The Cyclops Initiative

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have existed without certain individuals I would like to thank. They include (but are not limited to) Russell Galen, my agent; Lyssa Keusch, my editor; as well as Rebecca Lucash and Jessie Edwards at Harper. Thanks for bringing Jim home.

 

CONTENTS

 

PROLOGUE

PORT OF NEW ORLEANS: MARCH 21, 05:47

Silence.

Ten thousand feet up there was nothing to hear, except the faint scratching hiss of the wind as it spilled across carbon fiber control surfaces. Riding high on a column of warm air, the old Predator's engine barely ticked over. It was very good at conserving its energy. It was very good at waiting patiently. Waiting and watching with its single, unblinking eye.

Chuck Mitchell was asleep at his post.

He had the best of all possible excuses. His wife had given birth to a beautiful little girl three weeks ago. Mitchell hadn't slept more than a ­couple of hours a night since—­he'd been far too busy sitting up at night next to the crib, watching her squirm and wriggle, counting her ten perfect fingers, her ten perfect toes.

But if anyone needed to be awake at his job, it was Mitchell. He worked at the busiest port in America, scanning cargo containers as they passed through on their way to grocery stores and warehouses and schools across the country. It was his job to oversee the PVT portal monitor, a device that scanned those containers for radioactivity. All day long the containers passed through his station, one every few seconds—­more than sixty million a year. They went under a giant yellow metal arch and came out the other side, and nine hundred and ninety-­nine times out of a thousand, nothing happened.

That thousandth time Mitchell very much needed to be on top of his game.

So he did his best to fight the tide of sleep that kept washing over him. He mainlined coffee. When that wasn't enough, he would jab himself in the leg with a pen—­anything to help him wake up.

It was a losing battle.

The cargo containers were all the same. They didn't stay in front of him long enough for him to even know what was inside them. Even before dawn it was warm at his station, warm enough to make him feel cozy and complacent. Even the noise of the giant rolling belt that carried the boxes was a droning, repetitive sound that just lulled him back to sleep. Staying awake was just about impossible.

There was only one thing that could possibly yank him back, one sound.

A steady, persistent ticking. The sound he heard in his nightmares. The sound the detector made when it picked up stray gamma radiation.

Mitchell's eyes shot open. He nearly fell off his chair. Without even thinking about it, he slammed his palm down on the big red button in front of him, stopping the belt, freezing the cargo container in place under the arch.

The ticking sound didn't stop.

The old Predator could see in color, though the first early light made everything the same three drab shades of gray. Below, in the sprawling yard, the boxes stood in ziggurats twenty high, bluish gray and reddish gray and yellowish gray. The Predator's eye swiveled back and forth in its socket as it looked for patterns it could recognize.

The drone was an old model, one of the first wave of UAVs to see real action. It was obsolete now, and it had been declawed—­stripped of its weaponry and most of its fancier software. It should have been decommissioned a year ago.

But it could still fly. It could still loiter up there, so high up it looked like just another bird, a speck against the blue sky. It could still see—­its camera eye had not grown nearsighted over the years.

It still had one more mission in it.

Mitchell pulled a lead-­lined vest over his shoulders. The same kind dentists wore when they took x-­rays of your jaw. He jumped down from his station and took a hesitant step toward the cargo container.

The PVT equipment kept ticking away.

Mitchell knew that most likely this was a false positive. There were all kinds of things that gave off gamma rays—­everything from fertilizer to kitty litter to bananas. The chances that this box was full of, say, weapons-­grade plutonium were vanishingly small.

Like every box in the port, this one came with a sheaf of papers listing its contents and tracing its route across the oceans. The sheet on top was just a list of bar codes. He waved a handheld scanner over the box's codes. If the bill of lading said it was full of kitty litter, he would have a little laugh and go back to his chair and fall asleep again. It had to be kitty litter, right?

The box's forms all claimed it was full of plastic water bottles. Empty bottles. That definitely wasn't right—­he flipped through the sheets until he found what he was looking for, the declared weight of the container. The box was heavy. Heavy enough that it had to be filled with metal or stone, not empty plastic bottles.

He hadn't thought his day could get worse, but it just had.

Someone had shipped this box with counterfeit paperwork. Somebody had wanted to make sure nobody knew what was really inside.

Mitchell closed his eyes and tried hard not to panic. Was this the moment he'd trained for? He'd never actually seen radiological cargo come through his post before. It had just never happened. But when he took this job, he had known it might.

His duties at this point were clear. He was supposed to alert his superiors and then open the box and make a visual inspection of its contents.

Mitchell licked his lips because they were suddenly very dry.

If he did what his job required, if he popped the seals on that box, he might expose himself to the radiation inside. Most likely it wouldn't be enough to actually hurt him. Most likely it would be like getting a single chest x-­ray, nothing that would have long-­term effects on his health.

