The Cyclops Initiative

PART 3

Wilkes got some stares as he walked into the little restaurant. He had some visible bruises, but he didn’t think that was it. This was some kind of upscale place with folded linen napkins and chairs that looked like they would collapse if you sat down in them too hard. The tables were covered in shiny goblets of orange juice and ice water, and the people were all dressed in suits or business skirts and they all had great haircuts.

It was pretty tough for the marine not to plunk himself down, put his boots up on one of the tiny tables, and order a cheap domestic beer.

Instead he walked up to where Charlotte Holman sat with another man — Arnold Grauen, the director of the whole NSA. Her boss and, just then, his. He came up to the table and saluted, even though they were both civilians.

There was an almost audible sigh from the other tables. They’d had trouble figuring out what a roughneck like Wilkes was doing in their fancy eating establishment, but this was, after all, D.C. You saw soldiers in D.C. all the time. Once they’d put him in the right pigeonhole, the fancy people could all forget that he existed and go back to enjoying their fancy lives.

“Please,” Holman said, “sit down. This is just an informal meeting.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Wilkes said. He took one of the empty chairs — careful to make sure it would support his weight — and put one of the starched white napkins in his lap.

The two of them, the subdirector and the honest-to-god director, both had plates of fruit and brown bread in front of them. Holman was drinking orange juice or maybe a mimosa and Grauen had a Bloody Mary. Wilkes wondered if he could get some good, plain coffee. It had been a long night.

“I was just bringing the director up to speed,” Holman explained. “I’ve told him that you secured the remaining hard drive of the Angel system and that you made contact with Captain Chapel.”

“Winged him, did you?” Grauen asked, dabbing at his lips with a napkin. He didn’t look like much, even if he was one of the top spymasters in the country. Weedy and thin, with a receding hairline and wire-framed glasses. Wilkes had heard Holman talk about him before and he knew she thought Grauen was worse than useless. A presidential appointee who had almost no experience in real intelligence work, and no great desire to learn how things were done. The man was an impediment to her work.

Still, sometimes you had to play nice. Even though the secretary of defense had put Holman in charge of this mission, she still had to report to her boss on her progress. Wilkes had been called in from the field to brief the man. A bullshit job, but it had to be done. He folded his hands in his lap. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Were you trying to kill him?” Grauen asked, his eyes blank. As if he’d just asked for the time.

“No, sir,” Wilkes said. “It was my intention to detain him for questioning. However, he assaulted my person and I was forced to defend myself. He evaded capture, but when I last saw him he had lost a great deal of blood. It’s possible he died in those woods. I requested assistance from local law enforcement this morning and they are right now searching the area, looking for his body.”

“You think they’ll find it?” Grauen asked.

He was asking if Chapel was dead. “I believe so, sir. Until they do I wouldn’t like to assume anything, however.”

The director took a sip of his drink. “What about the hard drive?”

Wilkes opened his mouth to answer, but Holman beat him there. “We have it at a secure location, sir,” she said. “I have my best man, Paul Moulton, working on it right now. He’s already given me a preliminary report, and I’m afraid the news isn’t good.”

Intelligence people were trained to be pretty good at telling lies, but this woman was a pro. It was hard for Wilkes not to crack a nasty grin as he listened to her spin out her line of nonsense.

The director bought it, of course. He sighed deeply. “We’ve inherited quite a jackpot, haven’t we? All right, spit it out. What’s gone wrong now?”

Holman pursed her lips. “We found concrete evidence that rogue elements of the DIA — namely, Rupert Hollingshead’s working group — were behind the attacks in both New Orleans and California. It’s helpful to be sure about that. Unfortunately we also discovered that while the Angel system is no longer operational, there are other systems. Other neural networks, scattered around the country. Still online and ready to carry out more attacks.”

“Fuck,” Grauen said, his eyes going wide as if he was choking on his cantaloupe. “How many? When? Where?”

“That remains to be determined. My analyst is working on it nonstop. He’ll have more soon. The main thing right now is that we need to make sure that Chapel is dead. And then we need to start thinking about bringing in Hollingshead for… questioning. It will of course have to be done quietly, perhaps under the National Defense Authorization Act provisions.”

The director stared at her. He put his fork down very carefully.

“Am I hearing you correctly?” He asked. “You want me to bring in a subdirector of military intelligence under a secret NDAA warrant? You understand what that means, I’m sure. They’ll stick him in front of a military tribunal without any due process. Jesus, Charlotte. You know I can’t do that without presidential approval. You really have enough evidence for that?”

“We do — it’s all on that hard drive. And I think we need to move on this right away. The NSA is already monitoring all his communications and anyone he meets with, but I’d like to have guards put on him to observe his movements at all times. We still don’t know if he has the capacity to activate one of those neural networks and initiate another attack.”

“You’re suggesting he’s personally behind all of this,” Grauen said. “I’ve known Rupert for years. He never struck me as the type to betray his country.”

“He didn’t? He’s never gotten along with the rest of the intelligence community. A few years ago he went to extraordinary lengths to destroy Tom Banks over at the CIA. He’s not one of us. He’s made that very clear. What if he decided we were the traitors, and somehow thought he could bring us down with these attacks?”

Grauen pushed himself back from the table. “I’ll authorize the guard detail around him,” he said. “And I’ll talk to the president. But you’d better be sure about this. If Hollingshead goes down, it’s going to tear the entire intelligence community in half. Every director at every agency is going to wonder if they’re next.” He stood up and adjusted the sleeves of his suit jacket. “I want constant updates,” he said.

“You’ll have them,” Holman assured him. She gave him a very warm smile and reached up to touch his hand. “Please give my best to Sarah and the children.”

The director nodded and then hurried off.

“You are one sly fox, lady,” Wilkes said when he was out of earshot. “When you called me into this meeting, I thought it was going to be some pointless backgrounder. Politics and bullshit. Instead I got to watch you crucify your worst enemy. Even if the president says no, he’ll have to lock Hollingshead down tight, just to cover his ass in case there are more attacks.” He wanted to applaud, he was so impressed. Instead he reached for a menu. “French toast sounds pretty good, if they don’t have pancakes. And I am in serious need of coffee.”

Holman tapped the top of the menu with one perfectly manicured finger. Wilkes lowered it to look at her.

The cold fury in her eyes might have turned another man to jelly on the spot.

“You’ll eat when Chapel is dead and you can prove it,” she told him.

Wilkes knew better than to snap back at her. “Ma’am,” he said, very quietly, very patiently, “when I shoot a man at point-blank range, he goes down.”

She shook her head. “Get the fuck back out there. Find me a body. And you’ll start operating according to our protocols from now on. Moulton tells me you weren’t even wearing your hands-free set during the operation. You broke communication with him at the most vital time.”

Dude’s a little turd, Wilkes thought, because he couldn’t say it out loud. He would have just distracted me. Out loud he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

Chapel couldn’t move. He was frozen in place. He tried to talk, but even his lips and tongue were completely immobile.

People surrounded him. Injured people.

People with pieces missing.

“I’ll take that arm, if he ain’t using it,” Ralph said, fiddling with the straps on his own prosthetic. “I mean, if that’s cool.”

“Dibs on his leg,” someone else said. “It’s not fair he got to keep it this whole time.”

“All of you, out of my way,” Top said, pushing the others away. He grinned down into Chapel’s face. “I got seniority here. Let me take a look at that eye,” he said, and his teeth started growing points. “You’re dead, army man. You’re dead and we’re not. Sure you see how that adds up.”

And then there were hands on him, hands at his knees and his shoulder, hands that twisted at his skin, twisted hard and his joints started coming unscrewed, his bits and pieces coming loose and there was less of him, less of him all the time …

Jim.

Everything faded away. It didn’t so much go black as it just vanished. All the people, the room, his body.

Just nothing left.

Nothing.

Jim. Can you hear me?

Jim!

So far away. So far away and calm. Nothing there to worry about, nothing that could hurt him now. He felt no remorse, no regrets. It was all going to be okay, because when there was nothing left, nothing mattered.

Blink or something! Please, Jim, stay with me!

A little bit of light touched him. It annoyed him, in that nonplace. He tried to move away from it, but the light just followed him around, and it kept getting brighter and brighter.

He’s not breathing —

I’ve got a pulse, but it’s —

Hold his legs, he’ll hurt himself thrashing like that —

The light tried to go away. For some reason that bothered him, so he chased after it. He had no legs, so he wasn’t running, but somehow he could move, move with the light, even as it fled away from him so fast, even as it dwindled until it was just a star on the horizon, until—

Until it went out.

With his eyes closed, there was nothing around him but sounds and smells. Some of the smells were repulsive. The stink of antiseptic cleaning products. The smell of his own body, which really needed a wash.

The sounds were better. They were soft, low sounds. Unobjectionable. The sound of his own breathing, of the air going into his body and then slowly, slowly leaking out. The rumbling, rolling hum of a washing machine in spin cycle, somewhere close by.

The tiny cascade of sound that hair made as it brushed the skin of his hand. The hair smelled good, too, so much better than he did. It smelled like a woman’s hair.

Soft lips touched the back of his hand. Fingers gripped his, held them tight. That felt good. It felt like those fingers would keep him from floating away again. From disappearing.

The hair brushed his hand again and this time he felt it, felt a thousand little tingles as each individual hair met the nerve endings in his flesh.

Would that hair be red or brown? He kind of wanted to know. He wanted to open his eyes and find out. He took a deep breath and consciously willed his eyelids to flutter open, so he could see, so he could—

The pain hit him so hard that tears burst across his vision. His head roared with blood and with agony and his whole torso spasmed and shook. It felt like he’d been nailed down to the floor with a huge iron spike. It felt like he was a bug pinned to a board, wriggling its legs desperately to try to get free, only hurting itself worse in its desperation.

“Jim! Jim, try not to move — try to calm down, I know it hurts, I know it hurts, but you’ll reopen your wound. We didn’t have any painkillers, nothing stronger than ibuprofen, please, please try to calm down!”

He forced himself to put his head back. To stretch his legs out so they wouldn’t thrash. He tried to focus on breathing, even though every time he inhaled it felt like he was being run through with bayonets.

Eventually, after far too much time had passed, he quieted down again. His body came back under his control. The pain was still there, it was absolutely not going away, but if he didn’t move, if he was very careful with his breathing, it couldn’t take control of him.

When he was finally able to blink the tears away, he looked down and saw Angel sitting beside him, pressing her face against his hand. She looked terrified.

Julia stood over him, doing something to the bandage on his other side. He knew the look on her face, though it took him a second to place it. It was the look she got when she examined a dog or a cat in her clinic, when she had to be very careful to keep her expression neutral so the owner wouldn’t panic.

“Am I going to die?” he asked.

Julia leaned over him and looked directly into his eyes. He realized she was checking his pupils.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“We found you crawling in the road. You nearly got run over by a car. The driver wanted to take you to a hospital,” Julia explained. Angel was nowhere in sight.

“Wilkes would have found me there and finished the job.”

Julia nodded. “That’s what Angel thought. I kept telling her there was no way I could treat you without a lot of equipment and drugs, but she was adamant. She convinced the driver that we would take care of you. He seemed relieved not to have to let you into his car.”

“I was a real mess,” Chapel said. “Probably covered in mud and scraped to hell.”

Julia nodded. “Yes, you were. Not to mention having a gunshot wound, a concussion, and general shock. We brought you back here to Top’s. Set up a makeshift operating room in his basement. Prisoners of war get better medical treatment.” She scrubbed at her face with her hands and sat down hard in a chair. “You want all the gory details?”

“Just the highlights.”

Julia nodded. “The bullet didn’t penetrate the abdominal cavity. It just tunneled through muscle tissue. It was a through and through wound, too. No fragments inside you that I could find. The wound track missed your kidney by about an inch, but it nicked an artery on the way through and that’s why you lost so much blood. I cleaned out the wound as best I could and sutured you, but I’m still very much worried about sepsis. That bullet cut through your shirt and probably blasted cotton fibers halfway through your abdomen and some of them would be so small I couldn’t see them, not with my naked eye, which was all I had to work with. Those fibers can cause some pretty ugly infections. We should be starting you on heavy-duty antibiotics right away. There’s only one problem. We don’t have any. None of them here in the house, and nobody here has a prescription. I can’t write a prescription for you, not with the cops looking for me. So unless we start knocking over pharmacies, we just have to hope for the best.”

“How long until I’m on my feet?”

Julia laughed. “With anyone else, I’d say weeks. For you — well. Bed rest isn’t how you operate, is it? There are no broken bones, and the wound should stay closed unless, you know, you try to run, or jump over a fence, or get in a fistfight.”

“Those are some of my favorite things,” Chapel pointed out.

“You can walk a little tomorrow. We’ll see about the heroics. Jim — there’s a takeaway here. A really important point you need to remember.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Sepsis is not funny. You could have an infection right now. You could develop one next week. You might get feverish, or you might not. You might get stomach cramps or you might not. Those will be the symptoms to look for. Even if they don’t show up, that doesn’t mean you’re well. If the infection goes unchecked too long, you could just die. Just up and die with no warning at all. At any time.”

“When this is over—”

She laughed again. “I’ve heard that one before.”

“When this is over,” he said, “I’ll check myself into a hospital and swallow every pill I can find. But right now if I show my face in public, I’m going to get killed. We need to work this case. I need to work this case. Right now, I need to talk to Angel.”

With some help from Julia, he managed to sit up. It was a small victory.

They had him on a folding cot in the basement. Julia told him he’d raved and screamed when they brought him in so they’d taken him down there so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. “Though Top tells me,” Julia said, “given all the people in this house who get night terrors, the people next door probably wouldn’t notice the difference. Anyway, I figured it was best to keep you away from windows. And down here you won’t be bothered all the time. Suzie’s already complaining that she needs to use the gym equipment down here, but Dolores… well, Dolores shut her up.”

Chapel smiled. Smiling didn’t hurt.

“I’ll bring Angel down so you can talk,” Julia said. She didn’t move from the side of the bed, though. “She’s… Jim, she’s in pretty bad shape. We almost lost you and she took it very hard.”

“Angel’s tough,” he pointed out.

Julia nodded. “Sure. I noticed, for instance, that she didn’t cry much over the bump I got on my head.”

Chapel cursed himself silently for forgetting that Julia had been injured, too. Too late to say anything, he supposed.

“Just go easy on her,” Julia said. She turned to go, but before she’d taken two steps she looked back at him. The expression on her face mystified him. It was a pointed, searching look like she knew he’d done something wrong but wasn’t ready to accuse him yet. He had no idea what that was about.

She left before he had a chance to ask. A few minutes later Angel came down the stairs. Her eyes were puffy, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a long time. She came and sat next to him and reached over to hold his hand.

“I guess I look pretty bad, huh?” he asked. He looked down at himself. The lower half of his torso was wrapped in gauze. His artificial arm was sitting a few feet away on top of a bookshelf, the fingers dangling over the edge. He didn’t have access to a mirror, but he could tell from the pain in his face that he was covered in scrapes and bruises.

