The Cyclops Initiative (38 page)

She laughed. “No. They look like sleepy grad students from the university, trying to get their papers written before class tomorrow. But you can't be too careful.”

“Fair enough,” he replied.

“Give me some time here to work up the imaging,” she told him.

Chapel took a second to breathe. He looked out at the lights of Washington across the river, watched them dance as they were reflected in the water. In the distance he could hear lines jingling as they slapped against bollards, hear the repetitive dull thudding of the boats bobbing in their slips. The night air was crisp on his exposed face and he felt himself centering. Feeling good. It had been way too long since he'd worked a mission like this, the way it was supposed to be done.

Of course, complacency could get you killed.

His back began to ache from crouching so low, so he straightened up a little to put his weight on different muscles. He closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath.

And that was when he was spotted.

“Hey!” someone called out. “Marina's closed!”

Chapel craned his head around to see a man in a gray shirt and dark pants—­a navy uniform. He was carrying an M4 rifle and he was maybe twenty yards away.

No chance of taking the guy down from that distance, not with Chapel's sidearm still tucked in its holster. No chance to run away, either.

“Come on out of there,” the MP told him. “Hands out.”

Chapel nodded and stepped out from between the boat trailers. It was dark enough that he didn't think the MP would be able to see his holster. If he played this calm, it might give him another few seconds before he was arrested. “Sorry, Officer, I was just—­”

“Don't call me ‘officer,' ” the MP said. “Reach into your pocket very slowly and take out your ID. You own one of these boats?”

“That's right,” Chapel said. Slowly he moved his good hand toward his back pocket. Where his wallet might be, if he was carrying one. “I have the registration card right here.” Did boats have registrations like cars? He had no idea. But it sounded good. Smiling, he walked straight toward the MP. “I left some important stuff in the boat last time I was down here, figured I would just duck in and get it, is that okay?”

“Not tonight it's not,” the MP said.

“Sorry, I had no idea,” Chapel told him. They were almost close enough to touch. “Here, my ID,” he said.

The MP lowered his rifle a little, reaching for what he thought Chapel was going to hand him.

Except instead of a driver's license it was a Glock 9 mm.

“Shit,” the MP said.

“Yeah,” Chapel told him. “Now, if you'll—­”

Maybe the MP thought Chapel was going to kill him then and there. He moved so fast he might have thought he was fighting for his life. His rifle came up, not to shoot Chapel, but to knock the pistol out of Chapel's hand.

The move surprised Chapel. He lost the gun, and his hand suddenly stung with pain.

Chapel knew what to do next. The only thing he could do if he didn't want to die or be arrested right here. Time seemed to slow down as he went through the movements he'd had drilled into him a thousand times.

Step in—­he moved his left foot in between the MP's feet, closing the distance between them, making it impossible for the MP to shoot Chapel or use his rifle as a club.

Unbalance your opponent—­Chapel brought his good arm up, bent at the elbow, and shoved it into the MP's neck, pushing the man to one side, off his center of balance. The MP had no choice but to change his footing or fall over. The MP did the obvious thing—­he tried to dance sideways, to get his balance back. Which set Chapel up perfectly for the third movement.

Trip and control—­Chapel's left foot twisted around the MP's calf and suddenly balance just wasn't possible. The MP went crashing to the ground, with Chapel's foot directing him until he was lying on his back, his arms splayed out to the sides to try to break the fall.

In a second Chapel had his spare pistol—­his P228—­out and in his hand. “Don't move,” he told the MP. “And don't make a sound.”

The man nodded in agreement.

That was when Angel's voice came back in his earpiece. “I've got that imaging now, sweetie,” she said. “We can get started.”

“Actually, there's been a change of plan,” Chapel said.

GEORGETOWN, D.C.: MARCH 25, 23:01

North across town, about a mile away from the White House, Wilkes sat in his car and waited for a signal. He had a bag of potato chips and a two-­liter bottle of soda and he would have been perfectly happy to sit there all night if the mission hadn't required exact timing. As it was, he was beginning to get concerned.

