He jumped to his feet, already reaching for his gun. Except it wasn’t there. He was unarmed and suddenly very alone. He headed toward the bedroom door, but before he could reach it, Julia came running out of the kitchen.
“There’s somebody else here,” he said.
She nodded. She looked scared. Had the police forced her to call him? Had they used her as bait so they could arrest him here?
He couldn’t believe she would go along with something like that. Not Julia. But there was someone else in the apartment and she hadn’t told him when he came in. She’d been hiding this third person from him.
He walked over to the bedroom door. Then he glanced back at her. “Is there something you want to tell me?” he asked.
“Jim,” she said, “before you go in there — you have to tell me something. I know you aren’t supposed to. But you have to. You have to tell me why you came to New York.”
“That’s got nothing to do with you,” he said, staring at the door. If there were cops in there, if this was a trap, they might come rushing out at any moment if they thought he’d seen through the ruse.
His best bet was to just run. Get out of the apartment as fast as he could, get away before the cops could close in and take him.
“You have to tell me, Jim,” she said again. She pushed herself between him and the bedroom door.
He reached for her slim shoulders, intending to move her out of the way. She planted her feet. This was about to get bad, he thought.
But then the bedroom door cracked open behind her. Whoever was back there spoke.
“It’s okay, Julia. He’s not the one they sent to get me.”
It was the sexiest voice Chapel had ever heard. And one of the most familiar.
PART 2
Brent Wilkes opened his eyes.
Above him he saw nothing but gray overcast sky. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was at first. There’d been a lot of light and heat and then he’d blacked out. There might have been a loud noise in there, too.
Iraq? That sounded like Iraq. At least the way he remembered it.
There must have been an explosion. That explained a lot of what he was feeling, and a lot of what he remembered.
It brought to mind one mission in particular, a mission in Fallujah. It was after the siege when more than half the city was just flattened. The DoD had sent a bunch of relief money to help the refugees there, a big briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills. The guy who received the briefcase, the local emergency management head, had taken the money across town and just handed it over to an al-Qaeda contact.
The money wasn’t recoverable, but they needed to save face. So they’d sent Wilkes in to kill the al-Qaeda guy. He didn’t like the mission, didn’t like the idea of just killing a guy, even if he was an insurgent. But he didn’t like a lot of his missions. He completed them anyway.
That might as well have been the unofficial Marine Corps motto, right there.
For three days he just followed the guy around. Wilkes was dressed up like a Blackwater civilian contractor — nobody would have bought it if he dressed like an Iraqi. The guy he was tailing made him less than an hour after he hit the ground, but it didn’t matter. Nobody wanted to start real fighting again, not with so little of the city left, so Wilkes and his target just danced around each other, each of them looking for a time and a place where they could bump off each other where nobody would see it happen.
On the third day, Wilkes took his dinner in a little restaurant built into the ruin of a hospital. They’d set up awnings and tables and pushed all the broken bricks and rebar into a pile to one side. The food was good, even though he had no idea what he was eating. His target pulled up outside in a limousine with three thugs with AK-47s, and it looked like time was up.
Then the target guy just stepped on something in the street that looked like a broken plate, just one more piece of debris. It was an IED, of course, which some local kid had put there to get Wilkes when he finished his dinner. The target got it instead.
Mission accomplished, and Wilkes didn’t have to lift a finger.
There had been light and heat and a shock wave that hit him so fast he didn’t hear it until he was already on his back in the rubble, staring up at a blue sky.
Just like now, except this sky was gray. Not a lot of gray days in Iraq, the way he remembered it. Gray days meant stateside. He was in America, he decided.
Right. New York. It all came flooding back. Angel. Chapel.
After an explosion, if you woke up on your back like this, you were supposed to just lie still. You might have a concussion or, worse, your neck could be broken and it would be hard to tell. Lie still and wait for help to arrive.
Wilkes heard a lot of shouting, somebody yelling for somebody else to freeze. “Okay,” he said. “No problem.”
There were people running around, yelling things back and forth. Something hit the ground hard and a piece of broken glass bounced off Wilkes’s cheek. Maybe there was going to be another explosion. Maybe there was another bomb.
Eventually a paramedic came over and looked at Wilkes’s eyes and asked him what day it was, who the president was. He complied and answered all their questions. That information wasn’t classified. Somebody else took his blood pressure.
“He’s okay,” they said. “One lucky son of a bitch.”
Which was pretty much how Wilkes had felt that day back in Fallujah.
“Just stay here. There’s an ambulance coming,” somebody else said.
“How do I look?” Wilkes asked. “Anything broken?”
The paramedic actually laughed. “No. And you’ve got the right number of arms and legs, still. But you’re covered from head to toe in cuts and bruises. We’re also worried you might have a concussion.”
“I’ve had worse,” Wilkes said. He sat up. The paramedic tried to push him back down, but Wilkes just shrugged the guy off. “I’ve got work to do.” He remembered when the robot came rushing at the trailer. He’d known something was up so he smashed his way through the blacked-out windows and out the back of the trailer. Looked like that had been the right move.
“You really need to be in a hospital right now. You could have internal injuries — hell, for all I know you’re bleeding out right now, I just can’t see it.”
He just waved one hand in the guy’s direction and headed back to the blast site. Not much left. All the computers and stuff were destroyed and just one corner of the trailer remained, sticking up in the air like a jagged spearhead. Angel was gone. Vaporized.
Well, most of her. In the short time he’d had inside, before the robot came, he’d noticed that one of the hard drives was missing from her server stack. Somebody had taken it.
Chapel. It must have been Chapel.
Which meant his mission wasn’t complete at all. And worse — he couldn’t trust the man who’d given it to him. The only way Chapel could have known to come here, the only way he could have beaten Wilkes to the punch, was if Hollingshead had fed him information he wasn’t supposed to have.
Well, that was kind of fucked up.
Wilkes walked away from the paramedics, who seemed to have other people to worry about. There were a bunch of things he needed to do. First and hardest was that he needed to call the Department of Defense and tell them Rupert Hollingshead was in league with the drone hijacker. That wasn’t going to go down well, but it had to be done. Then Wilkes needed to find the highest-ranking cop who hadn’t been blown up in the blast. He needed to start organizing a manhunt.
If he wanted to salvage anything from this mission, he was going to have to get that hard drive. Anything else was failure. Marines like Wilkes found the very idea of failure unacceptable.