The Cyclops Initiative (7 page)

“That's enough.” Hollingshead lifted his chin and looked over at a Humvee that was heading toward them—­clearly the transport he'd requested. “Captain, I'm temporarily relieving you from duty.”

“What the hell?”

The director kept his eyes on the approaching vehicle. “Effective immediately. Your behavior today has been inexcusable. Am I understood?”

Chapel fought for words. “Sir, I'm very sorry about throwing that chair, but—­”

“I said, ‘Am I understood'?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hollingshead nodded. “Don't attempt to contact me or my office. I'll let you know when I think enough time has passed.”

The Humvee pulled up in front of them. The driver jumped out and ran around the front of the vehicle to open Hollingshead's door.

Chapel felt like he might fall over.

Relieved of duty. For conduct unbecoming an officer.

It was just about the worst thing anyone had ever said to Chapel. He couldn't believe it.

It also meant he had very little left to lose. “This has been coming for a while. You've been trying to find a graceful way to get rid of me, haven't you? That's what Wilkes was for. My replacement. I screwed up and now you're just done with me, because one time I made a mistake. A mistake you also made, if we're being honest—­”

Hollingshead took his hand from his pocket. He shoved a finger in Chapel's chest. “We're done here, Captain. Very much done.”

Then he did something very strange. He opened his hand and a scrap of paper fell from it, a piece of paper no larger than an inch on any side.

Chapel moved quickly to cover the scrap of paper with his shoe. An old spy reflex.

Without another word Hollingshead climbed into the Humvee. Chapel watched it go. Then he made a show of bending over to tie his shoe, which gave him a chance to move the piece of paper into his pocket.

Beyond that he was too shocked and confused to know what to do.

Left to his own devices, stranded at NSA headquarters, eventually he ordered a cab. He had no idea where to go, so he just told the driver to take him to the nearest train station.

Only when they were under way and clear of Fort Meade altogether did Chapel feel safe to look at the scrap of paper. Holding it cupped in his hand, he read it over and over again.

There wasn't much on it. A set of map coordinates—­latitude and longitude for someplace in New York City, he thought. And underneath that a short message:

FIND HER FIRST

NEW YORK CITY: MARCH 21, 15:45

Chapel jumped off the train at Penn Station in Manhattan and ran all the way to the subway. Angel had taught him long ago that it was the fastest way to move around New York, if you didn't have access to a helicopter. He got lucky and found a train just pulling into the station. He dashed through the opening doors and found the commuters inside staring at him as if he were insane. This being New York, they quickly averted their collective gaze.

He wasn't surprised he looked crazy. He was feeling pretty crazy.

Those things he'd said to Hollingshead—­they really were inexcusable. Especially since, apparently, the director still had
some
confidence in him. Enough to give him new orders.

Find her first—­find Angel before Wilkes could get to her. And then . . . what? Chapel could guess that Hollingshead didn't want Chapel to bring Angel in. They had both known what would happen to her, with the NSA providing evidence of her guilt. She'd be lucky if she didn't end up waterboarded, worked over by the CIA until she gave them what they wanted to hear.

And she would. Eventually, she would name names. Because that was how torture—­even “enhanced interrogation”—­worked. You told your persecutors anything to get them to stop. You made things up, if you had to. Would she claim to be working for the Chinese? Or domestic terrorists? It depended on how they phrased the questions. At least she wouldn't suffer for long. Angel was not a field agent and had never had any training on how to resist interrogation. It wouldn't take long for her to break down.

Chapel had no doubt of her innocence. The NSA could claim she was responsible for the hijacking, but that just meant somebody had hacked into the DIA databases and stolen her identity.

Right?

That was supposed to be impossible—­she'd said so herself, but—­

As the train shot through the tunnels under Manhattan, Chapel forced himself to think like an intelligence operative. To actually look at this thing with logic and deductive reasoning. What if Angel was guilty? Just as a hypothetical?

