up with had been to get Chapel close enough to Hollingshead to protect him — and then to put pressure on Holman to call off the assassination. If half of the plan failed, the other half might still work.

It was a gamble, but Chapel had taken worse bets.

Chapel skirted Baltimore — he could not afford to get stuck in traffic — then rejoined 95 just before the Beltway. Working his way down past the airport and into Alexandria took some doing, but he knew these roads like the back of his hand and he was able to stash the car not too far from the marina where Hollingshead lived.

The marina sat at the north end of what was technically an island, though it came so close to touching the banks of the Potomac that it was hard to tell. The island had managed to avoid every wave of development in the twentieth century and was almost unused except as parkland. Chapel supposed that the people wealthy enough to keep their boats at the marina liked it that way. The northern half of the island was basically a giant parking lot for boats, a haul-out facility filled with small pleasure craft up on trailers. South of there were the actual slips where the bigger vessels, the ones that couldn’t be brought on land for the winter, still bobbed in the river. Hollingshead’s yacht was about as far as you could get from the road, of course — that was how these things always worked. Chapel had considered going in by water, shimmying up a dripping line with a knife between his teeth like a pirate, maybe. But he couldn’t get his artificial arm wet and he wasn’t willing to part with it, so he had to approach by land.

The problem with that, of course, was that Charlotte Holman had posted armed guards all over the marina, to stop Hollingshead from meeting with anyone.

Good thing Chapel had been trained for this kind of job.

Another thing they’d bought with Wilkes’s magic credit card was a hands-free unit and a burner phone. As Chapel slipped between two parked boat trailers at the edge of the marina grounds, he put in the earpiece and slipped the phone into his pocket.

“Angel,” he said. “You there?”

“You know it, baby,” she replied.

He tried very hard not to let the sound of her voice send shivers down his spine. He failed. It was just how they worked together.

And it was magnificent.

“It’s so good to have you back where you belong,” he told her. “Perched on my shoulder, working as my guardian angel.”

“Tell me about it. I’ve been so useless up to now. It’s good to be back on a mission with you, even if I have to do it from this Internet café. There’s three other people here. So I may have to watch what I say.”

“Do they look like hired killers or NSA spies?”

She laughed. “No. They look like sleepy grad students from the university, trying to get their papers written before class tomorrow. But you can’t be too careful.”

“Fair enough,” he replied.

“Give me some time here to work up the imaging,” she told him.

Chapel took a second to breathe. He looked out at the lights of Washington across the river, watched them dance as they were reflected in the water. In the distance he could hear lines jingling as they slapped against bollards, hear the repetitive dull thudding of the boats bobbing in their slips. The night air was crisp on his exposed face and he felt himself centering. Feeling good. It had been way too long since he’d worked a mission like this, the way it was supposed to be done.

Of course, complacency could get you killed.

His back began to ache from crouching so low, so he straightened up a little to put his weight on different muscles. He closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath.

And that was when he was spotted.

“Hey!” someone called out. “Marina’s closed!”

Chapel craned his head around to see a man in a gray shirt and dark pants — a navy uniform. He was carrying an M4 rifle and he was maybe twenty yards away.

No chance of taking the guy down from that distance, not with Chapel’s sidearm still tucked in its holster. No chance to run away, either.

“Come on out of there,” the MP told him. “Hands out.”

Chapel nodded and stepped out from between the boat trailers. It was dark enough that he didn’t think the MP would be able to see his holster. If he played this calm, it might give him another few seconds before he was arrested. “Sorry, Officer, I was just—”

“Don’t call me ‘officer,’ ” the MP said. “Reach into your pocket very slowly and take out your ID. You own one of these boats?”

“That’s right,” Chapel said. Slowly he moved his good hand toward his back pocket. Where his wallet might be, if he was carrying one. “I have the registration card right here.” Did boats have registrations like cars? He had no idea. But it sounded good. Smiling, he walked straight toward the MP. “I left some important stuff in the boat last time I was down here, figured I would just duck in and get it, is that okay?”

“Not tonight it’s not,” the MP said.

