“You want us to be more like Chapel and Angel?” Wilkes asked. “Think about that. Think about how well it worked out for them.”
He could hear Moulton seethe through the phone.
The helicopter was already settling down in a rest stop parking lot. Wilkes figured he knew why — he didn’t need Moulton to explain it all. “Let me guess. You found Julia Taggart’s car.” Wilkes had wasted an hour trying to locate her in New York before the cops had bothered to tell him her driver’s license had been scanned as she passed a roadblock outside the Holland Tunnel. It had given him something to work on, but for most of the night the helicopter had just been flying passes over the New Jersey Turnpike, looking for her license plate.
“Yeah, it’s sitting in a parking lot in—”
“In a rest stop in New Jersey. Yep. I assume you told my pilot where to take me.” Wilkes leaned forward to look at the pilot in the cockpit of the helicopter. He gave the man a thumbs-up. He put his legs down on the chopper’s floorboards and started to climb out through the hatch. “How long ago did you find the car?”
“An hour ago,” Moulton said. “But according to the surveillance cameras, it’s been sitting there most of the night.”
“Yeah?” Wilkes said. He glanced out, across the lot. A couple of police cruisers were sitting near the entrance to a diner about two hundred yards away. “So they’re already gone. We missed them.”
“Well, sure. They had a huge head start,” Moulton said. “And we wasted time bringing you to the Pentagon for that farce of a debriefing.”
“Okay,” Wilkes said. “I’m going back to sleep.”
“What?”
“You’re boring me to the point where I lose consciousness,” Wilkes said.
“You’re not going to question anybody? You’re not going to even talk to the cops on the scene?”
“No reason to. I already know what they could tell me. Our targets aren’t here anymore. I know Chapel, and I know how he was trained. He stole another car and they left. The big question is, which direction did they go, and I’m guessing the locals can’t tell me that.”
Moulton laughed derisively. “I can’t believe this. You won’t even get out of your aircraft? Assistant Director Holman brought you in on this because we needed somebody in the field, somebody who could work this case and—”
“No, she didn’t,” Wilkes said.
“What?”
“When you got assigned to work for me, did you even bother to look at my military record? Did you see what my operational specialty was when I was in Iraq? You need to understand something, Moulton. I’m not like Chapel. His job is to go into bad places and do all the subtle crap. Maybe pay off some warlord or sabotage a nuclear reactor or steal some documents we need. Spy shit. You take a second now, look at what they had me doing in Iraq.”
“Oh,” Moulton said when he’d finished doing as he was told. “You do wet work.”
“Nobody calls it that, dingus,” Wilkes told him. “We call it F3.”
“What does that mean?”
“Find, Fix, Finish. What I am is a self-guided missile. You tell me where to go, and then you set me loose. So I’m going back to sleep unless you can give me a target.”
Moulton sounded almost apologetic when he responded. Maybe he was just scared. “Okay. Okay — I have something. A car was reported stolen from that rest stop last night. Early this morning, actually. I’ve got the plate number and… and…”
“Still not telling me what I need, buddy,” Wilkes said.
“Hold on! There’s something here. That plate number was recorded by an automatic speed trap in… Pennsylvania. They’re headed west. I’m going to get some satellites on this, do a full scan for vehicle tags and—”
“Wake me up when you have something,” Wilkes said, and then he ended the call. He shoved the phone in his pocket. Then he leaned forward to look at the helicopter pilot. He rolled one finger in the air, the hand signal to take the chopper up again. “West,” he shouted, over the noise of the helicopter’s rotor. “Head west until I tell you to stop.”
Then he put his feet up, his head back, and closed his eyes.
They needed to get rid of the stolen car.
As they headed out into the fresh light of day, Chapel felt like his eyeballs were vibrating in his head. He needed to sleep, and soon. But if the government was searching for them, then it was just a matter of time before they found the car. With the sun up it would be that much easier for them. Julia came along to help him, though he could easily have taken care of it alone. It seemed she had something to say to him.
She kept quiet, though, as he leaned under the dashboard and fiddled with the wires that would start the ignition. The car sputtered to life and he put it in drive right away before it could stall out.
“We need a place where it won’t be seen,” he told Julia. “Preferably someplace covered, so it can’t be seen from the air. They’ll find it eventually, no matter what we do, but we don’t want to make it easy for them.”
She nodded. “So like a parking garage? No — no, that wouldn’t work. The attendants would find it and call the police. What about an abandoned house? One with a garage?”
“As long as nobody saw us breaking in, that would be great,” Chapel said. “That’s a risk, though.” He headed out onto a wide stretch of road surrounded on both sides by strip malls and big box stores. “Even if we can just ditch it under some trees, that would be a big help.”
They drove for a while in silence, both of them craning their necks around for the right spot. It was Julia who found it. “There,” she said, pointing at the overgrown parking lot of a deserted minimall.
The lot was empty, and far too visible from the street, but Chapel pulled into it anyway and then drove around the back of the run-down buildings. “Oh, perfect,” he said. There had been a drive-through bank back there, with a concrete overhang that would shield the car from satellites. He put the car in park and leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes for a second. He finally felt safe.
“We’ll need to strip the license plates, right?” Julia asked. “I remember you’re supposed to do that when you abandon a car.”
Chapel nodded without opening his eyes. “We’ll need to file off the VIN numbers too. They’ll know the car was stolen, but it’ll take longer to trace it back to its owner then.”
“I feel sorry for whoever owns this car,” Julia said, with a little laugh. “I mean, I know we had no choice. But I keep imagining them coming out of that rest stop and realizing they’re going to need to get a cab home. That’s got to suck.”
Chapel opened his eyes and looked across at her. He realized he hadn’t given a second’s thought to that. He was on a mission — at least, it felt like he was on a mission. If he’d been in Uzbekistan or Somalia, stealing cars would just be standard operating procedure. Why should it be different here in the States? And yet, once Julia pointed it out, he couldn’t help but feel like a criminal.
Still. “I would do a lot worse things to keep you and Angel safe.”
Julia hugged herself and looked down at her lap. She nodded, but she looked as if she was deep in thought.
“I know this is scary,” he told her. He reached over with his good hand and ran the backs of his knuckles up and down her arm.
“That’s the funny thing. It’s not,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said. She kept looking down, like she didn’t want to meet his eyes. “If it was just me out here. I mean, if I was running from the cops on my own, if it had been up to me to get Angel to safety, I think I’d be shitting myself.”