“Jesus Christ, no!” Julia said, looking at him with flashing eyes. “I don’t want to know. Your life — after I broke up with you — that’s — that’s—”
Her eyes shimmered with tears that refused to fall.
“Who did he work for?” Angel asked. “This mysterious guy. Did he give you any idea of who he worked for?” When Julia didn’t respond right away, she said, “Come on, this is important. Did he give you any kind of clue?”
“I asked if he worked for Hollingshead. He said no, and it was funny I would even think that. He said he worked for a different agency. That he was a civilian. That’s all. I told him to go away and never bother me again and he just smiled — he always smiled, I hated that smile — he smiled and said he was sure we’d see each other again.”
“I can confirm he didn’t work for the DIA,” Angel said. “I would have known about this.” She looked at Chapel. “We didn’t do this to you.”
“To him?” Julia said. “They didn’t do this to him at all. They did it to me.”
Angel drew back into her seat like she was afraid Julia would attack her. “Never mind. I didn’t mean anything by that.”
Chapel shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Julia. That must have been terrifying.”
“A little. But I’m kind of used to it. Spies telling me cryptic things. Acting shifty.” She crumpled a paper napkin in her fist and looked out the window.
Chapel had forgotten that her parents used to work for the CIA. It was how she’d gotten mixed up with him in the first place. A CIA lawyer used to come over to their house once a month when she was a kid, just to make sure her parents hadn’t been subverted by foreign spies.
“You think he was with the CIA?” he asked.
“Not really,” Julia said. “I tried tricking him into admitting just that, once, and he looked… contemptuous. Like I had insulted him. But he was definitely an intelligence guy, and an American.”
Chapel nodded. “So somebody from some agency screwed with our personal life. Then later, somebody framed Angel, somebody we’re pretty sure was also part of the intelligence community.”
“You think there’s a connection there?” Julia asked.
“Two attacks on us, coming so close together? I’m certain of it. Whoever is behind the drone hijacking is the same person who pressured you. Clearly there’s a conspiracy to take us down — and it’s working.”
“Are you sure about this?” Julia asked.
Chapel glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then tried the handle on another car door. Locked. He tried to make it look like he was just walking past the car toward the next one in the lot. Tried the handle. Locked.
Angel answered Julia’s question. “If the police are looking for you, they’ll have looked up your license plate number. There’ll be an APB out for you. We need a new car.”
Chapel tried another door handle. Locked. The tricky part was testing the handles gently. Most of these cars had car alarms. If he pulled too hard, he would set them off, and the owner would come running out of the rest stop looking to see what was going on.
“Damn,” Julia said. “I loved that car.”
“Switching cars here makes sense, too,” Angel went on. “When they find your car here, they’ll know we headed south from New York. But they won’t be able to tell if we were headed for Pennsylvania or Maryland or Delaware.”
Chapel tried another handle. Locked.
“Where are we headed?”
Chapel answered her. “Pennsylvania. I have a friend who lives south of Pittsburgh. He’ll take us in, for a while anyway.”
The next car was locked, too.
“You’re sure about this friend? Wouldn’t it be safer just to keep moving?”
“I am absolutely sure that my friend won’t turn us in,” Chapel said. He wasn’t prepared to make any promises beyond that. “And, anyway, we need a place to sleep, and a base of operations so we can start fighting back. Running is just putting off the inevitable. We need to figure out who was behind the drone hijacking and everything else if we’re going to have a chance of clearing our names.”
“I can help there,” Angel said. “I mean. I could.” She tapped her hard drive with her fingernail. “There’s data on here that might tell me who was behind the drone attacks.”
Chapel nodded. “That’s fantastic, Angel. That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.” He tried another car and found it locked. Of course. Who would leave their car unlocked in a rest stop in New Jersey? He tried another car. Again, locked.
“You’re smiling. You found one?” Julia whispered.
“No. But for the first time since this all started, I feel like I might have a plan. I feel like there’s something we can actually do, instead of just running away. And the first thing we need for that plan is—”
A car handle yielded under his fingers. The door popped open on its hinges.
“And of course, you know how to hot-wire a car,” Julia said.
Chapel’s smile got bigger. “I do.”
“Give me another one of those energy shots,” Chapel said.
Angel frowned. “You know these are terrible for your heart, right? They’re just pure caffeine. They won’t even keep you awake much longer. You’re going to crash no matter how many of them you drink. You should pull over and take a rest.”
Chapel glanced into the backseat. Julia was sprawled out back there, her plum-colored coat pulled tight across her shoulders. He had always loved to watch her sleep. It meant she felt safe.
“In a bit,” he said.
Angel flipped off the top of the little plastic bottle. It wasn’t a brand he recognized, just some knockoff they’d sold back at the rest stop. He had no idea what was in it. Chapel knocked it back anyway, grimacing at the foul taste. Back when he was in Afghanistan, when he pulled long duty, he used to chug cans of energy drink, carbonated lizard spit laced with all kinds of herbal nonsense. They’d tasted like watered-down, sweetened battery acid. These energy shots went down a lot faster, but somehow they still managed to taste worse.
Almost at once, though, he felt his vision tighten up, felt his focus come back. For a long time now he’d been staring at the double yellow line on the road, pretty much the only thing his headlights could pick up. It got dark in Pennsylvania. A lot darker than it even got in New York, or Virginia for that matter. Maybe it was all the trees.
Talking helped him stay awake, too. And talking to Angel had always made him feel like things were going to be okay. Especially now, in the dark, when he couldn’t really see her. It almost felt like the old days, when she was watching over him from somewhere far away, able to see everything on her screens, always ready with good advice. When she was just a voice in his ear.
“You really think you can do something with that hard drive?” he asked her.
“Maybe, sugar. Maybe. Whoever hacked me and made it look like I was piloting that drone, they were good. So good I wasn’t even aware it was happening. But they must have left tracks behind. If I can get a really good look at the activity logs on the drive, maybe I can find something. Something we can follow back to where the attack really came from. If I can figure that out—”
“Then we can find them. And at the very least we can find some proof that can clear our names. And this’ll be over.”
“Possibly,” Angel said. “But it’s not going to be easy.”
“My friend, the one we’re going to stay with. He’ll have a computer. You can log in there.”
Angel sighed. “I’m going to need more processor power than you get in just some commercial laptop. More speed. What I have in mind is risky. The NSA tracked me down once — when I go online again, there’ll be nothing stopping them from finding me again. If we do this, if we try to track the data, they’ll know where we are.”