Angel cleared her throat. “I—” She stopped and looked like she was struggling with her words. “Uh.”

“Was there any more to that thought?” he asked.

She nodded and he watched as she composed herself, sitting up straight in her chair, clearing her throat a few times. “This isn’t the first time you’ve been injured.”

“No,” he agreed.

“I’ve listened to you being shot before. I’ve seen video of what you looked like after the Russians worked you over. I never exactly liked it, sweetie. But this is different. Seeing it for real. Helping Julia clean out your wound… it was… it was tough.”

“I’m still here,” he told her. “I made it.”

She looked away. “We’re supposed to be a team. Partners.”

“That’s exactly what we are,” he told her. “You proved that last night, as if you needed to. You saved my life when you pushed over those shelves. Wilkes came there to kill me and you stopped him. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

She nodded but she didn’t say anything.

“Angel — is there something we need to talk about?”

Her cheeks turned red while he watched. She didn’t answer his question, though. “Not now. We should — we should talk about other things. About how we get out of this mess. Right, sugar?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Okay. So…” It took him a second, weak as he was, to get his brain back in gear. “So last night didn’t end the way we’d hoped. How far did you get with your search for the hijacker?”

She let go of his hand and sat back in her chair. “Well, there’s bad news. And then there’s some news that is almost good. The bad news is, I didn’t get a chance to complete the search. I still have no idea who took over my computer.”

“It was the NSA,” he told her.

She looked stunned.

He didn’t blame her. “Wilkes told me that he was working for Charlotte Holman. She’s a subdirector of the NSA.”

“But that just means they’re the ones tasked with arresting us,” Angel pointed out.

“Sure — if he had any plans on bringing us in. No. He was there to kill us, Angel. He came there specifically to kill us. I don’t care how angry the government is about these drone attacks. They wouldn’t want us dead, at least, not until they’ve had a chance to interrogate us. Killing us is a downright stupid play. Unless—”

“Unless they’re trying to cover their tracks,” Angel said, nodding. “Sure. They frame us, then kill us so we never get a chance to clear our names. But I don’t know. The National Security Agency is pretty scary, but they don’t kill people, as a rule. They’re analysts. They leave that to the clandestine agencies.”

“That’s why they needed Wilkes. They’ve convinced him we’re guilty. I thought he might have a little more loyalty to Hollingshead, but…”

Angel bit her lip. “Do you remember when you asked me to look into his background? Because the two of you were working together and you wanted to know who you got stuck with?”

“Sure. Back when we were still working the Contorni case out at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. You said you couldn’t find anything dirty in his file.”

“I didn’t. He was a model operative in MARSOC. But I did find out his operational specialty. He was trained as a sniper, and then for high value targeting.”

“Targeting… you mean, he was an assassin.”

Angel nodded. “He killed at least three people in Iraq and Yemen. Maybe more — there were hints of some operations so compartmentalized even I couldn’t dig them up.”

Chapel closed his eyes. “Guys like that are trained to kill without worrying about why. Yeah. I can see one of those guys turning on us, if the order came from high enough up. Damn.”

“I was confused when the director brought Wilkes into our group — I had no idea why he would want such a person,” Angel said.

Chapel thought he knew why. More than once Hollingshead had ordered him to kill somebody. He’d always responded by saying he wasn’t a hit man. He’d found other ways to complete his missions. But for a guy with a job like Hollingshead’s, sometimes an executioner was exactly what you needed.

Chapel had never gotten to know many marines, other than Top and Rudy. They didn’t socialize with army grunts like himself. He knew very little about MARSOC, much less its assassins. But he knew enough to be sure of one thing: they didn’t give up. They completed the missions they were given or they died trying.

Wilkes had orders to kill him. Chapel had gotten away once, but nothing was over. He would have Wilkes on his tail for the rest of his life — or until somebody high up changed Wilkes’s orders.

He doubted the NSA would do that any time soon.

“NSA works with assassins all the time,” Chapel said. “But not directly. They call it selective targeting. They provide Geo Cell data on terrorists, tracking them by their SIM cards, and then CIA or JSOC carries out the actual strikes, either with drones or with commandos. Them bringing Wilkes in to do the dirty work fits with their standard operating procedure.”

“The NSA fits a lot of the other evidence as well. We know it was an inside job, and we know it was done by somebody with real skill when it comes to computers. Well, the NSA are the best in that field.”

“Present company excluded,” Chapel said, smiling.

Angel wasn’t joking, though. “Sugar, I’m damned good at what I do. But I’m not at all surprised that the NSA beat me at my own game. They’ve got scary skills over there in the puzzle palace. They may not be the most creative hackers, but just using brute force attacks, they can beat anybody’s security. Hijacking those drones is almost beneath them. Finding backdoor access to my system would seem like a fun challenge.”

Chapel shrugged. It hurt. A lot. When he could see straight again, he said, “So we know who is after us. We still have no idea why. Why would the NSA attack the United States?” He started to shake his head, then thought better of it. “Why they want to take down Hollingshead and his directorate is a whole other mystery.”

“Wait a minute,” Angel said, leaning in close as if to hear him better. “They’re framing us, but the director—”

“Wilkes told me he’s been relieved from duty. They’re trying to charge him with treason for sending me to rescue you.”

“Chapel. We have to stop them,” she said.

“I’m right there with you.”

“No,” she said. Her face had lost all its color. “We have to save the director. I–I can’t explain why. But you have to promise me, we’ll get him clear of this. Please.”

He reached over and took her hand. “I’m pretty fond of him myself,” he said. “I promise. We’ll do whatever it takes. But it looks like the best way to achieve that is to clear our own names.”

She nodded and looked down at their clasped hands. “That’s going to be tricky now,” she said. “We lost my hard drive, so I don’t have the intrusion data to work with. And even if I did, it’s obvious that if I try to go online and trace them, they’ll know exactly where I am. And then they’ll just send Wilkes to kill you again.”

“So we can’t try again to find the evidence we need,” Chapel said.

Angel nodded. “I’m useless. I’m a liability to you.”

“I refuse to accept that,” he said. “You said earlier there was some almost good news.”

She pulled her hand away. “My search was interrupted before I could find any real evidence of who framed me. I didn’t find anything that would stand up in court. I couldn’t get a name or any real information about who did it. But I did turn up one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Their street address,” she said.

“Wait,” Chapel said, sitting up a little more. He ignored the pain. “You know where they live?”

“Don’t get too excited,” Angel told him. “I analyzed some of the packets from the intrusion and ran them through a WHOIS lookup, that’s all. Normally I wouldn’t even bother. It’s way too easy to fake this kind of thing.”

“You thought it was worth doing this time,” Chapel said.

Angel shrugged. She went over to the desktop computer in the corner of the room behind Suzie’s punching bag. She woke the computer from sleep and then brought up a browser window that showed a page of text. It was too far away for Chapel to be able to read any of it.

“I know you don’t like tech talk, so I’ll try to keep this simple. When the NSA broke into my system, they had to do so from an IP address, and if you have an IP address you can find all sorts of things. What browser somebody’s using, what plug-ins they have installed, who their ISP is, and, to a certain degree of accuracy, a physical location.”

“That’s a little scary.”

“It would be if it was reliable information. It isn’t — the location isn’t precise, and it’s really, really easy to hide. Just putting yourself behind a proxy server is enough. Using a TOR — an onion router — lets you encrypt that information, or just bounce it around the Internet until it’s useless. When the NSA broke into my system, they went one better and stripped out all the metadata via an anonymizing server—”

“Over my head, here,” Chapel said. “But I guess I get the point. We know that the NSA was smart enough to hide themselves from you. So any information you found like that was useless, right?”

“For most of it, yes,” Angel told him. “I analyzed thousands of packets. Almost all of them stripped. Almost all — a handful of them somehow got missed. That isn’t uncommon. Software is only as good as the person who wrote it, and everybody makes little mistakes. Normally it doesn’t matter, if you use multiple-step security, which the NSA always does.”

“Normally.”

Angel grinned. “Normally you aren’t up against the likes of me. But bragging aside, I wouldn’t have found this if I’d had anything better to do. I scanned the stray packets that still had their headers because I had nothing else to look at. I assumed they would be hidden behind proxy servers at the very least. But they weren’t. This was just a simple bug in the system, but it let me see behind the curtain for the barest fraction of a second.”

She tapped a URL into the browser and brought up a mapping site. “The location you get from the packet headers can be laughably wrong or just really imprecise. In this case, it turned out not to matter.” On her screen the map zoomed in on a specific location, a large rectangular patch of white surrounded on every side by green. Chapel realized he was looking at a satellite image. “This is the only building that fits the coordinates. A place in rural Kentucky. It’s surrounded on every side by woods and fields. I think it’s some kind of mansion, or at least it was — property records say the place was abandoned years ago.”

“Does it belong to the NSA?” Chapel asked.

“Well, no, it doesn’t match the coordinates of any government or military installation I’ve ever heard of. It’s definitely not an official NSA data center. But maybe that’s the point. They didn’t want to be traced back to their headquarters, did they? So they set up a server in some building nobody could ever attach to them.”

She shook her head and then came back over to sit next to him. The look on her face was not particularly hopeful.

“It’s probably nothing. I mean, they could have just found an abandoned building and used the address to throw us off the trail.”

“Or?” Chapel asked.

“Or,” Angel said, “that building could be a secret NSA server farm. Which would contain all the evidence we need.”

Chapel would have asked her more questions, but they both turned then as they heard a commotion at the top of the stairs — and then the door that led down to the basement banged open and boots tromped down the steps.

Upstairs, five minutes earlier, the troops were in revolt.

“Maybe I don’t own this house,” Ralph insisted, “but I have a right to know what’s going on.”

“Fuck yeah,” Suzie said, bobbing up and down on her feet like she expected a fistfight to break out any second. Julia thought the woman probably wanted one.

“Look,” Julia said, “Top specifically said—”

“Top ain’t here,” Ralph pointed out. “He and Dolores wanted to go see a movie.”

Which explained why things had gotten so tense right now, Julia thought. Clearly the others had waited until the king and queen of the house were out of the way before they pushed for answers.

Julia was sympathetic. The three of them — Chapel, Angel, and herself — had burst in here before dawn the day before and disrupted everyone’s lives. They were obviously in trouble and Top was clearly protecting them. But the others in the house — Top’s boys — had no reason to feel loyalty to Chapel, and they were scared of what was going to happen to them. It wasn’t an unreasonable fear. If the cops came storming in, the lot of them could be taken in as accomplices in harboring the fugitives.

“Look, I’ll explain, but—”

“No need,” Ralph said, pushing toward the door to the basement. “I’ll just have a quick look for myself.”

It was Rudy who came to Julia’s defense, then. “Now you just hold it, fella!” he said, putting his back up against the basement door. “I know this fine lady. If she says there’s a reason to stay out of the basement, then I figure it’s got to be a goodly one.”

“Seriously?” Suzie asked. “You pathetic old drunk.” And then she picked Rudy up like a sack of potatoes and threw him onto the couch.

Before Julia could stop him, Ralph had the door open and was pounding down the stairs in his heavy boots.

“There’s a sick man down there!” Julia shouted, chasing after him.

But she couldn’t catch him in time. He had already reached the bottom of the stairs. Suzie pushed past Julia to join him. The rest of the boys, including Rudy, stood up at the top looking down, as if they wanted to know what was down there but they were afraid and wanted Ralph and Suzie to go first.

She half expected them to run over and attack Chapel on the spot. But when she reached the bottom of the stairs, she saw Suzie leaning up against the basement wall, arms folded across her chest. She refused to meet Julia’s eyes.

Meanwhile Ralph stood in the middle of the basement, rubbing his mouth with his good hand. He was staring at Chapel.

No. He was staring at Chapel’s left shoulder. What remained of his missing arm.

“He’s been hurt,” Julia said. “He has a surgical wound. I don’t think I need to tell you how serious an infection could be.”

“Don’t worry,” Ralph said. “I’m not going to sneeze on him.” The one-armed vet walked toward the camp bed — then changed course and went to the bookshelf nearby. With his good hand and his claw he picked up Chapel’s robotic arm.

And then he just stood there, staring at it. For a very long time.

“You could have just fucking told us,” Suzie said, still not looking at anyone.

“I’m seriously confused,” Julia said. “A second ago you were ready to tear this basement apart.”

“Yeah, a second ago,” Suzie said. She sighed dramatically and then leaned out over the stairs. “You bunch can come down now,” she said, and soon all the boys had tromped down into the basement, gathering in a respectful semicircle around the camp bed.

Julia shook her head, but there was nothing she could do.

Ralph grabbed a chair and sat down next to Chapel. He cradled the robotic arm in his lap like something precious. She supposed to a man with a claw replacing his lost hand and a piece of beige plastic for an arm, Chapel’s prosthetic would be worth more than rubies and pearls.

“You’re a vet. You were in the war and you lost an arm,” Ralph said.

“Yep,” Chapel replied. “That’s how I became one of Top’s boys.”

“You want to talk about it?” Ralph asked.

“He doesn’t have to!” Suzie said, almost shouting.

“It’s all right,” Chapel said. “I don’t mind.”

“I actually didn’t see much of my war,” Chapel said. Most of the boys had pulled up chairs around his camp bed or were just sitting on the floor where they could hear him. Suzie still leaned up against the wall, scowling, but she wasn’t the one who interrupted.

“Chapel,” Angel said, “this story’s classified.”

“I guess we’re past that now,” Chapel said, with a weak smile. “Anyway, these people are soldiers, marines—”

“Sailors, too,” said a guy who had burn scars over half his face.

Chapel nodded gravely. “These people can be trusted,” Chapel said.

Angel stared at him with huge eyes. Then she just nodded.

Chapel launched into his story, then. “I’m older than most of you,” he said, nodding quickly at Rudy, who was the obvious exception. “I was in Afghanistan in the real early days. Just after September eleventh. I’d been trained by the Rangers and I thought I was the toughest, meanest son of a bitch ever created by the toughest, most morally upright country the world had ever seen. At the time we figured three months tops and we’d have Bin Laden in custody, we’d have knocked over the Taliban and taught everybody over there a lesson.”

Julia barely recognized the Chapel telling this story. He’d fallen into a whole different speech pattern, much rougher and more expansive than usual. She realized this must be how he talked around other soldiers, and she wondered if this was how he thought in his own head.

“A whole bunch of us got sent in to Khost Province where we thought we still had some friends. My unit had all been crash trained in the local dialect. We’d been taught which hand to eat with and how to show respect to village elders. We even had special dispensation from the regs to grow beards, to help us gain respect from the locals. My job was to meet up with a bunch of mujahideen — guys we used to call freedom fighters — and get them on the team. These were guys we used to pay to fight the Soviets, in the old days. They were already our best friends, right? It was going to be a cakewalk. There were Taliban everywhere, but our friends were supposed to protect me, keep me out of sight.”

