The Cyclops Initiative (44 page)

Norton grabbed a chair and dragged it over to where it would face Hollingshead. He didn't sit down, though. Instead, he stood behind the chair, as if he was using it as a shield. As if he expected Hollingshead to lunge at him and wanted some cover to hide behind. Hollingshead tried not to read too much into it.

“You think you still have a chance,” Norton said. His eyes narrowed as he watched Hollingshead very closely. “You think you have some play that will still bring me down. You had some kind of plan. But then you did the dumb thing and came here. What's to stop me from having you shot right now?”

“Nothing,” Hollingshead said.

The SecDef raised an eyebrow.

Good,
Hollingshead thought. He'd gotten the man to be quiet for a moment. Maybe now they could have a real conversation. “I know perfectly well that you aren't going to let me leave this building alive. But I had hoped we could talk for a few minutes, first.”

CAPITOL HILL, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:34

“Got it,” Angel said. Julia came racing over to look over her shoulder, though of course she couldn't make any sense of the strings of numbers and letters on Angel's screen. “There,” Angel said, pointing at a log entry that looked like all the others.

“You can just . . . look at all this, and see a drone coming at us?” Julia asked.

“No, of course not. But I can read a weather radar report. This radar is looking for clouds, right? So it has to screen out anything it sees that isn't made of water vapor. It's reporting here that it found something that it should ignore. There's a metallic object the size of a Predator or a Reaper or whatever reported here, at such and such an altitude, and that altitude fits with the flight profile we're expecting. It could be something else, of course. A small helicopter would match those numbers, and there are plenty of helicopters over D.C. But look at this.” Angel tapped a key. Only a few of the characters on her screen changed.

“I have no idea what you just did,” Julia pointed out.

Angel sighed. “Look, it's gone. This is one second after the first screen. The metallic object doesn't show up on the weather report this time. Which means it was moving so fast it passed right through the area that radar was sweeping in less than a second. A helicopter wouldn't move that fast.”

Julia squinted at the screen. “That's not a lot to go on. It could be some other kind of airplane—­”

“It could just be a glitch. It could just be a coincidence. Except for one thing.”

“What's that?” Julia asked.

“There's no such thing as a coincidence. That's our drone. And it's going to be here very soon.” Angel ran her hands through her hair. “I need to concentrate,” she said. She looked at all the ­people in the bakery. Half of them looked back at her.

There wasn't much Julia could do about that. She knew Angel was struggling under the weight of all those stares, but the sidewalk out front was so crowded it looked like the mass of ­people out there was about to burst in through the plateglass windows. Julia couldn't clear the bakery.

“How about I get you something to drink?” she asked instead. “Do you want some coffee?”

Angel glanced over at the counter. “I only drink soda. Not coffee. This place doesn't have any soda.”

“No,” Julia agreed.

Angel leaned over her computer again, as if she could climb through the screen and escape that way. “A scone, then. Blueberry.” she said.

GEORGETOWN, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:35

The security guards flooded out into the street where Top and his boys were protesting. There was a lot of shouting about the First Amendment and a lot more shouting about how the protesters needed to clear the street right now.

Chapel didn't stick around to listen to all of it. He took a deep breath, then walked right up the alley to the back door of the safe house, right in view of its cameras. The alley was deserted when he started.

It didn't stay that way. The back door swung open and a man in a black suit stepped out. He had a pistol in his hand and a big hands-­free unit in his ear. “Sir,” he said. “You need to not be here.”

Chapel kept coming, his head down, his hands shoved in his pockets. No point in subtlety here. The guard's job was to keep this alley clear. He wasn't going to listen to anything Chapel had to say.

So Chapel just waited until the guard started to raise his pistol. The man still didn't intend to shoot, just intimidate.

Which gave Chapel the advantage, since he had no such qualms.