In sniper school they'd taught him that worry was pointless. If you wasted time on things you couldn't control, you harmed your readiness for the things you could. Far better to spend your time maintaining your equipment, or feeding yourself to keep up your energy, or doing anything more constructive than worrying about what might or might not be.

They'd taught him that lesson very well. Well enough that now he was only peripherally aware that there was less than an hour remaining before Hollingshead's scheduled execution. Even if things worked perfectly from here, he was going to have to make great time.

At least one thing worked out. Fifteen minutes late, maybe, but there was the signal. A newspaper tucked into the slats of a decorative bench across the street.

Wilkes flashed his headlights twice, very quickly. There weren't very many ­people out and about on the street to be annoyed. None of them seemed to notice.

Well, one person had. A dark shape stepped out of an alley and moved quickly to the passenger-­side door of Wilkes's car. He unlocked it, and the shape opened the door and ducked inside.

“It wasn't easy getting away,” Charlotte Holman told him. She was dressed in a black trench coat and had her hair wrapped in a kerchief. “The SecDef is keeping me at his side twenty-­four seven until after the president's speech tomorrow. Supposedly so I can give him constant updates. I think he's actually starting to get afraid of me.”

Wilkes favored her with a big friendly smile. He held out the bag of chips in case she wanted one. The way she turned up her lip told him she didn't.

“You've been out of contact for a while,” she told him. “I haven't heard anything from either of you in far too long. I think you're a bad influence on him.”

“Him?” Wilkes asked.

“Paul. Paul Moulton. Where is he? He should be here with you.”

“Funny thing about that,” Wilkes told her. “He's dead.”

Her eyes went very wide. “When?” she asked. “How?” She shook her head. “Never mind. It was Chapel, obviously. He's alive, isn't he? Goddamnit, I knew right from the start we should have followed him from NSA headquarters and killed him quietly before he could even get to New York. But Moulton thought we needed to establish a connection between him and the Angel system. Poor Paul!” She took a deep breath. “His sacrifice won't be in vain.”

“Maybe,” Wilkes said.

She stared at him. “Don't tell me there's more bad news.”

“Just one thing,” he said, slapping his hands together to get some of the grease and fragments of potato chip off his fingers. Then he grabbed the stun gun at his side and brought it around very fast, fast enough she probably didn't see it before its prongs touched her neck.

DAINGERFIELD ISLAND, VA: MARCH 25, 23:08

A nice thing about running an operation in a marina was that you could always find plenty of rope. Chapel had his captive MP trussed up and gagged and dumped in an old rowboat before anybody had time to call for help. There was a problem, though. The MP had a walkie-­talkie on his belt and any second now his superior was going to call him to ask for a report. Chapel had had the same problem back at the beginning of all this, outside of Angel's trailer. At the time, he had just had to accept his time was limited. That wasn't going to work here.

“I've got an idea,” Angel said. “Take out your phone and snap a picture of the radio for me.”

Chapel did as he was told. “What exactly will this achieve?” he asked.

“It tells me the make and model of the walkie-­talkie,” Angel replied. “Knowing that, I can look up the specifications for it on the Internet. Knowing the specifications . . . here. Turn it on and see what happens.”

Chapel adjusted a knob on the face of the radio. A squeal of white noise came from the speaker.

“Walkie-­talkies all work on different frequencies,” she explained. “This brand is a multichannel unit, but all those channels are in the same general part of the spectrum. I've tied into the local cell-­phone towers, and now I'm jamming all the possible frequencies this radio can pick up.”

“I had no idea you could do that.”

“Sugar,” Angel said, “we've been out of touch too long. You've forgotten the principle rule when dealing with me. I can do
anything,
as long as it's attached to a computer. In fact, I can do more than this. Give me a second.”

Chapel huddled over the radio, watching the marina in every direction. It didn't take long for Angel to come back.