“The Taliban were onto you, though?” Ralph asked. “I remember, they always seemed to know our business, sometimes even before we got our actual orders. They had spies everywhere.”

“This time they didn’t need them. The main guy I was meeting with, he arranged transport for me; he was going to take me up to a cave complex where I was going to meet with a bunch of our kind of people. He showed up in an open jeep at the house where I was staying. No armor on it, no MG, just basically a beat-up old car, except a car might have blended in, but this jeep was obviously military. I didn’t like it much, but I figured they had their own ways of doing things and you had to go along to get along. My contact drove me about fifty clicks out into open country, a wide valley between two mountain ridges. I kept my eyes open, scanning the high ground, but I didn’t see anything. At one point my guy brakes hard and stops the jeep because there’s a flock of sheep crossing in front of us. Taking their time. Their shepherd kept making nasty gestures at us, calling us all kinds of names. My guy tells me this kind of thing happens, it’s nothing, and if I give him a hundred dollars, he can get the sheep moving and we can be on our way. I give him the money and he jumps out of the jeep. He and the shepherd go wandering off to talk and work things out.”

Chapel grimaced. “You all know the feeling, I’m sure. That cramp in your guts when you just know you’re being played. When shit is about to go down.”

The boys assented in a chorus of profanities.

“I didn’t see the Taliban. I didn’t have time to see anything. An RPG hit the jeep, getting in under the back of the undercarriage so the whole thing flipped over on top of me. Sounded like my head was an anvil getting hit with a big hammer. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything. I could smell lamb chops, though. Well-done lamb chops.”

Julia was surprised to hear some of the boys laugh at that. The thought of Chapel under the jeep made her sick to her stomach. But she supposed when you lived in constant danger you learned to find humor where you could.

“My contact — all the people I’d come to talk to — had already made up their minds. They were honorary Taliban by then, one hundred percent committed. Seconds after the jeep flipped, they were all over me, pulling on me, screaming in my face, asking me where my money was and saying they would let me go for a million dollars. I was hurt, bad, and I couldn’t do anything. They pulled me out of that wreckage, but they weren’t gentle about it and they left a big chunk of my arm behind.”

“How’d you get free?” one of the boys asked.

“I didn’t. They took me to that cave complex, the one I’d been headed for anyway. It was full of guys with AK-47s and RPGs and even just machetes. Even if the place had been guarded by kittens, I was in no shape to fight my way out. They held me there with no food, just a little water each day, and they demanded information. They wanted to know where our troops were, where they were headed. They wanted to know what locals we’d contacted and who was looking to betray them. They wanted to know every piece of information I could give them. They wanted to know a whole bunch of stuff I had no idea about, too, and they refused to believe me when I said I didn’t know.”

“Did they cut off your arm?” the burned sailor asked.

“No. No, they didn’t touch it. They beat me occasionally, and sometimes they… well, they tortured me. But they left the arm alone. That was intentional. They kept saying that it was getting infected. That it was going to die unless I got medical attention. They made me watch as it turned different colors. They pushed it in my face so I could smell it rotting.”

“They let gangrene set in?” Julia asked, horrified. “You could have died!”

“Probably would have,” Chapel said. “I got lucky.”

“How?” Ralph asked.

“The best kind of luck you can get — a SEAL team. It was just before dawn one day and my guards were already up, making breakfast. They liked to do that in front of me to remind me how hungry I was. One of them stood up to get some salt, and his brains came right out of his ear. The others ran for their weapons, but they were dead as soon as they moved. I was so out of it by then, so delirious, I thought it was all a trick. A ruse to get me to talk. I don’t remember much else until I was on a helicopter, headed to a field hospital. That was the last time I ever saw my left arm. They knocked me out for surgery, and when I woke up, I was about eight pounds lighter.”

“They couldn’t save the arm,” Chapel said, looking around at his audience. It had been a long time since he’d talked about this with anybody. A long time since he’d let himself think about it. “The gangrene had progressed too much. It was poisoning me, and leaving the arm on would just make it worse. They cut it off while I was still asleep. Then they shipped me to Walter Reed so I could get pumped full of antibiotics and that was where I met Top.”

“Sucks,” Ralph said.

“Yeah, it did,” Chapel agreed.

“I can beat it, though.”

Chapel couldn’t stop the grin that spread across his face. “You think so?”

“You know what an antitank weapon does?” Ralph asked. “I got to find out. I was driving an M1 Abrams TUSK; that’s a kind of tank you can drive right through a city. There’s a crew of four in one of those, with three folks stuck up in the turret. Driver gets the best seat, which isn’t saying much. You have to drive leaning way back, like in a dentist’s chair, and all you can see is what your periscopes give you. All around you there’s piles of armor plate, thick enough to stop just about anything. On the outside you got reactive tiles, and those protect you from mortar fire.”

Chapel looked over and saw Julia’s eyes glazing over. She didn’t have much patience for technical discussions of weapons systems, as he knew all too well. Still, she seemed to sense what was going on here — why Ralph was telling this story — and he knew she wouldn’t protest.

“So you’re just about invulnerable in there, and you can just laugh at enemy infantry,” Ralph went on, “except then they went and invented LAWs. Light antitank weapons. A thing just a little heavier than a rifle that any dumb grunt can carry. There’s no point throwing a bomb at a tank — hell, those reactive tiles are basically bombs themselves. So instead your LAW has a nose cone that’s made out of pure copper. When it hits the side of a tank, it doesn’t explode, it vaporizes. Heats up about as hot as the sun and just melts its way through your armor, like a blowtorch. When it gets through, when that jet of superhot metal gets inside the tank hull, it’s still hot enough to flash fry every single asshole in the crew.”

“So you got hit by one of those?” Angel asked. “How did you survive?”

“I got lucky. The second-best kind of luck you can have, I guess. It was somebody else’s turn instead of mine. The LAW hit the turret, not the hull. The other three guys — my commander, the gunner, and the loader — they were crispy critters in milliseconds. Down in the driver’s seat, right underneath them, I just got a little cooked. I would have been fine, except for how I was sitting, almost lying on my back. Molten metal dripped down out of the turret, right on my shoulder. There was no way I could get out of there, no way to even move out of the way. I watched it drip down over me, drop by drop.”

“Oh my God,” Angel said. “Oh, I’m so sorry—”

Ralph shrugged, his artificial arm clicking as it fell back against his belt. “Yeah, so you lost an arm to gangrene, well, you were asleep for most of that,” Ralph said. “Me, I got to feel the whole thing. Then I sat there for sixteen hours because all the comm gear was burned out and my superior officer assumed I was dead, too, so they didn’t bother prying me out of there until they wanted to take the tank apart for scrap. When they got to me, I was pretty much dead, yeah. They scraped up what was left of me and shipped me home and that was how I got to meet Top.”

Chapel looked the veteran right in the eyes and nodded. “You’re right. That sucks more than mine.”

“Oh, please,” Suzie said. “What a bunch of crybabies.”

Chapel looked over at her. He raised his voice so she could hear him all right. “I notice you still have both arms,” he said.

She stalked over to the bed and stared down at him. “Helicopter pilot, right? I did a bunch of milk runs, supposed to be easy flights. Of course we got stuck in sandstorms all the time, which clogged up our engines and screwed our visuals until half the time we didn’t know if we were flying upside down. Plus the friendly locals used to take potshots at us. You ever hear of a ballistic blanket? It’s a sheet of Kevlar you put down like carpeting inside the fuselage of your aircraft. Any bullets that come up through the floorboards, it stops ’em so they don’t hit you. I used to fly over perfectly nice and civilized towns and afterward I would shake out my blanket and twenty or fifty spent rounds would come clanking out. They weren’t shooting at me to kill me, see, just to let me know they were there. You can’t put tank armor on a helo, so they gave us bulletproof floor mats instead.”

“A bullet get through one of those, or something?” one of the others asked.

“Nope. I had the worst kind of luck,” Suzie said. “Which is when somebody else gets lucky when they weren’t supposed to. One of those potshots hit my Jesus nut. That’s the thing on top of the helicopter that holds the rotor on. You take that out, suddenly you are fifty feet up in a thing shaped like a school bus, not like a glider. You fall down and go boom. I was in my safety webbing, I had all kinds of fire suppression equipment and impact-resistant gel under my butt, I was going to be okay. Then a piece of my rotor comes straight down through my canopy and then straight through my face. It was like getting chopped in half by a sword.”

She pulled the neck of her tank top away to show the scar that ran from her hairline down across the middle of her chest. Chapel was a little shocked, thinking she was going to expose her breasts — until he saw that she only had one.

“Like the Amazons of old,” Rudy said, gasping.

“Shut the fuck up, you drunk,” Suzie said. She let her top fall back to cover part of her scar. “I was in traction for a year. They had me strung up in this frame, locked down so I couldn’t even move my fingers. If I wriggled around too much, I would have fallen apart like an onion chopped down the middle. Yeah,” she said, “real fucking lucky. And yeah, that was how I got to meet Top.”

One by one the others told their stories, each claiming they’d had it worse than anyone else, that they’d been lucky or unlucky in various measures, each one ending with how they’d come to meet Top. There were only two exceptions. One was an airman missing both legs below the knees. He started out strong. “Your stories ain’t shit,” he said. “You want to talk real suffering—”

But then he stopped. Chapel saw a look in the man’s eyes he knew all too well. The airman couldn’t see anything but the past. The worst moment in his life. “Never mind,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you.”

“That’s okay,” Suzie said. “Nobody wanted to hear it anyway.”

Some of the others chuckled.

Rudy, the other exception, was the last one to speak. “I’m afraid you’ve all got it wrong,” he said. “All these tales of woe. Talking about how unlucky you sods were. Nonsense, every bit of it.”

“Let me guess,” Chapel said. “You had it worse than us.”

“I wouldn’t say as much,” Rudy told them. “By fuck, I’d say you’re all a bunch of sad sacks that make my own troubles seem like minor inconveniences by comparison. But I know you’re the luckiest sons of bitches who ever lived. That antitank round, the helicopter blade that got you, Suzie my dear, the ammunition cooking off in your Stryker,” he said, nodding at a veteran with a white plastic hand. “In my day, those things would have killed you all stone dead. You’re all here because medical technology has come so far we can save people who should have died.”

“You saying I should be dead?” Ralph asked.

“Son, your very existence is a blessing on us all,” Rudy said. He shook his head. “No, I’m saying you got lucky enough to be born when you were, that’s all. I watched a lot of boys with injuries less severe than yours die back in ’Nam. There was a time when I wished I’d been one of them. I suppose there are times I still do. I couldn’t handle it, you see. All the death. Every time one of my friends caught a bullet or stepped on a punji stick or just disappeared out in the jungle… I knew it wasn’t going to stop. That kind of thing gets into a man’s head. I came back from Southeast Asia without so much as a scratch on me, you know that? At least, none I could point to. No Purple Heart. No medals at all. But I came back and found that I’d brought a souvenir with me. No matter where I went here in the States, every time I met someone I’d look them in the eye and think, Are you going to die today? Are you? I couldn’t care about anyone. I couldn’t get attached, because they were just going to disappear, so I treated them like they already had. Made it rather difficult to find a job. Made it rather easy to find a bottle, since when I drank it didn’t seem so bad.”

“You still feel that way? Even here?”

“I have my good days,” Rudy suggested. “And then sometimes—”

A familiar voice boomed out from the stairway. “What do we have here?” Top asked. “I believe I said you all should stay out of this here basement.”

The boys got to their feet. They didn’t quite stand at attention but they looked like they wanted to.

“Maybe,” Top said, “I’m getting senile in my old age. Dolores, honey, did I tell these people to stay out of the basement?”

“You did, Top,” Dolores called out from upstairs.

“And yet here they all are. What do you suppose we should do about this discrepancy?”

The boys filed out of the basement with bowed heads. When they were gone, Top glanced at Chapel. “You okay, Captain? They didn’t suck up all your air?”

“Just having ourselves a bitch session,” Chapel told him.

Top nodded in acceptance. “Well, I suppose that’s all right. You know what I always say. A soldier who can still bitch is a happy soldier. It’s the quiet ones you have to worry about.”

Chapel smiled. “How was the movie? What did you see?”

“Something about a dog that learned how to work a computer or some nonsense. Didn’t pay attention. But I’ll go see anything’s got a dog in it. Now, good night, my dear captain. You get some rest. That would be an order, if you didn’t outrank me.”

“I’ll take it as one anyway,” Chapel told him.

When they were alone, just the three of them — Chapel, Julia, and Angel — he let himself be eased down into a prone position so he could go to sleep. “Tomorrow we’ll talk more about that place in Kentucky,” he told Angel.

She nodded and then reached down to touch his cheek. “Good night.”

Julia watched her go. There was a funny look on her face.

“What’s going on between you and her?” Chapel asked.

“Tell you in a minute,” Julia said, then held up one finger. Together they listened for the sound of the basement door closing. “Okay, first, what exactly just happened down here? With all the stories?”

“Sympathy,” Chapel said. “It helps to share, sometimes.”

“Including trying to one-up each other with how bad your stories were, or Suzie telling people to shut up all the time?”

“What you saw,” Chapel told her, “is about the closest you can get to a pity party and still consider yourself a hard-ass soldier. We all need to feel like we’re not alone sometimes, but none of us wants to admit it.” He smiled at her. “Now. Are you going to answer my question?”

She looked away. “Angel has a crush on you.”

“Oh, come on. She and I flirt. It’s harmless,” he insisted.

“You didn’t notice how she was hovering over you? How she just touched your cheek? But of course, no, you didn’t notice. Because you’re an oblivious man.”

He shook his head. “Maybe you’re jealous.”

“I’m trying to decide if I am or not,” she told him.

That made him want to sit up. He didn’t, because he knew how much it would hurt. “Julia — if you think you and I could maybe—”

“Shush. Anyway, this isn’t the time for that conversation. Or the place.”

He grinned at her. “I’m not going anywhere. Doctor’s orders.”

“Veterinarian’s orders,” she said. “Which might be fitting, considering what a dog you are.” She smiled when she said it, but then her face fell. “Okay. If we’re going to do this, let me start. I’m not a jealous person. I don’t like being a jealous person. And I am very angry at you for forcing me to be a jealous person.”

“You mean — with Angel? I haven’t done anything. Neither has she.”

“I’m not talking about Angel now. Try to keep up. I’m talking about the picture I saw, the one the guy showed me, the guy who told me to break up with you. The one of you and that — that woman.”

Chapel felt like a deflating balloon. He had never wanted to talk about this, not with Julia. He’d also always known he would have to, eventually. “Her name was Nadia,” he said. “Do you want the details?”

“Absolutely not.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Jim. When I saw that picture, I hated you a little. I had no right to. I mean, I’d broken up with you. You were a free agent. You still are. I know that logically. But I couldn’t help myself. I was filled with rage. You made promises to me.”

