The Cyclops Initiative (33 page)

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Authors: David Wellington

BOOK: The Cyclops Initiative
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“Hollingshead figured that if he was spying on the conspiracy, it would spy on him, too. That whoever ran the thing would jump at the chance to turn one of his own ­people against him. Turned out he was right.

“It wasn't anybody at the NSA who contacted me originally. It was my CIA buddy who worked as my handler. Not that he was ever real clear on what our roles were. He said if I wanted to get back at Hollingshead, he had a way. One that he swore up and down wouldn't hurt national security, but actually make it stronger. He even suggested that Hollingshead was a problem, that maybe he needed to be taken out.

“It was all done with such a soft touch, I barely knew I'd been recruited. We were just two guys shooting the shit. It was months and months and months before he said he wanted to introduce me to his secret boss. I was going to meet a woman named Charlotte Holman. I was supposed to do whatever she said.

“For a long time, that just meant spying on Hollingshead. Feeding her data about his movements, about what he had you and Angel doing. In exchange, she said, she would see about getting me transferred. Get me a job somewhere I would be appreciated.

“Hollingshead made sure the info I gave her was real. That meant making himself vulnerable to her. But it also meant she started trusting me. She started talking to me about what she called the Cyclops Initiative. A plan, a big plan, that was going to make America safe for a very long time. I wasn't allowed to know many of the details, but she said it was going to look very bad but it would be a good thing in the end.

“She said I was going to be a big part of that. A hero.

“It wasn't until about a week before the attack on New Orleans that she told me she was going to need proof that she could trust me. She said things were getting critical, that she wanted to know if I was willing to take a more active role. I asked what that meant. She asked me if I was willing to help her take down Hollingshead's directorate, bust it open at the seams. I said sure—­I mean, I was supposed to hate the guy, right? Then she asked me if I was willing to kill some ­people. I didn't need to ask for names, I knew who she meant. Hollingshead, Chapel, Angel.

“I said, no problem. That was what I was trained for, after all.

“I could see in her eyes she believed me. I'd come so far, implicated myself enough by spying on Hollingshead for her, that there was no going back. When I said I was willing to kill you, that was what it took for her to let me in. To really trust me.

“To start telling me what was going on.”

NORTHWEST OF MOREHEAD, KY: MARCH 25, 03:58

Julia got up and moved over to Chapel's side. “This is how the intelligence community works? This is what you deal with all the time?”

“No,” Chapel told her. “Most of the time it's just guys in offices, shoving paper around. Writing up security estimates and analyzing photographs. Every once in a while, though . . .” He shook his head. “When national security is at stake, ­people get a little nuts. You're talking about the last bunch of ­people in America who still believe in the government. In its necessity, anyway. Threats to that government make the knives come out.”

Wilkes shook his head. “This isn't just some internal beef, though. It wasn't just you three I was supposed to be willing to kill. She told me a lot of stuff at that meeting. Suggested a bunch of things that might happen. She had to know, see. She had to know how I would react.

“She asked me, if her group organized an attack on civilian targets inside the borders of the United States, what would I do? I said I would assume she had a good reason. She seemed to like that.

“She laid it out for me. The whole thing with the cargo container full of radiological waste and the kamikaze drone. She watched me pretty close while she talked about it. I got the idea that if I winced or looked upset, then somebody would come bursting in and cap me right then and there.

“So I made a point of not wincing or looking upset.

“Once things were in motion, I had no contact with Hollingshead. I had to play this thing out. My orders were to get on Holman's good side and stay there as long as I could. Dig into her organization as deep as I could go. I did manage to swing things a little for you guys. I told her that Angel really was an AI. Obviously Moulton didn't buy it, but I think Holman was convinced. That meant I just had to destroy that hard drive, not actually kill Angel.”

“And me?” Chapel asked. “You shot me. Were you willing to kill me just to make things look good for your new boss?”

