The Cyclops Initiative (37 page)

“This is—­this is going—­” she gasped as she slid lower, even deeper, “going to make me come. I'm going to . . . I'm going to . . .”

And then she sank all the way down on him, collided with him, and he could feel how much he was filling her up, filling all of her, and she cried out, literally screamed as her whole body vibrated on top of him. He reached up then and grabbed her to support her, then to bring her down closer until she was lying on top of him, her head buried in the crook of his neck as her hips started to move, really move now. And he knew it wouldn't be long before he joined her, before he came too. She groaned a little every time she slammed her hips against him, held her breath as she slid back and he could tell she was lost inside that rhythm, that even if he called her name she wouldn't hear him, couldn't hear, and he was so close, and—­

The door of the room banged open and Angel stuck her head inside, her face wide open in fear. “I heard a noise,” she said before she'd even registered what was going on.

On top of him, Julia froze in place. “Shit,” she breathed against his neck.

Angel's mouth closed with an audible click as her teeth came together. Without a word she turned around and headed out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her.

“Damn,” Chapel said. He started to wriggle his way out from under Julia, trying to remember where his pants were.

“We could just finish,” Julia said.

But the moment was lost, and she must have known it. With a sigh she rolled off him, and together they hunted the floor for his underwear.

TOWSON, MD: MARCH 25, 17:32

Barefoot, and with one sleeve of his shirt flapping empty behind him, Chapel rushed around the motel looking for Angel. She wasn't in her room—­the door was hanging open and she didn't answer when he called inside, nor when he looked. He padded along the sidewalk toward the little coffee shop the motel used as a restaurant, but all he managed to achieve by peering through its windows was to freak out a waitress. He waved in apology and moved on.

Finally he found Angel at the back of the motel, on a little patch of concrete bordered by gray and dusty weeds. She was standing by a vending machine, trying to force a taped-­together dollar through the bill acceptor slot. It kept spitting the bill back at her.

“Angel,” he said, quietly. Not getting too close. He could hear Julia coming up behind him, but he waved his hand at her to tell her to slow down, to keep her distance.

He could tell that Angel was upset. Her shoulders were shaking, and when she turned to look at him, a tear fell out of her right eye.

“Angel, listen. It's not what it looks like—­”

Confusion and anger wrestled across her features. “What?”

Chapel cursed inwardly. “I mean. Okay, yes, you saw what you saw. But I don't want you to think—­I mean, I hope you don't think that—­”

“I did see what I saw. I can't unsee it now,” Angel told him.

Chapel bit his lip. The absolute worst thing that could happen now was for him to get in a big fight with Angel. For one thing, somebody might see them—­even worse, someone might think this was a domestic dispute and call the police. If they were caught now, Hollingshead didn't stand a chance.

Even if nobody saw them, he needed Angel for his plan. If she decided she hated him and wanted nothing to do with him—­

“I can see you're upset,” he said.

“You're damned right I'm upset,” Angel told her. “The director is about to be assassinated and you two don't seem to care, you're too busy fuh . . . too busy fu-­f-­f-­f—­”

“Fucking,” he said. No point evading it now

Angel nodded and looked away. Her cheeks were bright red.

This was what Julia had warned him about. Angel had a crush on him, and seeing him with another woman had destroyed her. “I am so sorry, Angel. But I want you to know why.”

“Why you're fuh—­why you're with her?” Angel asked, shaking her head. “That, at least, I get. She's beautiful and and curvy in the right places, and you have history, and—­”

“You're beautiful, too,” Chapel told her. “You're sexy, too.”

Angel made a sound like she was about to start retching right there in the parking lot. “Oh my God,” she said.

“Angel, it's okay,” he said, stepping closer to her, holding out his hand. She winced away from his touch.

“Oh my God.” Angel made the retching noise again. It was an awful hitching sound in the back of her throat that changed over time, becoming softer, becoming . . .

Laughter.