Chapel bit his tongue, at least metaphorically. He did not want to say out loud the words, You’re the one who refused my marriage proposal. He wasn’t quite that oblivious. So instead he said, “You’re going to feel what you’re going to feel.”

“That’s really very big of you,” she said, sarcasm dripping from the words. “I was getting past it. I was pretty much going to let Badass Julia screw your brains out, because she really, really wanted to.”

“I like Badass Julia,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes.

“Don’t be so sure. Now Badass Julia is considering what her chances are if she’s competing with a cute little twentysomething with daddy issues.”

“Now we’re talking about Angel again,” he said.

“You’re getting better at this game,” Julia told him. “I’m nearly twice her age. You can’t possibly prefer me to her. Men don’t work that way.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No,” she said, and he could tell she wasn’t.

“Julia,” he said. “I love you.”

“Badass Julia isn’t sure she believes you.”

“I wasn’t talking to her. I was talking to Julia Taggart, DVM. I’ve loved you basically since we first met and I always will. You don’t want to hear about Nadia, but I’m going to tell you this — none of that would have happened if I wasn’t so heartsick for you I couldn’t see straight. I know that’s not a very good defense, but it’s true. When I came to your apartment, back when all this started — I knew I was already being chased by the police. I knew I was in danger of being caught. But I came anyway because I thought maybe, just maybe you wanted to see me again. It didn’t matter why. It would have been worth it because I got to see you again.”

Her face was guarded. “You are good, I’ll give you that. You talk a great game.”

“Give me a chance to do more than just talk,” he said. “Wait. That sounded dirty. I meant it to be romantic.”

She rolled her eyes. “Maybe we will later. Talk, I mean. Go to bed, Captain Chapel. You need to heal. Your veterinarian insists.”

She stood up and started to turn away. But then she stopped and looked back at him. He had no idea what she was thinking.

Luckily Badass Julia wasn’t about mixed signals. She reached under his sheet and grabbed his cock. It stiffened instantly in her hand.

“Get better soon,” she said, and then she left him there.

Behind the chain-link fence nothing but anarchy held sway.

The National Guard had set up a temporary base at LAX. Patrick Norton, the secretary of defense, had flown in for an inspection. As he stepped off the plane he was led down a corridor formed by two rows of soldiers in full battle gear, every single one of them standing at attention, spaced exactly apart from one another. It was a perfect display of military discipline, designed to impress the absolute top brass.

A display that failed altogether once Norton could hear the protesters screaming just a few dozen yards away.

They pressed their faces against the fence, their mouths open, spittle flying in rage. He couldn’t understand what any of them were shouting, but some of them carried signs he could read:

“Sir?”

Norton looked to his left and saw a guard captain waiting to lead him away. He nodded gratefully and followed the man into a Quonset hut full of radio gear. In the center of the prefab building stood a series of card tables, each of them covered in manila folders. The captain picked one up and handed it to the SecDef.

“This is your briefing, sir, which you can peruse at your leisure. I’d be happy to give you the salient points in verbal form, if you would prefer that.”

Norton took the folder and glanced at it for a second without opening it. Then he threw it back down on the table.

“Show me,” he said.

It took an age to get a helicopter ready to go — the main concern seemed to be finding one that was properly armored, so that no one could shoot the secretary of defense out of the sky with a target pistol. Once they were airborne, though, Norton knew immediately he’d made the right choice. No paper briefing could give him the same perspective on the chaos that he got from the air.

For one thing — he wouldn’t have felt the darkness sprawling under him so intensely. Wouldn’t have known just how apocalyptic it could feel. He’d flown over Los Angeles many times in his career and always, when you came in by night, the whole landscape glowed like it was on fire. Lights from the buildings bounced off the permanent cloud of smog and lit up the countryside for miles around.

Now there was nothing down there except where something actually was on fire. Just inky blackness, interrupted here and there by a burning trash can or a car that had been doused in gasoline and set ablaze in the middle of a street crossing. Norton wondered if the cars had been lit up as a form of protest, or just because the locals were so desperate for whatever light source they could find.

Off in the distance, in the hills, there were some electric lights still burning. And if Norton looked to the south, he saw whole neighborhoods that glowed just as brightly as they ever had. But downtown L.A. had reentered the nineteenth century.

“Is any power getting through? Even just for part of the day?” Norton asked over his headset microphone.

The captain consulted his handheld. “Yes, sir. We had four hours today, that’s good for the average. Yesterday we had nothing. We get rolling blackouts that just kind of roll in and… stay. We’ve got the Army Corps of Engineers trying to put everything back together, get the grid online again, but their reports aren’t encouraging. If I didn’t know better, I’d think somebody was trying to stop them. They’re telling me it’s all computer problems, that every time they get a substation cleared, another one drops off-line.” The captain shook his head. “It’s going to be a matter of weeks, not days, before this is cleared up.”

Norton peered down into the soupy gloom. He occasionally thought he saw someone running on a sidewalk in the dark or a car moving between palm trees, but it was hard to tell.

Off to the east a blare of light alleviated the darkness, like a cloud of fire hovering over the black landscape. “What’s that?” Norton asked.

“Sir, that’s Dodger Stadium, it’s our relief station. We’ve got gasoline generators out there working all night. We’ve advised anyone in distress to head there; we’ve got medical teams, clean water, some communications—”

“Let me see,” Norton commanded.

The captain clearly didn’t think it was a good idea, but he said nothing. The helicopter swung around and headed directly for the light, which soon enough Norton could see came from the big stadium lights that normally illuminated nighttime ball games. “We keep those on from dusk until dawn,” the captain explained. “Some people… they just want the light, that’s all. They just need to get out of the dark.”

Norton turned to look at the man. “What about crime? Looting, violence, that sort of thing. Have you seen any riots?”

“The governor has us sweeping the streets, sir, on a constant basis. We do what we can to keep things calm.”

“That’s a nice nonanswer,” Norton told the man. “Tell me the truth.”

The captain looked down into the darkness. “Rioting is the main problem. The people are actually sticking together, forming neighborhood security groups. But they don’t trust us. There’s a bunch of them think we aren’t doing enough. There have been a couple of armed clashes. A couple of civilians have been shot. When this is over, there’s going to be a reckoning. A lot of us in command wonder if we’re going to get blamed.”

Norton frowned. “I’m sure you’ve acted in a professional manner.”

“Sir, with all due respect — the people down here are righteously pissed.” The captain looked over at Norton, and his eyes were suddenly very tired. “We’re keeping them from actually revolting in the streets. But if the power doesn’t come back soon — or worse, if something else bad happens, like wildfires or mudslides or, God forbid, an earthquake — this place is going to explode.”

Norton remembered something he’d heard many years before, back at West Point. Modern man is a miracle of civilization and sophistication. He is also three hot meals away from barbarism.

The helicopter pilot took them right over the stadium, low enough that Norton could see inside. The stadium lights gave him a great view of all the people in the seats — tens of thousands of them. Families sprawled across whole rows, sleeping under orange survival blankets or patrolling the aisles with baseball bats and chains. Down on the field soldiers marched relief seekers — Norton wondered if a better word was refugees — through metal detectors and intake desks, forcing them to fill out paperwork before they could get food or clean water.

It didn’t take long for them to notice the helicopter — or to react. It started with a dull roar, so low and far away Norton thought it might be distant thunder, but soon the noise rose in pitch as the refugees below screamed up at the chopper, screamed for light or air-conditioning or whatever it was they wanted most. He saw bits of debris floating over the crowd, and the occasional ribbon of white, and suddenly he realized — they were throwing things at him. Government paperwork, empty MRE pouches. The ribbons were rolls of toilet paper unfurling as they arced through the air.

None of it could hit the chopper, of course. Norton was safe up there in the sky.

He was safe.

For the moment.

He pulled out his cell phone and plugged it into his headset. Dialed Charlotte Holman. They needed to talk. “I want you on a plane as soon as possible. Check with my staff for my itinerary. Meet me at my next stop.”

“Of course, sir. May I ask what this is concerning?”

“I want you by my side until this thing is over. I need constant reports and updates. From now forward — nothing else matters.”

Because if Los Angeles was about to fall, it wouldn’t take very long for the rest of the country to follow.

Top, who had been a master gunnery sergeant in the Marines, had never looked worried in his life as far as Chapel knew. He didn’t now, though there were little signs to see if you knew the man well. He wasn’t smiling quite as broadly as he usually did. Instead of a glass eye, today he was just wearing an eyepatch. Of course, it was an eyepatch in a marine camouflage pattern, but even so.

“I got to get to work,” he said. “That hospital doesn’t even wake up until I arrive to properly motivate folks. But before I go, we’re going to settle this. The three of you are welcome in my house any time, for as long as you want.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Chapel told him.

On the kitchen table between them lay Top’s cell phone. He’d put it there so Chapel could listen to a voice-mail message Top had received an hour earlier. A message from Brent Wilkes, asking if Top would be willing to come in to the local police station to answer some questions.

“I didn’t think they would make the connection between you and me,” Chapel said, though saying it out loud made him realize how dumb he’d been. The NSA probably had a dossier on him a yard thick, and somewhere in there would be the fact that Top had worked with Chapel as his physical therapist after he came home from Afghanistan.

Most likely Wilkes was interviewing every known associate in Chapel’s file. He’d probably bothered Chapel’s parents and sister first, then worked his way down the list until he harassed Chapel’s dry cleaner and his barber. Top would definitely be on the list. It only made sense to make those phone calls. Chapel was trained in how to live on the run, how to keep a low profile. But that was a hard road for a man to go alone. Most fugitives did exactly as Chapel had — they found a friend who would hide them for a while.

“Could just be a coincidence,” Top pointed out.

“They believe in those, in the Marines? Coincidences? In the Rangers we used to say that a coincidence was guaranteed to be somebody getting ready to kill you.”

“In the Corps we just assumed everybody was doing that whether we saw any clues or not,” Top said. He shrugged, the empty sleeve of his work shirt flapping against his side. “All right, seeing as this guy is the one who tried to kill you the other night, I suppose we can assume the worst. But so what? I go in, he asks me, have you seen this man, I say, no, sir, can’t say as I have. And then I walk back out.”

“He’s trained in interrogation,” Chapel pointed out. “And he’s an expert poker player, so he can spot a bluff. I should know — I still owe him six bags of chips.”

Top shook his head. “I can’t believe they’d send a serviceman after you. You army grunts sure know a bit about loyalty, don’t you? You could try a little semper fi now and again.”

“Wilkes isn’t army. He’s a marine. MARSOC — the Raiders.”

Top leaned back in his chair. “Aw, shit. Now we are in trouble. All right. So say you refuse my hospitality and get back in the wind. Where are you going to go next?”

“No idea. And it’s probably best I don’t tell you, anyway.”

Top nodded. “Sure.” He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “So you want me to just blow this guy off? Never show up for my interview?”

“No. That’ll definitely make him suspicious. Just — don’t say much. Answer his questions with as few words as possible. Act like you wished you could help but he’s out of luck. It’ll help if you know that when you’re talking to him, I’ll already be gone.”

Top got up from the table. “Any chance that when you go you’ll leave one or more of those fine ladies behind to keep me company?”

Chapel grinned. “Dolores might mind.”

“She might at that. Okeydokey, smokey. You take care of yourself, Captain.”

Chapel looked away. He didn’t want Top to see the look on his face. “I can’t thank you enough,” he said.

“The bond you and me have is supposed to go beyond words,” Top told him. “Same as for all my boys. Not that you’d know from all the jawboning goes on around here twenty-four seven. Now, I’m going to be late for work, and all the pretty nurses are on the night shift and if I don’t get there on time, I miss my chance to make them blush.”

He grabbed the phone and left Chapel alone in the kitchen.

When he was gone, Chapel rubbed at his eyes with his good hand.

Crap. If Wilkes was interviewing Top, that meant he was sure that Chapel was still alive. Which meant going on the run again, no question. Just when Chapel had started to like it in the house full of Top’s boys. It had begun to feel like he was back in the army again, living in barracks, something he never thought he would have missed.

Nothing for it, he supposed. He started making a mental plan about how he was going to steal another car.

On the screen Angel kicked open a wooden crate while Ralph laid down suppressing fire on a squadron of Nazi flamethrower troops. “Ammo,” Angel said, and they switched positions so fluidly they might have been practicing the maneuver for years. Ralph, who in the game was playing a British Tommy with a BAR rifle, ducked down to grab a new drum of ammunition. Meanwhile Angel, dressed like a member of the French resistance (the only female character in the game), threw a stick grenade into the midst of the Wehrmacht troops.

The Germans screamed “Schnell, schnell!” but it was too late for them. The grenade went off in a cloud of fire and smoke, and the fuel tanks on the Nazis’ backs popped off one after another, bathing them all in liquid fire and sending them screaming around a village square, their faces melting in exquisitely rendered detail as they died.

“Jesus,” Chapel said, wincing.

“That was — that was—” Julia couldn’t seem to find the word.

Ralph had it, though. “Nice,” he said, bouncing up and down on the couch.

His claw hand didn’t seem to be any kind of impediment to working the video-game controller. Chapel knew from experience how much you could achieve with one hand, if you had enough practice. What surprised him was just how good Angel was at the game.

Julia had a theory about that. “She’s been living in one trailer or another for the last ten years, never going out, living on delivered Chinese food. Her only connection to the outside world has been telling spies where to go and who to shoot. Why wouldn’t she be a natural at this?”

Chapel just shook his head. They needed to head out soon, but it was clear Angel was enjoying herself and he didn’t want to interrupt the game.

On the screen the Tommy and the resistance fighter dashed across the village square, hopping over the bodies of the still-smoldering Nazis. On the far side they took cover in a bombed-out café. As soon as they’d hunkered down, the television started growling with the noise of tank treads coming closer.

“You have any shaped charges?” Angel asked.

“Just one left. Glad I held on to it,” Ralph told her.

His on-screen avatar jumped through the door of the café and rolled along the street, a square lump of plastique in his hands. He slapped it onto the cobblestones and a little red light started blinking on its detonator. The tank was only a dozen yards away.

“Did they even have C4 in World War II?” Chapel asked.

“Shut up, Chapel!” Angel cried, anguish tinging her voice because just then the tank’s machine gun opened fire and Ralph’s character flopped down in the street, right next to his bomb. “Hold on,” she said, and her beret-clad character rushed out to his side, carrying a green box with a red cross on it. She injected something into his arm that was apparently a cure for machine-gun bullets, because suddenly Ralph was up and on his feet again and drawing a pistol.

It was too late for both of them, however. The panzer’s main gun fired with a cloud of smoke and debris, and the screen went red as both characters fell in slow motion to lie in heaps on the cobblestones.

“Dang,” Ralph said, tossing his controller onto the couch. “I can never get past that tank.”

“Why do you want to?” Julia asked. “Why do you even play this game?”

Ralph lifted one eyebrow. “Because it’s fun?”

