The Cyclops Initiative (17 page)

“You can sleep when this is over. Look, when Angel and Chapel are on a mission, he never takes his earpiece out. The two of them are always working together, talking things out, figuring out their next move—­”

“You want us to be more like Chapel and Angel?” Wilkes asked. “Think about that. Think about how well it worked out for them.”

He could hear Moulton seethe through the phone.

The helicopter was already settling down in a rest stop parking lot. Wilkes figured he knew why—­he didn't need Moulton to explain it all. “Let me guess. You found Julia Taggart's car.” Wilkes had wasted an hour trying to locate her in New York before the cops had bothered to tell him her driver's license had been scanned as she passed a roadblock outside the Holland Tunnel. It had given him something to work on, but for most of the night the helicopter had just been flying passes over the New Jersey Turnpike, looking for her license plate.

“Yeah, it's sitting in a parking lot in—­”

“In a rest stop in New Jersey. Yep. I assume you told my pilot where to take me.” Wilkes leaned forward to look at the pilot in the cockpit of the helicopter. He gave the man a thumbs-­up. He put his legs down on the chopper's floorboards and started to climb out through the hatch. “How long ago did you find the car?”

“An hour ago,” Moulton said. “But according to the surveillance cameras, it's been sitting there most of the night.”

“Yeah?” Wilkes said. He glanced out, across the lot. A ­couple of police cruisers were sitting near the entrance to a diner about two hundred yards away. “So they're already gone. We missed them.”

“Well, sure. They had a huge head start,” Moulton said. “And we wasted time bringing you to the Pentagon for that farce of a debriefing.”

“Okay,” Wilkes said. “I'm going back to sleep.”

“What?”

“You're boring me to the point where I lose consciousness,” Wilkes said.

“You're not going to question anybody? You're not going to even talk to the cops on the scene?”

“No reason to. I already know what they could tell me. Our targets aren't here anymore. I know Chapel, and I know how he was trained. He stole another car and they left. The big question is, which direction did they go, and I'm guessing the locals can't tell me that.”

Moulton laughed derisively. “I can't believe this. You won't even get out of your aircraft? Assistant Director Holman brought you in on this because we needed somebody in the field, somebody who could work this case and—­”

“No, she didn't,” Wilkes said.

“What?”

“When you got assigned to work for me, did you even bother to look at my military record? Did you see what my operational specialty was when I was in Iraq? You need to understand something, Moulton. I'm not like Chapel. His job is to go into bad places and do all the subtle crap. Maybe pay off some warlord or sabotage a nuclear reactor or steal some documents we need. Spy shit. You take a second now, look at what they had me doing in Iraq.”

“Oh,” Moulton said when he'd finished doing as he was told. “You do wet work.”

“Nobody calls it that, dingus,” Wilkes told him. “We call it F3.”

“What does that mean?”

“Find, Fix, Finish. What I am is a self-­guided missile. You tell me where to go, and then you set me loose. So I'm going back to sleep unless you can give me a target.”

Moulton sounded almost apologetic when he responded. Maybe he was just scared. “Okay. Okay—­I have something. A car was reported stolen from that rest stop last night. Early this morning, actually. I've got the plate number and . . . and . . .”

“Still not telling me what I need, buddy,” Wilkes said.

“Hold on! There's something here. That plate number was recorded by an automatic speed trap in . . . Pennsylvania. They're headed west. I'm going to get some satellites on this, do a full scan for vehicle tags and—­”

“Wake me up when you have something,” Wilkes said, and then he ended the call. He shoved the phone in his pocket. Then he leaned forward to look at the helicopter pilot. He rolled one finger in the air, the hand signal to take the chopper up again. “West,” he shouted, over the noise of the helicopter's rotor. “Head west until I tell you to stop.”

Then he put his feet up, his head back, and closed his eyes.

SOUTH HILLS, PA: MARCH 22, 07:36

They needed to get rid of the stolen car.

As they headed out into the fresh light of day, Chapel felt like his eyeballs were vibrating in his head. He needed to sleep, and soon. But if the government was searching for them, then it was just a matter of time before they found the car. With the sun up it would be that much easier for them. Julia came along to help him, though he could easily have taken care of it alone. It seemed she had something to say to him.