Most likely.

There. The drone had found the pattern it was looking for. Near the docks where the big ships came in, it made out the rectangular silhouette of a box sitting underneath a yellow arch.

The drone shifted its control surfaces a few degrees, turned about on its circling course. Then it put its nose down and opened up its throttle, launching itself into a powered dive.

“I can't,” Mitchell said, aloud. “I just can't. Not with the baby . . .”

He stared at the box, knowing what he was supposed to do. Knowing he would probably get fired if he didn't do it.

Knowing he couldn't.

If he got sick now, if he couldn't work, who would take care of his perfect little girl? His wife had quit her own job to look after the baby. If he got sick—­

He would go and find his supervisor, go and explain. He turned on his heel and started to walk away from the box, away from—­

He didn't get very far.

The drone weighed nearly five thousand pounds. It had a top speed of three hundred miles an hour. Dropping out of the sky like a javelin, it was moving even faster than that when it struck the cargo container.

Its eye hit the steel side of the container and shattered in a million shards of glass. Its nose, made of carbon fiber and Kevlar, disintegrated on impact.

But its wings were edged with pure titanium. They smashed into the container with enough force to tear through the box's metal walls, to pulverize its contents and send them flying, a thick roiling column of powdered metal that hung glittering in the air until the wind caught it.

The noise of the impact could be heard five miles away.

“Oh God, no, please,” Mitchell whimpered.

He couldn't hear his own voice. His ears weren't working. The afterimage of the flash filled his eyes, made him blind. He could still feel pain, though.

He was down on the concrete, and he felt like half his face had been scraped off. There was blood on his cheek, wet and hot. He struggled to get up, but he couldn't move. He couldn't even get up on his knees.

As his eyes slowly cleared he saw pools of burning jet fuel all around him, saw chunks of dull gray metal strewn everywhere.

He still couldn't hear anything.

That wasn't the worst of it. Something had hit him in the back. Something hard and sharp. His first thought had been that he'd been struck by a bullet, but it had been much bigger than that and it had knocked him down like a giant hand pressing him against the floor.

Whatever it was, it was still back there. He was—­he was impaled on it.

Blood was pouring from his stomach. From where the piece of debris had punched right through the lead vest he wore—­and the flesh inside it. He'd been so worried about radiation. That didn't seem so terrifying anymore.

In the distance he heard the sirens of emergency vehicles, coming closer.

He wondered if they would make it in time.

He wondered if he would ever see his little baby girl again.

 

TOWSON, MD: MARCH 21, 07:14

“If I were you,” the marine said, “I'd think real careful about my next move. There's a lot riding on this.”

Jim Chapel stared the man right in the eye. As usual, there was nothing there. Years of clandestine missions in the Middle East had given Marine sergeant Brent Wilkes total control over his facial expressions. The man just didn't have a tell as far as Chapel could see.

And he was right—­there was a lot at stake. Chapel glanced down at the table and did a mental calculation. Two sixes showing, and Chapel only had queen high. If Wilkes wasn't bluffing, the game could be over right here.

Chapel sighed and threw his cards down on the table. He found that he couldn't care less. “Fold,” he said.

Wilkes's mouth bent in a fraction of a grin and he grabbed for the pot—­nearly a full bag of potato chips. He stuffed them in his mouth one after another with the precision that marked everything he did.

Chapel had spent three months in the smelly motel room with Wilkes, as much as sixteen hours out of every day, and he still couldn't get a read on his partner. Wilkes didn't seem to care about anything except
poker—­he didn't read, he didn't watch TV, he just wanted to play cards. After the first week, Chapel had realized how outclassed he was and had refused to play for money anymore. They didn't have anything else
to wager with, so they'd played with potato chips instead. It didn't seem to matter to Wilkes. He played the game to win, not to make money.

The floor around the marine's chair was littered with a drift of empty potato chip bags. He ate each little crumb of chip that he won, scouring the table bare, but then he just dropped the empty bags on the floor, completely uninterested in keeping the room clean. At the end of each day Chapel picked up the bags and threw them out, knowing he would get to do it again the next day.

And meanwhile nothing whatsoever changed with the case.

They were holed up in the motel because a high-­profile black marketeer had taken a room there, too. The motel was a place where he could meet and make deals with military personnel from the nearby Aberdeen Proving Ground. A lot of very expensive military hardware had gone missing from Aberdeen, and intelligence suggested it all came through this motel. Chapel had identified one Harris Contorni as the buyer, a former army corporal who had been dishonorably discharged. He'd gathered enough evidence to show that Contorni had connections to East Coast organized crime. Chapel had thought that once he identified the culprit his involvement with this case would be finished. After all, chasing low-­level crooks like Contorni was way below his pay grade.

