“Because,” Chapel had said, “if I can show an enlisted man like you how to swim, sorry sack of guts that you are, I can surely figure out how to do it with my own glorious and beautiful officer’s body.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Top had said. “Now get in that goddamned pool or I will throw you in.”
Now — years later — Chapel was up to twenty laps at a time, in less than an hour. He would never do the butterfly crawl again, but he’d mastered a kind of half stroke that used his arm mostly for steering and let his legs do all the work. Fort Belvoir had a wonderful pool in its fitness center, and he availed himself of it daily.
There was no feeling like it.
The blood-warm water streamed past him, buoying him up like gentle hands. He didn’t have to think about anything else while he swam — he just focused on his body, on his movements. His muscles moved in perfect concert, his arm and his legs snapping into an old familiar rhythm. His head turned from side to side as he drew in each breath and let it out again in a long, slow exhale. There was no better feeling in the world.
Thanks, Top, he thought, as he kicked off for the start of lap seventeen.
The last time he’d seen Top had been at the master gunnery sergeant’s wedding, less than a year previous. Top had walked down the aisle with two legs and two arms — the only way anyone could tell he wasn’t whole was that he was wearing an eye patch. Chapel had gotten to know Top’s bride a little bit and she had turned out to be the toughest, most sarcastic woman he’d ever met. She needed to be if she was going to keep up with Top.
Lap eighteen. Chapel would have stayed in the pool all day if he could have. He needed to get back to work, though. The frustration and boredom of his morning and of Major Volks’s rejection were gone, or at least he’d worked off enough of that negativity to actually start drafting some memos of his own.
Still. Maybe he’d shoot for twenty-five laps today.
Across the pool. Back. He kicked off for lap nineteen.
And then stopped himself in the water before he’d gone five yards out.
“Hello?” he said.
A man in a pin-striped suit was standing at the edge of the pool, looking down at him. He had a thick white towel in his hands and something else. A BlackBerry, maybe.
“Can I help you with something? Make it quick, though,” Chapel said. “I’m pretty good on the straightaways, but treading water isn’t exactly my forte.”
Anyone wearing that kind of suit in Fort Belvoir was a civilian, and Chapel had a bad moment where he thought the guy might be some kind of CEO from one of the corporations he was watchdogging. The buzz-cut hair said otherwise, though, as did the sheer bulk of muscle crammed into the jacket.
Chapel was trained in Military Intelligence. He’d studied all the different ways to put clues together, to draw conclusions from scant evidence. From just the look of this guy he knew right away that he had to be CIA.
The agency had tentacles everywhere, and there were plenty of them wrapped around INSCOM and Fort Belvoir. They tended to stay in other parts of the fort though, where Chapel couldn’t see them, and he’d always been happy about that. Military Intelligence and civilian spies never got along.
“Listen, if you just came to watch the freak go for a swim, that’s fine,” Chapel said, because the guy still hadn’t told him what he wanted. “But then I’ll just get back to it.”
The agency guy shook his head, slowly. And then he started to laugh. His whole body shook as he guffawed and chortled and chuckled.
Chapel swam over to the edge of the pool and dragged himself out. Water poured off him in torrents as he stormed around the side of the pool, headed straight for the laughing bastard. If fraternizing with Sara could cost him his career, punching out a CIA man could get him thrown in the brig, but at that moment he did not give one good goddamn. Nobody laughed at Jim Chapel like that.
Before he could land the punch, though, the CIA bastard lifted the BlackBerry he was holding and held it up at Chapel’s eye level. Chapel saw that it was his own smartphone. The one he’d left at his desk when he headed for the pool.
The screen said he had twenty-seven new text messages, and three new voice mails. Chapel grabbed the phone and scrolled through the phone’s logs. Every single message had come from the same number. There were e-mails, too, from a military address he didn’t recognize, but he knew with a cold certainty they came from the same person who’d sent all those texts.
“When you didn’t answer,” the CIA man said, still burbling with mirth, “they sent me to come find you. We have to go. Now. The man who’s been trying to contact you is not the kind of person you keep waiting.”
Chapel stared into his eyes. They were hazel, green in the middle and gold around the edges, and they were full of laughter, still.
“Give me that,” Chapel said, and grabbed the towel.
FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+4:03
Chapel read one of the e-mails for the third time, still not sure what the hell was going on. It went on for pages, but most of that was just boilerplate confidentiality statements — legalese describing what exactly would happen to anyone who forwarded or printed out the e-mail. Standard stuff for military intelligence. The only real content of the e-mail was a single line of tersely written text:
Report instanter DIA DX Pentagon for new orders. Reply to acknowledge.
Chapel understood all that just fine. DIA was the Defense Intelligence Agency, the top level of the military intelligence pyramid. DX was the Directorate for Defense Counterintelligence and HUMINT — HUMINT being Human Intelligence, or good old-fashioned spycraft. DX was the group that used to give him his orders back when he was a theater operative in Afghanistan, but he hadn’t worked for them for a long time — these days his work was handled directly by INSCOM, and he hadn’t so much as spoken to anyone in the DIA in five years.
Technically, of course, he still had to answer all the way up that chain, and if somebody at the DIA wanted him to show up at their office and get new orders, he was required to do so. But what on earth could they want him for?
“You know anything about this, Laughing Boy?” he asked the CIA goon.
Laughing Boy shook his head. The very idea seemed to set him off on another chuckling fit. “I just do as I’m told.”
Chapel stared at the man. His involvement in this — even if it just came down to fetching Chapel when he wouldn’t answer his phone — added a whole new wrinkle of weirdness. On paper the DIA and the civilian CIA worked hand in glove, but everyone in the intelligence community knew there was a permanent divide and lasting hatred between the defense department and the civilian intelligence organizations. They never shared anything with each other unless they were legally required to. If the CIA and the DIA were working together, then that could only mean something really bad had happened and that rivalry had been put aside long enough to clean it up.
And somehow that meant they needed a one-armed captain from INSCOM to hold the bucket and the mop.
Chapel rubbed vigorously with the towel at the skin on the left side of his chest. Laughing Boy raised an eyebrow and Chapel grunted in frustration. “My skin has to be dry or the electrodes don’t work right. Do you mind? I need to get dressed.”
Laughing Boy kept giggling, but he stepped aside to let Chapel head for the locker room. Chapel sat down on a wooden bench inside and picked up the arm. It only weighed nine pounds — lighter than the original. Its silicone cover looked exactly like a real human arm up until you reached the shoulder, where it flared out into a pair of molded clamps. Putting it on was simplicity — he simply drew it over the stump of his shoulder until it fit snugly. The arm recognized automatically that it was on and the clamps squeezed down gently on Chapel’s flesh until it was locked into place.