The Cyclops Initiative

PART 5

“Okay,” Angel said. She tapped the keypad of her laptop, and a green light came on next to the camera. “We’re ready.” She glanced over at Chapel, and he supposed she was asking him what to say next, but he had no idea. He’d never done this before. So he just nodded.

Angel swallowed and looked straight into the camera. “The following is an interview with Charlotte Holman, subdirector of the National Security Agency, recorded March twenty-sixth, 20 —, starting at… 3:18 A.M.” She nodded once at the camera, then turned the laptop around so that the camera faced Holman. “Please confirm your identity.”

“I’m Charlotte Holman.”

Chapel walked over to where Angel sat in a folding metal chair. It was one of two, and they comprised the only furniture in the tiny room. They were in the cellar of a DIA safe house just across the river from Washington. A place where foreign spies were taken to be debriefed. Hollingshead believed it was the safest place they had access to, a place the NSA didn’t know about.

The perfect place to carry out an interrogation. “All the levels look good?” Chapel asked Angel. “You’ve got plenty of memory?”

“It’s all fine, Chapel. Go ahead and start. You can—”

“Hold on,” he said. His stomach had just flip-flopped. It had been doing that every so often. He’d assumed it was just nerves, or the fact that he wasn’t eating properly. Normally it just twitched a couple of times and that was it. This time it lasted longer. It didn’t hurt, it just felt weird.

Angel’s expression changed to one of concern. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Fine. A little exhausted. I’ll try to get some sleep after this, if I can,” he told her. Then he walked over to where Holman sat. He remained standing as he interviewed her.

“We want to ask you some questions,” Chapel said. “About the Cyclops Initiative. First off, I’d like to know why.”

Holman’s brow furrowed. “Why?”

Chapel pinned her with his gaze. “Why you crashed a Predator drone into the Port of New Orleans. Why you took down the power grid in California. Do you admit that you did those things?”

“Yes, of course. We also manipulated the stock market. Oh, and we released a virus into the Internet that slowed down electronic transactions. That was one of Paul’s favorite parts of this. He was really quite proud — you see, the people who run e-commerce sites are always looking for ways to speed up transactions, to make it easier to buy and sell online than it is in the real world. Just adding code to sabotage those transactions wouldn’t have worked, because the software engineers would have noticed it right away and cut it out on their own. What Paul did was add an upstream checksum function at the level of the banks funding the…” She stopped herself. She blinked as if remembering where she was. “I… I’m guessing you didn’t know about that. You look surprised.”

“We’ll get to that later. But you’re not answering my question. Why did you do all this?”

“To soften the economy,” Holman said, with a smile. “Do you have any cigarettes? I gave up smoking years ago, but this feels like a good time to start again.”

“No. I don’t have any cigarettes. Answer the question, please.”

“The question?”

Chapel fought to control himself. “Why?”

“We attacked the economy because we wanted people to care.”

“What people?”

“The American people, of course. That’s where the name comes from. The Cyclops part. The American people are like a Cyclops, a giant of immense power but capable of seeing only one thing at a time. For years now, the leaders of the country have known this. They’ve used it to shape the discourse, to move national politics in the direction they want. Look at the Iraq war. After September eleventh, the people couldn’t see anything, couldn’t deal with any issue except terrorism. The Bush White House claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — well, who knows. Maybe they really thought that was true. Or maybe it was a convenient excuse. They got the war they wanted. Later on, after the economic collapse in 2008, the only thing the people could talk about was the economy. About money. Which provided the impetus to bail out the banks, the auto industry, later on the insurance companies and the hospitals. All of it on the dime of the people who were already hurting financially. Because we told them it would improve the economy.”

Chapel gritted his teeth. “Maybe we can save the conspiracy theories for later.”

Holman laughed. “Theories? This is all a matter of historical fact. For a generation now, the two political parties have exploited the public’s single-mindedness to line the pockets of their friends and cronies. They’ve dismantled the American state piece by piece, sold it off to the highest bidder—”

“Enough,” Chapel said. “This isn’t a propaganda video. Get to the point. You don’t like the way the country’s being run, fine. So you started your own conspiracy to fight that?”

“The Initiative is made up of people who understand that the real problems of this country are being ignored,” Holman told him. “Climate change running amok. Income inequality so profound the only logical outcome is class warfare. Globalism and automation leading to double-digit unemployment. These are the things that need to be addressed, and yet no politician will touch them. It was clear to us we needed to remove the politicians from the equation.”

Chapel raised an eyebrow. “And how exactly do you plan on doing that?”

“By putting power in the hands of the one branch of government that doesn’t take its orders from a fickle public: the military. The point of the Cyclops Initiative is to engineer a military coup in the United States.”

“The idea was quite simple. The people of this country care about only one thing right now: the economy. As long as the politicians keep making promises, though, the people remain complacent — unwilling to actually take any action on their own. They would rather let a few hundred people inside the Beltway make the decisions for them. We needed to wake the people up — wake the sleeping giant, as it were.”

“By way of terror attacks on American assets,” Chapel said.

Holman shrugged. “We would create a situation where the economy was in such a shambles that civil order would break down. We would incite riots and social disorder — which is exactly what we’ve accomplished in California. Soon that chaos will spread across the country. The governors of the states will call in the National Guard, but of course, they aren’t prepared for something of this magnitude. They’ll need to bring in the regular military for assistance in restoring order. The legislature and the executive will be forced to give the military more and more power to aid them in containing the panic, and in the end the Joint Chiefs of Staff will simply assume command. They will declare a state of emergency and dissolve Congress. At that point, the real work can begin.”

Holman sat up very straight in her chair. She’d had a very long night, Chapel knew. She’d been kidnapped by a deranged marine. Dragged halfway across the city. Thought she was going to be blown up by a Hellfire missile, but instead she’d been brought to a windowless little room underground and forced to confess to all her sins.

But now she reached up and patted her hair. Brushed some lint from the front of her blazer. Suddenly she cared very much how she looked.

Chapel realized with a start that what he’d thought was an interrogation under duress was in fact a chance for her to say something she’d been holding in for a very long time. To express how proud she was of herself.

“We aren’t terrorists, you see,” she told him, and the camera. “We’re patriots. We love this country. We love what it used to be. What it has the potential to become again. But if we continue down this same suicidal course, if we can’t rise above ourselves to face the challenges of the twenty-first century, then—”

“Stop,” Chapel said.

“You wanted to know why,” she told him.

“Sure. I think we’ve got that. You think that to save America you need to cancel democracy. Depose all the elected leaders and put generals and admirals in their place.”

“You’re a soldier. You must know they would do a better job.”

Chapel shook his head. He didn’t want to get into an argument about this, but he could barely help himself. “I don’t know that at all. The officers I’ve known have been mostly good people, sure.”

“People with a firm grasp on reality,” Holman said.

“Fine. Yeah, because they have to be. If every decision you make means life or death for somebody, yeah, you tend to drop the rhetoric and stop worrying about how popular you are. But there’s another side to that. You get too focused. You have an objective to meet — say, you need to take a hill or secure a town. And everything you have goes into meeting that objective. But to do that, you sacrifice the bigger picture. You can’t worry about why your superiors wanted that hill or that town. You can’t waste mental energy thinking about why the war started. You can only think about how to finish it.”

“And that’s exactly the kind of focus we need,” Holman insisted. “Get some people in place who can fix things. And then maybe in ten years, or maybe twenty, then the military can restore democracy and let us try again.”

“Assuming that when that day comes, the generals and admirals just decide to hand power back to the people. Without a fight.”

Holman shook her head. “Maybe it won’t be that easy. But it’s necessary. It has to happen.”

“Except it isn’t going to,” Chapel told her.

“What?”

“It’s not going to happen now. The Initiative is over, one way or another. Because you’re going to tell me how to stop it.”

All the air seemed to drain out of the room. Holman was beat, and she clearly knew it. But she was a proud woman. The kind of person who thought she knew better than everyone else, who was clear minded and certain about her right to be in charge. Chapel might as well have just slapped her across the face.

He might have felt bad about that, if she hadn’t been responsible for dozens of people losing their lives and the West Coast descending into chaos.

“You’re going to start by telling me the names of everyone you know who’s part of the Initiative,” Chapel told her. “Let’s begin with the top level. You must have been pretty high up, since you were in charge of the operational end. But from what I’ve heard so far, none of this was your idea, originally.”

“No,” Holman said.

“So who’s in charge? Who’s number one in this thing?”

She blinked at him. “You don’t know that? But — you must. I assumed … I… It’s Patrick Norton.”

Chapel’s mouth went dry. He really wanted to sit down.

“Wait,” he said. “Hold on. The secretary of defense—”

“Yes. The SecDef. He was the initiator for all this. He’s overseen it every step of the way. Who else could engineer a military coup?”

Chapel had to go lean against a wall. He glanced at Angel. She looked just as shocked as he felt. He’d known this thing went pretty far up. But the cabinet—

“You didn’t know,” she said. All the color had drained out of her face.

She must have just realized that Chapel was bluffing. That he had far less information — and control over the situation — than he’d claimed.

He supposed it had to happen eventually.

Holman pursed her lips. She looked like she could barely sit still in her chair. “I think I may have made a mistake. You said everyone else was dead or under wraps. I assumed that meant you had Norton, too. That you had him in a room like this somewhere.” She shook her head. “What a fool I’ve been. You didn’t know anything, did you?”

“Let’s get back on track,” Chapel said. “Tell me about—”

“No,” she said, her eyes wild. “I agreed to talk because I thought the Initiative was going to fail. My God, I gave Rupert far too much credit. You haven’t stopped Norton. You haven’t stopped anything.”

“We can still—”

“No, Captain. No. You can’t. It’s already in motion. This is the day it happens. The day of the coup. And you aren’t ready for it.”

Upstairs, they gathered around a kitchen table. Wilkes, Angel, Hollingshead. And Julia, who had a right to hear this if anybody did.

“Tomorrow morning — this morning, I guess,” Chapel told them, “in about five hours, the president is going to make a speech before Congress. An emergency address to talk about the riots in California and how scared everyone is. From what we know, he’s going to reveal that it’s all been a series of terrorist attacks. We think he’s going to blame the Chinese, although I doubt he’ll come out and say so directly. As far as we can tell he has no idea about the Initiative or about Norton. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going to get to finish that speech.”

Hollingshead blinked rapidly behind his thick glasses. “Son, are you saying — they’re going to, ah, assassinate the president?”

“I believe that’s the plan,” Chapel said. “And not just him. The vice president will be there. So will the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate. If they all die, well… the head of the Initiative, Patrick Norton, has been chosen as the designated survivor for this speech. As secretary of defense, he’s sixth in line to become acting president. If the secretaries of state and the Treasury are at this speech too, which is likely, then he could become commander in chief in one blow.”

Julia gasped. Angel looked like she might be sick.

“Holman wouldn’t give me any details of the attack. She shut down as soon as she realized Norton was still at large. She thinks he still has a chance to pull off a military coup. And if he does—”

“Then it won’t matter what we know,” Wilkes said. “He can throw us all in jail without a trial. Execute us without any fuss. Even if we tried to talk to reporters, he could just shut down the media. There’d be nothing stopping him.”

Chapel nodded. “And between now and then — we can’t show ourselves in public. The police were already looking for us, and after we fired a Stinger missile that close to the airport, they’ll come at us with everything they have.”

“I saw a news report,” Julia said. “Somebody’s covering up the fact we shot down a drone. There were lots of reports of the explosion, of course, but they’re claiming it was a Cessna that crashed before it could land at Ronald Reagan.”