Instead he'd been ordered to see the case through. Which meant a semipermanent stakeout of the motel where Contorni lived. Chapel had planted listening devices all through Contorni's room and phone and car and then he'd moved into a room three doors down and then Wilkes had shown up and Chapel had gotten the worst sinking feeling of his life.

His boss had given him scutwork to do. And then he'd assigned Chapel a babysitter just in case.

It was a pretty clear vote of no confidence.

And one he'd earned, he supposed. He'd screwed up badly the year before on a mission in Siberia. Put a lot of ­people in danger. Even though he'd fixed things, even though he'd completed his mission, he knew his boss, Director Hollingshead, must have lost a lot of faith in him.

“Wanna play again?” Wilkes asked.

“Not now,” Chapel said. He looked at the cards scattered across the table and realized he didn't even care enough to pick them up and put them away. This case was turning him into a slob—­breaking his lifetime habit of cleaning up after himself.

Months had passed with no sign whatsoever that Contorni was putting together another deal. Months of doing nothing but breathing in Wilkes's air. Chapel was losing his edge. Getting rusty.

“All right,” Wilkes said. “You mind if I run down to the store, get some soda? All these chips I keep winning make me so dry I don't even piss anymore. I just fart salt.”

Chapel waved one hand in the air, careful not to express disgust. It would just encourage worse behavior. Wilkes left without another word.

When he was gone, Chapel checked the laptop on the nightstand, but there was nothing there. Contorni hadn't made a call in six hours, and though he'd driven approximately sixty miles in his car over the last twenty-­four hours, he had gone nowhere near the Proving Ground. Nothing. As usual.

Chapel sat down hard on the bed. He considered doing some calisthenics, but the room already smelled like sweat and dirty laundry. Maybe later. Instead he reached into his pocket and took out his hands-­free device. He stared at it for a while, knowing he was probably making a mistake, but then he shoved it in his ear and pressed the power button.

“Angel,” he said, “are you there?”

“Always, sugar,” she replied.

He closed his eyes and let himself smile a little. That voice . . . it was like having someone breathe softly on the back of his neck. It made him feel good like nothing else did anymore.

He hadn't spoken to Angel in weeks. He'd missed it.

He had never met her. He had no idea what she looked like or where she was located. He didn't even know her real name—­he'd started calling her Angel and it just stuck, and now even his boss referred to her that way. He'd chosen the name because when he was in the field she worked as his guardian angel. If Chapel needed to look up the criminal record of a deadly assassin or just find the best route through traffic during a car chase, she was the one with the answers he needed. More than that, she had walked him through some very tricky missions. She'd saved his life so often he didn't even keep track anymore.

She had become more than just a colleague to him. Among other things, she was the only woman in his life, now that his girlfriend had dumped him.

While he was working the stakeout, though, he barely got to talk to Angel at all. There was no need for her special skills on this mission, no need to occupy her valuable time with the running tally of how many poker hands Chapel lost or how many days had passed without new intelligence.

“Anything to report?” she asked. “Or are you just checking in?”

“Nothing,” he told her. He wondered what he sounded like to her. There'd been a time she respected him, even admired what he'd achieved in the field. Had her esteem for him dropped as she listened to him grow more and more dejected? “Any word from the director? Any new instructions, any hint of reassignment?”

“You know I would call if there was,” she told him. There was something in her voice, a cautious little hesitation. She was waiting to hear why he'd called.

It was too bad he didn't have a good answer. He couldn't very well tell her that he'd called because he was lonely. Every time the two of them spoke it cost taxpayer money. Maybe something more than that, too. He knew she worked with other field agents—­even Wilkes knew who she was, though he said he'd only worked with her once, and briefly. Maybe right now she'd been in the middle of saving somebody else's life and he was distracting her. Though he supposed she would have told him so, or just not answered her phone.

“What about that other thing I asked you to look into? Did you turn up anything more on Wilkes?”

“I'm still not sure what you're hoping to find,” she said.

“I just want a better idea of who I'm working with here. I need to be able to trust this guy when push comes to shove.”

Angel sighed. “You know I can't tell you much. He's a Raider, as I'm sure you've already figured out.”

Chapel didn't need any great detective skills to turn up that piece of information. Wilkes had a Marine Corps logo tattooed on his arm and the distinctive haircut of a jarhead. If he was working for Hollings­head's directorate (the Directorate for Defense Counterintelligence and HUMINT, or DX), that meant he was special ops—­specifically the United States Marine Corps Special Operations Command, MARSOC, the Raiders, the newest branch of secret warriors in SOCOM. He would be what the ser­vice called a critical skills operator, which meant he would be trained in everything from unarmed combat to language skills to psychological warfare.

