The Cyclops Initiative

EPILOGUE

The attorney general carried out Patrick Norton’s debriefing the next day. The two of them sat in a small room in one of the White House subbasements, a room that was fully wired to record sound and video. The session went on for many hours. Norton was provided with food and water as requested.

Rupert Hollingshead observed the proceedings through a one-way mirror from a rather underheated adjoining room. Present with him were three of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the vice chairman. It was one of the very few times in his adult life when Hollingshead had found himself in a room full of people who outranked him.

No one in the observation room spoke during the debriefing. They were too busy listening to what Norton had to say. The former secretary of defense made a full and detailed confession of everything he had attempted. He described every one of the drone attacks and how it was carried out. He named all his confederates, starting with Charlotte Holman and Paul Moulton.

There was a certain… excitement in the observation room when Norton named one of the Joint Chiefs as a coconspirator. The man resisted briefly, but he was eventually convinced to leave the room in the company of a pair of armed MPs. After he was gone, the chilly room seemed positively arctic.

Norton did not spare himself in his confession, nor did he offer any apology for what he’d done. Not even an explanation of his motives. He simply laid out the facts of the case and answered the AG’s questions as they were asked.

When the AG had finished with his questions, he thanked Norton for his candor. Then he packed up his briefcase and left the room. Norton remained where he was, shackled to the table. He did not seem particularly worried or afraid, as far as Hollingshead could tell.

Then again, Norton had proven already that he would make a very good poker player, based on his ability to bluff.

The door of the observation room opened and the AG stepped through. He addressed the Joint Chiefs with deference and nodded at Hollingshead. “It’s clear that he’s indictable under any number of statutes,” the man told them. “I’m going to advise we go ahead and just charge him with treason. If we had to try him for every attempted murder and violation of national security protocols, he’d be in court for a hundred years.”

“What’s your recommendation on sentencing?” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs asked.

“I think we have to seek the death penalty,” the AG said. “I respect the man’s office and his military service, but… this isn’t something we as a nation should ever forgive.”

There was no dissent among the Joint Chiefs. Hollingshead had been invited to the room as a courtesy — his opinion was not of interest to anyone there.

The AG and the Joint Chiefs filed out of the room then. Hollingshead waited at the back of the line out of respect, but before he could reach the door, he saw motion inside the debriefing room and he stopped to look.

The door had opened and Walter Minchell, the president’s chief of staff, entered with a single piece of paper in his hand.

Hollingshead stayed behind to see what would happen next. When the last of the Joint Chiefs had left the room, he closed the door behind them.

In the debriefing room, Norton looked up at Minchell with a warm smile. Ever the politician.

“This is how it’s going to be,” Minchell said. “You’re not going to trial. You’re not going to jail or the gas chamber, either. If you sign this piece of paper, the president will give you a conditional pardon and send you on your way.”

Norton had the good grace to at least look confused. “A… a pardon?”

“The conditions are these,” Minchell told him. “You will go immediately to Guam, and you will never come back. You’ll be put on the no-fly list without possibility of appeal. We’ll do what we can to make you comfortable there. Do you agree to these conditions?”

Without even waiting to hear an answer, Minchell slapped his piece of paper on the table and handed Norton a pen.

Norton signed.

Hollingshead was on his feet in the next instant, headed out the door. He caught Minchell in the hallway and grabbed the young man’s arm.

Hollingshead summoned up every shred of authority and command he’d ever possessed and put them in his voice. “Explain this,” he said.

Minchell looked at him with tired eyes. He didn’t pretend he didn’t know what Hollingshead meant. “The country is too close to falling apart right now. Revealing that the terrorist attacks came from so high up would be — deleterious to public order.”

“So he goes free? He gets the deluxe retirement package like a deposed dictator? Nobody is going to be punished for any of this?”

“Not exactly. Somebody has to be blamed. The prevailing wisdom,” Minchell said, “is that Moulton was the main bad actor here. He programmed the drones and orchestrated the attacks.”

“He happens to be dead,” Hollingshead pointed out.

“That is a problem,” Minchell replied. “We need to show that we’re tough on this kind of thing. So Charlotte Holman is going to take the fall.”

Hollingshead felt rage building inside his chest. “I promised her she would be spared if she helped me bring down Norton. I gave her my word.”