“Sorry, I had no idea,” Chapel told him. They were almost close enough to touch. “Here, my ID,” he said.

The MP lowered his rifle a little, reaching for what he thought Chapel was going to hand him.

Except instead of a driver’s license it was a Glock 9 mm.

“Shit,” the MP said.

“Yeah,” Chapel told him. “Now, if you’ll—”

Maybe the MP thought Chapel was going to kill him then and there. He moved so fast he might have thought he was fighting for his life. His rifle came up, not to shoot Chapel, but to knock the pistol out of Chapel’s hand.

The move surprised Chapel. He lost the gun, and his hand suddenly stung with pain.

Chapel knew what to do next. The only thing he could do if he didn’t want to die or be arrested right here. Time seemed to slow down as he went through the movements he’d had drilled into him a thousand times.

Step in — he moved his left foot in between the MP’s feet, closing the distance between them, making it impossible for the MP to shoot Chapel or use his rifle as a club.

Unbalance your opponent — Chapel brought his good arm up, bent at the elbow, and shoved it into the MP’s neck, pushing the man to one side, off his center of balance. The MP had no choice but to change his footing or fall over. The MP did the obvious thing — he tried to dance sideways, to get his balance back. Which set Chapel up perfectly for the third movement.

Trip and control — Chapel’s left foot twisted around the MP’s calf and suddenly balance just wasn’t possible. The MP went crashing to the ground, with Chapel’s foot directing him until he was lying on his back, his arms splayed out to the sides to try to break the fall.

In a second Chapel had his spare pistol — his P228 — out and in his hand. “Don’t move,” he told the MP. “And don’t make a sound.”

The man nodded in agreement.

That was when Angel’s voice came back in his earpiece. “I’ve got that imaging now, sweetie,” she said. “We can get started.”

“Actually, there’s been a change of plan,” Chapel said.

North across town, about a mile away from the White House, Wilkes sat in his car and waited for a signal. He had a bag of potato chips and a two-liter bottle of soda and he would have been perfectly happy to sit there all night if the mission hadn’t required exact timing. As it was, he was beginning to get concerned.

In sniper school they’d taught him that worry was pointless. If you wasted time on things you couldn’t control, you harmed your readiness for the things you could. Far better to spend your time maintaining your equipment, or feeding yourself to keep up your energy, or doing anything more constructive than worrying about what might or might not be.

They’d taught him that lesson very well. Well enough that now he was only peripherally aware that there was less than an hour remaining before Hollingshead’s scheduled execution. Even if things worked perfectly from here, he was going to have to make great time.

At least one thing worked out. Fifteen minutes late, maybe, but there was the signal. A newspaper tucked into the slats of a decorative bench across the street.

Wilkes flashed his headlights twice, very quickly. There weren’t very many people out and about on the street to be annoyed. None of them seemed to notice.

Well, one person had. A dark shape stepped out of an alley and moved quickly to the passenger-side door of Wilkes’s car. He unlocked it, and the shape opened the door and ducked inside.

“It wasn’t easy getting away,” Charlotte Holman told him. She was dressed in a black trench coat and had her hair wrapped in a kerchief. “The SecDef is keeping me at his side twenty-four seven until after the president’s speech tomorrow. Supposedly so I can give him constant updates. I think he’s actually starting to get afraid of me.”

Wilkes favored her with a big friendly smile. He held out the bag of chips in case she wanted one. The way she turned up her lip told him she didn’t.

“You’ve been out of contact for a while,” she told him. “I haven’t heard anything from either of you in far too long. I think you’re a bad influence on him.”

“Him?” Wilkes asked.

“Paul. Paul Moulton. Where is he? He should be here with you.”

“Funny thing about that,” Wilkes told her. “He’s dead.”

Her eyes went very wide. “When?” she asked. “How?” She shook her head. “Never mind. It was Chapel, obviously. He’s alive, isn’t he? Goddamnit, I knew right from the start we should have followed him from NSA headquarters and killed him quietly before he could even get to New York. But Moulton thought we needed to establish a connection between him and the Angel system. Poor Paul!” She took a deep breath. “His sacrifice won’t be in vain.”

