The Cyclops Initiative (42 page)

“You all right back there, sir?” Chapel asked.

“Fine, son. Fine.”

“I'm not going to let you come to harm. I promise, sir.”

“Captain,” Hollingshead said, leaning forward a little and smiling in the mirror, “given the situation, it's perhaps best if we don't make promises we can't keep. I know the risks I'm taking with this plan, and how to minimize them. I also know what's at stake. I'm actually more concerned for you. The lovely Julia tells me you were wounded a little while ago. Shot by your own comrade.”

Chapel grinned in the mirror. “I'm fine, sir.” He shook his head. “You know, it's funny. This business, I mean. It wasn't long ago I thought that Wilkes—­well—­I thought you had brought him in to replace me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Chapel shook his head. Now wasn't the time, given what was about to happen. But then again, he was unlikely to be alone with Hollingshead much in the near future like this, with time to talk. “I'm sorry, sir, do I have your permission to speak candidly? I should have asked before.”

“It's all right, son. After all you and I have been through, I think we can drop a little of the military discipline.”

Chapel nodded. He had heard the way Wilkes spoke to the director, and Hollingshead never called him on it. All right, he would open up a little. “Back before all this began. Back when you had the two of us in that motel room down in Aberdeen running the stakeout. I was convinced you put me there to punish me. And that you brought Wilkes in to see if maybe he would make a better field agent than me. I thought you wanted to get rid of me.”

“Is that right?”

Chapel could feel his cheeks getting hot, but he went on. “After what happened in Russia—­”

“Which, I'll remind you, we agreed not to speak of again,” Hollingshead pointed out.

“Yes, sir. But it didn't go as well as it could have. Not by a long shot. I thought maybe you had lost faith in me.”

“I see,” the director replied.

And then he didn't say anything else.

Chapel tried to focus on driving, on keeping pace with the cars ahead of him, but the silence growing inside the car made it feel like the air around him had been pressurized and was about to burst his eardrums.

“Well,” Hollingshead said finally. “Well now, son. I suppose—­from a certain perspective, ah, that is. Well.”

“Sir?”

Hollingshead cleared his throat. “I suppose you could say most of that is true.”

“I—­sir, I—­” Chapel's tongue froze in his mouth.

“You could say that. If you were feeling particularly uncharitable. You're not a fool, Chapel. I suppose I should have expected you to see what was going on. Though of course I couldn't tell you any of the facts of the case. As you know now, Wilkes actually had his own very specific mission—­to infiltrate the Cyclops Initiative. That was why I gave him such light duty at the time. As for yourself, I put you in that motel because of what happened in Russia, yes.”

“Sir,” Chapel said. “If you found my behavior less than satisfactory—­”

“Not,” Hollingshead said as if Chapel hadn't interrupted, “as a punishment. As a sort of rest cure. For years I've sent you on mission after mission and you've performed flawlessly. But I knew how much I was asking and that eventually it would become too much. After your mission in Russia, I knew you were right on the edge of breaking and I could not afford to lose such an important asset. So I gave you light duty so that you could recuperate.”

“Oh,” Chapel said.

“As for replacing you, well, that was somewhat true as well.”

“It . . . was?”

Hollingshead grunted in affirmation. “It isn't very easy for me to say this.”

“Sir?”

“I'm getting old. Too old to do my job. Please don't suggest otherwise. I won't have any false flattery. I'll be eighty years old before the decade is out. It's only a matter of time before my faculties begin to decay. I'm going to have to retire—­assuming, of course, I live through this day.” Hollingshead gave a little laugh that didn't sound very merry. “Assuming we have jobs tomorrow. Or a country to serve. Anyway. I'll need to retire soon. Which means that I will need a replacement.”

He leaned over the front seat. “Son,” he said very softly, “I was hoping that would be you. I wanted to bring Wilkes into the fold as an agent whom you could direct. I want to make you the director of DX.”

Chapel put his foot on the brake. He stopped the car in the middle of the street until he could catch his breath. The cars behind him started to lean on their horns, but he took another ­couple of seconds before he started moving forward again.