“The president didn’t,” Minchell pointed out. He slapped Hollingshead on the arm. “Rupert, he’s sensitive to your role in all this. He knows what you did for him.”

“For the nation, you mean,” Hollingshead pointed out.

“Yes, of course. And he’s very grateful. He mentioned to me that he’s thinking he might need a new director of national intelligence.”

“I gave her my word,” Hollingshead repeated.

But he already knew he’d lost.

The food at the new Walter Reed’s cafeteria wasn’t anything special, but Julia was getting used to it. It also had the advantage of being in the basement of one of the main buildings, so it didn’t have any windows. Angel looked almost comfortable as she sat down at Julia’s table.

“I went and saw him, but he was asleep. I sat with him for a while,” Angel said. “How’s he doing?”

It was the main thing Julia thought about these days, so she was always happy to answer that question. “Better,” she said. “His pulse ox is up, which is really good. He’s conscious sometimes. He sleeps a lot but … that’s a good thing. He was in really bad shape. Crazily enough, if he hadn’t gotten shot that day, he’d probably be dead right now. It turned out he had an infection from the time Wilkes shot him. If they hadn’t caught it when they brought him here, it would have killed him.” She ran one hand through her hair. “Funny how things work, huh? When I closed up that wound, I thought I was healing him, but in fact I might have killed him.”

Angel reached out one tentative hand. Julia grabbed it up like a lifeline and held on while her chest surged with all the tears she wasn’t going to let herself cry. Not yet.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“We don’t have to talk about—”

“Goddamnit,” Julia said, “yes, we do.” She stamped her foot under the table. “Give me this, Angel. Give me some small talk. I’ve been in this hospital for nearly a week with nobody to talk to except doctors. And do you have any idea how doctors talk to veterinarians? They assume we wanted to be like them but we weren’t smart enough. It’s about all I can do not to stab one of them. And then show him how good I am at field-treating lacerations.”

Angel laughed, which was good. It helped Julia get things back under control.

“So how are you doing?” Julia asked again.

Angel nodded. Shrugged one shoulder, looked around. She tried to pull her hand back, but Julia held on to it. “I’m good. They have me back to work, which is really good. I’m not supposed to tell you any of this, of course, but Wilkes is doing field agent stuff now and I’m his operator.”

Julia nodded in understanding. She kind of wanted to yell at Angel for cheating on Jim, but that was absurd. “They’ve got you in another trailer, then.”

“Yeah,” Angel said.

“That bastard. Hollingshead, I mean. I can’t believe he’d do that to his own granddaughter. I’m never going to see him the same way again.”

Angel yanked her hand back. She leaned back in her chair and just listened, though Julia could see by her face that she was offended.

“Angel — he owes you better than this. He uses you. He knows you have this, this problem with open spaces—”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Angel insisted.

Julia was on a tear, though. “He knows you’re terrified of being outdoors, so he shoves you in these little boxes and makes you work for him. That’s like — that’s the opposite of what a grandfather should do.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Angel said again.

Julia tried to smile at her. “I know he’s convinced you that what he did was okay. But you have to know he’s using you, that he just wants to hold on to his best operative so—”

Angel nodded. “Are you finished? Maybe you want to judge him some more?”

Julia sighed. You can’t help somebody, she thought, if they won’t acknowledge they have a problem.

“Maybe you’ll let me talk now. When I was fifteen years old,” Angel said, her voice only a little too loud, “I had already graduated from high school, and I was incredibly good with computers, and I was very bored. And within a month I was all set to go to prison for the rest of my life on an espionage charge.”

“I know this story. You were just a kid and you accidentally hacked into a Pentagon database. You didn’t even know what you were—”

“I knew exactly what I was doing,” Angel said. “There was a boy. A very nice boy, who I met online, and who I had a huge crush on. Do you remember what it was like to have a crush on somebody when you were that young?”

Julia nodded.

“This boy meant everything to me. He taught me so many different techniques — hacks, exploits, stuff I didn’t even know was possible. And he never asked me for anything. Until the day he did. He asked me to break into a certain database and get some files for him. I didn’t know at the time that he was actually a persona shared by a group of Chinese spies. That he was a complete illusion made to appeal just to me. I had no idea why he wanted the contents of that database. But I knew how to get in. My grandpa, after all, had access. So I broke into his study and stole his password and that was how I got in. Because I was young and stupid, I got caught. Luckily for all of us, I was caught before I found what I was looking for.”