“Maybe,” Wilkes said.

She stared at him. “Don’t tell me there’s more bad news.”

“Just one thing,” he said, slapping his hands together to get some of the grease and fragments of potato chip off his fingers. Then he grabbed the stun gun at his side and brought it around very fast, fast enough she probably didn’t see it before its prongs touched her neck.

A nice thing about running an operation in a marina was that you could always find plenty of rope. Chapel had his captive MP trussed up and gagged and dumped in an old rowboat before anybody had time to call for help. There was a problem, though. The MP had a walkie-talkie on his belt and any second now his superior was going to call him to ask for a report. Chapel had had the same problem back at the beginning of all this, outside of Angel’s trailer. At the time, he had just had to accept his time was limited. That wasn’t going to work here.

“I’ve got an idea,” Angel said. “Take out your phone and snap a picture of the radio for me.”

Chapel did as he was told. “What exactly will this achieve?” he asked.

“It tells me the make and model of the walkie-talkie,” Angel replied. “Knowing that, I can look up the specifications for it on the Internet. Knowing the specifications… here. Turn it on and see what happens.”

Chapel adjusted a knob on the face of the radio. A squeal of white noise came from the speaker.

“Walkie-talkies all work on different frequencies,” she explained. “This brand is a multichannel unit, but all those channels are in the same general part of the spectrum. I’ve tied into the local cell-phone towers, and now I’m jamming all the possible frequencies this radio can pick up.”

“I had no idea you could do that.”

“Sugar,” Angel said, “we’ve been out of touch too long. You’ve forgotten the principle rule when dealing with me. I can do anything, as long as it’s attached to a computer. In fact, I can do more than this. Give me a second.”

Chapel huddled over the radio, watching the marina in every direction. It didn’t take long for Angel to come back.

“Once they realize they’re being jammed, the MPs might get suspicious and start looking around for the source. So now I’m spoofing them as well.”

A deep, masculine voice swam up out of the static from the walkie-talkie. Chapel couldn’t understand much of what it was saying in the midst of all that white noise, but he definitely heard the voice say “all clear.”

“Who is that?” Chapel asked.

“That’s me,” Angel said. She laughed. “I recorded my own voice, then slowed it down and changed the pitch a little. I have no idea if any of the MPs sound like that, but given the static it might be enough to fool them.”

Chapel couldn’t help but smile in the dark. “You really are something.”

“Tell me that again the next time you see me. Right now, you’ve got a rendezvous to make.”

Inside the flight electronics of the MQ-9 Reaper, an electronic clock ticked over to a new second and sent a signal to the command module. A new program loaded into the machine’s memory and began to run.

The screen of the Reaper’s stick jockey, back at Creech Air Force Base, went black. The men in the room around the remote pilot lurched forward, hitting keys and asking questions, but there was nothing to be done. All telemetry was lost, all command channels shut down. The Reaper had gone rogue.

A second signal from the command module armed the single Hellfire missile that nestled against the Reaper’s belly. It was ready to fire as soon as its target had been acquired.

A third signal went to the unmanned aircraft’s rudder, turning it from its previous course. It banked to the left, over the streets of Washington, its single camera eye tracking the lights below.

One MP was down by the river, watching for any boats that might try to pull up alongside the yacht and rescue Hollingshead. He didn’t seem to expect any kind of threat to come from the land. Chapel padded up behind him and got him in a sleeper hold and he went down without so much as a squeak of protest.

Another MP was guarding the entrance to the slips, a natural choke point — nobody could get to the yacht without passing him. He faced the darkened marina buildings and he never turned around, so Chapel was at a loss as to how he would sneak up on the man.

In the end he caught a lucky break. He saw the man’s chin droop. Saw his grip on his rifle go slack. The man was falling asleep on his feet. Chapel waited until he was just about to fall over on his own — then made sure he at least didn’t fall off the dock and into the water. He put the MP down in the cool grass and hog-tied him.

Only two left.

They were going to be a major problem, though. The two of them were up on the deck of the yacht, working together. Maybe Chapel could get to one of them without being seen, but the seconds he needed to take the man down would leave him vulnerable to the other MP, who would surely just open fire and end Chapel’s mission in the most definitive way.