Chapel nodded. “About what I expected. But believe me, there are still plenty of cops looking for us, cops who know the truth. We won’t be allowed to just walk up to the president and give him a friendly warning.”

“We can’t drop him an e-mail, either,” Angel said. “The NSA has every one of us flagged. If we try to go online or even call somebody on the phone, we’ll just be telling them where we are.”

“So what do we do?” Julia asked. “Just sit here and wait for them to find us and scoop us up?” She looked around at the rest of them.

Nobody seemed to have an answer for her.

“Come on,” she said. “You can’t just let him kill all those people. If he blows up the entire Capitol building, he’s going to get a bunch of innocents, too.” She grabbed Chapel’s arm. “You’re the good guys,” she said. “We are the good guys. We need to stop this asshole. We can’t let him win.”

Hollingshead took off his glasses and set them on the table in front of him. “No, my dear. We can’t.” He looked around at the rest of them, his eyes as hard as wrought iron. “We won’t,” he said.

Chapel agreed with all his heart.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”

They set Angel up with a laptop, but she had no idea where to start. “I can go online if I set myself up behind an onion router,” she told them, but then she shook her head. “But then I’ll be anonymous. No way I can even access my old DIA files. I can send the White House all kinds of warnings, but they’ll get logged and dismissed because they come from unconfirmed sources. I might as well phone in a bomb threat.”

Julia looked confused. “Wouldn’t that be enough? I mean, if there was a bomb threat to the Capitol, wouldn’t that be enough to get them to cancel the speech? They have to take those seriously, don’t they?”

Wilkes laughed. “You kidding? You know how many times a day the president gets a bomb threat? The Secret Service looks into ’em, but only as time allows, and only if there’s some real chatter or analysis from their security advisers.”

“Think about it,” Chapel told her. “Let’s say you’re a political opponent of the president’s. You want to keep him from getting anything done. Why not pay a bunch of people to call in a bomb threat once per day? If he had to change his schedule every single time, he’d be paralyzed. If we had time, maybe we could mail some talcum powder to the Capitol, that would probably shut things down for a few hours while they tested it for anthrax residue. But we can’t do that now.”

“What about the media?” Julia asked. “We could just call every television station in town, tell them what’s going to happen. They would send enough camera trucks that the Secret Service would have to react.”

“Right now I don’t know — the country’s ready to fall apart at the seams. Even just hinting at what’s really going on might start a panic,” Chapel pointed out.

“So what do you want me to do?” Angel asked.

“We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way — in person. So we need to know where Patrick Norton will be during the speech,” Chapel said. “That’s going to be tough to find out. If he’s the designated survivor, they’ll have him somewhere secure, and part of that is not putting the location on his public agenda. But a guy like that can’t stop working, even for an hour. He’ll need to bring an entourage with him, have special communications arrangements made… there’ll be a trail. Look for public buildings in D.C. that are scrambling to upgrade their phone lines, maybe. Look at his staffers’ blogs and twitter feeds, see if they give anything away.”

“I’ll try,” Angel said. She shook her head. “I’ve got limited access here, but—”

Hollingshead placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “If anyone can do it,” he said, “it’s you, dear. You’ll do fine.”

Angel looked up at him with desperate hope in her eyes. Like she really wanted to believe him. Then she reached up and grasped his hand.

And then — incredibly — Hollingshead responded. Stroking her hair and cupping her cheek with one hand.

Chapel felt his jaw starting to drop, but instead of saying anything, he gestured for Julia and Wilkes to follow him out of the room. When the door was closed behind them, he said, “What exactly did I just see?”

Wilkes belched on cue. “Looks like maybe the director’s got a girlfriend.”

Julia shook her head. “No — no. She told us she isn’t into that kind of thing. And anyway, he’s nearly three times her age.”

“Who was it said power was the ultimate aphrodisiac?” Wilkes asked. “Spiro Agnew or some dude like that?”

“It was Kissinger, but forget it — there’s no way the two of them are — are—” Chapel found he couldn’t even say the words. He kept remembering, though, how Angel had reacted every time Hollingshead was in danger. Like she would give anything to keep him safe. None of it added up. “Anyway. It doesn’t matter. We don’t have time to stand here gossiping. We need to make plans.”

Wilkes nodded. “Yeah, okay. The big problem I see right now is what we do once we know where Norton’s gonna be. If he’s a designated survivor, he’s gonna have T-men all over his butt, making sure nobody gets close to him. How do we get close?”

Chapel exhaled deeply. “It’s not going to be easy. But maybe I have an idea there. I need to make a phone call.”

Traffic in Washington was more insane than usual that morning. It seemed a lot of people were heading into town to hear the president’s speech.

“I don’t get this,” Angel said, keeping her head low as if to avoid the early sun coming through the car windows. “It’s not like they’re going to let all these people into the Capitol.”

Julia had been keeping an eye on the news feeds all morning. “They’re going to set up loudspeakers on the Mall. Everyone’s supposed to gather there. People are really worried about what’s going on — not just in California, but everywhere. They know something big is coming.”

All of them were surprised, however, when they saw the sheer number of people who had made their way to Capitol Hill. The Mall was packed with them, standing shoulder to shoulder — huge knots of them carrying signs and chanting for public order, hundreds of them sitting on folding chairs and drinking coffee from thermoses — whole multitudes just milling around aimlessly, looks of desperate expectation on their faces.

“They really think one speech is going to turn things around?” Wilkes asked.

It was Hollingshead who answered. “People crave leadership in times of crisis. It’s what Norton is counting on. If his attack succeeds, these people will accept anyone who claims to be in charge — no matter how brutal or dictatorial — because it means safety for their families. No, they don’t expect a speech to save them. But they do expect a president to be there for them, to make things right.”

Chapel nodded to himself, but he was busy scanning the streets around the Mall. “Angel,” he said, “what do you need? A coffee shop with Wi-Fi? Or something more?”

“An Internet café might do,” she said, frowning. “I’d say we should use one of the Smithsonian buildings; those have good libraries and that means solid Ethernet connections, but—”

“But they’re also going to have a lot of security,” Chapel agreed. “Especially today. Okay, Internet café it is.” He worked the car’s GPS unit. “Great. There’s one pretty close — except it’s on the far side of this crowd. It’ll take another hour to get around them all, an hour we don’t have.”

“It’s okay,” Julia said. “We can walk across — on foot we can get through them.”

“Speak for yourself,” Angel said, her eyes bright with sudden panic.

There really wasn’t any choice, though. Wilkes pulled over on a cross street and let the two women out. He held out his hand to Chapel, who shook it heartily, and then the marine got out as well. “I’ll keep them safe,” he said.

“You’d better,” Chapel told him. Then he scooted over into the driver’s seat. From the backseat Hollingshead watched him in the rearview mirror.

“You sure you want to go through with this, sir?” Chapel asked. “I can intercept Norton myself.”

There’d been a great deal of discussion about how they would handle Norton if they could get to him. Wilkes had wanted to assassinate the man, of course. Chapel had wanted to exfiltrate him back to the safe house where they could hold him in the cellar room with Charlotte Holman until both could be brought to justice. Hollingshead had his own idea. He said he wanted to talk to Norton. Reason with him.

Chapel had no idea what the director hoped to achieve. But he was still the boss.

“I’m sure, son,” Hollingshead replied.

Chapel put the car in gear and got moving again.

The noise and the press of bodies got overwhelming as soon as they pushed their way onto the Mall — even for Julia, who was used to the crush of New York City, this was bad. She worried about Angel, but she knew they had to get across.

Somewhere close by someone was playing an acoustic guitar, belting out an old Bob Marley song about people loving each other. From the other side came the noise of chanters demanding the government reduce the cost of bread and milk immediately. A woman with no top on but with her breasts painted like butterflies came running past and nearly knocked Julia down. She was followed in quick succession by three young men with video cameras and iPads.

Inside the throng of people you couldn’t see the roads, you couldn’t see the Capitol building — you could barely tell which direction you were headed. You could see arms raised against the blue sky and you could see a lot of feet moving in every direction. Julia reached backward and grabbed Angel’s hand while Wilkes moved ahead, steamrollering his way through the crowd.

Angel didn’t look good. She was pale and she squinted as if the sun hurt her eyes. “Are we almost there?” she asked.

“Almost,” Julia lied. She smelled cooking food and then nearly stepped in somebody’s hibachi. Looked like they were making tofu burgers, she thought. Someone shouted right in her ear, but she just kept moving, pushing forward. Wilkes did a good job of making a hole for her — nobody wanted to get in his way — but still sometimes she had to squeeze between people who didn’t want to move, who cursed at her and refused to move.

The throng looked like the New York peace demonstrations she remembered from the start of the Iraq war — like hippies and college students and people just out for a pleasant afternoon on the grass. But once you were inside the crowd you felt their mood and it was toxic. These people were scared. They didn’t know any way to express that fear except by gathering together and shouting slogans — but Julia was pretty sure that if something bad happened here, anything the crowd didn’t like, they would remember how to riot pretty fast.

“This way,” Wilkes said, bellowing back over his shoulder. He veered into the middle of a drum circle, pushing his way past a dancer who was clearly on so many drugs he didn’t even see Wilkes, much less have a chance to step aside. The drummers looked up in horror as the big marine plowed through them. Julia smiled an apology down at them as she stepped over their ranks, but she was glad for Wilkes all the same.

There was a little moment inside the middle of the drum circle where they could breathe air that hadn’t just come out of somebody else’s lungs. Angel’s hand nearly slipped out of Julia’s. The younger woman was shaking. “I don’t like this,” she said.

“Tell me what you don’t like,” Julia said, pulling her close and getting an arm around Angel’s shoulders. “Talk it out.”

“I don’t trust them,” Angel said. “I keep expecting them to grab us, to throw us down on the ground. To trample us. I think they’re going to just close ranks and smoosh us. Suffocate us.”

“None of that is happening,” Julia said. “They’re people like you and me. Nobody wants to hurt anybody.”

“It’s not a question of what they want, it’s just physics, it’s differential equations,” Angel protested.

“It’s going to be okay,” Julia told her, because what else was she going to say?

“Come on,” Wilkes said. “Stay close.”

Julia hurried to move forward a little faster and obey. The last thing she wanted was to get separated from him in the crowd.

Driving away from the Capitol was a lot easier than getting close had been. Chapel headed up Massachusetts Avenue and then across into Georgetown and soon had left the bulk of the traffic behind — meaning that while they still crawled along in typical D.C. gridlock, at least they were moving more often than not. As he drove, Chapel occasionally glanced in the rearview, looking at the director.

Hollingshead seemed perfectly calm. A little surprising, considering what he was about to do. Hollingshead was a spymaster, a spider in the middle of a web. He had never in his life, as far as Chapel knew, gone out on a field mission. But now he was going to be right in the front lines.

“You all right back there, sir?” Chapel asked.

“Fine, son. Fine.”

“I’m not going to let you come to harm. I promise, sir.”

“Captain,” Hollingshead said, leaning forward a little and smiling in the mirror, “given the situation, it’s perhaps best if we don’t make promises we can’t keep. I know the risks I’m taking with this plan, and how to minimize them. I also know what’s at stake. I’m actually more concerned for you. The lovely Julia tells me you were wounded a little while ago. Shot by your own comrade.”

Chapel grinned in the mirror. “I’m fine, sir.” He shook his head. “You know, it’s funny. This business, I mean. It wasn’t long ago I thought that Wilkes — well — I thought you had brought him in to replace me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Chapel shook his head. Now wasn’t the time, given what was about to happen. But then again, he was unlikely to be alone with Hollingshead much in the near future like this, with time to talk. “I’m sorry, sir, do I have your permission to speak candidly? I should have asked before.”