Among the piles of handguns and assault rifles and carbines and grenade launchers in Contorni's arsenal, Chapel had found an entire crate full of military-­grade Tasers. He had one in his pocket now. He shot the guard right in the chest and watched him shake and gag and then fall to the ground in a heap. Once the Taser had stopped clacking away and the current had stopped flowing, Chapel reached down and grabbed the hands-­free unit out of the guard's ear. He dropped it on the pavement and crunched it under his heel.

Then he dug his fingers into the incapacitated guard's neck and slowed the blood flow to his brain. Not enough to do any permanent damage. Just enough to knock him out for a while.

When it was done, Chapel stepped inside the back door of the safe house. Beyond was a spacious kitchen full of stainless steel sinks and copper-­bottomed pots hanging in neat rows on the brick wall. There was nobody else in sight.

Chapel closed the door behind him and locked it up tight. For good measure he grabbed a chair and shoved it under the doorknob at an angle. When the guard woke up, he would have a hard time getting back inside.

There was another security camera in the kitchen, watching the door from the other side. Chapel had expected as much. Hopefully nobody was watching those cameras—­the bulk of the security detail being busy elsewhere.

GEORGETOWN, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:36

There was a great deal of pushing and shoving and brandishing of signs, but it was clear the guards were about done with fooling around. “Now listen here, friend—­and I do want us to be friends, ever so much,” Top said as one guard tried to grab him by the shirt. “I want you to consider just exactly how this is going to look for the news media. Now, you and I both know that I'm some cussed fool who has refused to listen to any kind of reason, while you're just a workingman trying to do an honest job. And that's exactly the kind of moral equation that might lead you to start thinking you can lay hands on me. But I've got four different media outlets sending camera trucks in our direction right now. And when the two of us—­cussed fool and workingman—­are under the television lights, I wonder if things won't get a little less clear? If maybe it'll look like you're assaulting a multiple amputee who was intent on just a little harmless exercise of his First Amendment rights.”

The guard pulled a gun and pointed it in Top's face. “Move now,” he said.

“Point taken,” Top said. “And I salute your initiative. But I'm afraid we have a new problem to contend with. I hope we can work together to find an amicable solution to this one, but I fear—­”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” the guard demanded.

“It would appear,” Top said, blinking his eyes in mock contrition, “that I've accidentally handcuffed my arm to the door handle of this van. And I've completely forgotten what I did with the key.”

CAPITOL HILL, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:38

“Come on,” Angel said. She pouted at her screen. Took a bite of scone.

For a long, heavy second nothing happened.

“Come on!” she shouted as she lifted her hands away from the keyboard.

“Everything okay?” Julia asked.

“Arrgh!” Angel groaned. She tapped her fingernails on the table. “A ­couple of years ago somebody put a virus on the servers that run these stupid drones. Back then the command signal channel wasn't even encrypted. The virus didn't even affect that channel, just the back-end stuff, but still, they had to go and add serious military-­level encryption to the command channel and make my life really, really difficult.”

Julia frowned. “You're complaining because the military actually went to the trouble of making their drones
hard
to hack?”

“It's really adding to my workload,” Angel said. “Okay, okay. Let me try something different. Every system has a weakness, right?”

“Um, sure,” Julia said.

Angel nodded. “There has to be a channel I can exploit. Maybe something on the optical bus. The drone just has the one camera pod. If I can shut down that camera, it won't be able to find its target, and it won't ever launch its weapons.”

Julia leaned back. “That's kind of brilliant.”

Angel shrugged. “It's what I do. Now, could you just leave me to it? Maybe you should go talk to Wilkes. Make sure he doesn't accidentally kill somebody.”

“Good idea,” Julia said.

GEORGETOWN, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:41

“I know,” Hollingshead said, “what you're planning. What you're in the middle of achieving and it is, well, quite ambitious.” He smiled at the SecDef. “I'd very much like to try to convince you not to go ahead with it, however.”

“Oh? And why is that?” Norton asked.