It would explain, perhaps, why she'd gone dark. Why, in the middle of a conversation, she'd cut her own phone connection. Maybe she'd gotten some word that she was about to be arrested and so she'd disappeared. Maybe Chapel would arrive at the coordinates Hollingshead gave him and find that she'd run off with a briefcase full of foreign money. The fact that she'd been unreachable ever since didn't look good.

Then again—­the timing was off. Chapel had spoken to her a half hour after the Predator attack in New Orleans. She hadn't sounded like somebody in a hurry or like someone who had just committed treason. She'd sounded like her old self. Unless they had some serious dramatic training, it was next to impossible for somebody in that situation to sound cool and collected. It was why they trained airport security guards to look for ­people who seemed agitated and sweaty. No matter how committed you were as a terrorist, you couldn't hide your own body's reaction to what was going on.

Angel had sounded breezy and unconcerned. And then she had just disappeared.

The other big clue to her innocence was that Hollingshead clearly believed in her. He'd risked a great deal sending Chapel after her, moments after he'd given Wilkes the order to bring her in. If Chapel's new orders ever got out, Hollingshead would earn himself a cell right next to Angel's in Guantánamo Bay.

So there were two things pointing to her innocence. Not that either of them would hold up in court.

Rationally—­purely hypothetically—­Chapel considered the possibility that Angel had carried out the attack . . . under Hollingshead's orders. That the two of them were in collusion, paid by a foreign power to destroy the economy of the United States. Both of them traitors. And now, if Chapel helped Angel escape, he would be signing on with their cause, a patsy in their grand plan.

Complete bullshit, of course. Chapel had known Angel and Hollingshead for years. He trusted them a lot more than he trusted anyone else in the government. He would believe that half the U.S. Senate were foreign spies before he would accept that Hollingshead had betrayed his country.

He heard a chime over his head and looked up, half expecting to see a time bomb wired to the roof of the subway car. It was that kind of day. Instead it was just a prerecorded announcement. “The next stop on this train will be Queens Plaza,” the voice said.

Chapel nodded to himself. A ways to go yet—­the coordinates were for a place way out on the edge of Queens, not far from JFK airport. He still had time to think.

But he was already sure of one thing. He was going to find Angel. Angel, the most important woman in his life, the woman he'd never actually met before. He was going to meet her face-­to-­face for the very first time.

And he was going to save her. No matter what that meant.

QUEENS, NY: MARCH 21, 16:22

Apparently it meant breaking the law.

Chapel's smartphone showed that Angel's coordinates were located inside a railroad yard, a big triangle of Queens real estate surrounded by fences covered in barbed wire. Through the chain-­link fence Chapel could see boxcars quietly rusting on sidings, endless stretches of railroad track curling through a wasteland of gravel where weeds sprung up uncut between wooden ties that had cracked and broken from years in the sun. A desolate, quiet place, normally, the stillness punctuated only by the occasional distant whistle or the sudden metallic thud of switches moving in their grooves.

Normally—­but now it was lit with splashes of red and blue light, and the quiet was broken by the sound of police radios squawking back and forth.

It seemed Wilkes had done the smart thing. Normal protocol for a mission like this would be to maintain discretion. You didn't want to give your target any reason to suspect you were coming, so you went in alone by the most devious route you could find.

Instead, Wilkes had called the cops before he arrived. He'd mobilized dozens of police cruisers to surround the area so that if Angel tried to run, she would find herself surrounded. It wasn't how Chapel would have done it, but it made sense. Angel was no field agent. He sincerely doubted she was even armed. Why wouldn't Wilkes make this easy on himself? Why not make it impossible for anyone else to help her? The marine was no fool, it seemed.

Chapel found a position where he could observe the terrain without being spotted, but it wasn't easy. The cops had set up patrols that kept moving around the fence, checking for any sign of movement. Chapel had been forced to take up a position in an old empty water tank right on the edge of the rail yard. The metal wall of the tank had rusted through on one side, giving Chapel a chance to look out and see what was going on.

