The noise of the impact could be heard five miles away.
“Oh God, no, please,” Mitchell whimpered.
He couldn’t hear his own voice. His ears weren’t working. The afterimage of the flash filled his eyes, made him blind. He could still feel pain, though.
He was down on the concrete, and he felt like half his face had been scraped off. There was blood on his cheek, wet and hot. He struggled to get up, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even get up on his knees.
As his eyes slowly cleared he saw pools of burning jet fuel all around him, saw chunks of dull gray metal strewn everywhere.
He still couldn’t hear anything.
That wasn’t the worst of it. Something had hit him in the back. Something hard and sharp. His first thought had been that he’d been struck by a bullet, but it had been much bigger than that and it had knocked him down like a giant hand pressing him against the floor.
Whatever it was, it was still back there. He was — he was impaled on it.
Blood was pouring from his stomach. From where the piece of debris had punched right through the lead vest he wore — and the flesh inside it. He’d been so worried about radiation. That didn’t seem so terrifying anymore.
In the distance he heard the sirens of emergency vehicles, coming closer.
He wondered if they would make it in time.
He wondered if he would ever see his little baby girl again.
PART 1
“If I were you,” the marine said, “I’d think real careful about my next move. There’s a lot riding on this.”
Jim Chapel stared the man right in the eye. As usual, there was nothing there. Years of clandestine missions in the Middle East had given Marine sergeant Brent Wilkes total control over his facial expressions. The man just didn’t have a tell as far as Chapel could see.
And he was right — there was a lot at stake. Chapel glanced down at the table and did a mental calculation. Two sixes showing, and Chapel only had queen high. If Wilkes wasn’t bluffing, the game could be over right here.
Chapel sighed and threw his cards down on the table. He found that he couldn’t care less. “Fold,” he said.
Wilkes’s mouth bent in a fraction of a grin and he grabbed for the pot — nearly a full bag of potato chips. He stuffed them in his mouth one after another with the precision that marked everything he did.
Chapel had spent three months in the smelly motel room with Wilkes, as much as sixteen hours out of every day, and he still couldn’t get a read on his partner. Wilkes didn’t seem to care about anything except poker — he didn’t read, he didn’t watch TV, he just wanted to play cards. After the first week, Chapel had realized how outclassed he was and had refused to play for money anymore. They didn’t have anything else to wager with, so they’d played with potato chips instead. It didn’t seem to matter to Wilkes. He played the game to win, not to make money.
The floor around the marine’s chair was littered with a drift of empty potato chip bags. He ate each little crumb of chip that he won, scouring the table bare, but then he just dropped the empty bags on the floor, completely uninterested in keeping the room clean. At the end of each day Chapel picked up the bags and threw them out, knowing he would get to do it again the next day.
And meanwhile nothing whatsoever changed with the case.
They were holed up in the motel because a high-profile black marketeer had taken a room there, too. The motel was a place where he could meet and make deals with military personnel from the nearby Aberdeen Proving Ground. A lot of very expensive military hardware had gone missing from Aberdeen, and intelligence suggested it all came through this motel. Chapel had identified one Harris Contorni as the buyer, a former army corporal who had been dishonorably discharged. He’d gathered enough evidence to show that Contorni had connections to East Coast organized crime. Chapel had thought that once he identified the culprit his involvement with this case would be finished. After all, chasing low-level crooks like Contorni was way below his pay grade.
Instead he’d been ordered to see the case through. Which meant a semipermanent stakeout of the motel where Contorni lived. Chapel had planted listening devices all through Contorni’s room and phone and car and then he’d moved into a room three doors down and then Wilkes had shown up and Chapel had gotten the worst sinking feeling of his life.
His boss had given him scutwork to do. And then he’d assigned Chapel a babysitter just in case.
It was a pretty clear vote of no confidence.
And one he’d earned, he supposed. He’d screwed up badly the year before on a mission in Siberia. Put a lot of people in danger. Even though he’d fixed things, even though he’d completed his mission, he knew his boss, Director Hollingshead, must have lost a lot of faith in him.
“Wanna play again?” Wilkes asked.
“Not now,” Chapel said. He looked at the cards scattered across the table and realized he didn’t even care enough to pick them up and put them away. This case was turning him into a slob — breaking his lifetime habit of cleaning up after himself.
Months had passed with no sign whatsoever that Contorni was putting together another deal. Months of doing nothing but breathing in Wilkes’s air. Chapel was losing his edge. Getting rusty.
“All right,” Wilkes said. “You mind if I run down to the store, get some soda? All these chips I keep winning make me so dry I don’t even piss anymore. I just fart salt.”
Chapel waved one hand in the air, careful not to express disgust. It would just encourage worse behavior. Wilkes left without another word.
When he was gone, Chapel checked the laptop on the nightstand, but there was nothing there. Contorni hadn’t made a call in six hours, and though he’d driven approximately sixty miles in his car over the last twenty-four hours, he had gone nowhere near the Proving Ground. Nothing. As usual.
Chapel sat down hard on the bed. He considered doing some calisthenics, but the room already smelled like sweat and dirty laundry. Maybe later. Instead he reached into his pocket and took out his hands-free device. He stared at it for a while, knowing he was probably making a mistake, but then he shoved it in his ear and pressed the power button.
“Angel,” he said, “are you there?”
“Always, sugar,” she replied.
He closed his eyes and let himself smile a little. That voice… it was like having someone breathe softly on the back of his neck. It made him feel good like nothing else did anymore.
He hadn’t spoken to Angel in weeks. He’d missed it.
He had never met her. He had no idea what she looked like or where she was located. He didn’t even know her real name — he’d started calling her Angel and it just stuck, and now even his boss referred to her that way. He’d chosen the name because when he was in the field she worked as his guardian angel. If Chapel needed to look up the criminal record of a deadly assassin or just find the best route through traffic during a car chase, she was the one with the answers he needed. More than that, she had walked him through some very tricky missions. She’d saved his life so often he didn’t even keep track anymore.
She had become more than just a colleague to him. Among other things, she was the only woman in his life, now that his girlfriend had dumped him.
While he was working the stakeout, though, he barely got to talk to Angel at all. There was no need for her special skills on this mission, no need to occupy her valuable time with the running tally of how many poker hands Chapel lost or how many days had passed without new intelligence.
“Anything to report?” she asked. “Or are you just checking in?”