“It’s all right, son. After all you and I have been through, I think we can drop a little of the military discipline.”

Chapel nodded. He had heard the way Wilkes spoke to the director, and Hollingshead never called him on it. All right, he would open up a little. “Back before all this began. Back when you had the two of us in that motel room down in Aberdeen running the stakeout. I was convinced you put me there to punish me. And that you brought Wilkes in to see if maybe he would make a better field agent than me. I thought you wanted to get rid of me.”

“Is that right?”

Chapel could feel his cheeks getting hot, but he went on. “After what happened in Russia—”

“Which, I’ll remind you, we agreed not to speak of again,” Hollingshead pointed out.

“Yes, sir. But it didn’t go as well as it could have. Not by a long shot. I thought maybe you had lost faith in me.”

“I see,” the director replied.

And then he didn’t say anything else.

Chapel tried to focus on driving, on keeping pace with the cars ahead of him, but the silence growing inside the car made it feel like the air around him had been pressurized and was about to burst his eardrums.

“Well,” Hollingshead said finally. “Well now, son. I suppose — from a certain perspective, ah, that is. Well.”

“Sir?”

Hollingshead cleared his throat. “I suppose you could say most of that is true.”

“I — sir, I—” Chapel’s tongue froze in his mouth.

“You could say that. If you were feeling particularly uncharitable. You’re not a fool, Chapel. I suppose I should have expected you to see what was going on. Though of course I couldn’t tell you any of the facts of the case. As you know now, Wilkes actually had his own very specific mission — to infiltrate the Cyclops Initiative. That was why I gave him such light duty at the time. As for yourself, I put you in that motel because of what happened in Russia, yes.”

“Sir,” Chapel said. “If you found my behavior less than satisfactory—”

“Not,” Hollingshead said as if Chapel hadn’t interrupted, “as a punishment. As a sort of rest cure. For years I’ve sent you on mission after mission and you’ve performed flawlessly. But I knew how much I was asking and that eventually it would become too much. After your mission in Russia, I knew you were right on the edge of breaking and I could not afford to lose such an important asset. So I gave you light duty so that you could recuperate.”

“Oh,” Chapel said.

“As for replacing you, well, that was somewhat true as well.”

“It… was?”

Hollingshead grunted in affirmation. “It isn’t very easy for me to say this.”

“Sir?”

“I’m getting old. Too old to do my job. Please don’t suggest otherwise. I won’t have any false flattery. I’ll be eighty years old before the decade is out. It’s only a matter of time before my faculties begin to decay. I’m going to have to retire — assuming, of course, I live through this day.” Hollingshead gave a little laugh that didn’t sound very merry. “Assuming we have jobs tomorrow. Or a country to serve. Anyway. I’ll need to retire soon. Which means that I will need a replacement.”

He leaned over the front seat. “Son,” he said very softly, “I was hoping that would be you. I wanted to bring Wilkes into the fold as an agent whom you could direct. I want to make you the director of DX.”

Chapel put his foot on the brake. He stopped the car in the middle of the street until he could catch his breath. The cars behind him started to lean on their horns, but he took another couple of seconds before he started moving forward again.

“I don’t know what to say, sir,” Chapel managed to get out.

“Then don’t, since of course this is all, well, provisional. Contingent. Just tell me one thing. You’ve had a chance to work with Wilkes out in the field. Do you think he would be a good fit with any future directorate we build?”

It gave Chapel something else to think about, for which he was very grateful. He collected his thoughts and tried to think of the right way to answer. “He’s good. Very good at fieldcraft, and he can definitely handle himself in a fight.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“No,” Chapel said, “no, sir, it doesn’t. Because I’m struggling with finding a nice way to say no.” He took a breath. “Wilkes saved my life when Moulton would have killed me. He got us this far. I owe him a lot. But he’s — he’s a thug.”

“Really?” Hollingshead asked. “You know I chose him personally.”

Chapel swallowed uncomfortably. “I know that, sir. And you know I don’t like to question your decisions. But he kills people.”

“Part of the job,” Hollingshead pointed out.

“No, sir. No. Sometimes it’s necessary.” But it wasn’t what a field agent should do. Chapel had struggled with this the whole time he’d worked for the director. “Sometimes it’s necessary, but it’s always a mistake. When I have to, I will take a life. But I know it means I didn’t do my job well enough, and every single time, I’ve regretted it. It’s my absolute last option when I’m out in the field. But for Wilkes it’s the first. It’s what he’s trained to do, and it’s what he looks for.”

“As they say,” Hollingshead said, “when one has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail? Interesting.”

“I hope I haven’t offended you, sir.”

“Chapel,” Hollingshead said. He leaned back against his seat. “Jim,” he went on. “I asked for your opinion. If you’re going to replace me, you’re going to need to learn to take a stand.”

Chapel nodded. “If I were the director, my first act would be to transfer him somewhere else. I owe him, I even kind of like him. But I won’t work with him again.”

“That’s what I needed to hear,” Hollingshead said.

A few minutes later they arrived at their destination.

“Get out of my goddamned way,” Wilkes bellowed, and a group of protesters dressed like Revolutionary War — era soldiers blanched and quivered and finally moved. Wilkes reached back and grabbed Julia’s arm and hauled her forward.

“Angel,” she called out. She’d lost contact in the press. “Angel! Wilkes, where did she go?”

Wilkes didn’t reply, except to pull her up onto a sidewalk. Then he dove back into the crowd, and when he returned, he hauled Angel behind him with a vise grip on her arm, tight enough to make her cry out in pain. Julia started to yell at him to stop hurting her, but the look on the marine’s face stopped her cold. Then he raised an arm and pointed. Ahead of them was the glass front of a little shop — a bakery, by the look of it. He pulled the door open and got the women moving inside.

The shop was full of people but not quite so packed as the sidewalk had been. Every table had people clustered around it, a lucky few in chairs. A line of people was crushed up against the counter, all of them craning their necks around to try to see through the plateglass front of the store. Following their gaze Julia saw nothing but the constant crush out on the sidewalk and, off in the distance, the white obelisk of the Washington Monument framed by blue sky.

“This isn’t the right place,” Angel said. “This isn’t right! We wanted the Internet café. I need real access. This isn’t right!”

“Let’s just catch our breath in here for a second, first, before we head back out there,” Julia told her.

“Back? Out there? No no no no no no. No,” Angel said. “No, I won’t go back out there. Don’t make me go back out there!”

“But you said it yourself,” Julia told her. “You need Internet access.”

Angel’s face was wild, blotchy with fear. Her eyes were rolling like those of a panicked animal — something Julia had seen all too often in her veterinary practice.

Julia had to fight down the urge to slap her. The younger woman was sick. She was having a panic attack. Under any other circumstances she would have felt sympathy. She would have done everything in her power to calm Angel down. But now—

“Wilkes,” Julia said. “We need to get her access.”

The marine nodded. He reached in his pocket, and for a second Julia thought he would pull out a gun. Instead he took out a slim piece of leather like a big flat wallet. He flipped it open and held it over his head.

“FBI,” he announced. All over the bakery people cried out, as if they expected to be arrested on the spot and dragged off to a police station. Despite the fact that even if that had been the case, even if Wilkes really had been arresting anyone, he would never have been able to get them half a block down the sidewalk in the crush out there. “I need the manager of this place, right now.”

A middle-aged woman with streaks of gray in her long hair stood up from one of the tables. She looked terrified as she raised one hand.

Wilkes nodded at her. “Wi-Fi password. Right now.”

“I — what?” the manager asked.

“Right goddamned now,” Wilkes said again.

“It’s—”

“Don’t say it out loud,” Angel interjected. Julia saw that she’d regained control of herself, a little. Angel looked around the bakery, at all the people craning forward to get a better view. “Otherwise everybody’s going to use it and that’ll slow the network down. Here. Type it on my phone.”

The manager nodded and did as she was told, looking grateful that at least Wilkes wasn’t shouting at her anymore.

Over the Atlantic, the MQ-1C Gray Eagle banked and turned on its long mission guarding the sea lanes. It was flying on automatic pilot — a stick jockey back at Creech Air Force Base was watching the controls, of course, and after the Reaper had gone rogue the night before, every last thing the Gray Eagle did was closely monitored. But at the moment it was just keeping station, exactly as it had been programmed to do, running endless laps over the ocean waves.

This time, the base commander had assured the SecDef, there would be no deviation from standing orders. If the Gray Eagle were to fail to make a turn at the proper time, or if any of its systems came online when they should have been dormant, the drone would not be given a chance to do harm. An F-16 with a human pilot at its yoke was already in the air, ready to strike. All it would take would be one terse order from Creech and the Gray Eagle would be shot down.

The base commander had wanted to do more, of course. He had urged the SecDef to ground the entire drone fleet. The explosion over the Potomac had been covered up in an efficient manner, but the commander still had no idea exactly what had gone wrong or why his people couldn’t seem to replicate the problem in simulation. A drone had just exploded without warning — and miles from where it should have been.

Given recent events, the only logical thing to do was to ground the fleet. But then the SecDef had responded in no uncertain terms. The drones were vital to national security. They would stay in the air. And you just didn’t question orders that came from that high up.

So the base commander stayed on post all that morning, watching over the shoulders of stick jockeys and sensors as his robot planes carried out their given tasks. He was ready at the slightest provocation to send the kill signal, but he never had to.

The Gray Eagle, after all, never deviated from its mission. Or at least… it didn’t appear to.

The base commander had to be reassured that the Gray Eagle was where it said it was. He could look at the telemetry data that gave GPS coordinates, altitude and the like, but all that could be easily faked. More reliably, he could watch the live video feed from the drone’s camera eye and see the furrowed blue of the Atlantic roll by underneath the Gray Eagle’s nose.

He had no reason whatsoever to suspect that that view, that video feed, wasn’t live. That it was in fact a recording of what the ocean had looked like weeks earlier, the last time this particular Gray Eagle had been sent out on patrol.

Paul Moulton had been a very, very good programmer, and an even better judge of human paranoia. He had known perfectly well that at some point the drones would be monitored, that they would be under threat of being shot down. He’d gone to great pains to make sure they kept flying, right until the very last attack.

The Gray Eagle kept feeding false telemetry and video back to Creech as it turned on the wind, breaking away from its previous course. It headed straight for Washington, and Paul Moulton’s final, glorious, posthumous strike.

Chapel’s stomach was tied up in knots. Well, he supposed he was allowed to be a little nervous. What they had planned was one of the most reckless, dangerous stunts he’d ever pulled in the field.

It made him nauseated. Or maybe it was just the quick breakfast he’d wolfed down before they set out. Either way, he put his good hand on his stomach and held it there, as if he’d been cut open and needed to hold his guts from spilling out. There was some pain.

“Son?” the director asked.

“Hrm,” Chapel said. Then he shook himself out of it and turned to face his boss. “Fine, sir. Just anxious. This is the place Angel told us about.”

Hollingshead looked out his window and nodded.

The quaint brick three-story building across the street looked like every other quaint brick three-story building in Georgetown with one exception — there wasn’t a coffee shop or a bank branch inhabiting its ground floor. Instead it just had an unmarked door and a couple of windows covered over by thick curtains. It looked, in fact, so much like a safe house that it couldn’t be one. Any spy wandering past would immediately think they knew what it was, which invalidated its use as a safe house in any way.

