The Cyclops Initiative (41 page)

“Then it won't matter what we know,” Wilkes said. “He can throw us all in jail without a trial. Execute us without any fuss. Even if we tried to talk to reporters, he could just shut down the media. There'd be nothing stopping him.”

Chapel nodded. “And between now and then—­we can't show ourselves in public. The police were already looking for us, and after we fired a Stinger missile that close to the airport, they'll come at us with everything they have.”

“I saw a news report,” Julia said. “Somebody's covering up the fact we shot down a drone. There were lots of reports of the explosion, of course, but they're claiming it was a Cessna that crashed before it could land at Ronald Reagan.”

Chapel nodded. “About what I expected. But believe me, there are still plenty of cops looking for us, cops who know the truth. We won't be allowed to just walk up to the president and give him a friendly warning.”

“We can't drop him an e-­mail, either,” Angel said. “The NSA has every one of us flagged. If we try to go online or even call somebody on the phone, we'll just be telling them where we are.”

“So what do we do?” Julia asked. “Just sit here and wait for them to find us and scoop us up?” She looked around at the rest of them.

Nobody seemed to have an answer for her.

“Come on,” she said. “You can't just let him kill all those ­people. If he blows up the entire Capitol building, he's going to get a bunch of innocents, too.” She grabbed Chapel's arm. “You're the good guys,” she said. “
We
are the good guys. We need to stop this asshole. We can't let him win.”

Hollingshead took off his glasses and set them on the table in front of him. “No, my dear. We can't.” He looked around at the rest of them, his eyes as hard as wrought iron. “We won't,” he said.

Chapel agreed with all his heart.

“Okay,” he said. “Let's get to work.”

ARLINGTON, VA: MARCH 26, 05:38

They set Angel up with a laptop, but she had no idea where to start. “I can go online if I set myself up behind an onion router,” she told them, but then she shook her head. “But then I'll be anonymous. No way I can even access my old DIA files. I can send the White House all kinds of warnings, but they'll get logged and dismissed because they come from unconfirmed sources. I might as well phone in a bomb threat.”

Julia looked confused. “Wouldn't that be enough? I mean, if there was a bomb threat to the Capitol, wouldn't that be enough to get them to cancel the speech? They have to take those seriously, don't they?”

Wilkes laughed. “You kidding? You know how many times a day the president gets a bomb threat? The Secret Ser­vice looks into 'em, but only as time allows, and only if there's some real chatter or analysis from their security advisers.”

“Think about it,” Chapel told her. “Let's say you're a political opponent of the president's. You want to keep him from getting anything done. Why not pay a bunch of ­people to call in a bomb threat once per day? If he had to change his schedule every single time, he'd be paralyzed. If we had time, maybe we could mail some talcum powder to the Capitol, that would probably shut things down for a few hours while they tested it for anthrax residue. But we can't do that now.”

“What about the media?” Julia asked. “We could just call every television station in town, tell them what's going to happen. They would send enough camera trucks that the Secret Ser­vice would have to react.”

“Right now I don't know—­the country's ready to fall apart at the seams. Even just hinting at what's really going on might start a panic,” Chapel pointed out.

“So what
do
you want me to do?” Angel asked.

“We're going to have to do this the old-­fashioned way—­in person. So we need to know where Patrick Norton will be during the speech,” Chapel said. “That's going to be tough to find out. If he's the designated survivor, they'll have him somewhere secure, and part of that is not putting the location on his public agenda. But a guy like that can't stop working, even for an hour. He'll need to bring an entourage with him, have special communications arrangements made . . . there'll be a trail. Look for public buildings in D.C. that are scrambling to upgrade their phone lines, maybe. Look at his staffers' blogs and twitter feeds, see if they give anything away.”

“I'll try,” Angel said. She shook her head. “I've got limited access here, but—­”

Hollingshead placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “If anyone can do it,” he said, “it's you, dear. You'll do fine.”

