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.
The coast looked clear. Chapel took the cop’s gun and his cell phone. Digging through the pouches on the cop’s belt, he found a pair of handcuffs. He dragged the cop the few feet over to the scaffolding that held the water tank. One cuff went easily around a support girder, and the other locked in place around the cop’s wrist. Chapel grabbed the handcuff key from the same pouch and threw it away into the gravel.
Then he went and found the cop’s radio. It was still on, though no one was currently broadcasting. He switched the radio off and then stomped on it until it broke.
Eventually someone was going to call the cop to get his location and status. When the cop didn’t answer, other cops would come looking for him. Chapel had no idea how long that would take, but there was nothing he could do about it.
He was just going to have to get Angel out first.
He walked across the gravel toward the trailer with a lump in his throat. Angel was probably his best friend in the world, if he thought about it. She had saved his life so many times, of course, but she’d also been his confidante, the person he talked to when he couldn’t talk to anybody else. The person who’d helped him through some very dark times, the person who’d given him great advice when he really needed it. Even if he hadn’t always taken it.
She had always believed in him. When he needed it the most, when he’d been so full of self-doubt he didn’t think he could go on, she had helped him find the strength.
And she had the sexiest voice he’d ever heard.
He stopped before the door of the trailer and tried to peer in through the window. It looked like it had been covered over with black paper, but maybe she had some way of seeing out, anyway. Maybe a hidden camera. He lifted one hand in greeting. “Angel,” he said, “it’s me. I need to come in. I swear I’m not here to hurt you or anything. Our — our mutual friend sent me to make sure you come out of this okay.”