He would get the drive, and if Chapel refused to hand it over, well …
Wilkes didn’t like what he would have to do then. He’d spent months in a motel room with Chapel, and while he thought the guy could be a little self-righteous, he was basically okay. Still. Wilkes didn’t like most of his missions. He completed them anyway.
Just like in Fallujah.
Chapel reached for the doorknob. He pushed the door open and stepped into the bedroom. And there she was.
“Hi,” she said.
He nodded.
She looked like she was in her early twenties. Just a little over five feet tall. Very cute, in a way nobody would ever call beautiful. She had a little turned-up nose and big eyes and very short hair that fell in bangs across her forehead. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that was too big for her. It had a picture of a Weimaraner on the front.
Her eyes were a bright blue he never would have expected.
“You, um,” he said, because what he was about to say was you’re real, which sounded pretty stupid even in his head. You’re human was just about as bad.
“Are you going to arrest me?” she asked.
Chapel bit his lip. “No,” he said. “No, Angel. No. I’m here to rescue you.”
And then he reached for her and she ran to him and they just hugged each other.
She was real. She was human. She cried a little. Chapel never wanted to let her go.
“I can’t believe you managed to save this,” Angel said, turning the hard drive over and over in her hands. “This could be really useful.”
Chapel didn’t want to talk about the hard drive.
They sat next to each other on the bed, their hands folded in their laps. So strange. He’d spent years with her whispering in his ear, her voice so real to him he could almost feel her breath on his neck. Now that she was right next to him in the flesh he felt like he’d never met her before, that they were just getting acquainted.
But then she would speak and it was all still there. The relationship they’d built up, as colleagues. As friends.
She kept looking at him out of the corner of her eye as if she couldn’t believe he was real, as if she’d never expected this either. Imagine that.
“I thought—” He shook his head. “What was that whole trick with the neural network all about?”
She smiled. “That was me trying to be clever. A while back, when I was working with Wilkes, he kept saying he didn’t believe I was a woman. That I was some fat guy in a stained sweatshirt who just wanted to fool him. Then he suggested maybe I was just an AI, not human at all. I thought the idea was interesting, so I downloaded the closest thing that actually exists — an Eliza variant. A program designed to fool someone into thinking they’re talking to a human being.”
“So when somebody came to find you in the trailer, and the computer started talking to them—”
“They would think that it was true, I was just an AI all along. Any half-competent computer tech would see right through it, but I figured it might give me a little extra time to get away.”
Chapel nodded. It was a good plan. Exactly the kind of thing the Angel he knew — the real Angel — might come up with. “You knew we were coming for you?” he asked.
“I figured out something was wrong pretty quickly,” she said. “All of my outgoing ports went dead — I was talking to you at the time, and suddenly you were just gone. I checked all my hardware and everything was working fine. I was certain I was being attacked. So I got out of there because I knew if they could do that to me, if they had the tech to shut me down, they could figure out where I was, too.” She shrugged. “Maybe, after working with you for so long, I just got paranoid. I was terrified they were going to come and kill me.”
“It isn’t paranoia if they’re really after you,” Chapel pointed out.
She laughed. Angel laughed. It was a sound that always made the hair stand up on his arms, and it did so then, too. “I hadn’t left that trailer in a long time. Being outside was… difficult. I had no idea what to do, where to go. I came here because I knew this address — you used to live here. And I thought Julia might help me.”
“It was a good call,” he told her.
“Thanks. But once I was here, once I was sure nobody was going to come bust down the door, I had no idea what to do next. Julia let me use her laptop and I was able to dig in enough to see that there was a secret warrant out for my arrest, signed by the director. I didn’t know who I could trust. I told Julia to call you — she really didn’t want to, but she could see we needed you. The problem was, for all I knew you were the one who was coming to grab me.”
“It was Wilkes — he was the one the director sent. But then he asked me to get you first. To make sure you stayed free.” He told her about the scrap of notebook paper Hollingshead had dropped in front of him. “He knows you’re being framed, but with the rest of the intelligence community against you, he also knew he had to play their game if he wanted to stay in the loop.”
“So he’s officially called for my arrest?”
“Officially,” he said.
She sat there lost in thought for a while. He didn’t push. Even though they were running out of time.
Finally she looked over at him and asked, “Chapel, what do we do now?”
He wished he had a real plan to give her. But all he could say was, “We keep moving.”
Chapel led Angel out of the bedroom and into the living room, where Julia was perched in front of the television. “I’m trying to get some news about what’s going on,” she said, “because I know neither of you can tell me.”
“It’s just better that you don’t know,” Chapel tried, but he knew Julia and he knew she wouldn’t just accept that.
“It’s bad, right?” Julia asked. She looked frightened. Chapel hated seeing her that way. “It must be, if Angel had to come out in the open. And it must be bad for you, too,” she said to him. “You’re not supposed to be here, are you?”
He’d forgotten how quick she could be. “It’s bad, yeah. But we’re going to fix it. Listen. I really want to thank you. You took Angel in when you didn’t have to.”
Julia stared at him. “Are you kidding? She saved my life once. You remember? When that guy from the CIA was trying to kill me, the one who couldn’t stop laughing? She got me out of that in one piece. I owed her.” She turned back to the TV. “Besides. Do you know what she was wearing when she showed up here? A jogging bra and yoga pants. If I turned her away, she would have frozen to death.”
Chapel turned to look at Angel.
“The last time I left my trailer,” she said, “it was warm out. I didn’t have time to check the temperature today.”
“The last time? When was that?” Julia asked. “Six months ago?”
“Maybe,” Angel admitted.
Chapel and Julia both stared at her then. But there was no time to ask any more questions. “We have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry. I really wish we had more time. Julia, I really wish we had a chance to talk. But the police will already be looking for us.”
Julia nodded. “Okay. What can I do to help?”
A wave of relief surged through Chapel. He’d known he could trust Julia, but things were tense between them and he wasn’t sure how she would feel about what he was going to ask for next.
“I need your car,” he said. Her eyebrows shot up and he was certain she would say no, so he tried to explain. “The bus and train stations are too risky — too many surveillance cameras. And there’s no way we’re flying out of here. I could steal a car, but if the owner reports it and—”