“I take it you don’t like those odds,” Chapel said.
Angel squirmed in her seat. “I mean, it could happen that way. Just because something is incredibly rare doesn’t mean it’s impossible.” She scratched violently at her head. “I have a hunch,” she said, as if she were admitting she was addicted to heroin.
“I trust your gut,” Chapel said.
“Well, I don’t!” Angel pushed herself away from the computer and sighed in frustration. “When I’m overseeing a—” She glanced in Suzie’s direction. “When I’m doing what I do,” she said, this time in a whisper, “I don’t let myself have hunches. Hunches can be wrong, and then they can get people killed. Normally I would corroborate any suspicions I had by digging into the data. I would hack in there and get the reports from the people on the ground, the people trying to fix the power grid. I would look for discrepancies and outliers and I would build a profile to—”
Chapel put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said, because she was getting agitated to a frightening point.
“I feel so useless. Without proper equipment all I can do is guess here.”
“So what’s your guess?” he asked.
“I think somebody studied that system until they found the vulnerability, and then they hit those three locations with pinpoint accuracy. I’m guessing some kind of drone strike, though don’t ask me what kind.”
“A drone.”
“Again,” Angel said, “that’s just a guess.”
Chapel nodded. “First the Port of New Orleans. Then your trailer in New York. Now the power grid in California. All drone attacks. I’d say you’ve got your profile right there.”
“What does all this mean?” Julia asked.
“It means,” Angel said, “that whoever framed me, whoever got us in this mess, is still at it. And if I had to guess—” She shuddered in revulsion. “I don’t think they’re done yet. I think there will be more attacks.”
“So what happened in California, that was intentional?” Top asked. His good eye scanned around the kitchen table, looking at Chapel and then at Angel. Behind him Dolores was busy putting away groceries, but Chapel could tell she was listening in.
“Angel thinks it could have been done with a drone,” Chapel said, summing up the very long explanation he’d given Top. “That seems to be their MO.”
Julia, Chapel, and Angel had spent the day trying to make sense of what they knew and what they thought might be going on. They hadn’t gotten much further than Angel’s hunch. Now Top and his boys were coming home from their various jobs. There’d been a lot of discussion about how much they would tell Top. Chapel had finally decided they had to give him all the information they had, since they were going to need his help.
As for Dolores and the boys — which included Suzie — they didn’t need to know as much. Chapel had a plan for what to do next, but it was definitely something to keep as close to the vest as possible. The big problem with that was that as the house filled up, any expectation of privacy dwindled. Out in the living room Ralph had come home and flopped on the couch. The second he’d arrived he’d started up his video-game console and was busy blowing away scores of Nazis in some war simulator. It seemed like the last thing a vet with PTSD might want to do to relax, but Ralph seemed to be enjoying himself.
The noise of the game — a constant string of explosions and gunshots — at least made it less likely that the conversation in the kitchen would be overheard.
“These drone jockeys. These the same people looking for you?” Top asked.
Chapel nodded. “Definitely.”
“Who are they?”
Chapel smiled and shrugged. “We’re still trying to figure that out. The only thing we know for sure is that the strikes were an inside job, carried out by somebody in the U.S. military.”
“The armed forces aren’t supposed to attack America, last time I checked,” Top pointed out.
“I don’t want to believe it either. But the NSA tracked the original hijacker back to the Pentagon. That means somebody in the military, and probably somebody in intelligence, because only somebody in intelligence would have access to the kind of computer tech to do all this. We think it’s just one guy, or maybe a small group, but we just don’t know how deep it goes.”
Top glanced across the table at Angel. “And she’s some kind of computer whiz. Gonna find out the whos and whys for you.”
“We can’t find a way out of this mess until we have information. She’s going to get it for us, yeah. It’s what she does, and nobody does it better.”
Angel smiled and looked down at her hands.
Top opened his mouth to say something. Then he closed it again. He leaned back in his chair and reached out to touch Dolores’s arm. “Baby, you mind asking Ralph to turn down all that noise? I can’t think.”
Dolores turned around and looked at Chapel, not Top. It was clear she knew what Top was really asking for — that she leave the room so she didn’t hear what he said next. She barely shrugged as she headed out of the kitchen.
As soon as she was gone Top leaned back over the table and stared at Chapel wide-eyed. “And that means you need to rob a bank?” he asked.
“We’re not going to rob one,” Chapel said. “Just break into one. We need the biggest, fastest computer we can get and banks have those. I know it sounds crazy, but we’ve worked it out as best we can. There’s a bank branch about twenty miles from here, one that’s not going to have much security after hours. We get in, Angel uses their computers for a couple of minutes, and then we leave.”
“Security,” Top said, frowning. “I know something about you, Captain Chapel. I know what kind of training they gave you in Ranger school. You can get past alarms and whatever, sure. But I’m guessing they won’t make it that easy. There’s no bank I ever heard of didn’t have an armed guard sitting by the door all night.”
Chapel nodded. “Right. But in Ranger school they taught me how to deal with guards, as well. That’s one reason I’m telling you all this. I need your help. I don’t plan on hurting anybody — I hope you know me that well. But I’m going to have to convince any security guards to stand down.”
“You might try that winning smile of yours,” Top suggested.
“I need you to loan me a gun,” Chapel said.
Top pushed back from the table, shaking his head. He got up and went over to the counter and started putting away the groceries Dolores had left there. “Not going to happen,” he said.
Chapel got up and moved over to his side. “I’m serious about not hurting anybody. Give me a pistol with no clip, if you have to. Give me an old handgun that doesn’t even fire anymore. I need this, Top.”
“Son,” Top said, not looking at him. “You think I would say no, now? After that fine speech I gave you about my dog? No, I’d give you a rocket launcher if I had one, because I know who you are and I know you’d do the right thing with it. But I can’t give you a gun tonight. For the simple reason I don’t have one.”
He turned and faced Chapel eye to eye. “I got a house here full of highly trained men and women with anger issues, with night terrors, with PTSD coming out both pant legs. Some of whom are what you might call a high suicide risk. You understand that? You think I would bring a firearm within five miles of this place?”
Chapel leaned hard against the counter. This was a real problem. There was no way he could break into a bank without some kind of weapon. The guards would just open fire the second they saw him. One thing he’d definitely learned in Ranger school was that an unarmed man facing a man with a gun was always going to lose.