The Cyclops Initiative (23 page)

“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.”

SOUTH HILLS, PA: MARCH 23, 19:43

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.

SOUTH HILLS, PA: MARCH 23, 20:16

“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—­”