“I don't know what to say, sir,” Chapel managed to get out.

“Then don't, since of course this is all, well, provisional. Contingent. Just tell me one thing. You've had a chance to work with Wilkes out in the field. Do you think he would be a good fit with any future directorate we build?”

It gave Chapel something else to think about, for which he was very grateful. He collected his thoughts and tried to think of the right way to answer. “He's good. Very good at fieldcraft, and he can definitely handle himself in a fight.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

“No,” Chapel said, “no, sir, it doesn't. Because I'm struggling with finding a nice way to say no.” He took a breath. “Wilkes saved my life when Moulton would have killed me. He got us this far. I owe him a lot. But he's—­he's a thug.”

“Really?” Hollingshead asked. “You know I chose him personally.”

Chapel swallowed uncomfortably. “I know that, sir. And you know I don't like to question your decisions. But he kills ­people.”

“Part of the job,” Hollingshead pointed out.

“No, sir. No. Sometimes it's necessary.” But it wasn't what a field agent should do. Chapel had struggled with this the whole time he'd worked for the director. “Sometimes it's necessary, but it's always a mistake. When I have to, I will take a life. But I know it means I didn't do my job well enough, and every single time, I've regretted it. It's my absolute last option when I'm out in the field. But for Wilkes it's the first. It's what he's trained to do, and it's what he looks for.”

“As they say,” Hollingshead said, “when one has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail? Interesting.”

“I hope I haven't offended you, sir.”

“Chapel,” Hollingshead said. He leaned back against his seat. “Jim,” he went on. “I asked for your opinion. If you're going to replace me, you're going to need to learn to take a stand.”

Chapel nodded. “If I were the director, my first act would be to transfer him somewhere else. I owe him, I even kind of like him. But I won't work with him again.”

“That's what I needed to hear,” Hollingshead said.

A few minutes later they arrived at their destination.

CAPITOL HILL, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:14

“Get out of my goddamned way,” Wilkes bellowed, and a group of protesters dressed like Revolutionary War–era soldiers blanched and quivered and finally moved. Wilkes reached back and grabbed Julia's arm and hauled her forward.

“Angel,” she called out. She'd lost contact in the press. “Angel! Wilkes, where did she go?”

Wilkes didn't reply, except to pull her up onto a sidewalk. Then he dove back into the crowd, and when he returned, he hauled Angel behind him with a vise grip on her arm, tight enough to make her cry out in pain. Julia started to yell at him to stop hurting her, but the look on the marine's face stopped her cold. Then he raised an arm and pointed. Ahead of them was the glass front of a little shop—­a bakery, by the look of it. He pulled the door open and got the women moving inside.

The shop was full of ­people but not quite so packed as the sidewalk had been. Every table had ­people clustered around it, a lucky few in chairs. A line of ­people was crushed up against the counter, all of them craning their necks around to try to see through the plateglass front of the store. Following their gaze Julia saw nothing but the constant crush out on the sidewalk and, off in the distance, the white obelisk of the Washington Monument framed by blue sky.

“This isn't the right place,” Angel said. “This isn't right! We wanted the Internet café. I need real access. This isn't right!”

“Let's just catch our breath in here for a second, first, before we head back out there,” Julia told her.

“Back? Out there? No no no no no no. No,” Angel said. “No, I won't go back out there. Don't make me go back out there!”

“But you said it yourself,” Julia told her. “You need Internet access.”

Angel's face was wild, blotchy with fear. Her eyes were rolling like those of a panicked animal—­something Julia had seen all too often in her veterinary practice.

Julia had to fight down the urge to slap her. The younger woman was sick. She was having a panic attack. Under any other circumstances she would have felt sympathy. She would have done everything in her power to calm Angel down. But now—­

“Wilkes,” Julia said. “We need to get her access.”

The marine nodded. He reached in his pocket, and for a second Julia thought he would pull out a gun. Instead he took out a slim piece of leather like a big flat wallet. He flipped it open and held it over his head.