Julia just stared.

“They took me right out of my bedroom, with no shoes on my feet. They put a sack over my head and drove me to an interrogation center. They told me they were going to send me away forever. I was going to be subjected to extraordinary rendition and taken away to a CIA black prison overseas. They kept telling me I was a terrorist. And then my grandfather stepped in and pulled me out of there.”

“I didn’t know—”

“He took me out of there and sent me home. I didn’t know at the time how much that cost him. He was already in trouble, since it was his password I used. It very nearly ended his career, but he didn’t give up on me. He made sure I didn’t have to go to jail. He wanted to send me home to my parents. Set me up with a nice therapist and lots of nice pills and let me have what they call a normal life. There were conditions, though. One was I was never going to be allowed to touch a computer again.”

Angel rubbed at her face. Was she crying? Julia didn’t see any tears. But she could tell how much it hurt Angel to talk about this.

“The one thing I had. The one thing that made any sense of my life. Imagine it, Julia. Imagine if someone told you that you could never touch a dog again. Never work with animals, and if they caught you within a hundred yards of so much as a gerbil, you would go straight to prison. Forever.”

“It’s not the same thing—”

“It’s exactly the same,” Angel told her. “I know I’m not like you. I know I’m different. But I am what I am. So I went to my grandpa. I got a hearing with a special group in the Justice Department, and then another meeting at the Pentagon. I laid out my argument as carefully, as logically as I could. When they didn’t listen to logic — people so rarely do — I played on their emotions. I cried and told them how sorry I was, how I was duped, how I felt so bad about the whole thing. Then I asked them for a job. I asked them for a way to redeem myself.”

“This — this life,” Julia said, scarcely believing it. “This was your idea?”

“I had to beg them to let me actually work. I had to beg them to give me those trailers. Do you understand? I had to fight for what I have.”

“You couldn’t have known what it would mean.”

“I wrote my own job description,” Angel said. “When he heard it, my grandpa tried to stop me. He tried to convince me that a life of pills and no computers and maybe a job somewhere flipping burgers was worth it. I pointed out that I wouldn’t be allowed to run a cash register. You need to run a cash register if you want to work at a fast-food place. There was nothing else for me. So he relented. He said yes. And now every year on my birthday, he comes and has lunch with me in my trailer. And he asks me if I still want this life. If I still want to be me. He says he can pull some more strings, call in some more favors. And every year I smile and kiss him on the cheek and say no. I’m not a prisoner, Julia. I make my own choices.”

Angel stopped talking then. She’d said all she had to say on the matter, clearly. Julia wasn’t sure how to respond.

“I didn’t know,” she said finally.

“No, you didn’t. And you weren’t supposed to. All that is classified.”

Julia nodded.

Angel got up from the table. She started to turn away, but then she stopped herself. She took a piece of paper from her purse and wrote a phone number on it. “The next time Chapel wakes up, just call that number. It won’t pick up no matter how many times you let it ring, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll see the call came in.”

Julia took the scrap of paper. “When he wakes up—”

“Sugar,” Angel said, “I’ll come running.”

“I know you need to get to work, and it wasn’t my, ah, intention to detain you. Mostly I just came to thank you, of course. After all that you” — Hollingshead waved his hands in the air — “after all you did. Quite frankly, you saved my life. But that’s not the only reason I came. I did wish to speak with you quickly about, well. About this house.”

Top’s hand lay on the table, the fingers flexing as he gripped it hard enough to damage the veneer. He said nothing. He didn’t even blink. He just nodded.

“It’s a fascinating arrangement here. All the veterans, all your — your boys — living under one roof. Struggling through their PTSD and their physical rehabilitation together. A brilliant stroke, that. I remember how terribly alone I felt after I came back from my first tour overseas. How a situation like this might have helped! And you manage on such a shoestring budget. I know that in the past you’ve managed to get by with donations from certain of your boys. Myself, of course, included.”

