The Cyclops Initiative (40 page)

So he needed to get Holman talking now.

“Director, sir,” he said, “forgive me, but we need to get you dressed, and we all need to get out of here.” Hollingshead nodded and stepped out of the room. “But the big question,” Chapel said, turning to Wilkes, “is whether we take her with us when we go, or just leave her here for the police to find her.”

Holman snorted. “You think I'm worried about them finding me here? I can make up any story I want as to why I'm handcuffed in a traitor's yacht.”

“I'm sure they'd believe you, too. A respected official of a government agency, held against her will. It would be hard to make anything stick to you, even your involvement in the Cyclops Initiative.”

Holman narrowed her eyes. “There's a ‘but' in there, isn't there?”

“Maybe an ‘unless.' We can't make anything stick without evidence. The problem for you,” Chapel told her, “is that we have some now. We have Wilkes.”

“His involvement was highly compartmentalized.”

Chapel nodded. This was where he had to start playing real poker. “As far as you know, yes. But he was there when you ordered us all killed. He was there when you said you planned on assassinating the director. And he kept his ears open the whole time. He met other ­people in the Initiative as well. Spoke with them. They're all dead now or out of the way. You're the only one left. The question you need to ask yourself is this: How much does he know? How much can he prove? And if the answer is anything more than ‘nothing,' you know you're in serious shit.”

She winced as if the obscenity stung her.

Chapel took a breath. “This ‘Cyclops Initiative' thing? It's over. It failed. Now it looks to me like you have one chance to beat a treason charge,” he said. “And that's to tell us everything, right now. Otherwise Wilkes is going to find the closest reporter and start giving interviews.”

Holman turned to look at the marine. “You wouldn't dare. I know you well enough that—­”

“You know me? I was a triple agent right under your nose for three years,” Wilkes pointed out. “You know jack, lady.”

Director Hollingshead stepped back into the cabin, dressed now in pants and a blazer over his pajama top. “Shall we head out, boys? I have a motor launch moored in the next slip over. It will allow us to make a, ah, more expeditious retreat than if we tried to move the yacht.”

“On it,” Wilkes said, and he stomped back up onto the deck.

“Sir,” Chapel said, “did you hear my conversation with Subdirector Holman?”

“I did, son.” Hollingshead took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. “So what will it be?” he asked her.

She was breathing heavily by then, as if she were about to have a panic attack. “Rupert—­I want your word as a gentleman. You'll protect me from any fallout.”

“To the best of my ability,” he said and gave her a little bow. “Of course, in exchange for my protection—­”

“Everything,” she said. “I'll tell you everything.”

 

ARLINGTON, VA: MARCH 26, 03:17

“Okay,” Angel said. She tapped the keypad of her laptop, and a green light came on next to the camera. “We're ready.” She glanced over at Chapel, and he supposed she was asking him what to say next, but he had no idea. He'd never done this before. So he just nodded.

Angel swallowed and looked straight into the camera. “The following is an interview with Charlotte Holman, subdirector of the National Security Agency, recorded March twenty-­sixth, 20—­, starting at . . . 3:18
A.M.
” She nodded once at the camera, then turned the laptop around so that the camera faced Holman. “Please confirm your identity.”

“I'm Charlotte Holman.”

Chapel walked over to where Angel sat in a folding metal chair. It was one of two, and they comprised the only furniture in the tiny room. They were in the cellar of a DIA safe house just across the river from Washington. A place where foreign spies were taken to be debriefed. Hollingshead believed it was the safest place they had access to, a place the NSA didn't know about.

The perfect place to carry out an interrogation. “All the levels look good?” Chapel asked Angel. “You've got plenty of memory?”

“It's all fine, Chapel. Go ahead and start. You can—­”

“Hold on,” he said. His stomach had just flip-­flopped. It had been doing that every so often. He'd assumed it was just nerves, or the fact that he wasn't eating properly. Normally it just twitched a ­couple of times and that was it. This time it lasted longer. It didn't hurt, it just felt weird.

Angel's expression changed to one of concern. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Fine. A little exhausted. I'll try to get some sleep after this, if I can,” he told her. Then he walked over to where Holman sat. He remained standing as he interviewed her.

“We want to ask you some questions,” Chapel said. “About the Cyclops Initiative. First off, I'd like to know why.”

Holman's brow furrowed. “Why?”

Chapel pinned her with his gaze. “Why you crashed a Predator drone into the Port of New Orleans. Why you took down the power grid in California. Do you admit that you did those things?”