“She’s got a point, though,” Chapel said. “Look, not to get all preachy here, but you’re a veteran with PTSD. We’ve all heard you screaming in the night. Why on earth would you want to traumatize yourself with a war game?”

“Therapy,” Ralph answered, without hesitation.

Julia looked intrigued. “How does that work?”

“The game isn’t real,” Ralph told them. “It’s nothing like real war. There’s no waiting around for weeks only to have an attack come when you’re just starting to relax. You can get shot, like, a dozen times in the game, and all you need is one medical kit to get back to full health.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Two people against an entire squad armed with flamethrowers? In real life, you’d be dead meat.”

Chapel had to admit that the game didn’t match his own experience of warfare.

“It helps with the dreams. Yeah, you’ve heard me wake up in the middle of the night thinking I’m back there, under fire. But when I play this game for like twelve hours straight, I’m not dreaming about Iraq. I’m dreaming about liberating Paris with a hot resistance fighter by my side.”

“You think she’s hot?” Angel asked. “I just thought she was an ass-kicker.”

“She can’t be both?” Ralph asked. “Anyway — sometimes the dreams get mixed up. I don’t know. It helps.”

Chapel had learned during his own rehabilitation not to turn up his nose at any treatment that actually worked. “Have at it, then. But I’m afraid your sexy partner there has to get going.”

Angel didn’t protest. She set her controller down on the couch and stood up. “What’s on the agenda?” she asked.

“We need to arrange transport,” Chapel said.

“What, like you need a car?” Ralph asked.

The place where Ralph worked had a clean and trim little storefront where it met the road. Four recently washed cars stood in the parking lot, all of them with prices listed on their windshields in greasepaint.

Beyond that lot, however, the place was pure junkyard. Behind a chain-link fence stood towering stacks of hubcaps and dented fenders, cars without wheels or doors or windshields, heaps of scrap metal, and, for some reason, an entire avenue lined with nothing but old washing machines. You could easily get lost wandering among the heaps of old decaying machinery back there — you could get lost, or you could just as easily get tetanus. The men and women working in the yard were all dressed in heavy corduroy jackets and wore thick, grease-stained gloves.

For a mechanical graveyard, though, it was anything but quiet. The noise of whining power tools and tracked vehicles filled the air, punctuated by the ring of actual hammers and mattocks where someone took out their frustrations by breaking down an old heap. They passed by a guy cutting a bulldozer down with an acetylene torch, sparks flying ten feet in the air. They walked past a kennel full of barking dogs. When they finally found Ralph’s boss, the man was hip deep in a pile of old hardware, hinges and flanges and nuts and bolts, sorting them by tossing them one by one into rusted fifty-gallon drums.

It took a while to get his attention. When Ralph called his name the fourth or fifth time, he finally looked up and glanced from Chapel to Angel to Julia as if he was sorting them into categories in his head.

“This is Art, he owns this place,” Ralph said. “Navy.”

Art clambered out of his pile, sending bits of metal cascading across their shoes, and reached out one massive hand to shake Chapel’s. He was a huge man, broad through both shoulders and belly, though his legs were crammed into heavy jeans that made them look like toothpicks holding up a jumbo-sized olive. He had hair the color of the old metal around him, and it cascaded down his shoulders and joined with his beard.

“Jim,” Chapel said, squeezing the massive gloved hand. “Army.”

He expected Art to make some joke — one of the dozen or so quips people always made when they met someone from a different branch of the services. Instead Art just said, “Uh-huh.” His eyes didn’t leave Chapel’s, though.

“They need a car,” Ralph explained. “Just an old beater is okay. But they’re friends of mine, so don’t cheat them.”

“Huh,” Art said.

“Ralph tells me he’s been working here two years now,” Chapel said, to fill the void in the conversation. “It was really good of you to give him a shot.”

Art shrugged. “Works hard. That’s what I want.” He broke his gaze, but only to stare at Ralph for a long time. “Cars,” he said finally. Then he took a deep breath and let it out again. “Okay.”

He headed down an aisle between two mountains of truck tires. The stink of rubber was overwhelming, and it wasn’t helped by the stagnant water that had collected inside the tires. “Art’s a genius,” Ralph said. “He can fix anything. Used to work on a nuclear submarine, keeping the engines going. Now he’s got more than a hundred people working for him here, most of them vets or people who were down on their luck. If you screw up, you get fired on the spot, but if you do what he says, he treats you right.”

“Only rule,” Art called back, without turning his head.

Beyond the tires lay a landscape of partially intact cars. A small legion of men and women were busy either stripping pieces off the vehicles or screwing parts back on. A few of the cars looked like they were in drivable shape, though most were just held together with primer and duct tape.

Art stopped in front of one that had definitely seen better days. The quarter panels were dented, and rust had set in where the paint had chipped away. The radio antenna was about a foot and a half shorter than it should have been, and none of the four hubcaps matched any of the others. The inside looked like it had been vacuumed recently, though, and the windows shone as if they were brand-new.

Art put a hand on the hood and closed his eyes, as if he were communing with the spirit of the car. Then he opened his eyes again. “It’ll run. You guys drug dealers?”

“No,” Chapel affirmed.

“Mafia, or somethin’?”

“No,” Chapel said again.

“Eight hundred, with tags. Tags are good.”

Chapel glanced at Julia. He knew they didn’t have that kind of money. He’d come out here with Ralph because he’d known that stealing another car was a bad idea. Wilkes would be looking for any reports of stolen vehicles now, anywhere within fifty miles of Pittsburgh.

Art must have thought he was hesitating because of the car’s condition. He pointed at another one, which had fewer dents. “Sixteen. Worth it.”

“If we could afford it,” Chapel began, but Ralph touched his arm with his claw.

“These are good people, Art, but they’re kind of broke.”

Art considered this for a long time. Then he tilted his head back, so his hair shifted out of his face, and announced in deep tones, “Poor people gotta drive, too.”

“I’m going to cover them,” Ralph said. “I don’t have much in my bank account, but I’ll work for free for three weeks and make it up to you.”

Art squinted hard at Ralph. His lips pursed.

Ralph nearly stammered under the pressure. “Four weeks,” he said.

Chapel shook his head. “Ralph, you don’t have to—”

Art squinted harder.

“Six.”

“Looks like,” Art said, his face relaxing, “you got a car.” Then he started walking back toward the office.

They watched the junkyard owner go until he was out of earshot.

“Man,” Ralph said, “that guy’s sharp.”

Chapel shook his head. “Ralph,” he said, “this is incredibly generous of you, but we can’t accept it.”

“It’s no big deal,” Ralph said. “Top and Dolores will feed me, and I’ve got a guaranteed bunk at their place. I might have to buy a few less video games.”

“Those games are your therapy,” Julia pointed out.

Ralph laughed. “I have enough already. Though I’ll tell you what.” He turned and reached over and grabbed Angel’s hand. “You come back some time, and we’ll beat that panzer together, okay?”

Angel looked confused. “Are you asking me out on a date?”

“She meant to say yes,” Julia said.

It was a clear, bright day, perfect for driving long distances. Something Chapel hadn’t done for a very long time. The beater might look bad, but it had a decent motor under its hood and it purred along, gobbling up the blacktop. Chapel drove fast without actually speeding, overtaking big rigs and the occasional tractor as the road unrolled before them, heading west through endless stretches of grass and trees and low, gentle ridges. The car had no air-conditioning and no radio. The latter wouldn’t have mattered much anyway, since Julia kept her window rolled down, one arm out in the rushing air, her outstretched fingers weaving up and down like the spread wings of a gull.

He looked over at her, a big grin on his face, and saw her smiling back, her eyes hidden behind chunky sunglasses, rivulets of red hair sweeping across her cheek, now her eyes, now getting in her mouth so she had to sputter it out, which made him laugh. Which made her laugh.

It just felt so damn good to be moving, to be free. This was the America Chapel had learned to love as a kid, the wide openness of it, the size of it, the raw country all around him. Headed west with no real idea what he would find, the danger and the fear and every worry in his head not gone, necessarily, but put aside for a while, put on a back shelf where he could think about it later.

At some point he felt like having lunch, so they pulled into the immaculate parking lot of a welcome center, right inside the Pennsylvania line, and had hot dogs and soda. He perused a rack of road atlases and folding paper maps, found the one he liked best.

“When was the last time you saw one of these?” Julia asked, unfolding the map, following the major roads with one finger. “I always just use my phone, now.”

Which made him think about the fact they didn’t have phones anymore. That they were cut off, with no chance of calling for help if they needed it.

But he thought about that for only a second. He paid for the map with a couple of bills from their dwindling treasury. He followed Julia back out to the car while she tried to keep the map from fluttering open in the wind. He stopped for a moment and just looked out at the farmland that surrounded them on every side, flat and open, a backdrop for the white grandeur of the clouds, which dropped nothing but big, sharp shadows on the green of the land.

Then he got back to the car and found Julia leaning in through one of the rear windows. He came up beside her and saw Angel in the backseat, scrunched down as far as she could get, her arms wrapped tight around her knees. She wore a pair of sunglasses that covered half her face and a floppy sun hat pulled down over her hair. She hadn’t bothered to take the price tag off the hat.

“Are we almost there?” she asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Chapel said. “Angel — are you — are you all right?”

“Fine,” she insisted, a little abruptly. “Just drive, okay?”

“What is it?” Julia asked, with her best bedside manner. “Is something scaring you?”

“No,” Angel said. She sighed dramatically. “Just — you know. Trees. And the sky’s too big. And everything’s so far apart. I’m fine.”

Her tone made it clear she had no desire to talk about it further. Chapel stepped over to his door, then stopped to look over the top of the car at Julia. Neither of them spoke, but he knew she was thinking the same thing he was.

What had the government done to Angel? They’d shoved her in a series of boxes for ten years, made her work in tiny trailers where her only stimulus was what came over a computer screen. What could that do to somebody?

He sat back down in the driver’s seat and started the car, but his previous good mood was shot. It was going to be a very, very long drive for somebody who was scared of trees.

They had to cross the whole length of Ohio to get to Kentucky, but Chapel wanted to avoid major cities — in this case, Columbus and Cincinnati. That meant taking a lot of country roads, long stretches of which snaked through endless farms and patches of forest. Other than the occasional ATV dealership or grain elevator, they saw little of civilization. Ancient farmhouses stood well back from the roads, colorless wrecks with peeling paint and sagging gambrel roofs. Only the endless row of telephone poles seemed to link them to the world they’d left behind.

The hours passed without Chapel noticing them much. Julia didn’t talk to him very often — neither of them felt like light conversation when Angel was curled up in the back, clearly in distress — and so he had nothing but the flashing lines on the road ahead to measure distance or time. Just as the sun began to sink low enough to get in his eyes, the road bent hard to the south and suddenly they crossed the Ohio River and were in Kentucky. It was hard to tell the difference. Maybe the ridges alongside the road grew a little taller. There were definitely more trees.

Chapel glanced in the rearview mirror. “Angel? It’s not far now. Can you hold on for another hour or so?”

“No problem,” she called out, her voice far too loud.

The address she’d found — what he really wanted to believe was a secret NSA data center — was deep in a wooded valley about thirty miles east of Lexington. It wasn’t exactly the middle of nowhere, there were plenty of roads around it and even a couple small towns nearby, but it was definitely secluded.

Chapel didn’t want to just drive up to the front door. His plan was to find a place nearby to spend the night and then scope it out. If it was what he thought it was, it would be well guarded and there would be constant surveillance all around it. Breaking in was going to be a real challenge.

Of course, Angel had told him it might be nothing. But he refused to think about that. If he’d come so far, if he’d pinned so many hopes on the place, it had to be a solid lead. He knew that was just wishful thinking, but in the absence of anything better, he would take it.

“Julia,” he said, “get that map out. Angel, can you help her find the exact spot we’re looking for? Maybe there’s a way we can get a look at it from the road.”

Angel leaned over the back of the front seat just long enough to point at the map. “Here,” she said, and then dropped back down out of sight, her head below the level of the windows.

“Okay,” Julia said, bringing the map close to her face to get a better look. “Take a left the next chance you get. There’s a little road there that’ll take us up on a ridge. Up on the high ground we might be able to see it.”

Chapel turned off onto a road that was barely paved, little more than a logging trail. The car’s engine whined as he headed up a steep grade. In the back Angel whimpered as they rose above the level of the trees and were suddenly exposed on top of a sharp defile. Chapel drove another half mile along the ridge, then pulled over into the grass on the side of the road.

“There it is,” he said.

Julia leaned out of her window to get a better look. Chapel peered around the side of her head. “Angel,” he said, “at least glance at it, okay?”

In the backseat she curled up tighter around herself. But then she grunted in frustration and popped her head up.

From the top of the ridge they had a good view across a wide valley, half of which was covered in trees and the other half in well-groomed fields. Far in the distance stood another ridge, taller than the one they perched on. Nestled into the slope of that ridge stood a building that was exactly as Angel had described it — an abandoned mansion.

It must have been something in its day. A central three-story house with tall white pillars, topped with a cupola like some Greek temple. Spreading out to either side were long wings with graceful high windows, each wing fronted by a broad garden full of statues and hedges.

Time hadn’t been kind to the building, though. A long crack ran across the cupola, and even from this distance Chapel could see it must be open to the sky. Meanwhile one wing had nearly collapsed, all its windows shattered, its brick walls crumbling until some of the rooms inside were exposed. The gardens were overgrown thickets. Nature had begun the long process of reclaiming the house, with a massive growth of ivy choking the walls, creepers spiraling up those strong pillars. It must have been abandoned for decades.

Or at least someone wanted it to look that way.

“I don’t know,” Julia said. “Not the kind of place I’d keep a server farm, if it was up to me. I don’t see any sign of habitation, do you?”

“Just one,” Chapel said. The house stood in a wide clearing, but it was surrounded on every side by clumps of trees. Hidden among the trunks he could just make out a high fence topped in coils of barbed wire. “Whoever owns that place isn’t interested in having visitors.”

Julia clucked her tongue. “Maybe the fence is just there to keep the locals from wandering in and getting hurt. You know, a liability thing.”

“Maybe,” Chapel said. He looked back at Angel, who was slumped low in the backseat, only her eyes above the level of her window. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know anything about architecture,” she said. “But I guess … I mean, a place like that. Why does it need so many satellite dishes?”

Chapel had missed them in his first look. Now he saw them instantly, perched among the ornamental stonework that ran around the cupola. They were painted the same color as the weathered stone, but once you knew they were there, you couldn’t miss them.

“Good eyes,” he said.

“Great,” Angel replied. “Now can we go?”

They found a little motel on the outskirts of the nearest town, a place that looked cheap but not too shabby. Chapel pulled up in front of a row of rooms connected by a long porch, then killed the engine. The three of them, glad for a chance to stretch their legs, headed into the reception office together.

A man with very thick glasses and a little bit of white hair welcomed them with a smile. “Need a room?” he asked. Then he took a look at Angel and said, “Maybe two rooms.”

