The Cyclops Initiative (43 page)

“Son?” the director asked.

“Hrm,” Chapel said. Then he shook himself out of it and turned to face his boss. “Fine, sir. Just anxious. This is the place Angel told us about.”

Hollingshead looked out his window and nodded.

The quaint brick three-­story building across the street looked like every other quaint brick three-­story building in Georgetown with one exception—­there wasn't a coffee shop or a bank branch inhabiting its ground floor. Instead it just had an unmarked door and a ­couple of windows covered over by thick curtains. It looked, in fact, so much like a safe house that it couldn't be one. Any spy wandering past would immediately think they knew what it was, which invalidated its use as a safe house in any way.

Angel was absolutely certain that Patrick Norton was inside. Two of his low-­level aides had complained on Twitter about being moved to a new location this morning, and while neither of them had given an exact address, one had said they were headed to Georgetown. Apparently they considered that to be vague enough to count as discretion. Meanwhile the Army Corps of Engineers had sent a team to this building in the middle of the night, and a local webcam had seen them. Angel had noted that they brought in some very high-­tech communications equipment, including an entire crate of satellite cell phones. The kind of phones Norton would use if he needed to communicate with his generals during, say, a military coup.

To add to all that, the registered owner of the building was the Department of Defense. It was, she told Chapel, kind of obvious, once you saw the signs.

Chapel was just glad he had the twenty-­first-­century version of Sherlock Holmes on his team.

In the backseat, the director was growing antsy. “I trust him as much as you do, but if he's going to provide this diversion—­”

“He'll be here on time. At eight thirty exactly,” Chapel said.

Hollingshead nodded. “Very well. Then I suppose the next step is mine.”

Chapel got out of the car and held the director's door for him. “Good luck, sir,” he said.

“Hopefully I won't need it.” Hollingshead looked both ways and then crossed the street, headed straight for the front door of the building. Chapel headed up the street, then crossed and jogged around to an alley that ran behind every building on the block. He made a point of not getting too close—­the DoD safe house would have cameras watching its rear door, of course. But he wished he could get close enough to hear what happened when Rupert Hollingshead rang the place's front doorbell.

They were pretty sure the director would be taken inside. Hollingshead was still the biggest thorn in Norton's side, the one man the SecDef considered a genuine threat to his grand plan. If he just walked up and turned himself over to Norton, he wouldn't just be turned away.

They were mostly sure that he wouldn't just be taken inside and quietly shot. They figured that Norton would want to talk to Hollingshead first. For a little while.

Meanwhile it was Chapel's job to get inside the building and make sure Hollingshead had a way to get back out again. This was where the plan left a lot of room for improvisation. Chapel had to figure it out on his own, once he was in place.

At least he could count on a little help. His diversion should be showing up at any minute.

CAPITOL HILL, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:24

“Angel,” Julia said. “Angel—­talk to me.”

But Angel was hunched over her laptop, two fingers on the trackpad as she scrolled through endless pages of what looked to Julia like random numbers and letters. She didn't even glance up.

“Leave her alone,” Wilkes said.

“She hasn't made a sound in a long time,” Julia pointed out. “That's not—­”

“Healthy?” Wilkes guessed. “Maybe. But it's the closest she's going to get. She's working. She's working 'cause it's all she can do right now. The only thing that keeps her from freaking out. So leave her alone.”

Julia knew he was right. Fussing over ­people was what
she
did, though, to keep herself from freaking out. She turned her attention to the other ­people in the bakery. Most of the customers were still packed into the tables and up against the glass display counter. The street outside was just too crowded for them to flee the place when Wilkes commandeered its Internet connection, though a lot of them looked terrified of the big marine.