From the shadows, Chapel studied the yacht. It was about thirty feet long, with a high main deck and a broad wheelhouse. The name Themis was stenciled on its stern, and it looked like the cleanest and best-maintained vessel in the marina.

The only way on board, as far as Chapel could see, was a gangplank in full view of the two guards. He might be able to climb onto the boat from the water side, but that didn’t seem practical — he would make so much noise in the water that he would be sure to attract their attention.

The one thing he had going for him was that they had no idea what was going on. They kept fiddling with their walkie-talkies, and he could hear them debating what the white noise and the voice saying “all clear” really meant. They were confused and worried, but they didn’t know who was out there or what was coming for them.

In the end Chapel had to use the oldest trick in the book. Divide and conquer.

He ran back to where he’d left the MP by the entrance to the slips. The man was still fast asleep and his ropes were secure. Chapel wasn’t so much interested in the man, though, as he was in his rifle. He picked up the M4 and set its selector to burst fire. Then he fired three shots into the ground, the noise explosive and deafening in the quiet of the deserted marina.

He looped back to the yacht, avoiding the shortest possible route. Much as he’d expected, when he arrived back at the slip, one of the MPs had already come down the gangplank and was hurrying in the direction of the noise, clearly intending to investigate the gunfire.

Chapel let him get out of sight of the yacht before swooping in and taking the man down. Only one left, then. He headed back to the yacht and waited in the shadows until the last MP started fumbling with his radio, clearly looking for an update from his vanished friend.

Chapel wasn’t going to get a better chance. He rushed forward, pounding across the gangplank, a pistol clutched in both of his hands, the barrel pointed right at the MP. “Don’t move!” he shouted. “Down on the ground!”

Maybe the MP could tell that Chapel wasn’t willing to kill him. Maybe he just didn’t like being told what to do. He chose the one action Chapel wasn’t prepared for, the one that ruined everything. He stood his ground. Lifting his M4 to his eye, he started shouting back, almost echoing Chapel word for word.

“Looks like we have a standoff,” Chapel told him as they aimed their weapons at each other.

“Doesn’t look like that at all to me,” the MP said.

“Oh? How’s that?”

“You’ve got a pistol. I’ve got an assault rifle,” the MP pointed out. “That means I have the advantage. You have to aim.”

It was a fair point. Chapel had no doubt he could kill or incapacitate the man with one shot, and at this range he wasn’t likely to miss. But pistol shots didn’t just knock people down or make them incapable of pulling their own triggers. The MP could cut Chapel in half with automatic fire at any time.

“Maybe we can just talk about this,” Chapel pointed out.

“Maybe you can throw that gun in the water,” the MP replied. “Then maybe you can get down on your knees and lock your fingers behind your head, like—”

He didn’t finish his sentence. Instead he looked very confused for a second, and then he lowered his weapon. With one hand he reached behind himself and touched his back and when he brought his hand around to his face, it was covered in blood.

In another second he was facedown on the boards of the deck, collapsed in a spreading pool of darkness. The hilt of a big hunting knife stuck up from his back.

Behind him, Chapel could see Wilkes perched on the far rail, a mischievous grin on his face. “Miss me?” he asked.

“Jesus,” Chapel said. “You didn’t have to kill him.”

“Yeah, I did,” Wilkes insisted. “If I just winged him, he would have opened fire. You’d be a goner.”

Chapel didn’t have time to argue. He went to the rail where Wilkes perched and looked over the side, down into the small powerboat Wilkes had brought up along the yacht’s hull. “I didn’t hear you coming.”

“I cut the engine about a quarter mile out,” Wilkes said. “Paddled the rest of the way. Figured if there were any police boats out here I didn’t really want to meet ’em.”

Chapel could see why. A body was stuffed into the powerboat, its hands bound and its head covered in a black sack. That would be Charlotte Holman. “Just tell me she’s still alive.”

Wilkes slapped Chapel on the back. “It’s your show, buddy. I just follow orders.”