Angel was absolutely certain that Patrick Norton was inside. Two of his low-level aides had complained on Twitter about being moved to a new location this morning, and while neither of them had given an exact address, one had said they were headed to Georgetown. Apparently they considered that to be vague enough to count as discretion. Meanwhile the Army Corps of Engineers had sent a team to this building in the middle of the night, and a local webcam had seen them. Angel had noted that they brought in some very high-tech communications equipment, including an entire crate of satellite cell phones. The kind of phones Norton would use if he needed to communicate with his generals during, say, a military coup.

To add to all that, the registered owner of the building was the Department of Defense. It was, she told Chapel, kind of obvious, once you saw the signs.

Chapel was just glad he had the twenty-first-century version of Sherlock Holmes on his team.

In the backseat, the director was growing antsy. “I trust him as much as you do, but if he’s going to provide this diversion—”

“He’ll be here on time. At eight thirty exactly,” Chapel said.

Hollingshead nodded. “Very well. Then I suppose the next step is mine.”

Chapel got out of the car and held the director’s door for him. “Good luck, sir,” he said.

“Hopefully I won’t need it.” Hollingshead looked both ways and then crossed the street, headed straight for the front door of the building. Chapel headed up the street, then crossed and jogged around to an alley that ran behind every building on the block. He made a point of not getting too close — the DoD safe house would have cameras watching its rear door, of course. But he wished he could get close enough to hear what happened when Rupert Hollingshead rang the place’s front doorbell.

They were pretty sure the director would be taken inside. Hollingshead was still the biggest thorn in Norton’s side, the one man the SecDef considered a genuine threat to his grand plan. If he just walked up and turned himself over to Norton, he wouldn’t just be turned away.

They were mostly sure that he wouldn’t just be taken inside and quietly shot. They figured that Norton would want to talk to Hollingshead first. For a little while.

Meanwhile it was Chapel’s job to get inside the building and make sure Hollingshead had a way to get back out again. This was where the plan left a lot of room for improvisation. Chapel had to figure it out on his own, once he was in place.

At least he could count on a little help. His diversion should be showing up at any minute.

“Angel,” Julia said. “Angel — talk to me.”

But Angel was hunched over her laptop, two fingers on the trackpad as she scrolled through endless pages of what looked to Julia like random numbers and letters. She didn’t even glance up.

“Leave her alone,” Wilkes said.

“She hasn’t made a sound in a long time,” Julia pointed out. “That’s not—”

“Healthy?” Wilkes guessed. “Maybe. But it’s the closest she’s going to get. She’s working. She’s working ’cause it’s all she can do right now. The only thing that keeps her from freaking out. So leave her alone.”

Julia knew he was right. Fussing over people was what she did, though, to keep herself from freaking out. She turned her attention to the other people in the bakery. Most of the customers were still packed into the tables and up against the glass display counter. The street outside was just too crowded for them to flee the place when Wilkes commandeered its Internet connection, though a lot of them looked terrified of the big marine.

Julia didn’t blame them. She might be a badass sometimes, and she might have seen plenty of this kind of action since she’d met Chapel, but still, the big dangerous soldier types like Wilkes bugged her. It wasn’t so much that you thought he was going to hurt somebody. It was that he looked like he could, and that he wouldn’t lose any sleep if it happened. It was something about the way he stared at everybody, she thought. Clearly sizing them up, assessing them as potential threats. He just made everyone uneasy.

Maybe she could help with that a little. She lifted her hands in the air until all the customers and the clerks and pastry chefs and the store manager were all looking at her. “No need to worry, folks. We’re actually here to keep everybody safer,” she told them. “To do that, we’re going to need your help for a little while. We need you to stay calm, that’s all.” Her brain reeled as she tried to think of some innocuous reason the FBI would burst into a bakery like this. Then she realized that a real FBI agent wouldn’t give one. “We’ll be done in a few minutes,” she said and lowered her hands. “Thank you very much for your patience.”

It sounded lame when she said it out loud, but it seemed the civilians in the bakery were just glad for any sign that somebody was in control. What was it Hollingshead had said, about people craving leadership? She could see them start to breathe again, saw some of them even smile and roll their eyes at each other — which meant that what had seemed like a terrifying breach of the peace was now, to them, just a mild inconvenience.

At least that was something.

She turned back to look at Angel. The younger woman hadn’t so much as shifted in her chair.

Julia knew what Angel was working on. There were radar dishes and optical sensors all over Washington, thousands of them, all tasked with different things. Some watched to make sure nobody landed a helicopter in the White House’s Rose Garden. Others monitored planes headed into and out of Ronald Reagan International. Some, which hadn’t been reassigned in a long while, were still watching for Russian bombers. Angel was checking all of them, all at once. She was looking for any sign of a drone approaching the Capitol.

Of course, she had no idea what kind of drone it might be, or what direction it was coming from, or whether it was flying low enough to evade radar. But if she found it, she could try to hack it in midflight. Gain access to its controls and send it back where it came from.

That was the plan, anyway. Angel had said there was maybe a one-in-three chance she could even find the drone, and the odds were even slimmer that she could gain control of it. But it wasn’t like they had much choice.

If she couldn’t get the drone to reverse course, a lot of people in the Capitol were going to die.

A white van pulled up right in front of the DoD safe house. Even before it came to a stop, a security guard in a dark suit came out the front door and started waving his arms at the driver, trying to get his attention. It didn’t work. The driver parked the van and switched off the engine. The security guard tapped at the driver’s window while simultaneously reaching for his phone.

The side door of the van swung open and a man in an army jacket jumped out, crowding the security guard back toward the safe house’s door. The man smiled and his eyes twinkled, and he reached out to shake the security guard’s hand.

“Name’s Rudy,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“You can’t—” The security guard managed to say.

He didn’t get any further because somebody else jumped out of the van then, somebody who was very difficult to ignore. This guy was missing an arm, a leg, and an eye, all three replaced by obvious prostheses.

“Morning, son,” the man said. “We’re here to meet with Patrick Norton.”

“You can’t — there’s nobody here by—”

The amputee frowned. “He’s the secretary of defense,” he pointed out.

“Yeah,” the security guard said, “I know who he is, but—”

“Good, then you go fetch him, we’ll just set up here. And before you go telling me I can’t use this particular stretch of sidewalk that my taxes happened to have paid for, I’ll have to point out that you can’t tell me why not.”

“I don’t need to—”

“So I think we’ll just wait here until the cops arrive,” Top pointed out. Behind him, more and more people came piling out of the van, some of them missing arms or legs, all of them carrying cardboard signs decorated with handwritten slogans:

“We’ve got a grievance, see, and we’re not leaving,” Top told the poor security guard, “until Mr. Norton comes down here and addresses it.”

“But what makes you think he’s even here?” the guard asked.

“Well now, friend, I wasn’t entirely sure until I saw the look on your face just now. Why don’t you go tell them we’re here? We’ll wait.”

The security guard took one last desperate look at the wounded veterans marching in a circle in front of the safe house. Then he shook his head in disbelief and ducked back inside.

At the back of the building, Chapel could hear Top and his boys chanting out front, and he knew it was time to make his move.

They frisked him quite thoroughly and then bound his hands with a loop of plastic. Rupert Hollingshead had expected as much. But then they bundled him into a rather pleasant office on the third floor of the safe house, and perhaps out of respect for his age or perhaps for his former rank, they gave him a comfortable chair to sit in.

He sat there as straight-backed as he could and waited patiently. Outside, through the thick, bulletproof windows, he could just hear Top and his boys down in the street. That made Hollingshead smile. One thing had gone right, anyway, and the protesters had shown up on time.

The door opened. A guard with a very serious expression on his face came in and checked the corners of the room, as if he might find heavily armed gremlins had spontaneously appeared there. He looked Hollingshead up and down, then he nodded at someone outside the doorway, someone Hollingshead couldn’t see.

It turned out, thankfully, to be Patrick Norton.

Of all the uncertainties and doubts that flitted around Hollingshead like a cloud of unwelcome gnats, there was at least one thing he was absolutely sure of. No one was going to put a bullet in the back of his head until Norton had left the room. It just wouldn’t do to have the SecDef be a witness to murder.

It behooved him, then, to keep Norton in the room as long as possible. So he put on his merriest face, made his eyes twinkle, and said, “Sir. Forgive me for, ah, not saluting.”

Norton grinned. “Rupert. I’m so sorry to have put you through all of this. I assure you, if I’d known you were coming, we could have met under more cordial circumstances.”

“No doubt. My own fault, but it seems, well, it seems my personal assistant has been, ah, misplaced. Never was very good at making my own appointments.”

“I see,” Norton replied. “Well, under ordinary circumstances, of course, I’d be thrilled to meet with you on anything you like, but I’m afraid today I’m a bit busy. Perhaps if you could tell me what this was about?”

“I thought we might have a chat, sir, about the Cyclops Initiative.”

The transformation that came over Norton’s face was incredible to behold. The man was a politician, through and through. He had spent years bolting armor plate onto the smiling countenance he wore in public, hammering out any quirks of personality, polishing his mannerisms and gestures until any sign of ambition or lust for power were smoothed away. He had worked that face until it showed nothing at all except a love for civil service and the American people.

Now that armor came off, plate by plate, bolt by bolt, in the time it took for a smile to turn into a frown. The eyes hardened. The chin lifted in the air. The brow furrowed.

“You’re a fucking idiot, Rupert,” Norton said when the transformation was done.

“Ah, I wondered when we would get to the, well—”

Norton wouldn’t let him finish. “What is this? You have a microphone hidden in your lapel, you think you’re going to tape me saying something stupid? No, my men would have found anything like that when they searched you. So you came here to try to stop things somehow on your own. Not a chance. You’re an idiot and a distraction. That’s all. A distraction at a time when I really don’t need one. Was that your whole plan? Is that why you brought this gang of cripples out to make noise in the street? You thought you could beat me through sheer inconvenience?” Norton studied him for a moment. “I find it hard to believe. But it’s not like you have much else to play with. Your directorate is gone. Burned to the ground. Chapel’s missing, presumed dead. Your Angel system is dismantled. By now you’ll have realized Wilkes was one of us all along.”

Hollingshead closed his mouth. He couldn’t help but smile a bit.

“I think you got Moulton and Holman. They’re dead, right?” Norton said. “It’s what I would have done in your place. I take your knights away, so you took my queen and my rook? But you’ve already lost this game. I have more people I can bring into play. A lot more. And anyway, in half an hour, it’ll be over.”

Hollingshead nodded. “Yes, that’s what I wanted to talk about.”

Norton grabbed a chair and dragged it over to where it would face Hollingshead. He didn’t sit down, though. Instead, he stood behind the chair, as if he was using it as a shield. As if he expected Hollingshead to lunge at him and wanted some cover to hide behind. Hollingshead tried not to read too much into it.

“You think you still have a chance,” Norton said. His eyes narrowed as he watched Hollingshead very closely. “You think you have some play that will still bring me down. You had some kind of plan. But then you did the dumb thing and came here. What’s to stop me from having you shot right now?”

“Nothing,” Hollingshead said.

The SecDef raised an eyebrow.

Good, Hollingshead thought. He’d gotten the man to be quiet for a moment. Maybe now they could have a real conversation. “I know perfectly well that you aren’t going to let me leave this building alive. But I had hoped we could talk for a few minutes, first.”

“Got it,” Angel said. Julia came racing over to look over her shoulder, though of course she couldn’t make any sense of the strings of numbers and letters on Angel’s screen. “There,” Angel said, pointing at a log entry that looked like all the others.

