They were given guest badges and instructions on how to find the briefing room. It was a little strange they were allowed to proceed without an escort, but Chapel supposed their security clearance spoke for itself. The two of them hurried through a series of windowless hallways and down several flights of stairs because they had no time to wait for an elevator. When they arrived at their destination, Chapel estimated they were at least one floor underground. He knew what that meant — he’d been in enough secure facilities in his time to know you put the really important rooms in the basement, where anyone inside would be safe from an attack on the surface.
Chapel pushed open the door and found himself in the largest, most high-tech briefing room he’d ever seen. Every wall was lined with giant LCD screens, some ten feet across, some the size of computer monitors. Currently they were all showing the same thing: a murky picture of a stack of shipping containers, with a deep fog or maybe a cloud of dust swirling between them. The view didn’t give him any useful information, so instead he looked at the people gathered in the room.
There were a lot of them. Maybe fifty. Half were dressed in military uniforms from every branch of service — even the Coast Guard and the National Guard were represented. Judging by the insignia they wore, Chapel, a captain in the U.S. Army, was the lowest-ranking man in the place except for Wilkes, who was a first lieutenant. He recognized some of the faces because they belonged to generals and admirals.
The other half of the crowd wore civilian clothes — conservative suits and flag pins. He recognized far fewer of them because he rarely dealt with civilian agencies, but he could tell right away they were all intelligence people by the way they kept glancing at one another as if they expected to be stabbed in the back at any minute.
Chapel definitely recognized one man in the room, a man in an immaculate navy blue suit with perfect white hair and deep blue eyes that could have drilled holes in armor plate. That was Patrick Norton, the secretary of defense. The boss of Chapel’s boss, and the leader of the entire military intelligence community of the United States.
“Shit just got real,” Wilkes muttered.
The two of them moved to the back wall of the room and stood at attention, waiting to be put at their ease.
It didn’t take long. Rupert Hollingshead came out of the crowd and shook both their hands.
The director didn’t dress like anyone else there. He wore a tweed suit with a vest and a pocket watch, and unlike everybody else he had facial hair — a pair of muttonchop sideburns that stuck out from either side of his wide face. He didn’t look like an intelligence professional at all. More like a genial old professor from an Ivy League university. He even had the mannerisms — the absent-minded attitude of a man lost in lofty thought. It was rare when Chapel didn’t see him smiling and nodding quietly to himself as if he were puzzling through an abstruse math problem.
Today, though, was one of those rare days. He’d never seen the director look so serious. The tweed, the smiles, even the pocket watch — those were all part of a costume, very carefully designed to put people at their ease and make them think he was no kind of threat. Today, though, his eyes gave him away. They had the laser focus of the man only his personal staff knew — the spymaster, the head of a secret Defense Intelligence Agency directorate. A man who was capable of sending field agents to their deaths, a man who could handle even the most grim situation report.
“Stand down, boys,” he said, in a voice that was not quite a whisper but was unlikely to carry across the room. “I’m sure you’re wondering why you’re here.”
“Yes, sir,” Chapel said. Wilkes just watched the director’s face.
“You two are here because I might need to send you on a new mission right away. Stay back here and keep quiet, all right? We’ll talk when this is done.”
Chapel very much wanted to tell the director about Angel’s dropped call and the fact that she’d been incommunicado for hours now. But this was neither the time nor the place. Even as Hollingshead stepped away from them, back into the muttering crowd, the briefing began.
A woman wearing a pantsuit — a civilian — stepped up to a podium on the far side of the room and asked everyone to take their seats.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I’m Melinda Foster, and I work for the NGA. We brought you all here to our offices as a kind of neutral territory. The NGA provides imaging product for both civilian and Department of Defense organizations, and the current situation is going to involve both sides of the intelligence community. My job isn’t to make policy decisions, though. I’m just here to give you the facts as we know them. Then we’ll open the floor to discussion.”
She picked up a remote control and clicked a few buttons. Behind her, on one of the big screens, a map of Louisiana appeared with a red star superimposed on the Mississippi delta. “This morning, just before six o’clock, the United States suffered a radiological attack.”
This wasn’t the kind of crowd that would easily erupt into chaos. Nobody jumped to their feet or shouted for more information. But Chapel could feel all the oxygen draining from the room as the crowd drew a deep and collective breath.
On the screen, a map of the Port of New Orleans appeared. “The night before, a cargo container came into this, our busiest port. It came with counterfeit paperwork. We’ve established it was full of low-level radioactive waste. I need to stress that does not mean weapons-grade radiologicals. Instead, we’re talking about the junk that gets discarded all the time by workers in nuclear power plants. Everything from scrapped computer components to contaminated safety equipment down to the gloves and protective clothing the workers used. All that stuff is considered as hazardous material and is normally processed along with spent nuclear fuel.”
A slide came up on the screen showing a pile of garbage that looked harmless enough, just as she’d described it.
“Radioactive particles can adhere to this material, so it needs to be disposed of carefully. But apparently some nuclear plant somewhere didn’t feel like paying to do that. So instead they just stuffed it in a cargo container and sent it overseas. Most likely it was being shipped to a developing country where it would end up in a landfill. This happens with distressing regularity. Along its journey, however, it passed through our port. That’s illegal — hence the counterfeit paperwork. Just before six A.M., this cargo container entered an inspection station in the Port of New Orleans. It went under a PVT gamma ray detection arch, a piece of technology we’ve installed in all our shipping hubs specifically to catch this kind of event. The arch did its job and logged a gamma ray detection event. Normally the cargo container would have been isolated in a quarantine facility and traced back to its origin. Today, however, we never got the chance.”
Foster clicked her remote again. The image on the screen changed to show a Predator UAV — an aircraft everyone in the room would instantly recognize.
“At the same time an MQ-1 aircraft was passing overhead. It was an old, demilitarized model, one of the first-generation drones. Civilian agencies and even law enforcement are using these now for basic surveillance functions. Local air traffic control was aware of the Predator, but nobody seems to have raised any red flags — they assumed it was a routine sweep. The port is monitored at all times by a variety of systems, including drones, and while this one didn’t have an official flight plan, everyone seems to have assumed that was just an oversight. Now, these drones don’t just fly themselves. Somebody has to actively control them from another location. So we know what happened next was not just a glitch.