Then he dropped back down into the powerboat and, with just a touch of its engine, brought it around the side of the yacht. Together Chapel and Wilkes lifted Holman out of the smaller vessel and carried her across the gangplank. She didn’t fight them, though Chapel could tell she was awake.

He pulled the hood off her head and helped her to her feet. Wilkes hadn’t bothered to gag her. Most likely he’d threatened to kill her the instant she made the slightest sound.

“I’m sorry about the rough treatment,” Chapel told her. “Really.”

She snarled at him. “Fucking Boy Scout. If you were more like him,” she said, nodding in Wilkes’s direction, “life would be so much easier.”

Chapel shrugged and grabbed the rope that bound her hands. He marched her down a short stairway to the lower deck of the yacht. A companionway ran the length of the vessel, with doors opening on four sides. “Director Hollingshead?” he called out. “Are you here? It’s Jim Chapel.”

A doorway popped open at the bow end of the corridor. The director peered out of the shadows beyond. He was dressed in pajamas with a neat pinstripe, and he wasn’t wearing his glasses, so his eyes looked small and only half open. Apparently he’d been sleeping.

He also had a big silver revolver in his hand. Clearly he’d been ready for whoever had come to wake him up. Maybe, Chapel thought, he could have kept the assassins at bay on his own.

“Son,” the director said, “I assume you have a good reason for being here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hollingshead nodded. Then he peered down the darkened corridor at the other two people in the narrow space. “Blast,” he said. He disappeared for a second and came back with his glasses. “Charlotte? And… Wilkes?” He shook his head. “The whole menagerie. Well, ah, I suppose if I’m entertaining I should make some coffee.”

The main cabin of the yacht was a cozy room with a low ceiling, all finished wood and brass. It was warm and the carpet was soft. When Chapel tried to pull out a chair, however, he found that it was bolted to the floor.

“This is a seagoing yacht,” the director explained. He still wore his pajamas, but he’d put on a silk dressing robe as well. He handed a coffee mug to Wilkes and another to Chapel. Holman didn’t get one, but then, her hands were still tied. “I always considered the possibility that I might, have to — you know. Make a sea crossing on short notice.” He gave them a wry smile.

“You should have gone to Russia the second the secretary of defense relieved you of duty,” Holman said. “You might have had a chance, then. Like Snowden.”

The director favored her with one of his most genial smiles. “Please have a seat, Charlotte. I have no desire for you to be uncomfortable.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “Whatever indignities I suffer tonight, I’ll come out on top. These two will get thirty years for kidnapping. And as for you, Rupert — I imagine we’ll be shipping you to a secret detention facility overseas. You won’t be coming back.”

Hollingshead’s smile never faded. “Looks like we have nothing to lose, then! I take it, boys, that if she’s here, then you’ve managed to dig a few things up.” He turned to face Chapel.

“That’s right, sir,” Chapel said. “For instance, we know she was a major player in the Cyclops Initiative.” He had played enough poker with Wilkes to know not to let on that he still had no idea what the Cyclops Initiative was. “Her workgroup over at the NSA was directly responsible for hijacking the drones in California and in New Orleans, and for the robot that tried to blow up Angel’s trailer.”

A brief flash of something like worry crossed the director’s face. It disappeared almost instantly. Chapel had a feeling that if they ever sat down to a hand of Texas Hold ’Em, Hollingshead could give Wilkes a run for his money.

“Most important,” he continued, “and why we’re here now, is the fact that we know she’s planning on having you executed at midnight. That is, in” — he checked his watch — “about ten minutes.”

“We’ll keep you safe, sir,” Wilkes said. He pulled a pistol from his belt and laid it on a table.

“If that’s even necessary,” Chapel said. “I’m thinking that if Holman is here, her assassins won’t attack. They’ll abort, rather than risk harming her by mistake.”

“Oh, you think so, do you?” Holman asked.

Chapel turned to face her. “Are you going to tell me I’m wrong?”

She gave him a nasty smile. “Yes,” she said. “In a few minutes, Captain Chapel, you’re going to be dead. So will Rupert. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Up in the wind, high over Alexandria, the Reaper made one last, tight turn and began its final run, straight and true, straight for its target.