“You can just… look at all this, and see a drone coming at us?” Julia asked.

“No, of course not. But I can read a weather radar report. This radar is looking for clouds, right? So it has to screen out anything it sees that isn’t made of water vapor. It’s reporting here that it found something that it should ignore. There’s a metallic object the size of a Predator or a Reaper or whatever reported here, at such and such an altitude, and that altitude fits with the flight profile we’re expecting. It could be something else, of course. A small helicopter would match those numbers, and there are plenty of helicopters over D.C. But look at this.” Angel tapped a key. Only a few of the characters on her screen changed.

“I have no idea what you just did,” Julia pointed out.

Angel sighed. “Look, it’s gone. This is one second after the first screen. The metallic object doesn’t show up on the weather report this time. Which means it was moving so fast it passed right through the area that radar was sweeping in less than a second. A helicopter wouldn’t move that fast.”

Julia squinted at the screen. “That’s not a lot to go on. It could be some other kind of airplane—”

“It could just be a glitch. It could just be a coincidence. Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” Julia asked.

“There’s no such thing as a coincidence. That’s our drone. And it’s going to be here very soon.” Angel ran her hands through her hair. “I need to concentrate,” she said. She looked at all the people in the bakery. Half of them looked back at her.

There wasn’t much Julia could do about that. She knew Angel was struggling under the weight of all those stares, but the sidewalk out front was so crowded it looked like the mass of people out there was about to burst in through the plateglass windows. Julia couldn’t clear the bakery.

“How about I get you something to drink?” she asked instead. “Do you want some coffee?”

Angel glanced over at the counter. “I only drink soda. Not coffee. This place doesn’t have any soda.”

“No,” Julia agreed.

Angel leaned over her computer again, as if she could climb through the screen and escape that way. “A scone, then. Blueberry.” she said.

The security guards flooded out into the street where Top and his boys were protesting. There was a lot of shouting about the First Amendment and a lot more shouting about how the protesters needed to clear the street right now.

Chapel didn’t stick around to listen to all of it. He took a deep breath, then walked right up the alley to the back door of the safe house, right in view of its cameras. The alley was deserted when he started.

It didn’t stay that way. The back door swung open and a man in a black suit stepped out. He had a pistol in his hand and a big hands-free unit in his ear. “Sir,” he said. “You need to not be here.”

Chapel kept coming, his head down, his hands shoved in his pockets. No point in subtlety here. The guard’s job was to keep this alley clear. He wasn’t going to listen to anything Chapel had to say.

So Chapel just waited until the guard started to raise his pistol. The man still didn’t intend to shoot, just intimidate.

Which gave Chapel the advantage, since he had no such qualms.

Among the piles of handguns and assault rifles and carbines and grenade launchers in Contorni’s arsenal, Chapel had found an entire crate full of military-grade Tasers. He had one in his pocket now. He shot the guard right in the chest and watched him shake and gag and then fall to the ground in a heap. Once the Taser had stopped clacking away and the current had stopped flowing, Chapel reached down and grabbed the hands-free unit out of the guard’s ear. He dropped it on the pavement and crunched it under his heel.

Then he dug his fingers into the incapacitated guard’s neck and slowed the blood flow to his brain. Not enough to do any permanent damage. Just enough to knock him out for a while.

When it was done, Chapel stepped inside the back door of the safe house. Beyond was a spacious kitchen full of stainless steel sinks and copper-bottomed pots hanging in neat rows on the brick wall. There was nobody else in sight.

Chapel closed the door behind him and locked it up tight. For good measure he grabbed a chair and shoved it under the doorknob at an angle. When the guard woke up, he would have a hard time getting back inside.

There was another security camera in the kitchen, watching the door from the other side. Chapel had expected as much. Hopefully nobody was watching those cameras — the bulk of the security detail being busy elsewhere.

There was a great deal of pushing and shoving and brandishing of signs, but it was clear the guards were about done with fooling around. “Now listen here, friend — and I do want us to be friends, ever so much,” Top said as one guard tried to grab him by the shirt. “I want you to consider just exactly how this is going to look for the news media. Now, you and I both know that I’m some cussed fool who has refused to listen to any kind of reason, while you’re just a workingman trying to do an honest job. And that’s exactly the kind of moral equation that might lead you to start thinking you can lay hands on me. But I’ve got four different media outlets sending camera trucks in our direction right now. And when the two of us — cussed fool and workingman — are under the television lights, I wonder if things won’t get a little less clear? If maybe it’ll look like you’re assaulting a multiple amputee who was intent on just a little harmless exercise of his First Amendment rights.”

The guard pulled a gun and pointed it in Top’s face. “Move now,” he said.

“Point taken,” Top said. “And I salute your initiative. But I’m afraid we have a new problem to contend with. I hope we can work together to find an amicable solution to this one, but I fear—”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” the guard demanded.

“It would appear,” Top said, blinking his eyes in mock contrition, “that I’ve accidentally handcuffed my arm to the door handle of this van. And I’ve completely forgotten what I did with the key.”

“Come on,” Angel said. She pouted at her screen. Took a bite of scone.

For a long, heavy second nothing happened.

“Come on!” she shouted as she lifted her hands away from the keyboard.

“Everything okay?” Julia asked.

“Arrgh!” Angel groaned. She tapped her fingernails on the table. “A couple of years ago somebody put a virus on the servers that run these stupid drones. Back then the command signal channel wasn’t even encrypted. The virus didn’t even affect that channel, just the back-end stuff, but still, they had to go and add serious military-level encryption to the command channel and make my life really, really difficult.”

Julia frowned. “You’re complaining because the military actually went to the trouble of making their drones hard to hack?”

“It’s really adding to my workload,” Angel said. “Okay, okay. Let me try something different. Every system has a weakness, right?”

“Um, sure,” Julia said.

Angel nodded. “There has to be a channel I can exploit. Maybe something on the optical bus. The drone just has the one camera pod. If I can shut down that camera, it won’t be able to find its target, and it won’t ever launch its weapons.”

Julia leaned back. “That’s kind of brilliant.”

Angel shrugged. “It’s what I do. Now, could you just leave me to it? Maybe you should go talk to Wilkes. Make sure he doesn’t accidentally kill somebody.”

“Good idea,” Julia said.

“I know,” Hollingshead said, “what you’re planning. What you’re in the middle of achieving and it is, well, quite ambitious.” He smiled at the SecDef. “I’d very much like to try to convince you not to go ahead with it, however.”

“Oh? And why is that?” Norton asked.

“Because I think it’s bad for America,” Hollingshead replied. “I understand, really, why you would do this. You think the country is out of control. And I suppose it is. The legislature is frozen in constant gridlock. The executive is stymied by special interests and a splinter party that viciously attacks its every move. Meanwhile the people refuse to even listen to the issues, much less debate them. The country can’t move forward like that, can it? Not when our economic interests are threatened by global market shifts. Not when the very climate has turned against us. Not when we need to be unified now more than ever.”

“You’re making my case pretty eloquently, Rupert,” Norton said. “This country needs a strong leader now. It can’t wait until the next presidential election — not that that would change anything. We need a hand on the rudder if we’re going to weather the coming storm.”

“Indeed. And I believe that leader will step forward. But I don’t think it’s you, sir. With all due respect—”

“History shows us that the man who has the audacity to take power for himself is the only kind of man fit to hold it.”

Hollingshead pursed his lips.

“Julius Caesar started an empire that would rule all the known world. Alexander the Great applied logic to warfare and won everything. Qin Shi Huang saw the petty warlords squabbling over pieces of China and knew they had to be brought together by force.”

“Hitler,” Hollingshead said. “Stalin. Mao.”

“That’s weak, Rupert. That’s just special pleading. You really think I’m that sort? You think I’d use power for that kind of monstrosity?”

“No. But I’d like to point out one simple thing. If you seize America by military force, if you take away the basic freedoms of its people, then you will have gained nothing. Because without freedom, there is no America.”

Norton laughed. “Over the last fifteen years we’ve been arguing this point endlessly. And the result? Americans are perfectly willing to give up freedom in exchange for security. If you want proof, look at what I’ve done in the last week. I’ve shown them what insecurity really looks like. By the end of the day today they will be begging me to take charge. To tell them what to do.”

Hollingshead looked down at his shoes. “You took an oath to protect the president. Now you’re going to murder him so you can take his place.” He shook his head. “This goes against everything that you and… you and … I — Patrick?” he said. “Patrick, are you all right?”

The man’s face had turned bright red. His eyes bulged from their sockets as if he was having a stroke.

Instead, though, his mouth opened, his head tilted back — and he laughed. He positively guffawed.

“Kill the president?” he said. “Kill him?”

Hollingshead blinked in confusion.

“Rupert, why would I do that? The man and I play squash together, for God’s sake.”

Chapel moved quickly out of the kitchen and through the first floor of the safe house, keeping his back to each wall, flanking each doorway as he moved but not wasting any time. He saw no one so he moved into a tasteful if somewhat cluttered parlor in the front. Peeking through the blinds that covered the windows, he could see the guards still arguing with Top and his boys. Chapel had to grin at that — he’d known his old physical therapist would help, had known it even before he’d made the call. But he’d had no idea that every single one of the boys would come with him, or that they would commit to their ruse so intently. Chapel had mostly expected them to show up, ask for Norton, and then politely leave when security showed up.

Instead it looked like they’d installed themselves on the sidewalk for as much time as it took for the guards to drag them away. Of course, eventually Norton’s people would just call the police. But maybe enough of the cops were busy out on Capitol Hill, and it would take them a long time to arrive …

Chapel was playing for time. If he could stay alive and free in the house until Angel reported in, if he could confront Norton with the news that his drone wasn’t going to be killing anyone today, they might have a chance. Charlotte Holman had been as devoted to the Initiative as anyone, but she was also a practical woman. When she thought the cause was hopeless, she had folded in a hurry. Chapel thought Norton would do the same, especially if Hollingshead allowed the SecDef a graceful exit.

Of course, all that depended on Angel and Chapel pulling off a couple of miracles in the next fifteen minutes.

The first floor was empty. The security detail had been smart enough to leave one man on the back door, but otherwise all of them had flooded out into the street to deal with Top. Chapel moved into the front hall and up to the main door. He locked it and threw the dead bolt. That wouldn’t stop the guards forever — once they realized they’d been locked out of the house, they would batter the door down if they had to — but it might buy him a minute or two.

He moved to the bottom of the stairs that led to the second floor. He drew a fresh Taser and started climbing the risers, one by one, careful to test each step with his weight, making sure it didn’t creak. He thought he could hear people moving in the floors above him and he stopped perfectly still to listen for a second, but the sound didn’t repeat.

He took another step. Another.

He couldn’t see any shadows moving at the top of the stairs. No sign that anyone was aware of his presence. He didn’t even hear anyone cough or clear their throat. He took another step.

He lifted his foot, got ready to take the next step, just three from the top of the flight. Put his foot down very gently.

That was when an armed guard leaned out into the stairs and started firing.

Angel tapped at a key. Her screen filled with new data. She tapped another key and shook her head. “Okay,” she said.

Julia nodded in excitement. She rubbed at her mouth because her lips were very, very dry. “Running out of time here,” she said.

“How far away is the drone?” Wilkes asked.

“About ten kilometers. It looks like it’ll be here right when the president starts his speech.”

“How are we looking?” Julia asked.

“Bad,” Angel told her. “I’ve got access to the onboard sensors, which is the first step toward switching off the camera. But I need more time, and—”

“And we’re not getting any,” Wilkes growled.