She leaned over, putting her hands on her knees. She couldn't stand up from laughing so hard. Chapel had no idea what was going on.

“Oh my,” Angel said, but she couldn't finish the exclamation because a new paroxysm of laughter seized her like a fit. “Oh my God. You thought—­oh my—­”

Chapel had no idea what to do except wait it out.

Eventually she managed to speak an entire sentence. “You thought I was jealous of you two.”

“Yes,” Chapel admitted.

“You thought—­what? That I wanted to be with you? Like . . . like that?” She shook her head in disbelief. “Listen, Chapel. I know we flirt. Over the phone.”

“Yes,” Chapel said again. “We do.”

Angel fought to control herself. “There's something you need to know. I flirt with you like that because it's safe. Because I thought we were never actually going to meet in person, and anyway I knew you would never, you know, try anything. The truth of the matter is, Chapel, I really, really do not now nor have I ever wanted to have se—­s-­s-­s-­s—­”

“Sex,” he supplied.

Angel nodded in gratitude. “Relations with you. I'm sorry. It's not personal. But I have zero interest in, you know. Touching your special places. Or anything like that.”

Chapel considered what she'd said earlier. About Julia's curves. “So you're—­that is . . . are you jealous of . . . Julia?”

“You mean, do I want to do that with girls? No, definitely not.”

“I don't understand,” Chapel said.

Behind him, Julia made an exasperated noise. Clearly she wasn't going to stay out of this any longer. She came up beside Chapel and took his arm. “She doesn't want to have sex with anyone,” Julia told him.

“Not, you know. Typically,” Angel said.

Julia turned to Chapel. “Don't you see? She was still in puberty when they started locking her up in those trailers. She never had a chance to figure things out.”

“You mean,” he said, looking back at Angel, “you've never—­”

“Please don't finish that sentence,” Angel asked him. “My stomach is feeling weird enough already.”

He nodded and shut his mouth. He was having a hard time believing all this, though. Angel had the sexiest voice he'd ever heard in his life. He'd gotten through a lot of dark times listening to her purr in his ear. And some of the things she'd suggested over a telephone line had been—­well, now that he thought about it, he supposed she'd never said anything truly dirty. She'd never been graphic or detailed in her flirting. She had just said things that might be . . . suggestive, if you were in the right frame of mind to hear them that way. If you
wanted
to hear them that way.

“I flirt,” Angel explained to him, “but it's kind of just . . . I don't know. Experimental. I liked hearing how you reacted to it.”

“Even though you couldn't understand why you liked that,” Julia prompted.

Angel's mouth pursed in anger. “There's nothing wrong with me,” she said.

“No, of course not,” Julia assured her.

“I'm fine,” Angel insisted. “I am absolutely fine.”

“Of course you are,” Julia said.

Chapel scratched at his head. “So when you walked in on us, you ran away—­”

“Because I was grossed out,” Angel said. “Look, I enjoy the occasional hug or whatever. But when things get—­you know. Sticky.” A wave of revulsion made her shiver. “I can't handle it.”

“Okay,” Chapel said. “Look, enough said, all right?” He looked back at Julia. “Let's all just pretend this never happened.”

Angel nodded agreeably.

Chapel moved closer to her and lifted his arm, thinking he would give her a quick hug to end things. But she shied away, putting her hands up to ward him off.

“No offense,” she said, “but right now, you kind of stink of it.”

He backed off.

Without saying anything more, Julia produced a ­couple of nearly fresh dollar bills from her pocket. Angel got the soda she wanted—­something sweet with lots of caffeine, her favorite—­and left without saying another word. When she was gone, Chapel leaned up against the vending machine and tried not to let his confusion completely overcome him.

Julia put a hand over her mouth and shook her head back and forth. “Jim, I'm so sorry—­”

“Looks like you misread some signals, there,” he told her.

She looked toward Angel's room, as if there would be some sign there to help her understand what they'd just heard. “Whoever did this to her . . .” she said.

