“You have a field agent in mind?” Norton asked.
“Lieutenant Wilkes,” she said.
That caused a little stir.
“We’ve established that the DIA is working against the common good,” Norton said. “And you want to use one of their agents?”
Holman smiled. She looked over at Wilkes and nodded at him. “He took a big risk here, accusing Director Hollingshead. It’s clear where his priorities lie — he’s more interested in serving his country than playing politics. More important, he’s already up to speed. No reason to bring in anyone else — we would have to tell them everything, and the fewer people who know what’s going on, the better.”
Norton stared at Wilkes for a second. Wilkes stayed at attention. Finally, Norton got up from his seat and headed for the door. “Okay,” he said. “Everybody else, with me.”
The room emptied out in a hurry, leaving only Wilkes, Holman, and Moulton behind.
When the door was closed, she walked over to Wilkes and put a hand on his cheek. “That was very well done,” she said. “Angel, Chapel, now Hollingshead. How long have we been working to get rid of the three of them?”
It was Moulton who answered. “A little over thirty-six months.”
Wilkes allowed himself a brief smile. “You really sure Hollingshead was such a threat he needed to be taken down like that? He never impressed me much.”
“Rupert does a very good job of hiding his light under a bushel. Believe me, if anyone could have stopped what comes next, it would have been him.” She walked over to where the SecDef had sat and touched the back of his chair. She looked like she wanted to sit in it, to see what it felt like. “I know your now-former boss pretty well. Though he can still surprise me on occasion. I would never have believed that Angel was an AI, not in a thousand years. He’s always been a firm believer in human intelligence.”
“I know what I saw,” Wilkes said.
Holman steepled her fingers in front of her and nodded. “We at the NSA have proven time and again that computers are better at this sort of work. It looks like Rupert finally came around to that understanding as well.”
Wilkes had no interest in any of that. “You’re supposed to give me orders, now, ma’am,” he said.
She gave him a very warm, very bright smile. “Of course. Well. You were looking for Chapel and Angel’s hard drive. Carry on.”
Wilkes saluted and turned toward the door.
She wasn’t finished, though. “When you find them, make sure nobody else ever can,” she added.
“Yes, ma’am,” Wilkes replied.
Julia looked terrified as she told her story. Chapel could only imagine how she must have felt back when it was happening.
“I only saw him twice. The first time, he came to see me at my clinic. This was back when we were living together. You were out on a mission — I had no idea where you were or when you were coming back, or if you were coming back. When he showed up, I could tell right away he was some kind of spy or whatever. He just had that — that smug thing.”
“Smug?”
“Oh, come on,” Julia said, running her fingers through her hair. “Don’t pretend like you don’t get the same way, sometimes. He had that attitude, that look on his face. Like he knew a bunch of secrets and that made him better than everybody else. You all get that look sometimes. It’s insufferable, to be honest.”
Chapel’s eyes went wide. He’d had no idea he gave that off.
“So I could tell he was — from the intelligence community, let’s put it that way. And I was sure when he walked into the clinic, absolutely sure he was coming to tell me you were dead. That it was a courtesy call.”
“That must have been horrible,” Angel said.
“Yeah. Well. I felt like I was going to throw up, just seeing him there. Or maybe I was going to break down and start crying and I wouldn’t even be able to explain why to my patients. My boyfriend was dead and I wouldn’t even be able to tell my closest friends. It was something I always dreaded. But then he came into one of the examination rooms with me and he told me right off the bat you were still alive. He must have known what I was thinking. He said he’d been sent to talk about our relationship.” She glanced over at Chapel. “Yours and mine, I mean.”
“Somebody from the government came to give you dating advice?” Chapel asked.
“I was so relieved I think I laughed at the idea. He agreed it sounded funny. But then he told me I was going to have to break up with you.”
“What?” Chapel asked, loud enough that diners around them turned to look.
“He had a whole speech about why it had to be done. I could tell even he didn’t believe it, but he wouldn’t answer any questions. He said that I was a liability and I could get you in trouble. He said I was compromising your effectiveness in the field.”
“To be fair,” Angel said, “that’s not all bullshit. We do prefer to work with agents who have no significant connections back home. It makes them—”
“Hold on,” Chapel said to her. “Julia — you’re saying this guy came from the government and he told you to break up with me? I thought you did it because you were sick of being kept in the dark all the time.”
“I was,” she replied. “I was absolutely miserable. Who knows? I might have broken things off anyway. I definitely wasn’t ready to marry you.”
Chapel closed his eyes. That didn’t help. All he could see was an engagement ring in a little padded box. Sitting on the front hall table of Julia’s apartment while she walked out the door.
He forced himself to stay in control. “What did you tell him?”
“To go fuck himself, of course,” Julia said. “That was when he started with the threats. No, no, don’t get like that,” she told Chapel, who had been about to jump out of the booth. “He didn’t threaten to hurt me. He threatened your career. He said if I didn’t break up with you he would leak your name to the news media. He would out you. He talked about how many enemies you had, how many people would love to get their hands on you, and if your name was in the public record, there was nothing to stop them. He said if I didn’t dump you, I would basically be sentencing you to death.”
Chapel put a hand over his mouth. He had to, or he knew he would start shouting.
“I couldn’t let that happen. So I agreed,” Julia said.
Chapel couldn’t reply, so Angel had to. “You said you met him twice,” she said.
Julia nodded. “The second time—” She stopped and looked at Angel as if she wasn’t sure she should say this in front of the younger woman. But then she shook her red hair and said, “The second time was a couple of months later. He came and showed me a photograph. It showed you, Jim. On a balcony, standing with — some other woman. And you had your, you know. Your hand in her panties.”
All the blood rushed out of Chapel’s body and he felt like he might collapse. Nadia. Julia had seen a picture of him with Nadia.
It was the last thing he’d ever wanted Julia to know about. The very last.
“I was… well. I didn’t like looking at that picture. I mean, I’d dumped you, in a pretty bad way. It’s true. And it wasn’t like you ran right out and found a replacement; I know some time passed. But it made me… it made me uncomfortable. Can we just leave it at that? It made me angry, too.” Julia turned her face away. “He said he wanted me to know I’d made the right choice, breaking up with you. I think he wanted to make sure I didn’t have any second thoughts.”
Chapel counted to ten in his head. Then he reached for Julia’s hand. She pulled it away. “Listen,” he said, “do you want the details? I’ll tell you all about her—”