Julia didn't blame them. She might be a badass sometimes, and she might have seen plenty of this kind of action since she'd met Chapel, but still, the big dangerous soldier types like Wilkes bugged her. It wasn't so much that you thought he was going to hurt somebody. It was that he looked like he could, and that he wouldn't lose any sleep if it happened. It was something about the way he stared at everybody, she thought. Clearly sizing them up, assessing them as potential threats. He just made everyone uneasy.

Maybe she could help with that a little. She lifted her hands in the air until all the customers and the clerks and pastry chefs and the store manager were all looking at her. “No need to worry, folks. We're actually here to keep everybody safer,” she told them. “To do that, we're going to need your help for a little while. We need you to stay calm, that's all.” Her brain reeled as she tried to think of some innocuous reason the FBI would burst into a bakery like this. Then she realized that a real FBI agent wouldn't give one. “We'll be done in a few minutes,” she said and lowered her hands. “Thank you very much for your patience.”

It sounded lame when she said it out loud, but it seemed the civilians in the bakery were just glad for any sign that somebody was in control. What was it Hollingshead had said, about ­people craving leadership? She could see them start to breathe again, saw some of them even smile and roll their eyes at each other—­which meant that what had seemed like a terrifying breach of the peace was now, to them, just a mild inconvenience.

At least that was something.

She turned back to look at Angel. The younger woman hadn't so much as shifted in her chair.

Julia knew what Angel was working on. There were radar dishes and optical sensors all over Washington, thousands of them, all tasked with different things. Some watched to make sure nobody landed a helicopter in the White House's Rose Garden. Others monitored planes headed into and out of Ronald Reagan International. Some, which hadn't been reassigned in a long while, were still watching for Russian bombers. Angel was checking all of them, all at once. She was looking for any sign of a drone approaching the Capitol.

Of course, she had no idea what kind of drone it might be, or what direction it was coming from, or whether it was flying low enough to evade radar. But if she found it, she could try to hack it in midflight. Gain access to its controls and send it back where it came from.

That was the plan, anyway. Angel had said there was maybe a one-­in-­three chance she could even find the drone, and the odds were even slimmer that she could gain control of it. But it wasn't like they had much choice.

If she couldn't get the drone to reverse course, a lot of ­people in the Capitol were going to die.

GEORGETOWN, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:28

A white van pulled up right in front of the DoD safe house. Even before it came to a stop, a security guard in a dark suit came out the front door and started waving his arms at the driver, trying to get his attention. It didn't work. The driver parked the van and switched off the engine. The security guard tapped at the driver's window while simultaneously reaching for his phone.

The side door of the van swung open and a man in an army jacket jumped out, crowding the security guard back toward the safe house's door. The man smiled and his eyes twinkled, and he reached out to shake the security guard's hand.

“Name's Rudy,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“You can't—­” The security guard managed to say.

He didn't get any further because somebody else jumped out of the van then, somebody who was very difficult to ignore. This guy was missing an arm, a leg, and an eye, all three replaced by obvious prostheses.

“Morning, son,” the man said. “We're here to meet with Patrick Norton.”

“You can't—­there's nobody here by—­”

The amputee frowned. “He's the secretary of defense,” he pointed out.

“Yeah,” the security guard said, “I know who he is, but—­”

“Good, then you go fetch him, we'll just set up here. And before you go telling me I can't use this particular stretch of sidewalk that my taxes happened to have paid for, I'll have to point out that you can't tell me why not.”

“I don't need to—­”

“So I think we'll just wait here until the cops arrive,” Top pointed out. Behind him, more and more ­people came piling out of the van, some of them missing arms or legs, all of them carrying cardboard signs decorated with handwritten slogans:

RESPECT OUR VETS

VA CLAIMS TAKE

TOO LONG!

I SERVED MY COUNTRY,

WHY CAN'T IT SERVE ME?

“We've got a grievance, see, and we're not leaving,” Top told the poor security guard, “until Mr. Norton comes down here and addresses it.”

“But what makes you think he's even here?” the guard asked.