He checked the map on his phone again. The exact location seemed to be a trailer about a hundred yards away. It was the newest thing in this decayed section of the yard, but it hardly stood out. The paint on its aluminum sides was peeling and its wheels had been removed, the body of the trailer propped up on cinder blocks. It didn't look like much, unless you noticed the thick bundle of cables that snaked through one of its windows. Those cables ran through a thicket of bushes and disappeared into the chaos of the yard. There were far too many of them to just provide power or even a standard Internet connection to the trailer.

It was exactly the kind of setup that Angel would need. A place that was out of the way and unlikely to be disturbed. Plenty of power and data access. And it was mobile if it needed to be—­a helicopter could come in and pick up that trailer and move it to a whole different state on very short notice. When Chapel had first seen the coordinates, he'd been surprised. He used to live in Brooklyn, not an hour away, and he'd thought how crazy it had been that he'd been so close to Angel the whole time and had no idea where she physically was. But looking at the trailer, he realized she might have been moving around constantly.

Below him a policeman slowly passed by, scanning the ground for any sign of trouble. The cop wore full body armor and had a submachine gun slung at his hip. He didn't even glance in the direction of the trailer. Chapel was pretty sure Wilkes hadn't arrived yet, and that the police had been instructed to secure the area but not to take any further action. They might not even know that it was the trailer they were guarding.

Hollingshead might have stalled Wilkes, holding out on providing the coordinates for as long as he could. Or maybe Wilkes had just driven from Fort Meade up to New York and gotten stuck in traffic.

Either way, Chapel had a little breathing room. But not much. He needed to move now. Too bad that cop was down there. There was no way for Chapel to get out of the water tower and over to the trailer without being seen. There just wasn't enough cover.

Chapel had no desire to add assaulting a police officer to his rap sheet, but it looked like there was no choice.

He waited until the cop was almost directly below him. Then he gently pushed against the rusted wall of the water tank. It peeled away like wet cardboard, but not without squealing loud enough to get the cop's attention.

Six feet below, the cop looked up, right at where Chapel hid. Chapel just had time to register the look of surprise on the cop's face.

If it had been a soldier down there, with a soldier's training, he would have backed the hell up and reached for his weapon. He would have had plenty of time to get half a dozen shots into Chapel's center of mass.

But it was a policeman with police training, and so his first thought was to reach for his radio and call in.

He never got the chance. Chapel leaped down on top of him, knocking the radio into the air. The cop just had time to get one arm up over his face before the two of them went crashing into the gravel. Belatedly the cop reached for his weapon, but Chapel was ready for that and brought his artificial fist down hard on the cop's wrist, pinning it to the ground.

NYPD training wasn't completely useless. The cop tried to roll over on top of Chapel, switching their positions. But Chapel was ready for that and dug his knee into the gravel and locked himself in place. The cop tried to punch at Chapel's head with his free hand, his gloved fist headed not for Chapel's nose or ears but for his throat in a blow that might have incapacitated or even killed an opponent—­if it landed.

Instead Chapel grabbed the cop's striking hand with his own good hand. They struggled for a second, purely a contest of strength. Chapel had been trained for this and he knew three ways to end this fight. The cop's body armor ruled out two of them.

So he settled for the oldest, dirtiest trick in the book. He brought his knee up hard into the cop's groin. Not exactly a fair tactic, but it worked.

The cop's breath exploded out of him into Chapel's face. His arms went slack for a second and Chapel let go of the cop's hands, then reached up under the armored collar of his vest and found the carotid arteries.

He had no desire to kill this man. Instead he just put pressure on those arteries, cutting the flow of oxygen to the cop's brain. That was a good way to give somebody permanent brain damage if you didn't know what you were doing. Chapel, however, was trained by the Army Rangers in how to make sure that didn't happen. He applied the pressure just long enough to make the cop lose consciousness.

As the cop's head rolled to the side and his eyes fluttered up into their sockets, Chapel let go and slid off the inert body. Only then did he bother to look around to see if anyone was watching.