All well and good. But there was something about Wilkes that bothered Chapel. The guy was just too self-­contained. He never gave anything away, never spoke of himself, never so much as blinked at the wrong time or laughed at a private joke. Chapel had met plenty of vets with PTSD, ­people who were stuck inside their heads, reliving a bad moment over and over. They acted a little like that, but in Wilkes's case there was something more. He didn't seem like he was stuck. Instead he acted like a panther in a cage at the zoo. Watching the world through hooded eyes, giving nothing away. Waiting for something to happen. Maybe he had some dark secret he didn't want Chapel—­or Hollingshead—­to know about.

“And you say his record is clean. No red flags anywhere in his file.”

“None,” Angel replied. “He served a bunch of tours with military intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq. When he got home, about three years ago, he was recruited by Director Hollingshead personally. He checks out—­I vetted him myself.”

“And you worked with him, too, on a mission,” Chapel said.

There must have been a certain tone in his voice. “Are you getting jealous?”

Chapel forced a laugh. “Hardly.”

“You know I'm yours, first and last,” Angel said. “You were on mandatory vacation. A mission came up, and he and I were just free at the right time. Don't worry, Chapel. Nobody's replacing you in
my
heart.”

It felt damned good to hear that.

He just wished he was sure Director Hollingshead felt the same way.

Chapel respected and trusted his boss implicitly. He would even admit to loving the man, the way a soldier loves a worthy commanding officer. Hollingshead was fair-­minded and he took good care of his ­people. But he was also a pragmatist.

If he was going to replace Chapel, then Wilkes was a perfect choice. Chapel was rushing toward his midforties, way older than any field agent should be, while Wilkes still had plenty of good years in him. Chapel had been badly wounded in combat, and in Siberia he had screwed up a vital mission by misjudging a foreign asset. Wilkes was tough as nails, smart as a whip, and had no bad marks on his record at all. It would just make sense to put Wilkes on the most vital missions and have Chapel make a more or less graceful descent into, say, an analyst position or have him work as a consultant or, God forbid, run stakeouts for the rest of his career.

If Chapel had been in Hollingshead's place, he would make the same decision.

It didn't mean he had to like it.

“Chapel, are you okay?” Angel asked. “You went quiet there.”

He shook himself back to attention. He realized he'd been sitting there ruminating while Angel was on the line. He was so comfortable with her, so utterly at home talking to her that he'd let his brain shut down.

“I'm . . . fine. I . . .”

Maybe it was time to lay his cards on the table.

His mouth was suddenly dry. He swallowed thickly and said, “I'm fine, Angel. I just need to know something. You and I have been through so much, I'm hoping I can count on you to tell me something even if you have orders not to.”

Angel didn't respond. Maybe she was waiting to hear what he said next.

“I need to know—­is my career over? Because it's pretty much all I have left.” He shook his head, even though she couldn't see him. “When Julia left, when . . . when Nadia died, I . . . I guess I started to wonder about what I'm doing. About what kind of life I can have now. I took my time and weighed things and I think, well, I think if I can keep working, if I can keep going on real missions, then it'll be okay. All the sacrifices I've made, everything I've had to do, it doesn't matter. Not if I can still be of some use. But if I'm being put out to pasture, I'm not sure I can keep—­”

He stopped because there was a click on the line. A soft mechanical sound that could have meant anything. Maybe somebody else was listening in, or maybe Angel had just changed the frequency of her signal, or—­

Three annoying beeps sounded in his ear. The tones that indicated a dropped call.

“Angel?” he said. “Angel, are you there?”

Angel's equipment was the best in the world. There was no way she could get cut off like that, not just because of a bad cellular link or rain fade or anything like that.

“Angel?” he said again.

There was no reply.

TOWSON, MD: MARCH 21, 07:36

When Wilkes got back, Chapel was still trying to raise Angel. He had a phone number for her, one he'd never written down, only memorized. There was no answer on that line. It didn't even go to voice mail. It just rang and rang. He tried to get in touch with Director Hollingshead next, calling a number for a pet store in Bethesda that was a front for the Defense Intelligence Agency. The woman on the other end of the line listened to his access code, then told him to hold the line while she connected him.

At least he got an answer this time—­the woman came back and told him the director was not available to take his call. Chapel knew better than to ask if he could leave a message. His access code had been logged—­Hollingshead would call Chapel back as soon as he could.

Wilkes had returned with a two-­liter bottle of soda and with his own phone in his hand. He kept trying to get Chapel's attention, but Chapel just waved him away. If something had happened to Angel, if she was in trouble, he would move heaven and earth to help her. Nothing else mattered. Even his mission was less important. If Harris Contorni was in the middle of selling backpack nukes to Iran in his motel room three doors down, well, that would just have to wait.