The Cyclops Initiative (10 page)

“Just need the bathroom,” Chapel said, and before the young woman could respond he pushed through the door of the men's room and locked it behind him.

The silence in there was enough to make his ears ring again. But he could breathe.

He studied his face in the mirror, looking for any sign he'd been cut or bruised in the blast. He'd been lucky. As close as he'd been to the explosion he seemed to have escaped any serious injury. The main damage was to the silicone wrist of his artificial arm. It looked like someone had cut into it with a butcher knife. He prodded the wound with his good fingers, seeing how deep the gash went. It wouldn't damage his prosthesis, but it did make him look like an android that had unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide by slashing its wrist.

That made him think of the bomb squad robot, and the hijacked Predator. Robots turned into suicide bombers. There had to be a link there—­whoever hijacked the drone must be the same person who blew up Angel's trailer. But why? What were they trying to cover up? They'd already framed her—­not that anyone would have listened to her if she
did
have secrets to share. She wasn't even human.

Damn it. He was wasting time. He could do the detective work later. Right now he had to get out of New York.

He took off his tunic, carefully laying Angel's hard drive on the edge of the sink. There he got a nasty surprise. The entire back of the tunic was shredded. Luckily the shirt underneath was intact.

He took off his tie as well. Nothing he could do about his uniform trousers with their distinctive gold stripe. He washed up as best he could, getting the grime off his face and teasing most of the gravel dust out of his hair. Then he turned and looked at the hard drive. He needed a way to conceal it.

He found a plastic bag in the trash. He wrapped the drive in what remained of his tunic and stuffed the resulting bundle inside the bag. He glanced at himself in the mirror. It looked like he was just some guy in an ugly shirt carrying a bag full of old rags. He wouldn't stand out so much now. There were other ways to track him, though.

He took out his smartphone and stared at it for a while.

Anything he did with the device could be traced. The police were probably already getting a warrant to tap his phone. Maybe the hijacker would trace him as well—­anyone who could frame Angel like that definitely had the capability. The phone was a liability. But it was so damnably useful.

Nothing for it. He started prying open the back of the case so he could get the SIM card out when it started to ring.

Chapel was still jumpy from surviving the explosion. He nearly dropped the phone in the toilet. He shook his head.
Come on, keep it together,
he thought. He flipped the phone over, knowing that whoever it was, he didn't dare answer it. He was just going to power the phone down and then—­

It was Julia.

Julia was calling him. Right now.

“Shit,” he said, under his breath. As if she might hear him.

QUEENS, NY: MARCH 21, 17:09

Julia.

There had been a time, once, when he and Julia had spoken on the phone every day. Except when he was on missions, of course.

That had been the problem. He was always going off on missions. Disappearing without any warning. She could never know where he went, or when he was coming back.
If
he was coming back. If he had died on one of his missions, she wouldn't even get to find out how. Chapel had always assumed that Hollingshead would let her know that he had died, but even that couldn't be guaranteed. Chapel's life revolved around secrets. Julia had been forced to pay the price for that.

He'd thought he could fix things. He'd thought he could give up his work, get a desk job.

Marry her.

It hadn't worked out.

He hadn't spoken with her on the phone, or seen her, in nearly a year. He'd moved out of her apartment. Moved out of New York. Tried to find some other reason to live than for her.

Julia. He had never loved a woman as much as he'd loved her. He doubted he ever would again. He knew she didn't feel the same way.

Julia.

The phone was still ringing. He shouldn't answer it. He couldn't.

He used his index finger to swipe the screen, completing the connection. He pressed it to his ear and just waited, still not really believing it would be her voice on the other end.

“Jim?” she said. “Jim, are you there?”

This was a mistake. This had to be a mistake. Whatever she wanted—­

“I'm here,” he said. Jesus. He could have said hello, or sure, or . . . or anything else. “Julia,” he went on. “It's good to hear your voice.”

“Jim, are you okay? Listen, I can't really talk.”

“I can't, either,” he said. He closed his eyes and sat down on the bathroom floor. “Normally, I'd be so happy to hear from you, I mean, I know we left things kind of—­”

“Not now.”

He opened his eyes. “Um, okay,” he said. Better, really, if they didn't start anything right now. Better if they never did. Julia was in his past, a part of his life he was never going to visit again. He would never see her—­

“You have to come to my place,” she said.

“What?”

“As soon as you can. Please, Jim. This . . . this isn't about us.”

Then she hung up. Broke the connection.

Chapel stared at the phone for a long time. The screen stayed dark. She didn't call back. He didn't dare call her back. Even though he needed to explain what a terrible idea it would be for him to visit her just then. How it would just put them both in danger.

Eventually he took a deep breath.

He had to get rid of the phone.

As long as the phone could draw power from its battery, he could be tracked. There was no way to remove the battery from this model of phone without special tools. The phone had to go. He ejected the SIM card—­it was the only part he could keep. The phone went in the trash, the SIM card in his pocket.

He stepped out of the bathroom to find the coffee shop deserted. The baristas had left, presumably to go look for the chaos over in the rail yard. They'd locked the door behind them, but it was easy enough to open it from the inside.

He headed down the avenue, pausing only to ask directions to the subway station. The man he asked was distracted enough not to even look Chapel in the face.

Chapel had worried that the trains might not be running. In the case of a terrorist attack, the subway was one of the first things to shut down. But a train did come, a train headed for Manhattan. He could ride it down to the Port Authority. Get a ticket on the next bus out of town, regardless of its destination. It was the only smart thing to do. Whatever Julia wanted, it could wait.

The stations flew by. Fifty-­Ninth Street. Seventh Avenue. Forty-­Ninth Street. The train pulled into Times Square. His stop.