“Jimmy, please,” Wilkes said, looking pained. “You know my MOS. I shot you. I didn't kill you. If I planned on actually killing you, you would be dead right now. No, I just needed your blood all over that place. I thought maybe Holman would be satisfied with that, given how many other things she had on her plate. But she got obsessed with it. With the idea you were still out there, still alive.”

“Which raises another question,” Chapel said. “Why us? Did we do something to her in a past life that meant we needed to be killed? Was it just because Hollingshead didn't want to go on a second date?”

“What?” Julia asked, looking very confused.

“I'll explain later,” Chapel told her.

Wilkes laughed. “That's the funny part. When you talk to her, to Holman, or some of the ­people she introduced me to—­all they want to talk about is Hollingshead's DX department. He's a goddamned legend out there. Maybe because of how he took down Tom Banks a ­couple of years ago. Maybe because of some of the missions he's sent you on, Jimmy, the ones that actually worked. But they talk about him like he's some kind of superhero, and they know that when there's a superhero in town, the villains always lose. They decided to make the DX—­specifically Hollings­head, Angel, and you—­their scapegoats for one simple reason.

“They figured you were the only ones who could stop them.”

Chapel didn't bother feeling flattered. He understood the real message there. “So they honestly think they're going to get away with . . . what? Protecting the country? With selective drone strikes on domestic targets? How is that supposed to work?”

“Nobody bothered giving me the big picture. Just the operational parameters,” Wilkes pointed out.

Chapel looked away. “You say there were other ­people. It wasn't just Holman and Moulton working against us. You said there was a whole conspiracy, a secret network inside the intelligence community. How big do you think this is? How far up does it go?”

Wilkes lifted his shoulders dramatically. Let them fall again. “I don't really know. I know Holman gets orders from somebody else. She's a subdirector at the NSA. That suggests to me there are ­people at the director level. Maybe higher. As for how many of them there are, Hollingshead estimated that it included ­people in every agency. That's one thing we've got to remember here. It's not like every one of the ninety thousand employees of the NSA are in on this plot. It's just small workgroups here and there.”

Chapel frowned. “Cells. Like a terrorist organization uses.”

“The comparison is pretty fucking apt,” Wilkes told him. “Considering what they're doing.”

“Okay. But one thing I want to know—­why break your cover now? Why come out of the cold right in the middle of things?”

Wilkes laughed. “Maybe because maintaining my cover would have meant killing you and the ladies here while Moulton watched? I let you guys get away from me once and Holman nearly ripped my head off. Maybe I could have come up with some way of keeping you alive here tonight, but she never would have trusted me again.”

“So instead you killed Moulton,” Chapel pointed out.

“It's what I do.”

“It was stupid,” Chapel said. “We could have interrogated him. We could have learned so much from him.”

“Sure, during which time he could have found some way to contact Holman and tell her what happened.” Wilkes shook his head. “You have your way of operating, I've got mine.”

Chapel slammed his fist against a steel server rack, making it ring. The noise made Angel jump, but he was frustrated enough not to apologize. “Right now we've got no way of operating at all! We've got scraps of information that don't add up. We have no idea which direction to jump, no idea how to hit these ­people where they'll feel it.”

“I know one thing,” Wilkes pointed out.

“Oh? And what's that?”

“What their next move is,” the marine said. “I know their next target.”

Chapel nodded slowly. “Yeah?” he said. “What are they going to do? Crash the stock market? Disrupt the Border Patrol? Close a major airport?”

“Nope,” Wilkes said. “They're gonna assassinate Hollingshead.”

THE WHITE HOUSE, MARCH 25, 07:57

A carved wooden clock on an end table ticked away the seconds as the first rays of dawn came in through tall French windows. At one point a member of the custodial staff came into the room and stared at a painting on the wall for nearly a minute. Finally he reached up and tilted it a few degrees to one side, straightening it perfectly. Then he left.