Top nodded again. Hollingshead had needed physical rehabilitation after a hip replacement a few years back. Top had been his therapist. The fact that Hollingshead outranked Top by several orders of magnitude hadn’t mattered in the slightest — from that day forward, Rupert Hollingshead had been one of Top’s boys. He was rather proud of the affiliation.

“You may have heard — that is, I don’t know if you’ve heard but my, well, my job title has recently changed. To be blunt I’ve moved up in the world a bit.”

Top finally spoke. “Are you saying you want to give us more money?” he asked. “Admiral, sir?”

Hollingshead smiled and took off his glasses. He began to polish them with a silk handkerchief as if he needed time to think of how to frame his reply. “About that, well, certainly. I mean, if you think you could use more of, ah, a stipend. But what I was really thinking was, we could set you up as a pilot study. Get some data, crunch some numbers, as it were.”

“A pilot study?”

“Well, yes,” Hollingshead said. “The government does prefer hard data when it can come by it, you see. I think we can prove that a house like this does our veterans more good than — well, than the programs we have in place now. Ah, I know that look on your face. I remember it from our days together when you taught me how to walk again. You’re wishing that I would get to the point.”

“With all due respect, sir.”

Hollingshead nodded. “What I’m suggesting is simple: that we start up houses like this all over the country. Hundreds of them — as many as necessary. Places for our returning veterans to stay, to get back on their feet. To make sure that every one of your, well, metaphorically let’s call them your boys, has a chance like this. Now, of course, you and Dolores would be the directors of this program, which would mean a substantial yearly salary and—”

“You know I would do it for free,” Top interjected.

Hollingshead smiled.

“Damn,” Top said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”

Hollingshead tilted his head to one side. “Said what?” he asked. “At my age, of course, one’s hearing is the first thing to go.”

It was very quiet and very dark in the hospital room. They’d turned the lights out so that Chapel’s roommate could get some sleep.

Julia didn’t mind. She climbed into the bed with Jim and curled up against his side, careful not to disturb any of the tubes or sensors attached to him. It wasn’t the first night she’d done this, and she knew how to get comfortable.

It helped that they’d removed his artificial arm. That made some room for her on the bed. They’d stored it in a cupboard nearby, out of sight — apparently it creeped out some of the nurses.

Julia kissed Jim’s cold cheek. Laid her hand on his chest.

He stirred. He did that sometimes, in his sleep. But this time his eyes opened, just a crack, and he whispered her name.

“I’m here,” she said.

He nodded. Licked his chapped lips.

“Angel came by earlier,” she said. “She wants me to call her when you can actually talk to her—”

“Not… now,” he told her. The effort of talking visibly drained him. But he shifted a little in the bed, turned so he could face her better. “Now.” He took a long, deep breath. “Want to talk… to you.”

“Sure,” she said.

The words came out slowly, each one costing him a little strength. It was all right, though. This was the most he’d said since he first regained consciousness. Weak as he seemed, he was getting stronger. All the time.

He was going to make it.

“When you… broke up with me,” he said. “I had a little box. I put it on the… on the table by the door.”

“I remember,” she said. There’d been a diamond ring in that box. She’d already broken things off, and she was walking out the door for what she thought was the last time. She’d seen it sitting there and it had destroyed her. She’d spent that whole night crying and drinking and trying to not think about what the box meant.

“I want…” he said.

Then he stopped. His eyes closed, and she thought maybe he’d fallen asleep again. She knew she shouldn’t wake him up, that he needed his rest. She desperately wanted to know what he had been trying to say, though.

Fortunately for her sense of medical ethics, he opened his eyes again on his own. “Director. The director said… he said he wanted to give me a new job.”

“You’re not exactly ready to go on another mission,” Julia pointed out.

He smiled. “A desk job.”

“You know you couldn’t work at a desk again if—”

“His job. His old job,” Jim said.

“Oh,” Julia said, so surprised she had no idea how to react.

“You’d know where I was. All the time. And not as many people would… try to shoot me. Virtually none.”

She laughed.

“You should… go home,” he told her. “Get some sleep. You look tired.”

“You’re not one to judge,” she told him.

“I have an excuse. Go home.” He grasped her arm, ran his fingers up her biceps. It sent shivers down her spine, like it always had. “Go home. Get that box and bring it back here,” he told her. “I have a question I want to ask you.”