Still.
“You must have missed out on so much, though. Parties and going to college and dating—”
“Please! Online gaming parties, online universities, and, frankly, I’m a girl who likes video games and knows how to use the Internet. When it comes to dating, I can take my pick.”
Julia didn’t know what to say to that. It made her think of a thought experiment she’d read about when she was taking a psychology class in college. If you spent your whole life locked in a room where everything was painted white, you couldn’t miss the color blue. It wouldn’t even mean anything to you if somebody tried to explain it to you.
She couldn’t help but feel sorry for Angel, though. She could date all the Internet geeks she wanted online, but if she couldn’t actually meet up with them in person, well …
Maybe there were some things she didn’t want to know about Angel. There was one thing, though, that had always bothered her. “Listen, if I’m not allowed to know this, that’s okay. But if we’re going to be stuck together on this road trip all night, I have to ask.”
Angel looked at her funny. Maybe she thought Julia was about to ask her if she was a virgin or something.
But that wasn’t it. “I know Chapel gave you your name. Angel, I mean.”
“Yeah. It started out as a code name, but it just stuck. Now everybody calls me that.”
“I’m guessing your real name is classified,” Julia said.
Angel sighed. “It is. But I guess that doesn’t matter anymore. It’s not like I work for the government now. I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to laugh. It’s Edith.”
Julia bit her lip. “Okay,” she said.
“They named me after my great-grandmother. She was a great woman — she was a flapper in the 1920s and she learned how to fly an airplane and she worked at catching spies during World War II. I wanted to be just like her and now I kind of am and I’m very proud of it.”
“Sounds like a great role model,” Julia said.
“She was. Now I’ve got to ask you something.”
“Shoot,” Julia said.
“I want to ask you,” Angel said, “never, ever to call me that name.”
“You got it,” Julia replied. She glanced over and saw Angel smiling from ear to ear and that was it — she couldn’t hold it in anymore. They both broke up laughing so hard Julia had to fight to keep the car in its lane.
Chapel had been a soldier before he’d been anything else. He had a soldier’s skills, including the most crucial of them all. He could sleep anywhere, at any time.
When they opened the trunk, he was barely conscious. It could have been a horde of cops out there waiting to take him by force and he wouldn’t have been able to resist. Instead, and luckily for him, he opened one bleary eye and saw Julia looking down at him.
“Sorry to wake you up,” she said, “but we kind of need to know where we’re going next.”
He sat up and rubbed at his face. He felt sore all over and he had a few new bruises from being thrown around the trunk since they left the apartment, but in a second he would be fine, ready for action again.
In a second.
“My mouth tastes like the bottom of a trash can,” he said. “This has been a very long day.” And of course it wasn’t over yet. They might have escaped the police in New York, but they were far from being safe.
“Come on,” Julia said, giving him a hand with getting out of the trunk. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and we can talk.”
“Maybe some dinner, too,” Chapel said.
Julia laughed. “Sure.”
The three of them headed into the rest stop’s diner. Even at midnight there were a fair number of people inside, fueling up before they got back on the road. The three of them grabbed a booth near the back. They had a good view of the windows and would see any police cars that pulled into the parking lot, and if they had to run, they were right next to the kitchen.
Chapel had trained for this kind of thing. Of course, his instructors at Ranger school had expected him to be on the lam in Afghanistan or Pakistan, one step ahead of the Taliban, but the skills carried over.
He also knew that he needed a lot of protein to keep him going. He ordered pork chops and sausage while Angel got a salad and Julia stuck to just coffee.
Once the waiter was gone, Julia leaned across the table and said, “So what’s the plan? I assume you have a plan.”
“I can do something with this, maybe,” Angel said, picking up the plastic bag that held her hard drive. “If I can—”
Chapel waved a hand to silence her. “I have a plan,” he said, looking Julia in the eye. She wasn’t going to like this. “They locked down New York pretty tight, but they just don’t have the manpower to do that for the entire eastern seaboard. Which means we can relax just a little. From now on, I’m doing the driving. As for you, we have to find a way for you to go home. We’ll call you a cab or find some nice truck driver to take you back. I’m sorry, Julia, but you shouldn’t know anything else.”
“Uh, actually,” Angel said.
Julia frowned. “As usual, your big plan is to keep me in the dark. Well, sorry, buddy. You’re stuck with me for a while longer.”
Chapel turned to look from one of them to the other. “What are you two talking about?”
It was Julia who answered. “I got a phone call about an hour ago. Back when you were napping in the trunk. You remember Marty, the guy who lives in the apartment right below me? He called to tell me the cops were raiding my place, tearing up my furniture, asking a lot of questions about me. He said they wanted to bring me in for an interview as soon as possible.”
“Damn,” Chapel said. “Julia — I’m sorry. That’s the last thing I wanted to happen.”
“It’s not your fault,” Angel said. “I’m the one who went to her for help. You wouldn’t have involved her if I hadn’t asked her to call you.”
Julia shook her head. “Worrying about whose fault it was doesn’t get us anywhere. Obviously I can’t go back to New York now. They’ll just arrest me on sight. And we can’t let that happen. I know what Angel looks like, and they would eventually get me to talk, one way or another.”
Chapel nodded. He’d forgotten how quickly she adapted to new situations. Yesterday she’d been a perfectly ordinary veterinarian living in Brooklyn. Now she was a wanted fugitive. For a civilian like Julia, that was a huge shift — but she was taking it incredibly well.
Of course, this wasn’t the first time it had happened to her. Chapel and Julia had met under similarly screwed-up conditions, way back when.
Something occurred to Chapel. “This doesn’t make any sense. They must have known that Angel and I were at your place somehow. But how? Nobody knows what Angel looks like, and I wasn’t spotted on my way in or out. This doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe they just knew that you and I used to be a couple,” Julia pointed out.
“But how? My name was never on the apartment lease, or the phone bill, or anything like that. No, the only people who knew about us were the people in that building, our friends, and — well, Angel here and the director. But he wouldn’t have sent the police after you. He’s on our side.”
“You’re sure of that?” Julia asked.
“Absolutely,” Angel told her. “He would never turn on us.”
Chapel wondered, if only for a moment. Hollingshead was a tough man. He made tough decisions sometimes. If it was the only way to protect the country, he would turn them in. But no — he had sent Chapel to save Angel. Telling the police about Julia would only damage that operation. It hadn’t been the director.