“I have no idea what he’ll do,” Chapel said, which was the truth. He and Wilkes had never come to like each other, even after months holed up together on the stakeout. Protocol said Wilkes should save Chapel from the cops just because it was good practice not to let your fellow spies get interrogated. But Hollingshead’s directorate had never been very strict on protocol. “Look,” Chapel said, “is it really going to hurt so much just to tell me your name?”
The cop frowned. “You want a name? Larry Peters. That’s not me, that’s the guy you beat up on your way in. I doubt you asked him what his name was before you cuffed him to that water tower. I’ve worked with Peters for six years. He’s had my back more times than I can count. He’s a good man.”
“I’m sure he is,” Chapel tried, but the sergeant wasn’t finished.
“He’s got a wife. Baked cookies for me once, the first time I got shot. If I have to go home and tell her that her husband is in the hospital, or maybe that he’s paralyzed because he got in the way of some fed—”
“He’s okay,” Chapel said. “I know how to incapacitate someone without injury.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Chapel didn’t know if there was a right thing. The sergeant was getting angry, working himself up. Never a good thing in a man who was pointing a gun at you. “You’d better hope your friend in there comes back out in a good mood. You’d better hope he gives me a very good reason not to press charges—”
“Sir!” It was one of the other cops. “Sir — you might want to—”
The sergeant whirled around to face his man. “What is it, Fredericks? Can’t you see I’m busy with our prisoner?”
“Sorry, sir, but — it’s — well—”
“What the hell is that noise?” the sergeant asked.
“That’s what I was trying to talk to you about,” the cop replied. Then he pointed across the gravel yard at the robot that was noisily trundling toward them.
It was mounted on heavy treads, and it was the size of a very large dog. It had two grasping arms and a rudimentary sort of head — just a pair of cameras on a metal stalk, and what looked like the edging attachment from a vacuum cleaner. It carried a long metal pole in front of it that looked to Chapel like nothing so much as a fishing pole.
And it was coming straight toward them at high speed.
“What is it?” Chapel asked.
One of the cops answered. “That’s our bomb disposal robot. We brought it out in case the trailer was booby-trapped. The bomb squad guys must have gotten bored and took it out for a spin.” He laughed. “Those assholes are always playing pranks, ’cause they’ve got nothing better to do.”
“Any second now they’ll make it do a donut,” another cop added, “and then it’ll say ‘Johnny Five is alive’ or just ‘Wall-Eeee’ or something. Those guys are nuts.”
The robot’s treads spun out over the loose gravel, sending up a billowing plume of gray dust in its wake. It did not stop or do a donut or say anything.
“What’s that pole on its front?” Chapel asked. “The part that sticks out.”
“Remote detonation arm,” one of the cops said. “Sometimes when you find a bomb, the best thing you can do is just clear the area and set it off where it is.”
“All right, that’s enough,” the sergeant said. “No talking to the prisoner.”
Chapel shook his head. “Wait. Just wait a second. Remote detonation — the way you do that—” He’d seen bomb removal robots in Afghanistan. When you found an IED in the road out there, you had to call in the bomb people, and nine times out of ten they would send one of their robots. He remembered that they got rid of the IEDs by blowing them up there, too. And the way you did that was to detonate it by hitting it with a charge of explosives.
He peered across the gravel at the approaching robot, at its remote detonation arm. There was something clamped to the end of the pole, a big wad of something white and shapeless.
Semtex, Chapel thought. Plastic explosive. Maybe a pound of it, or maybe more.
And the robot kept getting closer, headed right for them. No — headed for the trailer—
“Wilkes!” Chapel shouted. “Out of there now! Everybody scatter and get your heads down!”
There was no time to stop the thing — it was moving too fast. Still, some of the cops turned and faced it with their submachine guns, looks of confusion on their faces but they could feel it, feel that something very bad was about to happen. Chapel started to run. The sergeant shouted for him to freeze and lifted his weapon to his eye.
Chapel figured he would just have to take his chances.
He ran.
It didn’t take long for the robot to cross the last stretch of gravel and ram into the side of the trailer. Chapel didn’t so much as turn his head to look back, so when a second later the shock wave lifted all the gravel under his feet and threw him to the ground, he wasn’t quite ready. He fell hard on his hands, scraping silicone skin off his artificial wrist, squinting his eyes shut as the dusty gravel pelted his face. It turned out to be a good thing he’d been knocked down. He heard debris whiz past him fast enough it would have taken his head off, felt hot pieces of metal bounce off his back. The noise of the explosion was loud enough that it deafened him, leaving his ears ringing and his chest burning as the air was ripped from his lungs.
Down on his knees in the gravel he reached for the hard drive hidden in his tunic. It was fine — his body had sheltered it from the blast.
Only then did he look back.
Part of the trailer remained intact, a jagged corner of aluminum sticking up at an angle. Debris was everywhere, some of it smoldering on the gravel — green chipboards and shards of black plastic and twisted, unidentifiable pieces of metal. He didn’t see much blood. The cops in their body armor must have listened to him and gotten their heads down — only the sergeant looked injured, a big gash running down one of his cheeks. He was staring at something only he could see.
Chapel saw no sign of Wilkes. Had he made it out of the trailer? It didn’t look good.
Poor bastard. Chapel might not have liked him much, but he was a fellow silent warrior. An intelligence operative. Even his family would never know how he died, the sacrifice he’d made to stop the hijacker.
The sergeant turned and looked at Chapel. His eyes still weren’t focusing, but he seemed to be getting over the shock of the blast. He looked like he was shouting, but Chapel heard his voice as only a whisper. “Somebody,” he said. “Somebody arrest… get that…” It was like he only had a thin stock of words left to him and he was burning through them fast. “His fault,” he managed. “Somehow.” Then he waved one arm in Chapel’s direction.
The cops who had recovered faster started to get up, started to reach for their weapons. Chapel got shakily to his feet. He felt like every bone in his body had been disconnected from all the others, like if he moved too fast he would just dissolve into a big pile of Jell-O. Little spots kept dancing in front of his eyes.
One of the cops managed to stagger toward him and shout something Chapel couldn’t really hear. His ears were still buzzing from the explosion.
But then another of the cops looked up in the air and shouted “Shit!” and started dancing backward. The others looked up and followed suit.
The pebbled glass door of the shower from the trailer — still miraculously intact — was spinning in the air above them like a thrown playing card. As soon as Chapel saw it, it was like the law of gravity had been momentarily suspended but now was going to be enforced with a vengeance. It came down hard on the gravel and shattered in a white cloud of glass fragments that shot out in every direction.