Angel looked up at him with desperate hope in her eyes. Like she really wanted to believe him. Then she reached up and grasped his hand.

And then—­incredibly—­Hollingshead responded. Stroking her hair and cupping her cheek with one hand.

Chapel felt his jaw starting to drop, but instead of saying anything, he gestured for Julia and Wilkes to follow him out of the room. When the door was closed behind them, he said, “What exactly did I just see?”

Wilkes belched on cue. “Looks like maybe the director's got a girlfriend.”

Julia shook her head. “No—­no. She told us she isn't into that kind of thing. And anyway, he's nearly three times her age.”

“Who was it said power was the ultimate aphrodisiac?” Wilkes asked. “Spiro Agnew or some dude like that?”

“It was Kissinger, but forget it—­there's no way the two of them are—­are—­” Chapel found he couldn't even say the words. He kept remembering, though, how Angel had reacted every time Hollingshead was in danger. Like she would give anything to keep him safe. None of it added up. “Anyway. It doesn't matter. We don't have time to stand here gossiping. We need to make plans.”

Wilkes nodded. “Yeah, okay. The big problem I see right now is what we do once we know where Norton's gonna be. If he's a designated survivor, he's gonna have T-­men all over his butt, making sure nobody gets close to him. How do we get close?”

Chapel exhaled deeply. “It's not going to be easy. But maybe I have an idea there. I need to make a phone call.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.: MARCH 26, 07:54

Traffic in Washington was more insane than usual that morning. It seemed a lot of ­people were heading into town to hear the president's speech.

“I don't get this,” Angel said, keeping her head low as if to avoid the early sun coming through the car windows. “It's not like they're going to let all these ­people into the Capitol.”

Julia had been keeping an eye on the news feeds all morning. “They're going to set up loudspeakers on the Mall. Everyone's supposed to gather there. ­People are really worried about what's going on—­not just in California, but everywhere. They know something big is coming.”

All of them were surprised, however, when they saw the sheer number of ­people who had made their way to Capitol Hill. The Mall was packed with them, standing shoulder to shoulder—­huge knots of them carrying signs and chanting for public order, hundreds of them sitting on folding chairs and drinking coffee from thermoses—­whole multitudes just milling around aimlessly, looks of desperate expectation on their faces.

“They really think one speech is going to turn things around?” Wilkes asked.

It was Hollingshead who answered. ­“People crave leadership in times of crisis. It's what Norton is counting on. If his attack succeeds, these ­people will accept anyone who claims to be in charge—­no matter how brutal or dictatorial—­because it means safety for their families. No, they don't expect a speech to save them. But they do expect a president to be there for them, to make things right.”

Chapel nodded to himself, but he was busy scanning the streets around the Mall. “Angel,” he said, “what do you need? A coffee shop with Wi-­Fi? Or something more?”

“An Internet café might do,” she said, frowning. “I'd say we should use one of the Smithsonian buildings; those have good libraries and that means solid Ethernet connections, but—­”

“But they're also going to have a lot of security,” Chapel agreed. “Especially today. Okay, Internet café it is.” He worked the car's GPS unit. “Great. There's one pretty close—­except it's on the far side of this crowd. It'll take another hour to get around them all, an hour we don't have.”

“It's okay,” Julia said. “We can walk across—­on foot we can get through them.”

“Speak for yourself,” Angel said, her eyes bright with sudden panic.

There really wasn't any choice, though. Wilkes pulled over on a cross street and let the two women out. He held out his hand to Chapel, who shook it heartily, and then the marine got out as well. “I'll keep them safe,” he said.

“You'd better,” Chapel told him. Then he scooted over into the driver's seat. From the backseat Hollingshead watched him in the rearview mirror.

“You sure you want to go through with this, sir?” Chapel asked. “I can intercept Norton myself.”

There'd been a great deal of discussion about how they would handle Norton if they could get to him. Wilkes had wanted to assassinate the man, of course. Chapel had wanted to exfiltrate him back to the safe house where they could hold him in the cellar room with Charlotte Holman until both could be brought to justice. Hollingshead had his own idea. He said he wanted to talk to Norton. Reason with him.