Angel shook her head. “I know, I know — Jesus. There are four bombs on this thing.” She rubbed at her face. “Viper Strikes.”

Julia had no idea what that meant, but clearly Wilkes thought it was bad. He actually went pale when he heard it. “Not Hellfires. You’re sure.”

Angel grunted. “I can tell the difference! And that’s very bad, very, very bad. Because. Because I think I know how to stop this thing.”

“So do it already,” Julia insisted.

“I can release them,” Angel said as if Julia hadn’t spoken. “I can send the rails hot signal, and the bombs will just… fall off the bottom of the drone. Before they were supposed to. That means they won’t hit the Capitol.”

Wilkes nodded. “And they’re Viper Strikes. Glide bombs, with GPS targeting. But they won’t have targets.”

“Yeah,” Angel said. She took a deep breath.

“What’s the big problem?” Julia asked. “Just do it already.”

Angel looked up at her. “Julia, the drone is already inside the Beltway. If I release those bombs, there is absolutely no way of saying where they’ll go. They’re glide bombs, which means they can fly a little on their own, they don’t just fall straight down. Normally they’re guided to their targets, but because they won’t have any target information, they’ll just glide on the wind until they hit something. Maybe they hit an IRS building and blow up everybody’s tax returns. Or maybe they hit schools and hospitals. If I do this, we can’t predict how many people will die. But we’ll be dropping four bombs on a crowded population center, and I guarantee you they’ll hit somebody.”

“It means saving the president, and everyone else in the Capitol,” Wilkes pointed out.

“You think he’s got more of a right to live than anyone else?” Angel asked. Julia was surprised at the younger woman’s tone — she made it sound like an honest question, like something that could be debated.

“Yeah, I do. I think right now this country needs the president,” Wilkes replied. “I think without him we’re utterly screwed. So if you don’t want to push the button — I will. And make up your mind right now, because we’re out of time.”

Angel stared at him for long, desperate seconds during which Julia felt like she couldn’t breathe. Like her heart was just going to stop beating.

Then Angel nodded and broke the spell.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

She tilted the screen of her laptop back up and reached for the keyboard. Her finger hovered over the enter key. Then she tapped it, just once and closed her eyes. A shudder went through her small body. “Forgive me,” she whispered.

Julia put her hand over her mouth. She couldn’t bear to think what they might just have done.

She didn’t get a chance to think about it. Someone on the other side of the bakery shouted “Hey!” and everything stopped.

All three of them turned to look at the middle-aged woman who had called out. She was holding her cell phone up as if she wanted to show it to everybody. “I had four bars,” she said. “Four bars!”

A guy in a business suit took his own phone out of his pocket and stared at it as if it had turned into an avocado while he wasn’t looking. “No signal,” he said.

Angel stared at the man in horror. Then she looked down at her laptop. “No,” she said. “No, no, no — not now!”

Julia looked out the plateglass windows at the front of the shop and saw something incredible. All over the sidewalk, as far as she could see in any direction, people were taking out their phones and staring at them, tapping wildly at the screen as if that would help, holding them high up in the air in an effort to catch even the slightest cellular signal, all to no avail. Her attention was drawn back when Angel tapped at the laptop screen, specifically at the icon in the status bar that indicated what kind of Wi-Fi signal the computer was receiving.

The icon had turned a useless gray, indicating the laptop had no signal at all.

“Not now!” Angel said again, grabbing her hair in both hands.

Chapel fell backward, half intentionally, trying to get away from the bullets that smashed into the wooden stairs all around him. He went down hard on his left arm — his artificial arm, which was good because if he’d landed on his right arm like that, it would have broken. The prosthetic twisted under him as he shoved himself downstairs, almost sledding over the risers until he reached the bottom. Then he twisted around to get the banister between himself and the shooter.

He was pretty sure he’d been hit, at least once. Looking up he saw blood on the risers and knew it was his. He also saw his Taser up there, sitting three steps down from the top of the staircase.

From above he heard the sound of a walkie-talkie, the voice of someone desperately trying to connect to his superior. There was no reply. Maybe the superior was busy out front with the protesters. Maybe he was the guy Chapel had Tased out back. What a lucky break that would be.

Chapel just hoped he would live to make use of it.

He didn’t dare look — he had to keep his eyes on the top of the stairs, in case the shooter came back. But with his good, living hand, he reached down and tried to figure out where he’d been hit.

Two places, it turned out. Once in his right hip, though that just looked like a flesh wound. Once in his back, where he found a neat little hole that was leaking blood in a steady stream. That was a lot scarier. He couldn’t reach the wound well enough to even put pressure on it.

Upstairs he heard a footstep creak on a loose floorboard.

He’d lost his Taser. But of course he’d come armed with more than one weapon. He drew a 9 mm handgun from one of his pockets and worked a round into the chamber. He hadn’t wanted to kill anybody today. The guards in the safe house all worked for the Department of Defense. They were his colleagues. But if he had no choice, then—

Another footstep.

The shooter swung out into open space at the top of the stairs and fired three shots down in quick succession, none of them coming close to hitting Chapel, but it was enough to make him dive behind his cover. When he dared to look again, the shooter was gone.

Damn. The shooter had the high ground. To get a clear shot Chapel would have to run all the way up those stairs, leaving himself exposed the whole time. The shooter could just pick Chapel off at his leisure.

But if he stayed down at the bottom, Chapel knew he would bleed to death before he could get to Hollingshead.

He tried to think of what to do. He tried to—

More gunshots fell around him, still wide of the mark. Close enough to make Chapel throw his artificial arm over his head for protection.

The shooter pulled back and Chapel heard the floorboard squeak again.

Maybe. Just maybe, he thought.

The stairs ended at an abrupt landing and turned to the right up there. Where the staircase met the ceiling was exactly where the shooter’s floor began. That creaky floorboard had to be about a foot and a half from the top riser, about… there …

Chapel heard the creak again, and this time he was ready. He aimed his pistol at the ceiling and fired six shots, one after the other.

Somewhere in the roar of the shots he heard a scream. He thought.

For nearly a minute he just sat there, bleeding. Waiting for the creak of the floorboard or the sound of gunshots coming from above. In the end, though, neither of those things gave him his signal. Instead, he looked up and saw the circular holes he’d punched through the ceiling with his own shots. A nice, tight grouping right where he thought the shooter had been.

As he watched, a drop of blood dangled from the edge of one of those holes. It grew larger and larger and then it fell to splash on the floor right next to where Chapel lay.

He didn’t waste any more time. He got to his feet — which made his new wounds burn like fire, and his old, Wilkes-inflicted gunshot wound flare up like a smoldering ember — and staggered up the stairs, as fast as he possibly could.

At the top he found the shooter staring up at him, one hand reaching toward the stairs. One of Chapel’s shots had gone through the bottom of the shooter’s chin and out again through the top of his head.

The man was dead.

Chapel kicked his pistol away, back down the stairs, just to be safe. Then he started down the hall, toward the room where they were keeping Hollingshead.

Judging by the trail of blood he left behind him, he knew he’d better make this quick.

When they hadn’t heard any gunshots in a while, Norton smiled. “That was your man, I think. The one we heard scream.”

Hollingshead hoped not. For everyone’s sake, he sincerely hoped not. “Then I suppose all is lost. I came here on a fool’s errand and threw away the life of my last asset. And, ah, well, of course — my own.”

“Looks that way,” Norton told him.

“Then — since it no longer matters — maybe you can fill me in on a few details. Assuming, of course, that you aren’t needed elsewhere.”

Norton shook his head. “No, I’m fine right here. I’m expecting a phone call a little after nine o’clock. From the president. Until then my schedule is clear.”

Hollingshead nodded. “Very good. A call from the president. And here I assumed your coup required that the man was dead. You set things up so you would be the designated survivor, then put most of the executive branch in one room—”

Norton waved a hand dismissively. “I had no idea I was going to be the survivor. I never planned to hurt anyone at that level.”

“Then why — I’m sorry, I find myself baffled. Not that I wish to give you any ideas, but — why not? Why not assassinate the president, now that he’s basically given you the perfect opportunity?”

“Because what you accused me of — of fomenting a military coup — that’s impossible in America.”

“Indeed?”

“Yeah. Aaron Burr tried it all the way back in 1807, and he failed. Douglas MacArthur and Alex Haig both considered it, I think — though neither of them went far enough for there to be any proof. I like to think they figured out the same thing I did. You can’t pull off a military coup in America because we’re a nation of loudmouths.” He laughed. “You know how many people would have to be in on such a thing? How many generals and colonels and majors I’d have to swing over to my side? And if even one of them decided they didn’t like my scheme, all they would have to do would be to make one phone call and I’d be in the stockades by dinnertime. Forget it. And even if I could get all those officers on my side, what about the actual soldiers? American soldiers are the best trained and best equipped in history. They’re also the best educated. You really think there’s a single private anywhere in the army who would shoot the president because I asked him to? No, they know their rights too well. They would just refuse.”

“I can’t say it’s something I’d considered before,” Hollingshead said.

Norton got up and paced around the room, waving his arms in the air as he spoke. “No, a coup was out of the question. Anyway, why would I want to be chief executive? The second I declared myself president for life, the UN would be on my ass. China and Russia would send their navies to blockade our ports. There would be no shortage of Americans calling for me to step down, and no shortage of self-styled patriots willing to martyr themselves if it meant they got a good shot at me.”

“So you don’t want to be in charge,” Hollingshead said. “You don’t want power. Despite everything you said about great men taking control of history.”

“Oh, I’m going to have the power. But I’m going to stay anonymous at the same time. I’ll be the man behind the throne.”

Hollingshead squinted at the SecDef. “And how, exactly?”

“By making myself so vital to the president that he won’t dare make a move without consulting me. When this country is reduced to utter chaos — when people are running wild in the street—”

“Ah!” Hollingshead said. “Of course. It will become necessary to declare martial law. And you will, of course, most modestly and in the service of your country, agree to take charge of the military clampdown that will follow.”

“Now you’re getting it, Rupert,” Norton said, his eyes shining.

“And lo and behold, the drone attacks will stop. Your efforts to protect the nation will bear fruit and you’ll be proclaimed a hero. Except, no — they won’t quite stop, will they? Any time there’s a threat to your power, there’ll be another attack.”

“Well,” Norton pointed out, “it’s not like anyone expects you to win the war on terror.”

“Oh, of course not. And if the president begins to suspect that you engineered the entire thing?”

“Presidents only get eight years, and that’s only if they can keep the American people safe. Cabinet positions like mine can last a lifetime.”

“Ingenious,” Hollingshead said. “Perhaps so brilliant that I feel like I’m still missing one piece of the puzzle.”

“Oh?”

“I was under the impression that you were going to use a drone to attack the Capitol and kill the president. I can see how silly that idea was, now. But there was — I mean, that is to say, Charlotte told me there was one more attack coming, and — well—”

“Oh, there’s going to be a drone attack today, definitely,” Norton said. “It’s just not aimed at the Capitol building.”

“Ah.”

“No. So far we’ve managed to cause panic and fear without too much loss of life. That poor bastard at the Port of New Orleans, of course, and some people in California when the lights went out. But I’m afraid you can’t really get the American people to panic without a good old-fashioned massacre.”

Hollingshead’s eyes went very wide.

“You saw how many people are out there on the Mall, today, Rupert. Maybe a quarter million. The people who came to hear the president’s grand ideas for how to fix the present crisis. I’m not proud of this. I ordered it with a heavy heart. But I need to utterly destroy confidence in the president’s ability to control the nation. So quite a few of those people out on the Mall… well, they’re going to have to make a sacrifice for the greater good.”

