The Cyclops Initiative (2 page)

Wilkes finally did get his attention by grabbing Chapel's phone out of his hand.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” Chapel demanded.

Wilkes didn't reply. He just tapped Chapel's phone screen a ­couple of times with one finger while unscrewing the top of his soda bottle with his other hand. Then he handed the phone back and took a long slug of cola.

Chapel looked down at his phone. Wilkes had opened an app that decrypted incoming messages from the Pentagon. What he read there made him swear under his breath.

ABORT CURRENT MISSION.

W AND C TO REPORT NGA HQ

FOR BRIEFING 0900.

AUTHORIZED POSEIDON.

“Poseidon” was Director Hollingshead's code name for the month, which meant he'd sent for the two of them personally. The headquarters of the National Geospatial-­Intelligence Agency were in Fort Belvoir in Virginia, less than an hour away. The two of them just had time to clean up and get their uniforms on before they had to leave.

All of which was fine—­but the first line of the message was what made Chapel's eyes go wide. They were being told to abandon their stakeout, just for a briefing? Something truly serious must have happened.

“When did this come in?” Chapel asked.

“Five minutes ago. Looks like you were too busy to notice,” Wilkes told him. He took another long pull on his soda, then capped the bottle and threw it on the bed. “What were you up to?”

Chapel tried to decide how much he trusted Wilkes. “Something's going on with Angel,” he said finally. “Her signal cut out and I can't get her back on the line.”

“Maybe it's something to do with this briefing.”

Chapel shook his head. No way to know. “You take the first shower. I'm going to keep trying to reach her.”

FORT BELVOIR, VA: MARCH 21, 08:51

Chapel had an office at Fort Belvoir—­as did half the intelligence staffers in America. It was an enormous, sprawling facility packed with the headquarters of dozens of agencies and offices and directorates large and small. He'd worked there for ten years, back before his reactivation as a field agent, but that had been in the southern area. The NGA headquarters was in the northern area, a region of the fort he'd rarely visited. He'd never even seen the NGA building before.

He had no idea why he was being summoned there. Normally he would have called Angel to ask her—­to get some idea of what he was walking into before the briefing began. But she still wasn't answering her phone.

Wilkes played with the radio the whole way there, trying to find some news broadcast that might give them an idea of what had happened. There was nothing. Some freak wildfires in Colorado caused by a massive lightning strike. The governor of New Jersey was in trouble again for reasons so boring Chapel just tuned them out. There was nothing to explain why Hollingshead had canceled a six-­month investigation just so two operatives could attend a briefing.

When they arrived at their destination, Chapel just took a second to look at the place. What he knew about the NGA was limited. The National Geospatial-­Intelligence Agency was responsible for SIGINT and imaging, he knew that much—­it was a clearinghouse for all kinds of intelligence ranging from satellite data to radio broadcast intercepts to paper maps of sensitive areas. Its mission was just to collect information that might be useful to other agencies, and as far as he knew it didn't carry out operations on its own; it just provided support. He knew that it was supposed to have been vital in locating Bin Laden in Abbottabad.

Apparently the kind of support that paid off.

The NGA building was the third-­largest federal building in the D.C. area. Only the Pentagon and the Ronald Reagan Building were bigger. Much of its size came from its unusual shape. From above—­say, from a satellite view—­the structure looked like two enormous concrete parentheses framing a central atrium like the world's biggest greenhouse. The atrium was five hundred feet long and more than a hundred feet wide. It was big enough to have its own weather system. As the two of them headed inside, Chapel couldn't help but look up at the massive span of arching trusses overhead that screened the sky.

The atrium was full of ­people headed from one side of the headquarters to the other, some in military uniforms, some in civilian clothes. None of them looked particularly scared or tense, but maybe they didn't know what was going on either.

Wilkes was already moving ahead toward a security station that blocked the main entrance to the complex. Chapel rushed to catch up—­then slowed down when he saw there was a metal detector station. Of course there was. If he hadn't been in such a rush, he would have thought about that in advance.