“Yes, of course. We also manipulated the stock market. Oh, and we released a virus into the Internet that slowed down electronic transactions. That was one of Paul's favorite parts of this. He was really quite proud—­you see, the ­people who run e-­commerce sites are always looking for ways to speed up transactions, to make it easier to buy and sell online than it is in the real world. Just adding code to sabotage those transactions wouldn't have worked, because the software engineers would have noticed it right away and cut it out on their own. What Paul did was add an upstream checksum function at the level of the banks funding the . . .” She stopped herself. She blinked as if remembering where she was. “I . . . I'm guessing you didn't know about that. You look surprised.”

“We'll get to that later. But you're not answering my question. Why did you do all this?”

“To soften the economy,” Holman said, with a smile. “Do you have any cigarettes? I gave up smoking years ago, but this feels like a good time to start again.”

“No. I don't have any cigarettes. Answer the question, please.”

“The question?”

Chapel fought to control himself. “Why?”

“We attacked the economy because we wanted ­people to care.”

“What ­people?”

“The American ­people, of course. That's where the name comes from. The Cyclops part. The American ­people are like a Cyclops, a giant of immense power but capable of seeing only one thing at a time. For years now, the leaders of the country have known this. They've used it to shape the discourse, to move national politics in the direction they want. Look at the Iraq war. After September eleventh, the ­people couldn't see anything, couldn't deal with any issue except terrorism. The Bush White House claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction—­well, who knows. Maybe they really thought that was true. Or maybe it was a convenient excuse. They got the war they wanted. Later on, after the economic collapse in 2008, the only thing the ­people could talk about was the economy. About money. Which provided the impetus to bail out the banks, the auto industry, later on the insurance companies and the hospitals. All of it on the dime of the ­people who were already hurting financially. Because we told them it would improve the economy.”

Chapel gritted his teeth. “Maybe we can save the conspiracy theories for later.”

Holman laughed. “Theories? This is all a matter of historical fact. For a generation now, the two political parties have exploited the public's single-­mindedness to line the pockets of their friends and cronies. They've dismantled the American state piece by piece, sold it off to the highest bidder—­”

“Enough,” Chapel said. “This isn't a propaganda video. Get to the point. You don't like the way the country's being run, fine. So you started your own conspiracy to fight that?”

“The Initiative is made up of ­people who understand that the real problems of this country are being ignored,” Holman told him. “Climate change running amok. Income inequality so profound the only logical outcome is class warfare. Globalism and automation leading to double-­digit unemployment. These are the things that need to be addressed, and yet no politician will touch them. It was clear to us we needed to remove the politicians from the equation.”

Chapel raised an eyebrow. “And how exactly do you plan on doing that?”

“By putting power in the hands of the one branch of government that doesn't take its orders from a fickle public: the military. The point of the Cyclops Initiative is to engineer a military coup in the United States.”

ARLINGTON, VA: MARCH 26, 03:49

“The idea was quite simple. The ­people of this country care about only one thing right now: the economy. As long as the politicians keep making promises, though, the ­people remain complacent—­unwilling to actually take any action on their own. They would rather let a few hundred ­people inside the Beltway make the decisions for them. We needed to wake the ­people up—­wake the sleeping giant, as it were.”

“By way of terror attacks on American assets,” Chapel said.

Holman shrugged. “We would create a situation where the economy was in such a shambles that civil order would break down. We would incite riots and social disorder—­which is exactly what we've accomplished in California. Soon that chaos will spread across the country. The governors of the states will call in the National Guard, but of course, they aren't prepared for something of this magnitude. They'll need to bring in the regular military for assistance in restoring order. The legislature and the executive will be forced to give the military more and more power to aid them in containing the panic, and in the end the Joint Chiefs of Staff will simply assume command. They will declare a state of emergency and dissolve Congress. At that point, the real work can begin.”

Holman sat up very straight in her chair. She'd had a very long night, Chapel knew. She'd been kidnapped by a deranged marine. Dragged halfway across the city. Thought she was going to be blown up by a Hellfire missile, but instead she'd been brought to a windowless little room underground and forced to confess to all her sins.

But now she reached up and patted her hair. Brushed some lint from the front of her blazer. Suddenly she cared very much how she looked.

Chapel realized with a start that what he'd thought was an interrogation under duress was in fact a chance for her to say something she'd been holding in for a very long time. To express how proud she was of herself.

“We aren't terrorists, you see,” she told him, and the camera. “We're patriots. We love this country. We love what it used to be. What it has the potential to become again. But if we continue down this same suicidal course, if we can't rise above ourselves to face the challenges of the twenty-­first century, then—­”

“Stop,” Chapel said.

“You wanted to know why,” she told him.

“Sure. I think we've got that. You think that to save America you need to cancel democracy. Depose all the elected leaders and put generals and admirals in their place.”