“Well now, friend, I wasn't entirely sure until I saw the look on your face just now. Why don't you go tell them we're here? We'll wait.”

The security guard took one last desperate look at the wounded veterans marching in a circle in front of the safe house. Then he shook his head in disbelief and ducked back inside.

At the back of the building, Chapel could hear Top and his boys chanting out front, and he knew it was time to make his move.

GEORGETOWN, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:32

They frisked him quite thoroughly and then bound his hands with a loop of plastic. Rupert Hollingshead had expected as much. But then they bundled him into a rather pleasant office on the third floor of the safe house, and perhaps out of respect for his age or perhaps for his former rank, they gave him a comfortable chair to sit in.

He sat there as straight-­backed as he could and waited patiently. Outside, through the thick, bulletproof windows, he could just hear Top and his boys down in the street. That made Hollingshead smile. One thing had gone right, anyway, and the protesters had shown up on time.

The door opened. A guard with a very serious expression on his face came in and checked the corners of the room, as if he might find heavily armed gremlins had spontaneously appeared there. He looked Hollings­head up and down, then he nodded at someone outside the doorway, someone Hollingshead couldn't see.

It turned out, thankfully, to be Patrick Norton.

Of all the uncertainties and doubts that flitted around Hollingshead like a cloud of unwelcome gnats, there was at least one thing he was absolutely sure of. No one was going to put a bullet in the back of his head until Norton had left the room. It just wouldn't do to have the SecDef be a witness to murder.

It behooved him, then, to keep Norton in the room as long as possible. So he put on his merriest face, made his eyes twinkle, and said, “Sir. Forgive me for, ah, not saluting.”

Norton grinned. “Rupert. I'm so sorry to have put you through all of this. I assure you, if I'd known you were coming, we could have met under more cordial circumstances.”

“No doubt. My own fault, but it seems, well, it seems my personal assistant has been, ah, misplaced. Never was very good at making my own appointments.”

“I see,” Norton replied. “Well, under ordinary circumstances, of course, I'd be thrilled to meet with you on anything you like, but I'm afraid today I'm a bit busy. Perhaps if you could tell me what this was about?”

“I thought we might have a chat, sir, about the Cyclops Initiative.”

The transformation that came over Norton's face was incredible to behold. The man was a politician, through and through. He had spent years bolting armor plate onto the smiling countenance he wore in public, hammering out any quirks of personality, polishing his mannerisms and gestures until any sign of ambition or lust for power were smoothed away. He had worked that face until it showed nothing at all except a love for civil ser­vice and the American ­people.

Now that armor came off, plate by plate, bolt by bolt, in the time it took for a smile to turn into a frown. The eyes hardened. The chin lifted in the air. The brow furrowed.

“You're a fucking idiot, Rupert,” Norton said when the transformation was done.

“Ah, I wondered when we would get to the, well—­”

Norton wouldn't let him finish. “What is this? You have a microphone hidden in your lapel, you think you're going to tape me saying something stupid? No, my men would have found anything like that when they searched you. So you came here to try to stop things somehow on your own. Not a chance. You're an idiot and a distraction. That's all. A distraction at a time when I really don't need one. Was that your whole plan? Is that why you brought this gang of cripples out to make noise in the street? You thought you could beat me through sheer inconvenience?” Norton studied him for a moment. “I find it hard to believe. But it's not like you have much else to play with. Your directorate is gone. Burned to the ground. Chapel's missing, presumed dead. Your Angel system is dismantled. By now you'll have realized Wilkes was one of us all along.”

Hollingshead closed his mouth. He couldn't help but smile a bit.

“I think you got Moulton and Holman. They're dead, right?” Norton said. “It's what I would have done in your place. I take your knights away, so you took my queen and my rook? But you've already lost this game. I have more ­people I can bring into play. A lot more. And anyway, in half an hour, it'll be over.”

Hollingshead nodded. “Yes, that's what I wanted to talk about.”