“Just step through, sir,” the attendant said. She was a middle-­aged woman with that look security professionals get, like they've seen literally everything and none of it was particularly interesting. “There's a line behind you.”

He gave the woman a smile. This was always tricky. “I'm afraid I'm about to make your day more complicated,” he told her. “I—­”

“No firearms are allowed inside,” she told him, running a practiced eye up and down his uniform. “No weapons of any kind. If you're worried about your belt buckle, you can take your belt off.”

“It's not that,” Chapel said. “I have a prosthesis.”

Her world-­weary stare didn't change. “You'll have to remove it.”

He considered arguing but knew there was no point. So while everyone in the NGA stared he unbuttoned his uniform tunic and then stripped out of his shirt until he was naked from the waist up. In a government office building.

Anyone seeing Chapel like that would take a second to realize what was different about him. His left arm, after all, looked exactly like his right one. It was the same skin tone and there was the same amount of hair on the knuckles and the forearm.

That appearance ended at his shoulder. There his arm flared out in a pair of clamps that held snug against his chest and back. He reached over with his right hand and released the catches that held the arm in place, then pulled the whole thing off and put it in a plastic bin so it could be scanned.

As it ran through the machine, the attendant didn't even look at him. She studied her screen making sure there were no bombs or weapons hidden inside the prosthetic. The fingers of the artificial hand ducked in and out of her x-­ray scanner, as if reaching out of the guts of the machine for help.

At least a hundred ­people, most of them in civvies, had stopped to watch. Some of them pointed at him while others whispered to each other with shocked expressions on their faces.

Chapel had been through this before. He tried not to let it bother him. On the other side of the security barrier, Wilkes watched with a sly smile. He knew about the arm, of course—­they'd been living together for months now. Most likely he just wanted to watch Chapel squirm. Well, Chapel did his best not to show his embarrassment.

When the scan was done and Chapel, sans arm, had passed through the metal detector, the attendant picked up the prosthetic and handed it back to Chapel. He started to take it from her, but she held on a second longer.

“Sir,” she asked. She looked like she was having trouble finding the right words. Finally she just said, “Iraq?”

“Afghanistan,” he told her.

She nodded. “I have a cousin. Had . . . had a cousin. He died in Iraq. Sir—­do you think it was worth it?”

Chapel wanted to sigh. He wished he knew the answer to that one himself sometimes. It wasn't the first time anyone had asked him the question, though, and he knew what to say. “I'm sure he thought it was. I'm sure he went over there to serve his country, even knowing what that could mean.”

The woman didn't look at him. She just nodded and gave him his arm back.

By the time he put the arm and his uniform back on, Wilkes was nearly jumping up and down in impatience. “Come on,” he said. “We're going to be late.”

FORT BELVOIR, VA: MARCH 21, 09:03

They were given guest badges and instructions on how to find the briefing room. It was a little strange they were allowed to proceed without an escort, but Chapel supposed their security clearance spoke for itself. The two of them hurried through a series of windowless hallways and down several flights of stairs because they had no time to wait for an elevator. When they arrived at their destination, Chapel estimated they were at least one floor underground. He knew what that meant—­he'd been in enough secure facilities in his time to know you put the really important rooms in the basement, where anyone inside would be safe from an attack on the surface.

Chapel pushed open the door and found himself in the largest, most high-­tech briefing room he'd ever seen. Every wall was lined with giant LCD screens, some ten feet across, some the size of computer monitors. Currently they were all showing the same thing: a murky picture of a stack of shipping containers, with a deep fog or maybe a cloud of dust swirling between them. The view didn't give him any useful information, so instead he looked at the ­people gathered in the room.