They were running out of money, but Chapel understood what the man was suggesting. He saw a middle-aged couple and a young woman who was too old to be their daughter. In this part of the country that meant separate rooms or a lot of uncomfortable questions. “Two, yeah. Maybe something in the back that doesn’t face the road? I’m a light sleeper, and I don’t want headlights keeping me up all night.”

“Surely,” the man said as he pushed a paper ledger across his counter. Chapel signed, using an alias he came up with on the spot — Charles Darnley. “Cash or credit?” the clerk asked.

“Cash,” Chapel said and pulled some bills out of his pocket.

“You here for the folk arts center? Just about the only thing to see around here,” the man said, counting out change.

“No, we’re just passing through,” Chapel told him. “We’re, uh—”

“Ghost hunters,” Julia said.

Chapel fought the urge to turn around and stare at her.

“There’s a restaurant in Lexington that claims to be haunted,” Julia said. “We’re going to take some readings tomorrow.”

“Really now,” the clerk said, suddenly very interested. “Can’t say I’ve ever seen a ghost myself. But there are all kinds of things hidden back in these hills, they say.”

Julia nodded excitedly. “I’ll bet. For instance — on the way here, we saw a big mansion on the next ridge over. I had no idea there was anything like that around here.”

The clerk nodded and patted his belly. “The old Chobham place, sure, sure. ’Fraid you won’t get up there, though.”

“Oh? That’s a shame,” Julia said. “It must have quite a story.”

“Indeed, indeed. Built by a coal magnate back in the ’30s, a placer miner who got lucky. He bought up half this county before his seam ran dry. Then he couldn’t afford to keep it. The government bought it up in the Depression and turned it into a camp for the WPA. That’s all long ago, now. Nobody’s lived up there in my lifetime.”

“It’s a shame they let a place like that go to seed,” Chapel said.

The clerk lifted one shoulder toward his ear, in a kind of lazy shrug. “Too expensive, I suppose, to keep it open, and anyway, we got a real shortage of billionaires around here might want it. No, the government seems happy to let it rot.”

“I’d love to take a look,” Julia told him. “But you say it’s off-limits?”

“Well, sure now. The place ain’t safe for human occupation,” the clerk pointed out. “You could fall through some broken floorboards, or a brick could muss that pretty red hair of yours. Even the local teenagers, well, they’ll go anywhere their parents aren’t looking, sure, but they stay clear. There’s a pretty serious fence, and there’s signs all ’round saying trespassers’ll be shot.”

“What a shame,” Julia said. “It would be great for our TV show. But I guess we’ll just have to hope this restaurant in Lexington pans out.”

The clerk got a shrewd look in his eye. “TV show? Now, it might just be, we have a haunted room right at this motel, if y’all’d be interested in staying a few nights.”

Julia laughed. “You have a haunted room, or you might have a haunted room?”

“Just suggesting a TV appearance could help my business. If you catch my drift,” the clerk said, with a wink.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re suggesting,” Julia said, suddenly deeply offended. “We’re serious scientists, only interested in getting to the truth about the paranormal.”

“Didn’t mean nothing by it,” the clerk said. “I’ll get you some keys.”

When he was gone, Chapel turned to look at Julia. “Ghost hunters?” he whispered.

“I watch a lot of reality television,” she told him. “I thought it would make a good cover, and give me a chance to ask about the mansion.”

Chapel nodded, impressed. Badass Julia made a great field agent, whether or not she had any training.

Once they had the keys, Chapel went outside to pull the car around to the back of the motel, where another file of rooms looked out on a thick growth of forest. When the women joined him, he held up the two keys. “One for boys, one for girls?” he said, but Angel just grabbed one of the keys out of his hand and hurried inside one of the rooms. A moment later he heard the door’s dead bolt slam into place, and then the sound of a television turned up to a high volume. It sounded like it was showing C-SPAN.

He turned to look at Julia. “I wish I knew what was going on with her.”

Julia sighed. “Agoraphobia. She denied it when I asked, but… my ex-boyfriend had a cousin with agoraphobia. She came to visit us once in New York, but she couldn’t handle Manhattan. She said she felt like all the tall buildings were going to fall down on her. She used to make all kinds of excuses why she couldn’t leave the house.”

Chapel frowned. “Angel’s been all right until now.”

“This is the first time we’ve traveled by daylight,” Julia pointed out. “A fear of wide-open spaces is a lot easier to handle when you can’t see them.” She took the other key from his hand and unlocked the second room. “She’ll be okay if you leave her alone. Shut up in that room she can probably relax for the first time all day.”

Chapel grabbed some bags from the car. “Poor Angel,” he said.

Julia looked toward the closed door of Angel’s room. “What I’d really like to know is whether she was like this before the government started hiding her away in trailers, or if it’s a reaction to living her entire life online.” She turned and looked at him. “Somebody really did a number on her, Chapel. They’ve kept her from having any kind of real life. They’ve put her under acute psychological stress. Whoever it was, they’ve got a lot to answer for.”

Chapel couldn’t find it in himself to disagree.

Chapel locked the door of the room and started unpacking. He hadn’t brought much — just a few pieces of clothing donated by Top’s boys. Most of those he left in the bag, but he took out a pair of dark jeans and a black hoodie. It was what he intended to wear that night when they investigated the mansion.

“You think we’ll find something useful in that place?” Julia asked. She sat down on the room’s queen-size bed and kicked off her shoes.

“I hope we will,” Chapel told her. “Angel believes that the command that launched the original drone attack in New Orleans came from there. If there are NSA people inside, we might be able to ask them some important questions.”

“I’m guessing they’ll be uncooperative,” Julia pointed out.

Chapel nodded. “We’ll find a way to get them to talk. But it probably won’t even come to that. Most likely the place is deserted, just a bunch of servers running on automatic. The NSA was smart enough not to send the attack signal from one of their official data centers. Most likely this place is just a relay — a cutout, designed to hide what they’re doing. But that might be useful, too. If there’s NSA hardware inside, then Angel can use it to get past their firewall and hack into their main servers.”

“Won’t they instantly know what she’s doing, like last time? It only took a few minutes for Wilkes to figure out where she was.”

“That was because she was working on an open, commercial Internet connection. Using the NSA’s own hardware means she can sneak in undetected.” Chapel shrugged. “I don’t understand how it works, but it sounds like it makes sense.”

Julia smiled. “And if she does find something, some evidence. What then?”

“Then we go to the director of national intelligence with it. Show him the NSA has been attacking American assets. He’ll shut them down in a hurry. The evidence will show that we — Angel, me, Director Hollingshead — are innocent, and he’ll call off Wilkes and anyone else who’s looking for us.” He sat down in a chair by the door. “Anyway. That’s the plan.”

Julia nodded. “You want me to be your lookout again?”

“Absolutely. I have no idea what kind of security this place has. It could just be that fence I saw and nothing else. Or they could have cameras, or even armed rapid response teams patrolling the place after dark. Though I doubt that — the clerk here would have told us the place was guarded, when what he was telling us was we couldn’t go up there.”

Julia leaned toward the bed, stretching her arms and arching her back. “When do we leave?”

“Not until the middle of the night. I want it as dark as I can get. Then we’ll need to hike up there — I don’t want our friendly clerk here noticing that we’re taking our car out of the lot.”

“Good,” Julia said. “That gives me a little time to relax. I still like the occasional road trip, but it’s more draining than I remember. If you want to take a nap, you can use the bed. I’m thinking I’ll take a very long, very hot bath.”

“Sounds good,” he said.

She went into the bathroom and soon he heard the sound of water running. He stripped off his shirt and checked on the bandage around his midriff. It looked like it was still in good shape. So he slipped off his artificial arm and plugged it into a wall socket, then lay down on the bed and tried to close his eyes.

A nap would be good. It would be useful. It was looking like a long night ahead. But he was just too wired — every time he closed his eyes they just snapped open again.

The bathroom door opened and Julia stepped out. She looked down at him and gave him a smile he couldn’t quite read.

Then she pulled her shirt over her head and draped it across the back of a chair. Her bra came next, and suddenly he had no interest in closing his eyes anymore. As she unbuttoned her pants she said, “I don’t want to get my clothes wet in there.”

She was still smiling. She didn’t stop as she stepped out of her panties and stood nude there in the doorway.

Chapel sat up. “You, uh, don’t want any company in there, do you?” he asked.

“In the bath? Absolutely not,” she said, and her smile grew mischievous. “There’s no room for two. Anyway, you can’t get your side wet, not until you’re properly healed.”

“Right.”

She turned to step inside the bathroom. “Of course,” she said, “you could come sit with me. Help me scrub my back.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, jumping off the bed.

Julia got a washcloth good and wet, squeezing it until soap bubbles popped between her fingers. She handed it to him, then leaned forward so he could wash her shoulders and back. He moved it slowly across her smooth, freckled skin, feeling the knobs of her spine through the thin cloth.

“Mmm,” she said. “I’d forgotten how nice it is to have someone do this for me.” She glanced back over her shoulder at him. In the steaming bathroom, curls of her hair stuck to her forehead and her cheek. “I’ve had to get used to doing everything for myself since I sent you away.”

Apparently Badass Julia was in a playful mood.

Chapel scrubbed lower down, paying special attention to the small of her back. He knew how much she liked that. It made her squirm now, pulling her knees up to her chest. A little water splashed out of the tub and got his feet wet. He didn’t mind.

He leaned over to kiss her shoulder. Putting the washcloth down, he lifted the hair away from the back of her neck and kissed her there, dragging his lips across the incredibly soft skin as she bent her head forward to receive his mouth.

“I’m never going to get clean if you keep doing that,” she told him.

“I don’t mind if you’re a little dirty,” he told her.

She laughed and then pushed him away. Leaning back in the tub, she looked up at him and suddenly her eyes turned serious. “We’re doing this?” she asked.

“Looks like.”

She nodded. “I want it, Jim. I want us to be like this again. Things — things can’t be the same as before, though. Too much has changed.”

His heart sank a little. “I know.”

“I still can’t believe you’ve forgiven me,” she told him. “When I broke things off — I was so cruel—”

“I know why you had to do it,” he told her. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I’ve changed, too,” she told him. “I’m not sure I understand how, but I feel it.”

“Julia,” he said, “whatever can be between us, whatever it means. I want that. Things haven’t changed for me at all.”

“God. Listen to me,” she said, with a laugh. “I’m talking about feelings when we should be focused on just enjoying this.”

“So let’s stop talking,” he told her.

He found the washcloth and scrubbed her arms, feeling the tight muscles in her biceps, running his hand down into the water to her wrists, to twine his fingers in hers. He brought the cloth up and worked it across the top of her breasts, watching the soap bubbles slide down those perfect curves, parting around the mounds of her hard nipples. He took his time, stopping now and again to kiss her deeply.

He dropped the washcloth in the tub and took one of her breasts in his hand, cupping it, caressing it, his thumb brushing against her nipple and making her gasp. She reached up and grabbed his wrist, then pulled his hand down across her smooth, flat stomach, locking her eyes to his as his fingertips found the red hair between her legs. She parted her thighs a little and he found her clitoris, rubbed it in small circles until she trembled. He slipped his index finger inside her and she let out a little cry, then slapped a hand over her mouth.

“We have to be quiet,” she whispered. “I don’t want Angel to hear us and get jealous.”

He leaned in close until his mouth was just millimeters from her ear. “Then be quiet,” he told her and slipped a second finger inside her body.

After that he made no attempt to take things slow. He worked her clit with the ball of his thumb while his fingers slipped in and out. Her body shook from head to toe and she whimpered behind her hand as a bead of sweat rolled down her forehead.

He kept up the rhythm, moving nothing but his hand, feeling how her whole body curled around him. One of her feet came out of the tub and he saw her toes clench against the enamel as if she was trying desperately to find something to hold on to. Her breath came out of her in quick gasps and then water went everywhere as she flung her arms around him, pulling him close and then she shoved her face into his bare skin, smearing her mouth across him as she suppressed the noise she couldn’t help but make. And still he kept stroking her, his fingers moving faster and faster—

— and then her whole body tensed, her hands squeezing his skin, her face buried in his chest and her hair bouncing against him as she cried out as she came, the sound reverberating through his body. She bit him a little and he laughed and she waved one hand in mock threat.

Eventually she stopped shaking and lay back against the tub, staring up at the ceiling, her hair floating on the soapy water.

She was so beautiful like that, so perfect he wanted to just stare at her forever. Instead he leaned over and kissed her, lightly, gently, on the lips.

“Oh my God,” she breathed. “Whatever happens between us, Jim, whatever we are in the future…”

“Yes?” he asked.

“It’s going to include that. A lot of that.”

Angel had recovered quite well by the time they knocked on her door and told her it was time to head out. She wore a navy blue windbreaker and a pair of black slacks she’d borrowed from Dolores. Julia was similarly outfitted in clothes from Suzie, including a dark knit cap to cover her red hair. Each of them had a flashlight, and Chapel had a satchel full of tools. “Where’d you get those?” Angel asked.

“The motel has a shed out back full of gardening stuff,” he said. “The lock on the door wasn’t exactly secure.”

Julia shook her head. “If I didn’t know you were one of the good guys,” she said, “I would worry about all the shady things you do.”

“Lucky for me I have a winning personality,” he told her.

The three of them set out quietly, not even turning on their flashlights until they were deep into the woods behind the motel. They took their time, staying as far from the road as possible, cutting through tangled growths of forest when they could. When they had to cross a farmer’s field, they moved fast with no light, keeping their heads down. Chapel felt ridiculously exposed as they dashed across the stubble and irrigation ditches, but sometimes they had no choice.

Once they had to walk within a hundred yards of a big, rambling farmhouse, close enough they could see the blue light of a television flickering inside. Once they heard dogs barking from close by as they pressed through a stand of trees. As far as Chapel could tell, though, no human being noticed them passing.

It was well after midnight by the time they reached the fence surrounding the mansion. Chapel told the women to stand well back while he investigated it. He didn’t see any cameras mounted on the fence posts, and no suspicious cables or junction boxes that might suggest the fence was electrified. Still, he wanted to be careful. He studied the fence for long minutes, taking in the fact that the chain link was rigorously secured and that the coils of razor wire on top weren’t rusted at all. That suggested somebody was taking care of this fence on a regular basis. A good sign in itself, though it meant it would be harder to get inside.

His final test was the one that scared him the most, but it had to be done. He reached out and grabbed the chain link with his artificial hand. The silicone flesh of his prosthesis would insulate him if it was electrified, but if the current running through it was strong enough—

He breathed a sigh of relief. The fence wasn’t electrified. Nor did he hear any alarms go off the second he touched it. Of course he knew there could be a silent alarm — maybe a light had just gone on in a security office inside the mansion, or maybe an automated system had already called the police to tell them someone was breaking into the old Chobham place. But if that was the case, there was nothing he could do about it. He had to get through this fence somehow, no matter the consequences.