She kept quiet, though, as he leaned under the dashboard and fiddled with the wires that would start the ignition. The car sputtered to life and he put it in drive right away before it could stall out.

“We need a place where it won't be seen,” he told Julia. “Preferably someplace covered, so it can't be seen from the air. They'll find it eventually, no matter what we do, but we don't want to make it easy for them.”

She nodded. “So like a parking garage? No—­no, that wouldn't work. The attendants would find it and call the police. What about an abandoned house? One with a garage?”

“As long as nobody saw us breaking in, that would be great,” Chapel said. “That's a risk, though.” He headed out onto a wide stretch of road surrounded on both sides by strip malls and big box stores. “Even if we can just ditch it under some trees, that would be a big help.”

They drove for a while in silence, both of them craning their necks around for the right spot. It was Julia who found it. “There,” she said, pointing at the overgrown parking lot of a deserted minimall.

The lot was empty, and far too visible from the street, but Chapel pulled into it anyway and then drove around the back of the run-­down buildings. “Oh, perfect,” he said. There had been a drive-­through bank back there, with a concrete overhang that would shield the car from satellites. He put the car in park and leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes for a second. He finally felt safe.

“We'll need to strip the license plates, right?” Julia asked. “I remember you're supposed to do that when you abandon a car.”

Chapel nodded without opening his eyes. “We'll need to file off the VIN numbers too. They'll know the car was stolen, but it'll take longer to trace it back to its owner then.”

“I feel sorry for whoever owns this car,” Julia said, with a little laugh. “I mean, I know we had no choice. But I keep imagining them coming out of that rest stop and realizing they're going to need to get a cab home. That's got to suck.”

Chapel opened his eyes and looked across at her. He realized he hadn't given a second's thought to that. He was on a mission—­at least, it felt like he was on a mission. If he'd been in Uzbekistan or Somalia, stealing cars would just be standard operating procedure. Why should it be different here in the States? And yet, once Julia pointed it out, he couldn't help but feel like a criminal.

Still. “I would do a lot worse things to keep you and Angel safe.”

Julia hugged herself and looked down at her lap. She nodded, but she looked as if she was deep in thought.

“I know this is scary,” he told her. He reached over with his good hand and ran the backs of his knuckles up and down her arm.

“That's the funny thing. It's not,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said. She kept looking down, like she didn't want to meet his eyes. “If it was just me out here. I mean, if I was running from the cops on my own, if it had been up to me to get Angel to safety, I think I'd be shitting myself.”

He laughed, and she smiled. But she still wasn't looking at him.

“But it's not me. This isn't me doing all this. Oh, I don't mean it like I've lost my mind and I'm disassociating or anything. It's more like there are two of me. There's Julia Taggart, DVM, who comes home from work every night and eats fat-­free frozen pasta and maybe stays awake long enough to watch some reality show about fashion designers. That woman could never do these things. But then there's also a Julia who comes out only when she's with you. When ­people are chasing us and I'm always worried one of us is going to get shot and everything is so much more intense. You'd think I would hate being that Julia. You'd think after the first time I would never want to be her again.”

“But . . . what? You like the adrenaline rush?”

“No. That doesn't last,” she said. “What happens is—­different. I change, somehow. I know you're relying on me to be strong. To handle this. And so I do. I step up and I get a lot tougher all of a sudden. For a ­couple of days, I get to be a badass.”

He smiled. “That was what made me fall in love with you,” he said. “You were stronger than anybody I knew. I needed you to be that badass and you were.” Here it was. The little thought he'd been thinking ever since she kissed him back in her apartment. The secret, tiny hope he'd kept burning just in case.

The idea that maybe things weren't over between them.

“This Julia, the badass Julia, is going to get herself killed someday,” she said. “She's going to think she's better at this stuff than she really is. And it'll mean her death.”

“No,” he said, his heart sagging in his chest. “No, that won't happen. I'd die before I let anyone hurt you.”