Charlotte Holman and Patrick Norton sat through the whole thing, stiff-­backed, on a white damask pattern loveseat that had probably belonged to Dolley Madison.

They had taken her phone away from her when she went through the security station. She was going quietly crazy.

Norton checked his watch. Again. Then he looked up at an unassuming door in the far wall. He turned to catch Holman's eye. “Have you ever been this close, before?”

“To the Oval Office?” Holman asked. “No, no, I . . . I haven't.”

Norton smiled at her. “It's always the same. He always makes you wait. Actually, I've known three of them, and it was the same every time. They need to make sure you understand how things work. That you sit here at the pleasure of your commander in chief.”

Holman chuckled. “I wouldn't have thought that was a point that needed to be stressed,” she said.

“The bigger the chief, the taller the totem pole,” Norton replied.

Holman was a woman of a certain age; all the same, the remark struck her as something distinctly out-of-date. The kind of casual remark you might have heard in this room fifty years prior. She considered whether she should say something, if only in the interest of friendly advice.

She didn't get the chance. The door—­
the
door—­opened and they both had to jump to their feet. If the president walked into their room, it would never do for them to be seated.

But it wasn't the man himself. It was his chief of staff, Walter Minchell, a trim, intelligent-­looking man with a nearly invisible fringe of red beard. He raised one hand and gestured for Norton to come closer, even though there was no one else in the room. “He wanted me to convey his apologies,” Minchell said. “He's too busy to speak with you directly.”

“Too busy?” Norton asked. “The country is falling apart and—­”

“And that's what's keeping him,” Minchell insisted. “He's got so much on his plate that he can't do face time right now.”

“Young man,” Norton said, “you do understand that I am the secretary of defense? That he himself appointed me to handle the security of the country?”

“I understand,” Minchell said, “what he told me, and what he said I could tell you if you tried to bully your way in. He says he put you in charge of stopping this thing. But since then it's only gotten worse. Hundreds of thousands of ­people in California with no power, no water—­ships lined up outside of New Orleans crammed full of rotting food while grocery stores in the Midwest can't stock their shelves. Half the Northeast locked down with a manhunt that has yet to produce a single captive.”

He glanced at Holman as he related this final fact. She made a point of not flinching.

“If,” Norton said, “the president has lost confidence in my abilities—­”

“No,” Minchell said. “That's not the takeaway here.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Norton replied.

The chief of staff scratched at his chin. “We need results, Mr. Secretary. We need them soon. You have got to start producing bodies. But in the meantime, the president is going to address the nation tomorrow night. Come clean with the fact that these are terrorist attacks and talk about what we're doing to find the culprits.”

“That's not the wise move right now,” Norton insisted. “If he would just meet with me so we could discuss this—­”

“That's exactly why you're not meeting,” Minchell told him. “There's nothing to discuss. You need to give him data. Anything you've got so it can go into the speech. Oh—­and there's one more thing. You'll be the designated survivor on this one.”

Norton inhaled very slowly.

Whenever the president gave a major speech, one where the vice president was also present, he always appointed a designated survivor. A member of the cabinet who would not be allowed anywhere near the location of the speech so that if something terrible happened like, say, a terrorist attack, at least one top-­ranking member of the executive branch would still be around to maintain control.

Being chosen as the survivor could mean one of two things. It could mean the president had faith in your ability to lead the country in case of his demise. Or it could mean he disliked you so much he didn't want to see you, even accidentally, at a crucial time.

“I understand,” Norton said.

“Good,” Minchell told him. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to work.”

Without even glancing at Holman, he disappeared back through
the
door.

“I'll get you that data,” she told the SecDef.

Norton just turned on his heel and started walking away.

IN TRANSIT: MARCH 25, 08:14

In the backseat, Angel held herself perfectly still. Her small body was crammed into the car door, and one of her slender shoulders propped up the majority of Wilkes's considerable weight. He had fallen asleep back there, more or less on top of her. They'd been driving for hours like that.

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