“What, you mean hiding her away in trailers her whole life? It was that or send her to prison,” he said. “Anyway, she's agoraphobic. She wants to live like that.”

Julia shook her head. “Sure. It makes her feel safe to be inside, away from ­people. But you don't treat an alcoholic by locking them inside a bar.”

He had to admit she had a point.

“She's missed out on so much,” Julia said. “If I ever find out who did this to her, who made her what she is—­I'm going to tear their balls off.”

IN TRANSIT: MARCH 25, 21:44

Teaming up with Wilkes had one major advantage: he had a credit card.

In fact, he had an unlimited corporate card from the NSA. The card was issued to a company called “Interstate Holdings,” but it drew on the endless coffers of one of the biggest black budgets in the country. It had been given to Wilkes when he was sent out to hunt for Chapel and Angel, and nobody had cut it off yet.

As a result, when Chapel headed out of the motel and south on the highway toward Washington, he was driving a slightly better car than he'd had before. Julia had the old beater that Ralph had bought for them, since she had her own destination to get to.

If they were going to save Hollingshead, they needed to approach the problem from several different angles. They had to split up.

The biggest issue they faced was that they didn't know how it was going to be done. Originally Holman had wanted Wilkes to kill the director—­she'd told him as much, maybe as a test to see what he was willing to do for her. But after Wilkes failed to kill Chapel in Pittsburgh, she had lost some of her faith in the marine. She'd told him she had a contingency plan in place and that he shouldn't worry about it.

Which could mean just about anything. One of the MPs guarding Hollingshead might be a plant. Or they could have a sniper ready to shoot the director from half a mile away. The only real piece of data they had was that it was supposed to happen at midnight.

The plan they'd eventually come up with had been to get Chapel close enough to Hollingshead to protect him—­and then to put pressure on Holman to call off the assassination. If half of the plan failed, the other half might still work.

It was a gamble, but Chapel had taken worse bets.

Chapel skirted Baltimore—­he could not afford to get stuck in traffic—­then rejoined 95 just before the Beltway. Working his way down past the airport and into Alexandria took some doing, but he knew these roads like the back of his hand and he was able to stash the car not too far from the marina where Hollingshead lived.

The marina sat at the north end of what was technically an island, though it came so close to touching the banks of the Potomac that it was hard to tell. The island had managed to avoid every wave of development in the twentieth century and was almost unused except as parkland. Chapel supposed that the ­people wealthy enough to keep their boats at the marina liked it that way. The northern half of the island was basically a giant parking lot for boats, a haul-­out facility filled with small pleasure craft up on trailers. South of there were the actual slips where the bigger vessels, the ones that couldn't be brought on land for the winter, still bobbed in the river. Hollingshead's yacht was about as far as you could get from the road, of course—­that was how these things always worked. Chapel had considered going in by water, shimmying up a dripping line with a knife between his teeth like a pirate, maybe. But he couldn't get his artificial arm wet and he wasn't willing to part with it, so he had to approach by land.

The problem with that, of course, was that Charlotte Holman had posted armed guards all over the marina, to stop Hollingshead from meeting with anyone.

Good thing Chapel had been trained for this kind of job.

DAINGERFIELD ISLAND, VA: MARCH 25, 22:49

Another thing they'd bought with Wilkes's magic credit card was a hands-­free unit and a burner phone. As Chapel slipped between two parked boat trailers at the edge of the marina grounds, he put in the earpiece and slipped the phone into his pocket.

“Angel,” he said. “You there?”

“You know it, baby,” she replied.

He tried very hard not to let the sound of her voice send shivers down his spine. He failed. It was just how they worked together.

And it was magnificent.

“It's so good to have you back where you belong,” he told her. “Perched on my shoulder, working as my guardian angel.”

“Tell me about it. I've been so useless up to now. It's good to be back on a mission with you, even if I have to do it from this Internet café. There's three other ­people here. So I may have to watch what I say.”

“Do they look like hired killers or NSA spies?”