“You're a soldier. You must know they would do a better job.”

Chapel shook his head. He didn't want to get into an argument about this, but he could barely help himself. “I don't know that at all. The officers I've known have been mostly good ­people, sure.”

­“People with a firm grasp on reality,” Holman said.

“Fine. Yeah, because they have to be. If every decision you make means life or death for somebody, yeah, you tend to drop the rhetoric and stop worrying about how popular you are. But there's another side to that. You get too focused. You have an objective to meet—say, you need to take a hill or secure a town. And everything you have goes into meeting that objective. But to do that, you sacrifice the bigger picture. You can't worry about why your superiors wanted that hill or that town. You can't waste mental energy thinking about why the war started. You can only think about how to finish it.”

“And that's exactly the kind of focus we need,” Holman insisted. “Get some ­people in place who can
fix
things. And then maybe in ten years, or maybe twenty,
then
the military can restore democracy and let us try again.”

“Assuming that when that day comes, the generals and admirals just decide to hand power back to the ­people. Without a fight.”

Holman shook her head. “Maybe it won't be that easy. But it's necessary. It has to happen.”

“Except it isn't going to,” Chapel told her.

“What?”

“It's not going to happen now. The Initiative is over, one way or another. Because you're going to tell me how to stop it.”

All the air seemed to drain out of the room. Holman was beat, and she clearly knew it. But she was a proud woman. The kind of person who thought she knew better than everyone else, who was clear minded and certain about her right to be in charge. Chapel might as well have just slapped her across the face.

He might have felt bad about that, if she hadn't been responsible for dozens of ­people losing their lives and the West Coast descending into chaos.

“You're going to start by telling me the names of everyone you know who's part of the Initiative,” Chapel told her. “Let's begin with the top level. You must have been pretty high up, since you were in charge of the operational end. But from what I've heard so far, none of this was your idea, originally.”

“No,” Holman said.

“So who's in charge? Who's number one in this thing?”

She blinked at him. “You don't know that? But—­you must. I assumed . . . I . . . It's Patrick Norton.”

Chapel's mouth went dry. He really wanted to sit down.

“Wait,” he said. “Hold on. The secretary of defense—­”

“Yes. The SecDef. He was the initiator for all this. He's overseen it every step of the way. Who else could engineer a military coup?”

Chapel had to go lean against a wall. He glanced at Angel. She looked just as shocked as he felt. He'd known this thing went pretty far up. But the cabinet—­

“You didn't know,” she said. All the color had drained out of her face.

She must have just realized that Chapel was bluffing. That he had far less information—­and control over the situation—­than he'd claimed.

He supposed it had to happen eventually.

Holman pursed her lips. She looked like she could barely sit still in her chair. “I think I may have made a mistake. You said everyone else was dead or under wraps. I assumed that meant you had Norton, too. That you had him in a room like this somewhere.” She shook her head. “What a fool I've been. You didn't know anything, did you?”

“Let's get back on track,” Chapel said. “Tell me about—­”

“No,” she said, her eyes wild. “I agreed to talk because I thought the Initiative was going to fail. My God, I gave Rupert far too much credit. You haven't stopped Norton. You haven't stopped anything.”

“We can still—­”

“No, Captain. No. You can't. It's already in motion. This is the day it happens. The day of the coup. And you aren't ready for it.”

ARLINGTON, VA: MARCH 26, 04:09

Upstairs, they gathered around a kitchen table. Wilkes, Angel, Hollingshead. And Julia, who had a right to hear this if anybody did.

“Tomorrow morning—­this morning, I guess,” Chapel told them, “in about five hours, the president is going to make a speech before Congress. An emergency address to talk about the riots in California and how scared everyone is. From what we know, he's going to reveal that it's all been a series of terrorist attacks. We think he's going to blame the Chinese, although I doubt he'll come out and say so directly. As far as we can tell he has no idea about the Initiative or about Norton. It doesn't matter. He's not going to get to finish that speech.”

Hollingshead blinked rapidly behind his thick glasses. “Son, are you saying—­they're going to, ah, assassinate the
president
?”

“I believe that's the plan,” Chapel said. “And not just him. The vice president will be there. So will the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate. If they all die, well . . . the head of the Initiative, Patrick Norton, has been chosen as the designated survivor for this speech. As secretary of defense, he's sixth in line to become acting president. If the secretaries of state and the Treasury are at this speech too, which is likely, then he could become commander in chief in one blow.”

Julia gasped. Angel looked like she might be sick.

“Holman wouldn't give me any details of the attack. She shut down as soon as she realized Norton was still at large. She thinks he still has a chance to pull off a military coup. And if he does—­”