There were a lot of them. Maybe fifty. Half were dressed in military uniforms from every branch of ser­vice—­even the Coast Guard and the National Guard were represented. Judging by the insignia they wore, Chapel, a captain in the U.S. Army, was the lowest-­ranking man in the place except for Wilkes, who was a first lieutenant. He recognized some of the faces because they belonged to generals and admirals.

The other half of the crowd wore civilian clothes—­conservative suits and flag pins. He recognized far fewer of them because he rarely dealt with civilian agencies, but he could tell right away they were all intelligence ­people by the way they kept glancing at one another as if they expected to be stabbed in the back at any minute.

Chapel definitely recognized one man in the room, a man in an immaculate navy blue suit with perfect white hair and deep blue eyes that could have drilled holes in armor plate. That was Patrick Norton, the secretary of defense. The boss of Chapel's boss, and the leader of the entire military intelligence community of the United States.

“Shit just got real,” Wilkes muttered.

The two of them moved to the back wall of the room and stood at attention, waiting to be put at their ease.

It didn't take long. Rupert Hollingshead came out of the crowd and shook both their hands.

The director didn't dress like anyone else there. He wore a tweed suit with a vest and a pocket watch, and unlike everybody else he had facial hair—­a pair of muttonchop sideburns that stuck out from either side of his wide face. He didn't look like an intelligence professional at all. More like a genial old professor from an Ivy League university. He even had the mannerisms—­the absent-minded attitude of a man lost in lofty thought. It was rare when Chapel didn't see him smiling and nodding quietly to himself as if he were puzzling through an abstruse math problem.

Today, though, was one of those rare days. He'd never seen the director look so serious. The tweed, the smiles, even the pocket watch—­those were all part of a costume, very carefully designed to put ­people at their ease and make them think he was no kind of threat. Today, though, his eyes gave him away. They had the laser focus of the man only his personal staff knew—­the spymaster, the head of a secret Defense Intelligence Agency directorate. A man who was capable of sending field agents to their deaths, a man who could handle even the most grim situation report.

“Stand down, boys,” he said, in a voice that was not quite a whisper but was unlikely to carry across the room. “I'm sure you're wondering why you're here.”

“Yes, sir,” Chapel said. Wilkes just watched the director's face.

“You two are here because I might need to send you on a new mission right away. Stay back here and keep quiet, all right? We'll talk when this is done.”

Chapel very much wanted to tell the director about Angel's dropped call and the fact that she'd been incommunicado for hours now. But this was neither the time nor the place. Even as Hollingshead stepped away from them, back into the muttering crowd, the briefing began.

FORT BELVOIR, VA: MARCH 21, 09:13

A woman wearing a pantsuit—­a civilian—­stepped up to a podium on the far side of the room and asked everyone to take their seats.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I'm Melinda Foster, and I work for the NGA. We brought you all here to our offices as a kind of neutral territory. The NGA provides imaging product for both civilian and Department of Defense organizations, and the current situation is going to involve both sides of the intelligence community. My job isn't to make policy decisions, though. I'm just here to give you the facts as we know them. Then we'll open the floor to discussion.”

She picked up a remote control and clicked a few buttons. Behind her, on one of the big screens, a map of Louisiana appeared with a red star superimposed on the Mississippi delta. “This morning, just before six o'clock, the United States suffered a radiological attack.”

This wasn't the kind of crowd that would easily erupt into chaos. Nobody jumped to their feet or shouted for more information. But Chapel could feel all the oxygen draining from the room as the crowd drew a deep and collective breath.

On the screen, a map of the Port of New Orleans appeared. “The night before, a cargo container came into this, our busiest port. It came with counterfeit paperwork. We've established it was full of low-­level radioactive waste. I need to stress that does not mean weapons-­grade radiologicals. Instead, we're talking about the junk that gets discarded all the time by workers in nuclear power plants. Everything from scrapped computer components to contaminated safety equipment down to the gloves and protective clothing the workers used. All that stuff is considered as hazardous material and is normally processed along with spent nuclear fuel.”