This train would keep going, he knew, through lower Manhattan and then into Brooklyn. It would go right to Julia's apartment, with or without him.

While he stood there, unable to act, unable to think, the doors slid closed and the train pulled away from the station. It looked like he'd made up his mind.

BROOKLYN, NY: MARCH 21, 17:49

A police car sat halfway down Julia's block. Its lights and its engine were off, and the policeman inside was just sitting there, writing something on a form. Maybe he was just writing up a parking ticket.

Maybe he'd been assigned to watch Julia's place and arrest Chapel if he showed his face. Chapel couldn't take the chance.

Luckily, he knew another way in. He'd lived at Julia's apartment once, and he knew the blocks around it. He'd had to slip away unseen from the apartment building more than once before.

Her building had a basement where the tenants did their laundry and where the building manager kept his office. In the alley behind the building a short flight of stairs led down to an entrance to that basement. That door was supposed to be kept locked at all times, but the building manager was a heavy smoker and he frequently ducked out the back to get his fix. He left the door unlocked during the day because it was just too big a hassle to constantly lock and unlock it.

Chapel slipped inside, into the all-­too-­familiar smell of fabric softener and mildew. He saw no one as he headed up the fire stairs to the second floor. Before he knew it he was there, standing outside Julia's door.

His living hand was sweaty. He felt unsteady on his feet and it had nothing to do with the shock of the explosion back at the train yard.

This was dumb. This was colossally stupid. Every second he spent in New York City increased his chances of getting picked up by the police—­and that would mean failing his mission. They would take the hard drive away from him, the last piece of Angel. They would dissect it and study all its secrets and he would have let Hollingshead down, would have compromised national security, would have thrown away his freedom for . . . what? One last chance to see the woman he loved?

He reached up to knock on the door, but before he had the chance, he heard the chain and the dead bolt being opened from the other side. Julia must have seen him through the peephole. She threw open the door and there she was.

She was beautiful. So beautiful. Her red hair was tied back with a piece of ribbon that failed to keep strands of it from falling down and framing her soft features, the hint of freckles on the tops of her cheekbones, the crow's-­feet that were just starting to form at the corners of her eyes. She was wearing a T-­shirt and a baggy pair of jeans, but the way she stood, Chapel could see the curve of one hip up against the door.

So many things came rushing back, so many memories, that he had to close his eyes and just stand there for a second. Which meant his other senses drank her in. The smell of her shampoo hit him and—­

“Jesus, get inside already,” she whispered. He opened his eyes and saw her peering down her hallway, looking to make sure he hadn't been followed.

He stepped inside and she locked the door behind him.

“You look a little shaky,” she said.

“Someone just tried to blow me up,” he told her. Julia knew all about his work and the risks involved. She didn't look surprised.

“Sit down. I'll get you some water. Or do you want tea?”

He looked around the apartment, taking in the fact she'd changed all the furniture. She'd put up new prints on the walls, big framed photographs of various dog breeds. Julia was a veterinarian and she loved dogs, but she wasn't allowed to have one in the apartment, so she settled for pictures of them everywhere.

She'd gotten a new couch, a cream-­colored leather sectional. “This is nice,” he said, because he wasn't ready to start talking. He didn't want to know yet why she'd called him and told him to come over.

“It's even nicer when you sit on it.”

He sat down, putting the bag containing the hard drive on the floor by his feet. He looked up. And then, for the first time since he'd arrived, their eyes met.

She started to turn away, but then she stopped and looked straight at him. Neither of them spoke. Eventually the beginnings of a sad little smile curled up one corner of his mouth. There was so much history between them.

“Shit,” she said.

“Yeah,” he replied, because he knew what she meant. “Listen. When I left here, when—­”

“When I dumped you, you mean. Right before you were going to propose.”

He laughed. He'd forgotten how direct she could be. “I know we said some things, things that—­”

“Jim, we can't do this. Not now.”

He frowned. “We can't talk about what happened?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he said.

“You got here fast,” she said.

“I came straightaway. How did you know I was in New York?”

She shook her head. “I didn't. I assumed you were down in D.C. or someplace. What were you doing here? Wait, sorry. Dumb question. You were getting blown up. Which means you were working, and I can't ask you about it.” She lifted her hands in a gesture of resignation. “I'll get you that water now.”

As she headed into the kitchen he called after her, “If you didn't want to talk about us, why did you call me?”

She didn't answer. But in the silence, Chapel heard a soft noise come from the bedroom, a muffled little click. It sounded like someone had just closed the lid of a laptop in there.

He jumped to his feet, already reaching for his gun. Except it wasn't there. He was unarmed and suddenly very alone. He headed toward the bedroom door, but before he could reach it, Julia came running out of the kitchen.

“There's somebody else here,” he said.

She nodded. She looked scared. Had the police forced her to call him? Had they used her as bait so they could arrest him here?

He couldn't believe she would go along with something like that. Not Julia. But there was someone else in the apartment and she hadn't told him when he came in. She'd been hiding this third person from him.

He walked over to the bedroom door. Then he glanced back at her. “Is there something you want to tell me?” he asked.

“Jim,” she said, “before you go in there—­you have to tell
me
something. I know you aren't supposed to. But you have to. You have to tell me why you came to New York.”

“That's got nothing to do with you,” he said, staring at the door. If there were cops in there, if this was a trap, they might come rushing out at any moment if they thought he'd seen through the ruse.

His best bet was to just run. Get out of the apartment as fast as he could, get away before the cops could close in and take him.

“You have to tell me, Jim,” she said again. She pushed herself between him and the bedroom door.

He reached for her slim shoulders, intending to move her out of the way. She planted her feet.
This was about to get bad,
he thought.