While the customers inside the bakery kept checking their cell phones, Julia leaned over Angel’s shoulder and said, “What’s going on? What just happened? What about the drone?”

Angel shook her head in irritation. She looked right into Julia’s eyes, not four inches from her own, and stared until the other woman backed off. Then she grabbed up her laptop and jumped off her stool. She ducked under the counter and squeezed in between the manager and the employees back there, who protested volubly but ineffectively.

“I tried,” Angel said. “I tried! I sent the rails hot signal. I told it to drop the bombs, but… hold on.”

“Angel, report,” Wilkes demanded.

“I was locked out,” Angel said from under the counter. “I got in, I had a clear signal to the drone. The second I sent a command, though, the system knew I was there. Moulton must have expected we would try something like this.”

“He knew what?” Julia asked. She shook her head. There was no time. “You were locked out of the controls? So you didn’t drop the bombs?”

“No,” Angel said.

“So just… just hack the drone again,” Julia suggested. “Try from a different direction or something.”

“It didn’t just lock me out. When it detected me, it locked out everybody. The drone has an ECM pod,” Angel said. When no one reacted, she added, “Electronic countermeasures. There was this… there was…” She ducked back down below the counter and rummaged around down there for a second. The store manager stared daggers at Wilkes, but he just flashed his fake FBI card at her again.

Finally Angel popped back up, yanking a credit card scanner after her. She pulled the cord out of the back of the scanner. She threw the scanner away, then jammed the cord into a port on the side of her laptop.

“In Iraq and Afghanistan, they had this problem,” she said, even as she typed furiously on her keyboard. “Insurgents were burying IEDs all over the place, bombs they could detonate with their cell phones. Bombs like that are super cheap to make, you can hide them easily — it was a nightmare for our guys. So the Pentagon started putting ECM pods on their drones. You know what jamming is?”

Julia frowned. “It’s like — you block somebody else’s, I don’t know. Radios.”

Angel didn’t even look up. “Good enough. The principle is basic, and it’s been around for more than a century. Your enemies are using some radio frequency to communicate, so you just broadcast a ton of noise — just static — on that same frequency and they can’t talk to each other. The jamming hardware on the drone is a lot more sophisticated, but it basically does the same thing. It’s knocked out every cellular connection, every Wi-Fi network, every television, radio, and satellite broadcast for a hundred miles. Just in case anybody tries to interfere with its programming.” She shook her head. “This sucks! I was in. I was in, Julia. I had this thing. I had the drone…”

“So if it blocks out all communications, what are you doing now?” Julia asked.

Angel tapped the cord she’d plugged into her computer. “You can’t jam wired connections. At least, not as easily. I’m still getting a signal through this thing, though ninety percent of the Internet around D.C. is down. Way too many vital connections being shared over Wi-Fi in this town. Damn it! I can’t even contact the drone now.”

“Why not?”

“Signal fratricide,” Angel said. She must have seen the look on Julia’s face, because she visibly calmed herself down and explained. “The big problem with jamming like this is that you jam your own connections, too. The frequency I was using to communicate with the drone is one of the frequencies it’s blocking. I just lost everything.”

“What does that mean?” Wilkes demanded.

“It means we’re screwed,” Angel said, putting her hands on her cheeks as if to warm them up. “It means I can’t stop the attack.”

Something happened to Julia then. Maybe it was just fear, maybe she’d had enough. She wanted to shake her head, she wanted to shake her whole body. Her stomach did somersaults as Badass Julia rose up inside her and took over.

She stood up very tall and stared down at Angel, forcing the younger woman to meet her gaze. “No, it doesn’t.”

Angel clearly wanted to look away. Julia grabbed her face and made Angel look into her eyes.

“I’m telling you,” Angel said, “even if I could get a good broadcast signal, which no, I can’t — even then — I can’t contact the drone. I can’t hack it if I can’t even talk to it.”

“Angel,” Julia said, “the attack isn’t going to happen for another… six minutes. Until then, I don’t want to hear the word ‘can’t’ out of your mouth. You think of something. You think of something right now.”

Angel turned and stared at Wilkes, as if for sympathy, but the marine had nothing to offer her.

Chapel heard something, the scuff of a shoe on the floorboards, maybe just the rustle of a cheap wool jacket. Somebody was up there in the hallway ahead of him. Doors lined either side of the hall and he had no idea where the attack was going to come from, but he knew — he positively knew — that someone was about to try to kill him.

It wasn’t like he’d never felt that sensation before.

Two guards stepped out of a room at the end of the hall, then, their pistols already up in the air. They fired without a moment’s hesitation.

But Chapel was already moving. He swung around, bringing his left arm up high, over his face and the upper portion of his chest. The first bullet missed him entirely, digging a long trench through the hardwood floor. The second bullet sank deep into the silicone covering his prosthetic. The energy of the shot pushed Chapel sideways, not enough to knock him off his feet but enough to knock him off course as he threw himself at the nearest doorway.

His right shoulder hit the wooden door hard, hard enough he worried he might have dislocated the joint. The door resisted for a second, then wood cracked and the door latch gave way, sending Chapel tumbling into the room beyond.

It proved to be a disused storeroom, full of old furniture covered in dusty sheets. He collided with something soft — it felt like a sofa — and he let himself flop down, his feet going wide as he sank to the floor.

There was blood everywhere, all over the room, the sheets, the door. It took him a while to realize it was his own.

Yep. He was definitely getting light-headed.

He craned his head around to look at the hole in his back and saw that his shirt and pants were both soaked in blood. The flow of blood seemed to have decreased to just a trickle, but he’d already lost so much.

The pain was manageable — adrenaline was helping with that — but he knew that shock was going to catch up with him soon. If he didn’t get a proper bandage on the wound, he could just bleed out as well.

A weird whining noise came from his left arm. He tried to make a fist with his artificial fingers, but they wouldn’t close properly. The prosthesis had taken a shot for him, probably saving his life, but it was done for now. Useless.

Out in the hall, he could hear two sets of footsteps coming closer. They were coming slow, giving him plenty of time to show himself, but they weren’t even trying to be quiet.

Chapel was pinned down by multiple enemies, stuck behind cover waiting for someone to just walk up and shoot him. He knew how to handle this situation.

But he also knew the odds.

A lot depended on how well trained these guys were. The MPs at the marina had been easy. Nobody had ever bothered to teach them more than basic hand-to-hand combat and simple overwatch tactics. Chapel had a feeling these two would be a little more advanced.

If they knew how to do their jobs, and if he just let them walk up to the doorway and start shooting at him, he was going to be killed. There was no question about that. He was going to have to take the fight to them. Jump out of that doorway, guns blazing, and hope he caught them by surprise.

It was just about the worst plan he’d ever heard. If there had been anything else, any other way …

Well, he told himself, there wasn’t.

Slowly, aching and bleeding and gritting his teeth, Chapel levered himself back up onto his feet.

Outside in the hall the two guards were only seconds away.

“Okay, okay! Just let me think,” Angel said. She rubbed at her temples. She stared at the screen of her laptop as if the answer was there, as if a riddle was written there that she could potentially solve.

“There’s gotta be something you can do,” Wilkes pointed out. “Take over a cruise missile from an air base around here, send it after the drone. Or, hell, send another drone.”

“No time, and even if I could launch a missile, I wouldn’t know where to shoot it. Right now I don’t know where the drone is.”

Julia just leaned against the counter and folded her arms.

“Jesus, that is not helping,” Angel said. She couldn’t even look at Julia.

“What about — I don’t know,” Wilkes said. “When they taught us to infiltrate buildings, they said, if the doors are locked, make ’em open the doors. Set off a fire alarm so they all come rushing out. Or just set the place on fire.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Angel demanded.

“I’m just trying to think a different way. You know, outside the box. Or inside the box in this case. Listen, the drone is jamming us, right? What if we jammed it? Like, its radar or something.”

“Possible,” Angel said, “but then it still has its cameras and the best pattern recognition software money can buy. If its radar went down, it would just ignore the radar. Unless — unless we spoofed it.”

“What’s spoofing?” Julia asked.

“That’s when, instead of jamming a signal with white noise, you actually send a false signal. Make the radar think there’s something in front of the drone, that it’s about to collide with another plane or something. It would veer off course.” She shook her head. “But that’s no good. Again, it’s got that camera. It would check the camera, see there was nothing there, and ignore the radar. And there’s no way to spoof the camera — at least, no way we’re going to make happen in five minutes.”

“Okay,” Wilkes said. “But if we had more time, how would we—”

“Wait,” Angel said.

A look of utter concentration came over her face. She put her hands out at her sides as if warding off distractions.

“Wait,” she said again.

“Okay,” Julia said. “We’re waiting.”

Angel looked her right in the eyes. “The drone has that fancy camera. But the bombs don’t.”

“How does that help?” Wilkes asked.

“We wait until it drops its bombs. These aren’t Hellfire missiles, they’re Viper Strikes. They’re guided after they drop. Guided straight to their targets, by GPS.”

“Okay,” Julia said.

“So we don’t spoof the drone’s radar. We spoof the entire GPS.”

“You’re going to kill thousands of people,” Hollingshead sputtered. “Just to make the president look like a fool.”

“No,” Norton said. “I’m going to kill thousands of people so that the president looks weak. So that it’s clear to everyone he can’t control his people through ordinary channels. Even if he doesn’t declare martial law on his own, Congress will insist on it. I have a few senators I can count on. And once martial law is declared—”

“ — the military will be in de facto control of the entire country,” Hollingshead said, nodding. “And you control the military. You’ll be given the justification to do whatever it takes to restore order. You’ll have power over every aspect of American life. You’ll tell people where they’re allowed to move, what time they have to be inside at night. You’ll have the power to nationalize whole industries and commandeer any goods or services you claim to need. And of course, suspend all elections as you see fit, until the time of crisis has passed.”

“And I’ll be the one who decides when that is,” Norton pointed out.

“The people will be very angry,” Hollingshead said. “They’ll hate this. But they won’t blame you — after all, you’ll just be doing what the president asked you to do. They’ll blame him.” Hollingshead very much wished his hands were free. He would have liked to polish his glasses. It was what he did when he needed time to think. “Simplicity itself. A flawless plan. I suppose one doesn’t rise to a vital cabinet position if one isn’t a little brilliant.”

“Thank you, Rupert. That actually means a lot,” Norton said, with a genuine smile.

Hollingshead grinned back. “Of course, it won’t last. Tyranny never does. The people will revolt.”

Norton opened his mouth to say something more, but he was interrupted by the sound of more gunshots out in the hall.

“Do you suppose,” he said when silence fell again, “that was mine or yours?”

“I imagine,” Hollingshead said, “we’re about to find out.”

Chapel had lost so much blood he could barely stand upright, but he was still strong enough to shoot. He leaned against the wall of the storeroom, right next to the door. He closed his eyes — the better to hear the approaching guards, he told himself. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was about to pass out.

He could hear them getting closer. Since his only plan relied on getting off two perfectly placed point-blank shots the second he stepped into the hallway, he wanted them as close as possible. He forced himself to wait, to concentrate.

He kept thinking about the fact he hadn’t said good-bye to Julia. Not properly, anyway. Nor had he told Angel what she’d meant to him over the years.

He hoped that she knew.

He forced open his eyes.

He stepped out into the hall and started shooting.

“More,” Angel said. “One more. Come on!”