Normally it had to search for its prey for hours, sifting through signals in a variety of spectra, or homing in on a particular cellular phone or the IP address of a computer. This time its masters had made things easy. They’d given it a set of map coordinates. The Reaper consulted the GPS satellites one last time and began its descent.

Already the hunter was being hunted. Waves of active secondary radar washed over its hull, demanding its transponder codes. Fighter jets had been scrambled to bring it down if it didn’t respond. None of that mattered — its masters had assumed this would happen, but they’d also known exactly how long it would take for the fighter jets to find and destroy the Reaper. Approximately three minutes too long, in point of fact. The Reaper’s defection, the parameters of its final mission, had been designed around that timetable.

Nothing in the air could stop it before it could launch its deadly payload.

Wilkes lifted a hand as if he would strike Holman across the face.

Only Hollingshead stopped him. In this case by clearing his throat. “Is there something you’d like to tell us, Charlotte?”

“The assassination can’t be aborted or stopped or even postponed,” she said. “If we don’t run away from here, right now and as fast as our legs will carry us, we’ll all die. Even then, there’s no guarantee we’ll make it to safety in time.”

Chapel stared at her. “Surely you don’t want that.”

“I don’t have much choice. Unless you let me go. It’s your only chance, Captain. It’s the only chance any of us have. What time is it?”

He glanced at his watch. “Three ’til.”

“And that’s assuming your watch isn’t slow,” she told him.

Chapel turned to look at the director. “Sir, maybe you should get out of here.”

Hollingshead sighed. “Unless that’s what she wants. Perhaps there’s a sniper out there waiting for me to step out onto the deck and make myself a target.”

Chapel reached for the hands-free unit in his ear. “Angel, what about imaging? Do you see anyone out there? Anybody skulking around?”

“Negative.”

“There’s nobody out there,” he told the rest of them. “Unless—” He slapped his forehead.

“You’ve figured it out, have you?” Holman asked. “We’re the NSA, Captain. We don’t have field agents. Much less human assassins. When we want to kill someone—”

“They send a drone,” Chapel said.

Wilkes jumped up and ran to the stairs that led above deck.

“You can’t send an abort signal?” Chapel asked. “Even if we gave you access to a computer, a phone, whatever?”

Holman laughed. “No. We knew we weren’t going to change our minds. Hollingshead knows too much — he has to die. If I’m going to die as well, then so be it. The Initiative will go on without me. What time is it?”

“Thirty seconds,” Chapel told her. “You could call them, call whoever it is you answer to, get them to—”

“There is no abort signal,” Holman said. She closed her eyes. He could tell she was trying to play it cool, but she was shaking, her breath coming raggedly as fear overcame her. “Good-bye, Captain. Good-bye, Rupert—”

An electronic signal from the Reaper’s command module readied itself to trigger. It only needed to run down a length of wire, headed for a contact point where the aircraft met the AGM-114 Hellfire missile it bore. When the signal reached the missile, its thruster would fire and the missile would streak down toward its target, the yacht Themis. It was designed to blow apart armored vehicles. The yacht, which was mostly made of fiberglass, would provide little resistance.

Before the missile could launch, however, Julia Taggart stood up from where she’d been lying in a rowboat a few hundred meters south of the marina and lifted a FIM-92 Stinger missile launcher to her shoulder.

“Ten o’clock high,” Angel said, in her ear.

The launcher weighed thirty-five pounds, but Julia had done a lot of Pilates and she managed it. She slammed the Battery Coolant Unit into the handguard, just as Wilkes had shown her. In the complicated eyepiece, the sky turned blue and yellow, with a big orange dot right where Angel had said it would be.

No need to aim. The Stinger was designed to be foolproof. Fire and forget.

Julia pulled the trigger. Fwoosh. The missile jumped out of its launch tube with a modest noise, followed a second later by a bone-shaking roar as its rocket motor kicked in.

“Drop the launcher and get out of there!” Angel said.