“Once they realize they're being jammed, the MPs might get suspicious and start looking around for the source. So now I'm spoofing them as well.”

A deep, masculine voice swam up out of the static from the walkie-­talkie. Chapel couldn't understand much of what it was saying in the midst of all that white noise, but he definitely heard the voice say “all clear.”

“Who is that?” Chapel asked.

“That's me,” Angel said. She laughed. “I recorded my own voice, then slowed it down and changed the pitch a little. I have no idea if any of the MPs sound like that, but given the static it might be enough to fool them.”

Chapel couldn't help but smile in the dark. “You really are something.”

“Tell me that again the next time you see me. Right now, you've got a rendezvous to make.”

IN TRANSIT: MARCH 25, 23:12

Inside the flight electronics of the MQ-­9 Reaper, an electronic clock ticked over to a new second and sent a signal to the command module. A new program loaded into the machine's memory and began to run.

The screen of the Reaper's stick jockey, back at Creech Air Force Base, went black. The men in the room around the remote pilot lurched forward, hitting keys and asking questions, but there was nothing to be done. All telemetry was lost, all command channels shut down. The Reaper had gone rogue.

A second signal from the command module armed the single Hellfire missile that nestled against the Reaper's belly. It was ready to fire as soon as its target had been acquired.

A third signal went to the unmanned aircraft's rudder, turning it from its previous course. It banked to the left, over the streets of Washington, its single camera eye tracking the lights below.

DAINGERFIELD ISLAND, VA: MARCH 25, 23:19

One MP was down by the river, watching for any boats that might try to pull up alongside the yacht and rescue Hollingshead. He didn't seem to expect any kind of threat to come from the land. Chapel padded up behind him and got him in a sleeper hold and he went down without so much as a squeak of protest.

Another MP was guarding the entrance to the slips, a natural choke point—­nobody could get to the yacht without passing him. He faced the darkened marina buildings and he never turned around, so Chapel was at a loss as to how he would sneak up on the man.

In the end he caught a lucky break. He saw the man's chin droop. Saw his grip on his rifle go slack. The man was falling asleep on his feet. Chapel waited until he was just about to fall over on his own—­then made sure he at least didn't fall off the dock and into the water. He put the MP down in the cool grass and hog-­tied him.

Only two left.

They were going to be a major problem, though. The two of them were up on the deck of the yacht, working together. Maybe Chapel could get to one of them without being seen, but the seconds he needed to take the man down would leave him vulnerable to the other MP, who would surely just open fire and end Chapel's mission in the most definitive way.

From the shadows, Chapel studied the yacht. It was about thirty feet long, with a high main deck and a broad wheelhouse. The name
Themis
was stenciled on its stern, and it looked like the cleanest and best-­maintained vessel in the marina.

The only way on board, as far as Chapel could see, was a gangplank in full view of the two guards. He might be able to climb onto the boat from the water side, but that didn't seem practical—­he would make so much noise in the water that he would be sure to attract their attention.

The one thing he had going for him was that they had no idea what was going on. They kept fiddling with their walkie-­talkies, and he could hear them debating what the white noise and the voice saying “all clear” really meant. They were confused and worried, but they didn't know who was out there or what was coming for them.

In the end Chapel had to use the oldest trick in the book. Divide and conquer.

He ran back to where he'd left the MP by the entrance to the slips. The man was still fast asleep and his ropes were secure. Chapel wasn't so much interested in the man, though, as he was in his rifle. He picked up the M4 and set its selector to burst fire. Then he fired three shots into the ground, the noise explosive and deafening in the quiet of the deserted marina.

He looped back to the yacht, avoiding the shortest possible route. Much as he'd expected, when he arrived back at the slip, one of the MPs had already come down the gangplank and was hurrying in the direction of the noise, clearly intending to investigate the gunfire.

Chapel let him get out of sight of the yacht before swooping in and taking the man down. Only one left, then. He headed back to the yacht and waited in the shadows until the last MP started fumbling with his radio, clearly looking for an update from his vanished friend.