“Because I think it's bad for America,” Hollingshead replied. “I understand, really, why you would do this. You think the country is out of control. And I suppose it is. The legislature is frozen in constant gridlock. The executive is stymied by special interests and a splinter party that viciously attacks its every move. Meanwhile the ­people refuse to even listen to the issues, much less debate them. The country can't move forward like that, can it? Not when our economic interests are threatened by global market shifts. Not when the very climate has turned against us. Not when we need to be unified now more than ever.”

“You're making my case pretty eloquently, Rupert,” Norton said. “This country needs a strong leader now. It can't wait until the next presidential election—­not that that would change anything. We need a hand on the rudder if we're going to weather the coming storm.”

“Indeed. And I believe that leader will step forward. But I don't think it's you, sir. With all due respect—­”

“History shows us that the man who has the audacity to take power for himself is the only kind of man fit to hold it.”

Hollingshead pursed his lips.

“Julius Caesar started an empire that would rule all the known world. Alexander the Great applied logic to warfare and won everything. Qin Shi Huang saw the petty warlords squabbling over pieces of China and knew they had to be brought together by force.”

“Hitler,” Hollingshead said. “Stalin. Mao.”

“That's weak, Rupert. That's just special pleading. You really think I'm that sort? You think I'd use power for that kind of monstrosity?”

“No. But I'd like to point out one simple thing. If you seize America by military force, if you take away the basic freedoms of its ­people, then you will have gained nothing. Because without freedom, there is no America.”

Norton laughed. “Over the last fifteen years we've been arguing this point endlessly. And the result? Americans are perfectly willing to give up freedom in exchange for security. If you want proof, look at what I've done in the last week. I've shown them what insecurity really looks like. By the end of the day today they will be begging me to take charge. To tell them what to do.”

Hollingshead looked down at his shoes. “You took an oath to protect the president. Now you're going to murder him so you can take his place.” He shook his head. “This goes against everything that you and . . . you and . . . I—­ Patrick?” he said. “Patrick, are you all right?”

The man's face had turned bright red. His eyes bulged from their sockets as if he was having a stroke.

Instead, though, his mouth opened, his head tilted back—­and he laughed. He positively guffawed.

“Kill the president?” he said. “
Kill
him?”

Hollingshead blinked in confusion.

“Rupert, why would I do that? The man and I play squash together, for God's sake.”

GEORGETOWN, D.C.: MARCH 26, 08:42

Chapel moved quickly out of the kitchen and through the first floor of the safe house, keeping his back to each wall, flanking each doorway as he moved but not wasting any time. He saw no one so he moved into a tasteful if somewhat cluttered parlor in the front. Peeking through the blinds that covered the windows, he could see the guards still arguing with Top and his boys. Chapel had to grin at that—­he'd known his old physical therapist would help, had known it even before he'd made the call. But he'd had no idea that every single one of the boys would come with him, or that they would commit to their ruse so intently. Chapel had mostly expected them to show up, ask for Norton, and then politely leave when security showed up.

Instead it looked like they'd installed themselves on the sidewalk for as much time as it took for the guards to drag them away. Of course, eventually Norton's ­people would just call the police. But maybe enough of the cops were busy out on Capitol Hill, and it would take them a long time to arrive . . .

Chapel was playing for time. If he could stay alive and free in the house until Angel reported in, if he could confront Norton with the news that his drone wasn't going to be killing anyone today, they might have a chance. Charlotte Holman had been as devoted to the Initiative as anyone, but she was also a practical woman. When she thought the cause was hopeless, she had folded in a hurry. Chapel thought Norton would do the same, especially if Hollingshead allowed the SecDef a graceful exit.

Of course, all that depended on Angel and Chapel pulling off a ­couple of miracles in the next fifteen minutes.

The first floor was empty. The security detail had been smart enough to leave one man on the back door, but otherwise all of them had flooded out into the street to deal with Top. Chapel moved into the front hall and up to the main door. He locked it and threw the dead bolt. That wouldn't stop the guards forever—­once they realized they'd been locked out of the house, they would batter the door down if they had to—­but it might buy him a minute or two.