“You aren’t climbing that,” Julia pointed out. “Not without reopening your wound.”

“That’s why I brought these,” Chapel said. He pulled a pair of long-handled wire cutters out of his satchel. “You two spread out, and keep your ears open. If you hear anyone coming, let me know and we’ll book it. This’ll take some time.”

The women nodded and disappeared into the trees. Chapel got to work.

In the movies, when someone cut their way through a fence, it seemed to take only a few seconds, or at best the director would cut away while the would-be intruder handled the laborious task. In real life, chain-link fences were designed to keep people out, and they were designed very well.

It took all of Chapel’s strength to cut through the first link. The fence was made of thick galvanized steel and woven in such a way that breaking any one thread didn’t help you much. He worked as fast as he could, but before he’d even made a dent in the fence he was sweating profusely and his living hand had started to cramp up. Then there was the fact that the fence rattled every time he touched it, and each link he cut made a sound like a little gunshot. If anyone was paying attention inside the fence, he was certain they would hear him before he got through.

In time, though, he made an L-shaped cut long enough that he thought they could wriggle through it. He put down the wire cutters and leaned against a nearby tree, getting his breath back and letting his hand relax. Before he was done recovering, Julia and Angel had returned. “The only thing I heard was you cursing at the damned fence,” Angel said.

“Yeah,” Julia said. “There’s nobody out here. It’s kind of spooky. I kept expecting a security guard to shine a light in my face. But I didn’t see so much as a squirrel.”

“It’s possible there’s nobody inside,” Chapel pointed out. “This could just be an automated server farm. But we’re not going to take any chances. Once we’re inside this fence, no talking, okay? And don’t do anything I don’t do first. I’ll walk a little ahead, keeping my eyes open for… I don’t know what. Anything from trip wires to land mines. When I stop, you stop. When I walk, you walk. Got it?”

“Got it,” Angel said. Julia nodded.

“Okay,” he said. He bent low, even though the sutures in his side made him feel like he was being poked in the ribs with a pitchfork. He pulled the cut fence back like a flap, pushing it as hard as he could so it wouldn’t just spring back on him. Careful not to snag his clothes — or his skin — on the sharp edges of the cut links, he stepped inside.

No spotlights came on from the house. No one called out for him to freeze.

He helped Julia and Angel clamber through. He took a little time to bend the fence back into place, so that given a cursory inspection in the dark it would be hard to tell it had ever been cut.

Then he headed for the mansion.

Overhead the branches of the trees spread like dark fingers clutching at anyone foolish enough to walk beneath them. It must have rained recently, because the undergrowth was damp and squelched under Chapel’s shoes. He used his flashlight sparingly, snapping it on for only a few seconds at a time, and keeping its lens covered with his hand. Hopefully that prevented anyone in the mansion from seeing his light, but it also played tricks with his night vision, so he was constantly blinking away afterimages. If there was something hidden in the leaf litter, he would be very lucky to see it.

Ahead of him the woods gave way to a long, overgrown patch of grass, and beyond that lay the neglected garden below the east wing. In the cloud-streaked moonlight it didn’t look like a house at all but instead like a haunted fortress, its crumbling walls like the battlements of a Gothic castle.

In the garden a statue of an angel with open, beckoning hands stared down at him with stony eyes. Lichen had encrusted its cheek, and one of its wings ended in a jagged stump.

He crept forward, crouching so low he could keep his artificial hand down on the ground, feeling for trip wires he couldn’t see. This was crazy — thinking he could get across that open ground, thinking he could break into this place. It had to be guarded, by cameras if by nothing else. They would see him the second he stepped out of the trees. See him, and send an alert to Wilkes, and he would come flying in to finish the job he’d started at the electronics store …

Chapel licked his lips and studied the windows of the mansion. He saw no light up there, no movement. Nothing to give away a human presence. It looked exactly like what it purported to be, an old abandoned house slowly falling in on itself. He struggled to control his fear, took another step—

— and felt something give under his foot.

There was a crack like something breaking, loud enough to make him want to jump. He held very still. If it was a trip wire connected to a land mine, say, it might go off only when he lifted his foot again. He switched on his light and pointed it at his shoe.

A twig. He had stepped on a twig, and it had cracked under his weight. That was all.

He looked back over his shoulder and saw Julia and Angel staring at him, their eyes wide. He held up one hand to give them the okay signal. Julia nodded, but she still looked terrified.

He didn’t blame her.

At the very edge of the trees, still in their shadow, he slipped the flashlight into his bag of tools. He gestured for Julia to come forward, then whispered in her ear, so softly the swaying trees made more noise. “I’m going to run up there, into the garden. Don’t follow until I give you the signal. When you do, come fast, and get into cover as soon as you can. Tell Angel to do the same, okay?”

“Okay,” she whispered back.

He nodded. Took a breath. And ran dashing out across the grass, not even bothering to keep his head down. What would be the point? Anyone watching from the house would see a dark shape hurtling from the woods, perfectly silhouetted against the damp, silvery grass.

He stamped up the slope, eating up the ground. Ten yards, eight, five — and then he was right up against an overgrown hedge, under its shadow. He dropped to the ground and let himself breathe for a second. Then he crept along the hedge, eventually coming to a break where it let into the garden proper. Inside he saw paths laid out in flagstones that had, over the years, tilted up at crazy angles. The paths ran in a wide circle around a dry and cracked fountain. The statue he’d seen stood in the middle of the fountain, facing a little away from him now. Irrational as it might be, he was glad to be out of its line of sight.

At the far end of the garden, past the fountain, was a low stone wall. Steps were cut into it, leading up to the east wing of the house. So close now.

He took a step away from the shelter of the hedge, back into the moonlight, and waved one hand over his head.

Instantly he saw Julia and Angel come running out of the woods, holding on to each other as they barreled across the grass. Smart — they were minimizing their profile, making it impossible for a watcher to tell if it was one person or two running toward the garden. He wondered which of them had thought of that. Not for the first time, nor the hundredth, he was glad he’d picked such bright people to be his partners in crime.

He watched them come, digging their feet in the grass as they made their way up the slope. It seemed to take forever for them to cross the open ground. He waved them closer, even though they wouldn’t be able to see him in the shadow of the hedge.

Just a little closer. A few more seconds, and then—

Chapel’s blood froze in his veins.

He’d heard something. A sound — a very weird sound. A kind of shrieking, but rhythmic, kind of like the cry of an animal. Kind of not. He couldn’t imagine what on earth could make such a noise.

It didn’t stop. It was getting closer.

“Come on,” he whispered, then grabbed for Angel’s arm as she came into reach, pulling her close to the hedge. Julia dropped to the ground, sitting with her back against the dense shrubbery. She reached over and touched his shoulder, pointed.

The sound was much louder now. She must have heard it — and tracked it back to its source. He could see it now, too.

Coming around the side of the house, up past the garden, a dark shape appeared silhouetted against the dark sky. The moonlight was only enough to give away the rough outline of the thing. To show that it was about the size and shape of a horse, with four legs that moved like an animal’s legs. There was only one reason to think that it was not in fact a horse.

It didn’t have a head.

The headless thing screeched as it moved. Each step, each time it bent one of its joints, it let out a high-pitched whining sound that made Chapel’s brain ache. As it walked toward them the sound became a sustained, horrible creaking that made it impossible for him to think, impossible to decide what to do next.

Especially when another of the things came around the far wing of the mansion and started picking its way toward them.

The things pranced more than they walked. They moved like deer, maybe, more than horses, their thin legs probing, testing with each step. They walked like drunkards who couldn’t be sure the ground would be where they expected it to be, who had to be extra-careful not to fall down.

For all that, they could move fast when they wanted to. The one that had appeared at the far end of the house closed the distance in a hurry, running straight at them until it was almost upon them. Meanwhile, the first one they’d seen was still carefully picking its way down toward them, climbing over the debris of the fallen wing, cresting a pile of bricks like a mountain goat, testing and probing its way through the frame of a broken window.

“They’re robots,” Angel said.

Chapel wanted to smack himself across the forehead. How hadn’t he seen that? Of course they were. That terrible sound they made — it was the whine of servomotors firing in sequence inside their mechanical legs. And when he thought about their body shape, he remembered he’d seen video of such things before, video of machines that were being tested by the armed forces for—

“I don’t care what they are,” Julia said. “I don’t want one touching me.”

Chapel nodded. Right. They needed to get away from these things.

“Back to the trees,” he said. “We’ve been spotted — don’t worry about being stealthy. Just run.”

Julia nodded and jumped out of the shadows, headed for the trees they’d just left. If they could get back to the cover of the forest, back out through the gap they’d made in the fence, Chapel was sure the robots wouldn’t follow them. He hated to just abort before they’d even got inside the secret data center, but what choice did they have? He gestured for Angel to run for the trees, then hurtled after her, even as the headless robots converged on the garden. Chapel glanced back over his shoulder as he ran, expecting to see the two robots hurtling after him, skidding down the slope on their skinny legs. Instead they simply took up position back there, like sentries.

He was afraid he knew what that meant. He turned his head to look back toward the trees just in time to see two more of the robots hidden there, crouching behind the branches.

“Angel! Julia!” he shouted. “Watch out!”

Julia saw the robots in time and slid to a stop on the wet grass, but Angel didn’t seem to understand what was happening. She kept running, right up to the edge of the trees. Chapel dashed after her, thinking he would grab her and pull her back, but he was too late.

The robot pounced with a grace no machine should have. It came down hard on Angel, knocking her to the ground. She rolled away, throwing her arms up to protect her head, but the robot reared over her, its front limbs flailing in the air, ready to stab down and smash her where she lay.

Running, not caring if he slid on the wet grass, Chapel caromed into the thing, body-slamming it from the side. If he could knock it over, he thought, leave it pinwheeling its legs in the air like an overturned tortoise, maybe that would give Angel time to get away. He got his shoulder underneath the thing and heaved, throwing it sideways.

It slipped away from him, its feet dancing crazily on the leaf litter, moving in a desperate rhythm and screaming with that horrible noise. It tilted one way, then the other, and he thought it was about to topple over. Instead it staggered and swung around like a drunkard — but it never lost its footing. It never fell over.

Damn.

Once it had stabilized itself, the thing turned slowly, and he got the impression it was glaring at him. If it had snorted like an enraged bull, he would have felt less intimidated. It was about to charge him, he was certain, and he tried to guess which direction to jump, which way to move to get away from it.

Then he felt something tugging at his back. Thinking one of the machines had come up behind him, he glanced over his shoulder and saw Angel dragging something out of the pack on his back.

Instantly he knew what she had planned. After years of working together, he guessed they really had come to know how the other one thought.

He feinted to his left and the four-legged robot started its charge, clearly intending to bowl him over and trample him. At the last second, Chapel broke right, barely getting out of its way. It barreled past him at high speed, its spindly legs squealing.

Before it could change course to come around for another attack, Angel brought a rubber mallet down hard on its side, a glancing blow but enough to make it dance sideways, just like when he’d tried to flip it over. As its feet lifted and fell, desperately trying to find its balance again, Angel dropped the mallet and hefted the same wire cutters he’d used to get through the perimeter fence.

She didn’t worry about finesse — instead she just jammed the blades of the cutters deep into the thickest part of the robot’s front left leg and then squeezed the long handles together. There was a very loud pop and a flash of light and suddenly that leg hung from the side of the machine as nothing more than dead weight.

“Now,” she said.

Chapel rushed in and got his shoulder right into the prancing thing’s side and this time he felt it shift under his weight. Inch by inch he knocked it back, even as its three working legs scrambled beneath it, desperately looking for purchase. He wouldn’t give it a chance and kept pushing — until the whole thing went over, falling over on its side where its legs kicked uselessly at empty air.

“Three to go,” Angel said, but before Chapel could reply, both of them turned to look up at the ruined east wing of the house.

They could hear Julia screaming from up there.

The two of them raced up the slope, watching in every direction in case one of the four-legged machines came flying out of the shadows. From the muffled sound of Julia’s shouts it was clear she’d tried to escape into the house, but the robots must have followed her in. Chapel and Angel hurried through the garden and up the steps, then Chapel pressed his back against the wall of the house, right next to a place where a broken window would let him get inside. He took a heavy wrench from his backpack — the best weapon he had — and looked over at Angel. She was panting, her eyes wide, but it looked like she was ready for this.

“Watch my back,” he told her. Then he ducked inside the house.

It was pitch-black inside, and even when he switched on his flashlight, it gave only enough illumination to show him the rough outlines of broken furniture and, at the far end of the room, an open doorway. He had no way of knowing whether Julia had come this way or what lay beyond that door, but he didn’t waste any time wondering. Calling for Angel to follow him, he headed into a hallway that ran the length of the wing. Angel pointed her own light at the ceiling, then moved it back and forth. “Look,” she said. “That’s Cat-5 cable hanging up there.”

Chapel spared a glance for the bundle of cables that hung on hooks from the ceiling, strung up like bunting. It might be more evidence that the mansion was, in fact, a secret data center, but it didn’t help him find Julia.

Standard operating procedure suggested he should stay quiet and keep his light off as much as possible. Standard operating procedure was very useful for infiltrating locations that were possibly full of unseen enemies in the middle of the night.

SOP be damned. “Julia!” he shouted as loud as he could. “Julia! Where are you? Are you okay?”

Angel winced and took a step away from him, as if he were inviting the wrath of the gods and lightning might hit him at any moment. When there was no reply, she pushed open a side door and pointed her light into the room beyond. “Clear,” she said and moved to the next door. “Clear.”

“Julia!” Chapel shouted. Why wasn’t she answering? He was pretty sure the four-legged robots weren’t programmed to kill them. Otherwise, why not give them better weaponry than their spindly legs? But maybe Julia had hurt herself by accident, somewhere in the house. Maybe she had fallen through rotten floorboards or something had collapsed on top of her—

“Clear,” Angel said, taking another doorway.

“Stop saying that,” Chapel snapped. She hadn’t been trained for this kind of operation. She had no idea what “clear” really meant, especially not when she was just pointing her light into the middle of each room. Chapel sighed. “Corners,” he said.

“What?”

“You check each corner of the room, one, two, three, four. Even then, you don’t say ‘clear’ unless you’re sure there are no doors or closets or even cupboards in there. If there are, you need to check every one of them.”

Angel looked hurt. “On TV—”

“On TV, they don’t fire real bullets,” he told her. He ran to the end of the hallway. “Julia!” he shouted.

Had he heard something? Had Julia responded? He couldn’t be sure his mind wasn’t just playing tricks on him. He’d thought he’d heard footsteps that stopped as soon as he called out.

It could have been anything. At the end of the hall was a huge foyer, with a cracked marble floor and a huge staircase leading up to the second story. The stairs looked intact, and more bundles of cable ran along the wall, following the risers. A little moonlight came in through tall windows and made the stone floor glow.

“Julia!” he shouted.

