He wasn’t worried that she would attack him when he opened the door. He just didn’t want to scare her. She must know by now that she was in trouble. She was tuned in to news feeds and government communication channels like nobody else. Knowing that he was coming to help might alleviate her fear a little.
Even if Chapel had no idea what their next move would be. That didn’t matter. Together they would figure something out. They’d always been an incredible team.
A short flight of metal steps led up to the door. He climbed them easily, then thumbed the latch. The door wasn’t locked. He swung it open and stepped inside.
There was no light in the trailer except the wan sunlight that streamed in through the door. At first he could see nothing. Eventually he started making out blocky shapes in the gloom, and then he saw little LEDs flashing at the far end of the trailer. Green and yellow lights on a router. A red light on a powered-down monitor.
He found a light switch and turned it on, then closed the door behind him. Now that he could see, he made a quick inventory of the contents of the trailer. There was a narrow camp bed made up with hospital corners. It looked like it hadn’t been slept in for some time. There was a little kitchen area with a microwave and a tiny sink. An even smaller shower with a pebbled glass door. The rest of the trailer was filled with high-end computer equipment, big black boxes all chained together with countless loops of Ethernet cable. There were six different monitors, none the same size, and three keyboards. There were server racks mounted on the walls and a projector hanging from the ceiling.
Sitting in the middle of all the computer equipment, propped up on a folding metal chair, was a small server rack with four slots for hard drives. All of them were busy chugging away, their activity lights strobing in the dark. On the front of the server rack’s face someone had attached a strip of masking tape, and written on the tape in permanent marker were the words:
“ANGEL” NEURAL NETWORK V. 7.4
Chapel didn’t understand. He refused to understand.
He refused to accept what he was looking at. It just couldn’t be right.
Sure, he’d had the thought once, years ago. Back when he was first starting to work with Angel and he’d spent far too much time wondering what she looked like, what kind of woman was behind that sexy voice in his ear. He’d jokingly considered the fact that she might actually be a three-hundred-pound man using a voice modulator. Or maybe even that Angel wasn’t a person at all, that she was …
No. It couldn’t be true.
He forgot all about the fact that he was running out of time. That he needed to get out of here before Wilkes arrived. He put the submachine gun down on the floor and walked over to the server rack where it sat on the folding chair. Squatting down, he read the piece of masking tape again, thinking maybe he’d misinterpreted it.
The server rack almost seemed to breathe, or maybe just to crackle with static electricity as he raised a hand to touch it.
When Angel spoke to him, his whole body flinched.
“Is someone there? This is private property. Leave now or I’m calling the police.”
It was the voice he knew so well, the one he’d flirted with, the one he’d told all his secrets. It came from a set of speakers mounted on top of one of the dead monitors.
He saw a microphone mounted above the largest of the keyboards. Leaning close to it, he said, “Angel? Is that you?”
“You’re in serious trouble, whoever you are. But you can fix it by turning around and leaving right now. This is your last warning,” she said.
“Angel — it’s me. It’s Chapel.”
“Chapel?”
One of the monitors flickered to life. It showed a plain gray window full of code he didn’t know how to read, making him think of the Predator drone activity logs he’d seen back at NSA headquarters. As soon as his brain made that connection he shook his head — no, it was nothing like that. There was more to Angel than just—
“Chapel, you weren’t ever supposed to come here,” she said.
“I know, but we were out of options,” he said.
“We? Who’s we?”
Chapel sighed. “I was sent here by… our mutual friend,” he said. It was a code phrase the two of them sometimes used when discussing Hollingshead. He didn’t want to name the director, not here. He was sure that everything he said in the trailer was being recorded. Somebody might be listening in, even now — maybe the person who hijacked the Predator. The person who was trying to frame Angel. Chapel tried to think it through, think about what he needed to do here. But he was still reeling from the discovery that Angel was—
“Angel, am I looking at you right now?” he asked.
“Chapel, you weren’t ever supposed to come here.”
He frowned. That was exactly what she’d said before. Not just the same words — the same inflection. The same emphasis.
“What’s a neural network?” he asked.
“A neural network is a computational array designed to mimic the process by which living nervous systems process information. Instead of running programs line by line, the network distributes information through a series of weighted—”
“Enough,” Chapel said, and she fell silent. He placed his good hand on top of the server stack. Its warmth radiated up through his palm, the way he would have felt warmth if he’d touched a human being. This was just too weird. “Tell me the truth, Angel. Do you exist? I mean, are you a human being? Or are you some kind of artificial intelligence that I’ve been talking to, some computer program designed to fool me into thinking—” He couldn’t finish that sentence.
She was his best friend in the world. Maybe the only friend he had left. And she wasn’t even real. Just some virtual woman created to gain his trust, designed — written — by some computer programmer, given that sexy voice because they knew how Chapel would respondto it—
“Chapel?” she said.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said very softly.
“Chapel?”
Another screen lit up. It showed more lines of code, scrolling down the screen far faster than any human being could read them. Then a third screen came to life, but this time it showed a video feed.
“Chapel, someone is outside,” she told him.
He studied the screen. It showed the gravel yard outside the trailer — he could see the old water tank in the distance and he imagined the camera must be located just outside the trailer’s door.
Maybe a dozen police in riot gear were approaching, taking their time about it but doing it right. They all had their guns up, ready to shoot anything that moved. In front of the pack of cops was a man in an army uniform. He didn’t seem to be armed. The camera’s resolution wasn’t good enough for Chapel to make out his facial features, but he didn’t need to.
Wilkes had arrived.
“Chapel, you weren’t ever supposed to come here,” Angel said.
“Yeah, you figured that out, huh? Well, it’s true. I’m not here in any kind of official capacity. You remember this guy?” Chapel said, tapping the screen that showed the video feed. It felt weird, like he was tapping her on the shoulder. “You remember Wilkes?”
“I worked with him once,” Angel said.
“Yeah. Well, he’s here to arrest you. I don’t know what he’ll do when he finds out what you are.” No time for carefully picking words now, he decided. “I was supposed to find you first. Get you to safety. I don’t even know what that means now. I mean, our mutual friend must have known what I would find, right? But what did he expect me to do? Unplug you and carry you out of here?”