Chapel had no idea what the director hoped to achieve. But he was still the boss.

“I'm sure, son,” Hollingshead replied.

Chapel put the car in gear and got moving again.

CAPITOL HILL, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:01

The noise and the press of bodies got overwhelming as soon as they pushed their way onto the Mall—­even for Julia, who was used to the crush of New York City, this was bad. She worried about Angel, but she knew they had to get across.

Somewhere close by someone was playing an acoustic guitar, belting out an old Bob Marley song about ­people loving each other. From the other side came the noise of chanters demanding the government reduce the cost of bread and milk immediately. A woman with no top on but with her breasts painted like butterflies came running past and nearly knocked Julia down. She was followed in quick succession by three young men with video cameras and iPads.

Inside the throng of ­people you couldn't see the roads, you couldn't see the Capitol building—­you could barely tell which direction you were headed. You could see arms raised against the blue sky and you could see a lot of feet moving in every direction. Julia reached backward and grabbed Angel's hand while Wilkes moved ahead, steamrollering his way through the crowd.

Angel didn't look good. She was pale and she squinted as if the sun hurt her eyes. “Are we almost there?” she asked.

“Almost,” Julia lied. She smelled cooking food and then nearly stepped in somebody's hibachi. Looked like they were making tofu burgers, she thought. Someone shouted right in her ear, but she just kept moving, pushing forward. Wilkes did a good job of making a hole for her—­nobody wanted to get in his way—­but still sometimes she had to squeeze between ­people who didn't want to move, who cursed at her and refused to move.

The throng looked like the New York peace demonstrations she remembered from the start of the Iraq war—­like hippies and college students and ­people just out for a pleasant afternoon on the grass. But once you were inside the crowd you felt their mood and it was toxic. These ­people were scared. They didn't know any way to express that fear except by gathering together and shouting slogans—­but Julia was pretty sure that if something bad happened here, anything the crowd didn't like, they would remember how to riot pretty fast.

“This way,” Wilkes said, bellowing back over his shoulder. He veered into the middle of a drum circle, pushing his way past a dancer who was clearly on so many drugs he didn't even see Wilkes, much less have a chance to step aside. The drummers looked up in horror as the big marine plowed through them. Julia smiled an apology down at them as she stepped over their ranks, but she was glad for Wilkes all the same.

There was a little moment inside the middle of the drum circle where they could breathe air that hadn't just come out of somebody else's lungs. Angel's hand nearly slipped out of Julia's. The younger woman was shaking. “I don't like this,” she said.

“Tell me what you don't like,” Julia said, pulling her close and getting an arm around Angel's shoulders. “Talk it out.”

“I don't trust them,” Angel said. “I keep expecting them to grab us, to throw us down on the ground. To trample us. I think they're going to just close ranks and smoosh us. Suffocate us.”

“None of that is happening,” Julia said. “They're ­people like you and me. Nobody wants to hurt anybody.”

“It's not a question of what they want, it's just physics, it's differential equations,” Angel protested.

“It's going to be okay,” Julia told her, because what else was she going to say?

“Come on,” Wilkes said. “Stay close.”

Julia hurried to move forward a little faster and obey. The last thing she wanted was to get separated from him in the crowd.

GEORGETOWN, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:09

Driving away from the Capitol was a lot easier than getting close had been. Chapel headed up Massachusetts Avenue and then across into Georgetown and soon had left the bulk of the traffic behind—­meaning that while they still crawled along in typical D.C. gridlock, at least they were moving more often than not. As he drove, Chapel occasionally glanced in the rearview, looking at the director.

Hollingshead seemed perfectly calm. A little surprising, considering what he was about to do. Hollingshead was a spymaster, a spider in the middle of a web. He had never in his life, as far as Chapel knew, gone out on a field mission. But now he was going to be right in the front lines.