At least now Julia could understand what showed on the laptop’s screen. It showed a simplified map of Washington, covered in tiny red dots. Each of those was a cell-phone tower. As Angel seized control of them, one by one, they turned green.

“I don’t understand,” Julia said. “I thought the drone was jamming all the radio frequencies.”

“It is,” Angel said. “Those towers aren’t getting any phone signals through. But GPS is different. It was designed by the military, originally, and it includes a technology called DSSS to get around jamming. Anything I send through those towers, if it uses DSSS, is going to look like GPS coordinates. If I can send the bombs fake coordinates, I can fool them into hitting the wrong targets.”

“Doesn’t GPS come from satellites, not cell towers?” Wilkes asked.

“Yeah. The drone would know it was being fooled, but the bombs aren’t smart enough to tell the difference. Any radio signal with DSSS looks the same to them. The trick,” she said, tapping at her trackpad until another tower turned green, “is to get enough towers up and running. The bombs are still getting real GPS data from the satellites. That signal is still stronger than what I’m putting out. But if I can take over enough cell towers, I can overwhelm the satellite signal and fool the bombs.”

Wilkes started to ask another question, but Julia put a hand on his arm and shook her head. Angel needed to concentrate.

On the screen another tower turned green. And another. Angel nodded encouragingly. Then she spat out an obscenity as one of her green towers turned back to red.

Wilkes bent his head down to whisper to Julia. “Is this going to work?”

“No idea,” Julia told him. “Normally I’d say it was impossible. But it’s Angel. So — maybe?”

On the laptop, three more towers turned green.

A fourth.

Two more.

“Please,” Angel said. “Please just work.”

Julia glanced out the plateglass windows of the bakery, as if she could see the drone out there. As if she could see the bombs falling from the sky.

“Please,” Angel said.

“Please.”

A logic gate in the electronic guts of the Gray Eagle clicked open, and a signal moved forward through the maze of its processors. A circuit was completed and a command issued.

Under its belly, four clamps opened simultaneously. The clamps were all that held the Viper Strike bombs to the drone, and now they dropped away.

At first the bombs fell like ungainly bowling pins, tumbling through the air. But after a second of free fall, spring-loaded wings and tail fins popped out of their fuselages and they caught the air, pulling out of their spins like diving birds. They settled into long, shallow trajectories as if they wanted to take their time and enjoy the breeze.

The bombs lacked jet engines or propellers, but by adjusting their fins they could change their course radically after they were deployed. One by one they turned away from the path they’d been on, the same path the Gray Eagle had flown. They sniffed the air for the signals they were designed to follow, the GPS coordinates programmed into their tiny brains.

But something was wrong. There seemed to be two signals, with very different values. The two targeting solutions were nearly a kilometer away from each other.

Which signal was correct? There was no way of knowing. For the first few seconds of their descent, the bombs’ fins twisted back and forth helplessly and their warheads swayed like dogs choosing between two perfectly identical bones.

An insoluble problem for computers as simple as those inside the bombs. They might have just kept twisting back and forth until they simply fell out of the sky. But then the problem solved itself, as things always do — for better or worse.

Little by little, one of the GPS signals grew stronger. Little by little the computers grew sure and certain of where they should go.

Down on the Mall a quarter million people waited to hear what the president had to say. One of the GPS signals indicated that the bombs’ target was right in the center of that crowd. Right where their explosions would do the most damage.

Kill the most people.

The protesters might hear a whistling sound, in the last moment. The bombs would be moving too fast for them to see their deaths streaking toward them.

At least… that might have happened. But the second GPS signal was stronger. At the critical moment, the bombs twisted away from the crowd and headed west. They stretched their wings as wide as they could to gain distance as they slid toward the ground, their noses coming up as they tried, desperately, to reach their new target, nearly a kilometer away. They flicked over the roof of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, just barely avoiding a collision, then nosed down to strike their target with pinpoint accuracy.

Their computer brains were not smart enough to wonder why. Why they had been told to attack a target fifty feet below the surface of the Tidal Basin, the nearest body of deep water. They were deeply submerged when they detonated. The high-explosive warheads sent a shock wave through the water, a concussive blast of incredible magnitude. The whole surface of the basin lifted and then a plume of water shot fifty feet up into the air.

Those few people who had gathered outside the Jefferson Memorial, perhaps to see the famous cherry trees, were soaked to the skin. Some of them screamed in panic — some ran for shelter. Most stared at each other with wide eyes, wondering what had just happened.

Antiterrorist units and uniformed police were mobilized and they raced to the scene, but there was nothing for them to see when they arrived except for some very wet, very confused tourists.

The attack was already over.

Meanwhile, over in the Capitol building, the president took the podium to enthusiastic applause and began to deliver the most important speech of his career.

Patrick Norton’s cell phone rang inside of his jacket.

Hollingshead did not know at the time about the ECM pod mounted on the Gray Eagle. He did not know that for the last ten minutes or so not a single cell phone in Washington had been able to receive a call. He did not know that the drone had now switched off its jammer, specifically so that this phone call could get through.

Nor could he know who was calling or what they had to say. He could only hear Norton’s side of the conversation, which was limited to a scant few words. “What? What do you mean — I see. All right, just stand by for now. Soon.”

That was all the information Hollingshead had. Those few words. But it was enough to let him inhale deeply for the first time all morning.

He waited for Norton to put the phone back in his pocket.

Then Hollingshead asked, “Things not going exactly to plan?”

Norton was too good a politician to let his face show any real emotion. Still, he couldn’t quite control the tic that made his left eyelid jump. “You didn’t come here to talk me out of the attack, did you?”

“No, I knew from Charlotte that it couldn’t be aborted,” Hollingshead agreed.

Norton lowered his head a fraction of an inch. He appeared resolute and determined, though, when he looked up again. He went to the window and looked down into the street. “Those protesters of yours are still down there. I’ll have to go out the back way. I’m sorry, Rupert, but you’ve pushed me too far. I don’t have any more time to talk.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid this is it for you. I still have a chance, I have plenty of people in sensitive positions who can arrange another attack, but—”

He stopped because there was a knock at the door.

Norton stared at the door for a moment, breathing heavily. Then he called out, “Come in,” in a clear voice.

The door swung open.

Jim Chapel stood there, covered in blood, holding a pistol tight in his right hand.

He took a staggering step inside the room, lurching like an incarnation of red vengeance.

“I didn’t come here to dissuade you from the attack,” Hollingshead said. “I came here today to make sure, when the attack was foiled, that you didn’t get away. This has to end, Patrick. It has to end this instant.”

Norton watched Chapel carefully. He licked his lips, as if they were suddenly very dry. Hollingshead wondered if the man would try to run. Force Chapel to shoot him. Suicide by field agent might seem better, perhaps, than facing what was to come.

Norton surprised him, however. The SecDef set his face very carefully. Then he lifted both hands in the air in surrender.

For a moment no one moved.

It was like they couldn’t believe it was over.

Eventually, though, Hollingshead decided the time had come to speak. “Mister Secretary, you’re under arrest for the crime of treason. Captain Chapel, would you please secure the prisoner?”

Chapel took out a pair of plastic handcuffs and locked Norton’s hands together. He frisked the man and took away his phone. Then he told the SecDef to sit down while he went over and cut Hollingshead free.

“Are you hurt?” Chapel asked.

“Son, you’re not the one who should be asking that question,” Hollingshead whispered back, while rubbing at his chafed wrists. “Are you going to—”

“I’ll be fine, for now,” Chapel told him.

He handed the SecDef’s phone to Hollingshead, then went back to watching Norton. Hollingshead made a few quick phone calls. Within minutes a squad of military police arrived at the safe house. They stood down Norton’s security guards — the ones out front, still arguing with Top — then came up the stairs to the room where Hollingshead waited for them. Their commander, a second lieutenant, blanched when he saw who he’d come to arrest.

“It’s all right,” Hollingshead said. “He’s been removed from office. You can take him into custody.”

Hollingshead didn’t technically have the authority — or the rank — to do that, but Norton didn’t protest. The MPs took him away without another word.

Only when they were gone did Hollingshead see Chapel sway on his feet.

“Is it hot in here?” Chapel asked. “It feels really hot.”

Hollingshead went over to his agent and placed a hand on his forehead. Chapel was burning with fever. “Son — maybe you should sit down,” he said.

“Not until,” Chapel said. But he didn’t finish the sentence.

“Not until what?” Hollingshead asked.

Chapel looked at him with the strangest expression. Then he collapsed, tumbling headfirst toward the floor.

It took forever to get over to Georgetown, creeping along through every traffic light, fighting weird traffic patterns as people kept trying to cram themselves into the Mall. Wilkes drove because Julia kept thinking she was going to throw up.

In the backseat, Angel was all but catatonic. Whether that was because of the news they’d gotten from Hollingshead or if she was just burned out after having to work so hard in the middle of so many people, well, who knew? Julia had stopped worrying about Angel.

She had somebody else to occupy all of her worrying faculties, now.

When they reached the DoD safe house Julia pushed open her door and jumped out onto the pavement even while Wilkes tried to park the car. Ralph, the one-armed vet, was standing by the door and he tried to say something to her as she pushed him away. He tried to grab her hands. She bulled past him and inside, then realized she didn’t know where to go next.

“Where is he?” she demanded.

Ralph tried to calm her down. “Just—”

“Where the fuck is Chapel?” she said, and then there was somebody else there. The house was full of Top’s boys. They tried to talk to her, maybe they even tried to answer her question, but she couldn’t hear them. Her heart was pounding in her ears and she wouldn’t have heard anybody. She couldn’t think, could barely see. Dolores appeared, briefly, but didn’t even try to get in Julia’s way. Somebody pointed up a flight of stairs stained with blood. She should have known. Blood in the hallway upstairs. You want to find Jim Chapel, follow the trail of blood. Inside Julia’s head a whole symphony of worry and fear was just tuning up.

Top himself opened a door for her. She stepped through into a little room.

The floor was littered with torn paper and foil wrappers and pieces of plastic tubing, a bright blue latex glove. The debris left by a team of paramedics. Blood everywhere. Stained towels and sanitary wipes. A syringe with no needle, lying on a carved wooden end table.

But no Chapel.

“Where is he?” she asked again, softly this time, because one of the possible answers was going to destroy her.

“Walter Reed,” Hollingshead said. He was there. She hadn’t noticed that before, but Rupert Hollingshead was there and he was alive and even unhurt. “He held on just long enough, you see. He waited until Norton was taken away, until he was sure we were done and then. Then he. Well. I, ah — he had sustained, that is—”

“Gunshot wounds, I’m guessing,” Julia said. Not because of what the paramedics had left behind. Because that was what happened to Jim. He got shot. All the fucking time. She put a hand to her forehead, then dropped it because she didn’t know why she’d done that. She thought maybe she should sit down. She thought she should run back downstairs and tell Wilkes to take her to the hospital, so she could see Jim again.

“What’s the prognosis?” she asked. “Is he going to live?”

“Ah,” the old man said.

Then Angel came running into the room. She ignored Julia and the very obvious absence where Jim Chapel should have been. Instead she ran over to Hollingshead and threw her arms around his neck and held on to him for dear life. Hollingshead closed his eyes and hugged Angel back and kept saying, “Oh, my dear, you’re safe.”

Julia wheeled around and stared daggers at them. Jim might be dying, right then, and all Angel wanted was to hug her sugar daddy. “You two are awfully glad to see each other,” she spat out, as if the words tasted nasty in her mouth.

“I imagine that’s, well,” Hollingshead said, “natural enough. Given that Angel — Edith — is my granddaughter.”