Julia tossed the launcher over the side of her boat and let it sink in the Potomac. She pulled the cord on the boat’s little outboard motor and started downriver, away from the yacht, away from everything.

Behind and far above her, the Stinger tracked the Reaper by its heat signature. It adjusted its course to home in on the drone, and they met in a burst of light and heat and smoke that filled up half the sky. The noise followed a moment later, loud enough to make the boat rock back and forth.

Julia did not turn around to watch.

She did let a little smile cross her face.

“Badass,” she said.

At the last second, Holman clamped her eyes shut and buried her face in her shoulder, as if that could protect her from a Hellfire strike. The noise and light of the explosion made her cry out in terror.

When she finally opened her eyes again and looked up, Hollingshead was standing over her, peering down at her through his thick glasses.

“Charlotte, my boys aren’t fools. They knew you might send a drone.”

Wilkes came thudding down the stairs from the deck. “It’s awesome out there.” He laughed. “Every car alarm from here to Foggy Bottom is going off.”

Holman’s eyes went wide. “You blew it up? You blew up a plane this close to Ronald Reagan airport?”

“To be fair, it was a drone, not a plane,” Chapel pointed out.

Holman shook her head. “Every cop in D.C. is going to be after you now.”

“Because of you they already were,” Chapel told her.

He knew she was right, though. They had only a few minutes before the entire river would swarm with police boats. Still, heading out by water was the better option. Moving overland would be impossible. The capital police drilled constantly for something like this and they would act quickly to shut down every road in the city. Chapel didn’t intend to go very far, but he wanted to be away from the epicenter of the search, and soon.

So he needed to get Holman talking now.

“Director, sir,” he said, “forgive me, but we need to get you dressed, and we all need to get out of here.” Hollingshead nodded and stepped out of the room. “But the big question,” Chapel said, turning to Wilkes, “is whether we take her with us when we go, or just leave her here for the police to find her.”

Holman snorted. “You think I’m worried about them finding me here? I can make up any story I want as to why I’m handcuffed in a traitor’s yacht.”

“I’m sure they’d believe you, too. A respected official of a government agency, held against her will. It would be hard to make anything stick to you, even your involvement in the Cyclops Initiative.”

Holman narrowed her eyes. “There’s a ‘but’ in there, isn’t there?”

“Maybe an ‘unless.’ We can’t make anything stick without evidence. The problem for you,” Chapel told her, “is that we have some now. We have Wilkes.”

“His involvement was highly compartmentalized.”

Chapel nodded. This was where he had to start playing real poker. “As far as you know, yes. But he was there when you ordered us all killed. He was there when you said you planned on assassinating the director. And he kept his ears open the whole time. He met other people in the Initiative as well. Spoke with them. They’re all dead now or out of the way. You’re the only one left. The question you need to ask yourself is this: How much does he know? How much can he prove? And if the answer is anything more than ‘nothing,’ you know you’re in serious shit.”

She winced as if the obscenity stung her.

Chapel took a breath. “This ‘Cyclops Initiative’ thing? It’s over. It failed. Now it looks to me like you have one chance to beat a treason charge,” he said. “And that’s to tell us everything, right now. Otherwise Wilkes is going to find the closest reporter and start giving interviews.”

Holman turned to look at the marine. “You wouldn’t dare. I know you well enough that—”

“You know me? I was a triple agent right under your nose for three years,” Wilkes pointed out. “You know jack, lady.”

Director Hollingshead stepped back into the cabin, dressed now in pants and a blazer over his pajama top. “Shall we head out, boys? I have a motor launch moored in the next slip over. It will allow us to make a, ah, more expeditious retreat than if we tried to move the yacht.”

“On it,” Wilkes said, and he stomped back up onto the deck.

“Sir,” Chapel said, “did you hear my conversation with Subdirector Holman?”

“I did, son.” Hollingshead took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. “So what will it be?” he asked her.

She was breathing heavily by then, as if she were about to have a panic attack. “Rupert — I want your word as a gentleman. You’ll protect me from any fallout.”

“To the best of my ability,” he said and gave her a little bow. “Of course, in exchange for my protection—”

“Everything,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything.”