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
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.
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.