“FBI,” he announced. All over the bakery ­people cried out, as if they expected to be arrested on the spot and dragged off to a police station. Despite the fact that even if that had been the case, even if Wilkes really had been arresting anyone, he would never have been able to get them half a block down the sidewalk in the crush out there. “I need the manager of this place, right now.”

A middle-­aged woman with streaks of gray in her long hair stood up from one of the tables. She looked terrified as she raised one hand.

Wilkes nodded at her. “Wi-­Fi password. Right now.”

“I—­what?” the manager asked.

“Right goddamned now,” Wilkes said again.

“It's—­”

“Don't say it out loud,” Angel interjected. Julia saw that she'd regained control of herself, a little. Angel looked around the bakery, at all the ­people craning forward to get a better view. “Otherwise everybody's going to use it and that'll slow the network down. Here. Type it on my phone.”

The manager nodded and did as she was told, looking grateful that at least Wilkes wasn't shouting at her anymore.

IN TRANSIT: MARCH 26, 08:17

Over the Atlantic, the MQ-­1C Gray Eagle banked and turned on its long mission guarding the sea lanes. It was flying on automatic pilot—­a stick jockey back at Creech Air Force Base was watching the controls, of course, and after the Reaper had gone rogue the night before, every last thing the Gray Eagle did was closely monitored. But at the moment it was just keeping station, exactly as it had been programmed to do, running endless laps over the ocean waves.

This time, the base commander had assured the SecDef, there would be no deviation from standing orders. If the Gray Eagle were to fail to make a turn at the proper time, or if any of its systems came online when they should have been dormant, the drone would not be given a chance to do harm. An F-­16 with a human pilot at its yoke was already in the air, ready to strike. All it would take would be one terse order from Creech and the Gray Eagle would be shot down.

The base commander had wanted to do more, of course. He had urged the SecDef to ground the entire drone fleet. The explosion over the Potomac had been covered up in an efficient manner, but the commander still had no idea exactly what had gone wrong or why his ­people couldn't seem to replicate the problem in simulation. A drone had just exploded without warning—­and miles from where it should have been.

Given recent events, the only logical thing to do was to ground the fleet. But then the SecDef had responded in no uncertain terms. The drones were vital to national security. They would stay in the air. And you just didn't question orders that came from that high up.

So the base commander stayed on post all that morning, watching over the shoulders of stick jockeys and sensors as his robot planes carried out their given tasks. He was ready at the slightest provocation to send the kill signal, but he never had to.

The Gray Eagle, after all, never deviated from its mission. Or at least . . . it didn't appear to.

The base commander had to be reassured that the Gray Eagle was where it said it was. He could look at the telemetry data that gave GPS coordinates, altitude and the like, but all that could be easily faked. More reliably, he could watch the live video feed from the drone's camera eye and see the furrowed blue of the Atlantic roll by underneath the Gray Eagle's nose.

He had no reason whatsoever to suspect that that view, that video feed, wasn't live. That it was in fact a recording of what the ocean had looked like weeks earlier, the last time this particular Gray Eagle had been sent out on patrol.

Paul Moulton had been a very, very good programmer, and an even better judge of human paranoia. He had known perfectly well that at some point the drones would be monitored, that they would be under threat of being shot down. He'd gone to great pains to make sure they kept flying, right until the very last attack.

The Gray Eagle kept feeding false telemetry and video back to Creech as it turned on the wind, breaking away from its previous course. It headed straight for Washington, and Paul Moulton's final, glorious, posthumous strike.

GEORGETOWN, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:21

Chapel's stomach was tied up in knots. Well, he supposed he was allowed to be a little nervous. What they had planned was one of the most reckless, dangerous stunts he'd ever pulled in the field.

It made him nauseated. Or maybe it was just the quick breakfast he'd wolfed down before they set out. Either way, he put his good hand on his stomach and held it there, as if he'd been cut open and needed to hold his guts from spilling out. There was some pain.