Nothing. He started across the floor, intending to climb those stairs. Behind him Angel stepped into the room and pointed her light across the foyer, at the entrance to the far wing.

Her light picked out a dark shape, crouching on four segmented legs. A shape with no head.

“Shit!” she cried out, the expletive lost as the robot started screeching away, its spindly feet lifting high and then stepping down hard on the slippery marble.

“Upstairs,” Chapel said. “Maybe it can’t climb!”

But he was pretty sure it could.

He pushed Angel ahead of him, moving her up the steps as quickly as he could. The stairs were, in fact, completely intact, untouched by the general ruin of the mansion, and they made good time.

Better time than the robot, anyway. He’d been right; it could climb stairs, but it was a slow process. The machine had to test each new step with each of its feet, bearing down on one leg, then the other to make sure it would hold its weight. By the time Chapel and Angel reached the top of the stairs, the robot was only halfway up.

Which was good, except for one problem — it meant they couldn’t get back down, if they needed to.

“Keep moving,” he told her. “Keep looking for Julia.”

Angel’s light hurried on ahead of them, following the bundles of cable that ran along the wall.

“I said to ignore those,” Chapel said. “Look for—”

“I’ve got a hunch,” Angel told him. “I’m supposed to go with those, right? Hunches?”

Chapel shook his head. This was no time to argue. He shoved open a door and stumbled inside, his light hitting each of the corners. Nothing there.

“This way,” Angel said, grabbing his arm.

Behind them, the robot was three-quarters of its way up the stairs. Chapel cursed and followed Angel. Together they headed down a long hallway with doors on either side. The bundles of cabling rose to the ceiling again. Occasionally one strand of cable would break off from the rest and disappear through a doorway, but the majority of the bundle continued in a nearly straight line toward the end of the hall. A big pair of doors stood there, one of them open just a crack. A hole had been drilled through the wall above the doors and the entire bundle of cable disappeared through it. Whatever lay beyond those doors clearly needed a lot of cable, though Chapel had no idea what that might mean.

He started to bellow for Julia again, but Angel reached up and clamped one hand over his mouth. Had she heard something? Seen something? He put his back against the wall and looked up and down the hallway, trying to determine what had alerted her.

Then he heard it. The screeching of robotic legs. The machine had made it to the top of the stairs and was coming closer, or — no, it wasn’t just one set of legs—

Angel ran to the double doors and threw them open. The room beyond was well lit and gave off the distinctive hum of server racks breathing together like the bees in a hive. None of that mattered to Chapel, though.

He could think of only one thing as Angel stepped inside the server room.

“Corners!” he called out.

Just before someone grabbed Angel and hauled her, screaming, out of view.

Angel’s scream cut off abruptly. The only thing Chapel could hear was the screech of the robot or robots behind him, coming closer.

The doors to the server room closed as if under their own power. Chapel ran forward and beat on the doors with his fists, calling Angel’s name. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw not one but two of the headless robots approaching, their thin legs stepping high on the carpeted floor of the hallway.

He still had his tools. He could stand and fight the robots. At least he could go down fighting — swinging away with a pipefitter’s wrench while the machines kicked him to death. It would be a pointless, stupid way to die. It wouldn’t help Julia or Angel. But Chapel had always been too dumb to just give up. He started to reach for the backpack.

That was when he felt the barrel of a silenced pistol touch the back of his neck.

In front of him the robots fell silent and unmoving. As if their power switches had been flipped to off. Clearly they weren’t needed anymore.

Chapel set his face in an emotionless mask and started turning around to face whoever it was who had drawn down on him.

It was Wilkes, of course. He recognized the man’s voice. “Stay right there, buddy. Don’t turn around. Not until I tell you to. You can go ahead and nod a little to show me you understand.”

Chapel nodded.

“Good. This bullshit with the robots, that wasn’t my idea. I want you to know that. My new operator thought it would be fun to test out some of his toys on you bunch. I protested, but after you got away the last time, I don’t get to give so many orders.”

Chapel sighed in resignation. “I expected more out of a trained assassin—”

The pistol dug into the back of Chapel’s neck. “Don’t talk,” Wilkes said. “You don’t say anything until we ask you specific questions. Nod if you’ve got that.”

Chapel nodded.

“Okay. We’re going to do a little dance. You’re going to turn around and face the doors while I stay directly behind you. We’re going to take this slow and easy. All you have to do is shuffle your feet until you’re turned around. You understand?”

Chapel nodded again.

He rotated in place, very slowly. Wilkes was quick enough that Chapel never really got a good look at him. Much less any chance to grab the gun — which was the point of their little pirouette, of course.

“Okay. When the doors open, you walk through, right into the middle of the room. Then you get down on your knees and put your hands behind your back.”

Just as Wilkes had promised, the doors opened. Chapel stepped through, noticing as he went that nobody stood near the doors — they were, in fact, automatic. He walked through into the server room. Light came from two long fluorescent tubes overhead, bright enough to make it hard for Chapel to see much. He took in the boarded-over windows of the room and the big shelving units full of computer equipment. It was warm inside, with so many racks of hard drives and circuit boards buzzing away. There were other people in the room, but he was blinking so much he couldn’t make out their faces.

One of them had red hair. Julia was still alive. That was something.

Chapel stopped in the middle of the room and dropped down onto his knees. He put his hands behind his back and waited. He felt Wilkes come up behind him. A knife touched his neck and then cut down, through his shirt. Fingers dug into his back, getting under the complicated flanges that held on his artificial arm. Wilkes tripped the two hidden catches that locked the arm in place and suddenly it was gone. What remained of Chapel’s shoulder felt naked and exposed.

Wilkes used a pair of handcuffs to lock Chapel’s good wrist to his ankle. Chapel knew he wasn’t going anywhere bound up like that.

He was pretty sure this was how he was going to die.

Chapel blinked in the light of the server room until his vision cleared and he could see again. The first thing he could make out was that there were two big armchairs at the far end of the room, their upholstery torn and their stuffing falling out. Julia sat in one of them, and Angel in the other. They’d been tied up with heavy rope and Angel had a gag across her mouth. They both looked terrified.

“We’re still alive,” he told them. Wilkes grabbed his hair and pulled his head back, but Chapel needed to reassure the two women. “If they wanted us dead, they would have already—”

Wilkes smashed Chapel across the mouth with the butt of his pistol. Blood leaked down between Chapel’s teeth.

“You’re still alive,” the assassin said, “because my operator had to see you die for himself or it doesn’t count. Orders. Once he verifies you are who you are, that’s when it’s over. So don’t fool yourself.”

Julia tried to say something, but Wilkes lifted his pistol as if he would strike Chapel with it again. She closed her mouth.

“It won’t be long,” Wilkes said. “He just went down to look at that robot you took out. He didn’t think it was possible. In fact—”

“In fact,” a new voice said, from behind Chapel, “I recorded a lot of useful data that we can add to the evaluation process. We’re testing those robots for battlefield use, to carry heavy equipment and even to ferry wounded soldiers back to field hospitals. They do an amazing job of handling rough terrain. Nobody had really thought to use them for base security before, though. For this trial, I downloaded a descriptive algorithm based on the way wolves hunt in packs. When faced with multiple prey animals, it turns out the best strategy is actually to separate them from one another. Pick out the weakest, the slowest, and get it away from the herd. I’m afraid that turned out to be you, Ms. Taggart.”

Julia’s eyes went wide.

Paul Moulton, the analyst that Chapel had met at the NSA — the one who had accused Angel in the first place, and started all this — walked to the far end of the room, where Chapel could see him. He wore a sweater vest over a shirt and tie and a very, very smug expression on his face.

“Hello again, Captain Chapel,” he said. Then he turned to Wilkes. “This is them. You’ve got your targets. Um, fire at will, I guess.”

Chapel closed his eyes, waiting for the gunshot. He heard Angel trying desperately to talk around her gag, but he tried to block out the sound.

He couldn’t ignore Julia, though.

“That’s him,” she said. “Jim, that’s the guy!”

“What?” Chapel asked.

“The guy who came to see me, when you were on your mission. The one who told me to break up with you or he would out you to the press.”

Chapel was seconds from being shot to death, but still his mind reeled. “Seriously?” he asked.

“Yeah, guilty, whatever,” Moulton said. “Do you really want to talk about this? We can just shoot you now; it’ll be easier that way. Like pulling off a Band-Aid.”

Julia clearly intended to hash it all out, though. “He threatened you. And then he showed me that picture of you and the other woman,” she said. “I thought he was CIA, but—”

“NSA,” Chapel said, nodding. “Moulton, I have to ask. That part has never made any sense to me. Why would you want to split us up? Why on earth do you care about my love life?”

Moulton rolled his eyes. “I don’t, obviously. It was a ploy. A gambit. And it backfired. I told her I would out you, that she was compromising your operational readiness and that you two couldn’t be together. I thought she had more backbone.”

“I — what?” Julia sputtered.

“I figured you would tell me to fuck off. That you would run straight to Chapel and Hollingshead and tell them what had happened. Then I could have leaked Chapel’s name to the press and made it impossible for him to work as a field agent.”

“Jesus. That was, what, almost a year ago? Moulton, have you really been working that long just to bring me down?”

The analyst’s eyes flashed. “Longer. And not just you. I took down Hollingshead’s entire directorate. I did that. Now we’re going to make it permanent. Chapel, dead. Angel, dead.”

“Angel’s already gone,” Wilkes pointed out. “She was just a computer, and I smashed the last of its hard drives back in Pittsburgh.”

“Seriously,” Moulton said, “did you believe that? I never did.” He went over to Angel and pulled the gag out of her mouth. She tried to bite him, but he pulled his fingers away fast enough to avoid injury. “It was a cute trick, that neural net you left for us in your trailer,” he told her. “But did you really think we’d fall for it? I follow all the latest advancements in artificial intelligence. I know what neural networks are capable of, and I’ve been studying you for years. There was no way a machine could do all the things you’ve done, Angel.”

She didn’t bother denying it. “Fine, you’ve got me. I have to admit I’m impressed.”

Moulton didn’t respond verbally, but Chapel could tell those words meant something to him. How long had he been following them around, really? How long had he been watching their every move?

“I’m curious about one thing,” Angel said. Maybe just to buy them more time before they were shot. Maybe because she was curious. “How did you know we were coming here tonight?”

“This is the data center where everything started,” Moulton said.

Angel shook her head. “No, I get that. But you knew we were coming here tonight. I don’t believe you’ve just been sitting here for days, waiting for us to figure things out.”

“No,” Moulton admitted. “That’s true.”

“You had to get all those robots out here. And Wilkes and yourself. All at the same time,” Angel pointed out.

“It took some work, yeah.”

“So how did you know?” Angel asked.

“I’m an analyst. I crunched the numbers,” he said. He took a deep breath as if he were about to give a lecture. “When you went online, in Pittsburgh. With all those video-game consoles — that was very clever, by the way. But red flags went off all over my screens. It was obvious that it was you, Angel, and not anybody else. Wilkes stopped you, but I knew you were still out there. That you might have a copy of the server logs from when I zombified your system. So I went through those logs myself, looking for anything you might find, anything you could use. I got inside your head, thought like you, mined the data like you would. And I found those stray packet headers, the ones with the plain text IP addresses. And I knew you would see them too.”

“So it was a race,” she said, “to see which of us could get here first.”

“Yep. And I won.”

Angel nodded. “You’re pretty good,” she said. “But then, I knew that already. It would take somebody damned good to do what you’ve done. Like hijacking that drone.”

Chapel felt his jaw fall open.

He’d thought that Angel was just stalling, trying to put off her death as long as she could. Now he understood. She had a plan.

She was going to talk her way out of this.

“I mean, that would have taken some serious skills,” Angel went on. “It wasn’t as easy as just, I don’t know, calling in an air strike. You had to make it look good. Like a terrorist did it. But what kind of terrorist could do all that? You needed to break the encryption on the command signal. You needed to work the duty logs to make sure there even was a Predator over New Orleans that day. And you really needed to be on top of your game to know about that shipment of low-level radioactive waste. I mean, it had a falsified bill of lading, right? It was contraband. But somehow you knew exactly where it would be, and when.”

“I work for the NSA. We know lots of things.”

Angel nodded. “You knew what was inside that cargo container. You knew the havoc it would cause if it was blown up in the right place. You got it right where you wanted. Did you hack into some kind of shipping database and change some numbers, make sure it ended up in New Orleans on the right day?”

“I’m not a hacker,” Moulton told her, his voice rising nearly an octave in pitch. Chapel remembered what had happened when he’d called Moulton a hacker back at NSA headquarters. “I’m an analyst. Anyone can break into a database and fudge entries until they create chaos. It takes a real talent to read the numbers, to see the opportunities in what’s already there.”

“So it was you,” Angel said. “You’re the hijacker.”

Chapel looked not at Moulton but at Wilkes. He knew that he was the one Angel was really talking to. Somehow the assassin had been seconded to the NSA, turned against his former colleagues from the DIA. But if he knew what Moulton and Charlotte Holman really were, if he understood that they were the terrorists, the real culprits — maybe he would stop this, right here. If they could just convince Wilkes—

“Go ahead and say it,” Wilkes told Moulton.

Moulton looked like he really wanted to rub his hands together. To laugh maniacally. Instead, he visibly forced himself to stay calm. “Yes, that’s right. I hijacked the Predator. I’m also the one who blew up your trailer, and the one who wrecked the California power grid. I’ve got other projects, too, ones that haven’t started yet.”

“Dear God, why?” Julia asked.

He turned to look at her. “There are some things you don’t even tell dead people.”

“Wilkes,” Chapel said, “you heard him, he’s a terrorist. He’s going to bring the whole country down if you don’t stop him. If you don’t—”

“Oh, come on,” Moulton said. “You haven’t figured it out by now? First Lieutenant Wilkes works for us. He always has. He was instrumental in our plan to destroy Hollingshead’s directorate. I know you thought he was one of yours, but that’s just because we wanted you to think that. He’s a double agent.”

“Okay. Enough,” Moulton said. “I know you’re trying to flatter me with all these questions. It’s not going to work. It’s time for the three of you to go.” He turned to Wilkes. He mimed firing a pistol with his hand.

Wilkes lifted his silenced pistol. But he didn’t fire, not right away. “Huh,” he said.

“Is there a problem?” Moulton asked.

“I’m just wondering. I mean, I thought Angel was a computer. Now we know she’s flesh and blood. You sure you don’t want to take her back to Fort Meade for questioning? She might know something. And what about Taggart there? She’s a civilian.”

Moulton looked very confused. “When we brought you on, we were told you were a team player. That you followed orders without question.”

“Yeah, sure. I mean, you want me to shoot, I shoot,” Wilkes said.

“So shoot, already.”

Wilkes nodded. He lifted the pistol again. “Okay. Just one thing. Triple.”

Moulton’s look of confusion didn’t change. “What?” he asked.

“I’m a triple agent,” Wilkes said.

And then he shot Paul Moulton through the head.