“That's a promise you can't make. Badass Julia wants to believe you. Julia Taggart, DVM, knows better. She wants to be at home where it's safe and she has her own bed to sleep in, and she keeps reminding me—­this isn't going to last. Even if things do work out, even if we clear Angel's name and somehow it's safe to go back to Brooklyn . . . then it'll just be over. I have to be careful making decisions right now.”

“Sure,” Chapel said.

“For instance, Badass Julia wants to just attack you right now. Pretend like we never broke up and make out with you right here in this stolen car. Because that's the kind of thing Badass Julia would do. But of course, that's a terrible idea. Just because something is exciting and reckless and—­”

She turned her face to look at him and didn't get to finish her thought.

The look in her eyes was one he remembered all too well. He hadn't seen it in a long time. He leaned across the seat and she leaned into him and their lips met, hard enough that their teeth clicked together. That made them both laugh, but it didn't make them stop kissing. He reached around behind her and pulled her close and she put her hands on his chest and his fingers sank into her hair and the smell of her, that incredible, intoxicating perfume filled his entire head. She broke away but just enough to kiss his jaw, his cheek, to bite his earlobe. God, he'd missed this. He leaned down to kiss her neck and he felt her tremble, felt her responding to his body, to his heat. He reached down with his good hand and cupped her breast through her thin shirt, felt the lacy outline of her bra and then her nipple, felt it harden under his thumb—­

And then cold air slapped him across the face as she pulled away, wrenching her door open and stumbling out onto the asphalt and broken concrete. As his senses reeled and he tried to figure out what had just happened, he felt the car rock slightly. She was leaning up against it, breathing hard. Maybe a foot and a half away from him. But the moment was over. She might as well be on the far side of the moon.

He took a second to let his pulse slow down. Then he climbed out of the car on the driver's side. “We need to get those license plates,” he said.

“Yeah. Definitely,” she said, and she rubbed at her mouth with the back of one hand. “I'll take the back. You take the front.”

“Deal.”

OVER NORTHERN CALIFORNIA: MARCH 22, 05:33 (PDT)

The CQ-­10 Snowgoose didn't look like anybody's idea of a drone. It had a stubby little body only nine feet long, ending in a single propeller, and no wings. It kept aloft by dangling from a broad white parachute that glittered in the moonlight. It didn't move very quickly and it didn't look like it carried any weapons that might hurt anybody. In fact, it wasn't designed to be a weapons system at all. It had three square bays built into its side that could pop open and drop supplies—­food, survival gear, blankets—­to ­people who were, say, stuck in an avalanche or in the middle of a forest fire.

Due to an extremely unlikely error in its logistics chain, this one had been loaded with a different sort of cargo.

It passed over a power plant just outside of Oakland first, a busy gas-­burning plant that provided San Francisco with much of its power. The Snowgoose bumbled along in the sky like a giant white bee, high up enough that no one could have seen it from the ground. One of its cargo boxes popped open and an object the size and shape of a hockey puck tumbled out, a hockey puck with its own tiny parachute. The Snowgoose didn't even slow down—­it had other places to be.

The hockey puck it had left behind drifted slowly down toward the power plant, bobbing this way or that on little gusts of wind. Just as it reached the height of the plant's tallest smokestacks, the hockey puck exploded into millions and millions of pieces, just as it had been designed to do.

It was known technically as a BLU-­114/B submunition, and it was designed for an extremely specific mission. Devices like it had been used over Serbia and Iraq, and they were sometimes called “soft bombs” because they were designed not to hurt human beings but only to cause damage to infrastructure. When it exploded, it sent all those tiny pieces of itself raining down across the power plant in a dense cloud that was sucked into the plant's air intakes and ventilation systems. The pieces were each only a fraction of an inch thick, and they were quite harmless on their own—­just strands of carbon fiber that fluttered through the plant, landing wherever they fell. Some happened to land on transformers or turbines and other pieces of high-­voltage machinery. When they touched these machines, they glittered and sparked as they conducted electricity where it wasn't supposed to go. In the space of seconds, hundreds of short circuits arced across the power plant, liberating enormous amounts of energy. Some of the transformers caught on fire. Every one of them touched by carbon fiber failed in a dramatic way. Around the plant alarms sounded and fire suppression systems switched on, only to stop almost instantly as they too were shorted out.