“Really now,” the clerk said, suddenly very interested. “Can’t say I’ve ever seen a ghost myself. But there are all kinds of things hidden back in these hills, they say.”
Julia nodded excitedly. “I’ll bet. For instance — on the way here, we saw a big mansion on the next ridge over. I had no idea there was anything like that around here.”
The clerk nodded and patted his belly. “The old Chobham place, sure, sure. ’Fraid you won’t get up there, though.”
“Oh? That’s a shame,” Julia said. “It must have quite a story.”
“Indeed, indeed. Built by a coal magnate back in the ’30s, a placer miner who got lucky. He bought up half this county before his seam ran dry. Then he couldn’t afford to keep it. The government bought it up in the Depression and turned it into a camp for the WPA. That’s all long ago, now. Nobody’s lived up there in my lifetime.”
“It’s a shame they let a place like that go to seed,” Chapel said.
The clerk lifted one shoulder toward his ear, in a kind of lazy shrug. “Too expensive, I suppose, to keep it open, and anyway, we got a real shortage of billionaires around here might want it. No, the government seems happy to let it rot.”
“I’d love to take a look,” Julia told him. “But you say it’s off-limits?”
“Well, sure now. The place ain’t safe for human occupation,” the clerk pointed out. “You could fall through some broken floorboards, or a brick could muss that pretty red hair of yours. Even the local teenagers, well, they’ll go anywhere their parents aren’t looking, sure, but they stay clear. There’s a pretty serious fence, and there’s signs all ’round saying trespassers’ll be shot.”
“What a shame,” Julia said. “It would be great for our TV show. But I guess we’ll just have to hope this restaurant in Lexington pans out.”
The clerk got a shrewd look in his eye. “TV show? Now, it might just be, we have a haunted room right at this motel, if y’all’d be interested in staying a few nights.”
Julia laughed. “You have a haunted room, or you might have a haunted room?”
“Just suggesting a TV appearance could help my business. If you catch my drift,” the clerk said, with a wink.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re suggesting,” Julia said, suddenly deeply offended. “We’re serious scientists, only interested in getting to the truth about the paranormal.”
“Didn’t mean nothing by it,” the clerk said. “I’ll get you some keys.”
When he was gone, Chapel turned to look at Julia. “Ghost hunters?” he whispered.
“I watch a lot of reality television,” she told him. “I thought it would make a good cover, and give me a chance to ask about the mansion.”
Chapel nodded, impressed. Badass Julia made a great field agent, whether or not she had any training.
Once they had the keys, Chapel went outside to pull the car around to the back of the motel, where another file of rooms looked out on a thick growth of forest. When the women joined him, he held up the two keys. “One for boys, one for girls?” he said, but Angel just grabbed one of the keys out of his hand and hurried inside one of the rooms. A moment later he heard the door’s dead bolt slam into place, and then the sound of a television turned up to a high volume. It sounded like it was showing C-SPAN.
He turned to look at Julia. “I wish I knew what was going on with her.”
Julia sighed. “Agoraphobia. She denied it when I asked, but… my ex-boyfriend had a cousin with agoraphobia. She came to visit us once in New York, but she couldn’t handle Manhattan. She said she felt like all the tall buildings were going to fall down on her. She used to make all kinds of excuses why she couldn’t leave the house.”
Chapel frowned. “Angel’s been all right until now.”
“This is the first time we’ve traveled by daylight,” Julia pointed out. “A fear of wide-open spaces is a lot easier to handle when you can’t see them.” She took the other key from his hand and unlocked the second room. “She’ll be okay if you leave her alone. Shut up in that room she can probably relax for the first time all day.”
Chapel grabbed some bags from the car. “Poor Angel,” he said.
Julia looked toward the closed door of Angel’s room. “What I’d really like to know is whether she was like this before the government started hiding her away in trailers, or if it’s a reaction to living her entire life online.” She turned and looked at him. “Somebody really did a number on her, Chapel. They’ve kept her from having any kind of real life. They’ve put her under acute psychological stress. Whoever it was, they’ve got a lot to answer for.”
Chapel couldn’t find it in himself to disagree.
Chapel locked the door of the room and started unpacking. He hadn’t brought much — just a few pieces of clothing donated by Top’s boys. Most of those he left in the bag, but he took out a pair of dark jeans and a black hoodie. It was what he intended to wear that night when they investigated the mansion.
“You think we’ll find something useful in that place?” Julia asked. She sat down on the room’s queen-size bed and kicked off her shoes.
“I hope we will,” Chapel told her. “Angel believes that the command that launched the original drone attack in New Orleans came from there. If there are NSA people inside, we might be able to ask them some important questions.”
“I’m guessing they’ll be uncooperative,” Julia pointed out.
Chapel nodded. “We’ll find a way to get them to talk. But it probably won’t even come to that. Most likely the place is deserted, just a bunch of servers running on automatic. The NSA was smart enough not to send the attack signal from one of their official data centers. Most likely this place is just a relay — a cutout, designed to hide what they’re doing. But that might be useful, too. If there’s NSA hardware inside, then Angel can use it to get past their firewall and hack into their main servers.”
“Won’t they instantly know what she’s doing, like last time? It only took a few minutes for Wilkes to figure out where she was.”
“That was because she was working on an open, commercial Internet connection. Using the NSA’s own hardware means she can sneak in undetected.” Chapel shrugged. “I don’t understand how it works, but it sounds like it makes sense.”
Julia smiled. “And if she does find something, some evidence. What then?”
“Then we go to the director of national intelligence with it. Show him the NSA has been attacking American assets. He’ll shut them down in a hurry. The evidence will show that we — Angel, me, Director Hollingshead — are innocent, and he’ll call off Wilkes and anyone else who’s looking for us.” He sat down in a chair by the door. “Anyway. That’s the plan.”
Julia nodded. “You want me to be your lookout again?”
“Absolutely. I have no idea what kind of security this place has. It could just be that fence I saw and nothing else. Or they could have cameras, or even armed rapid response teams patrolling the place after dark. Though I doubt that — the clerk here would have told us the place was guarded, when what he was telling us was we couldn’t go up there.”
Julia leaned toward the bed, stretching her arms and arching her back. “When do we leave?”
“Not until the middle of the night. I want it as dark as I can get. Then we’ll need to hike up there — I don’t want our friendly clerk here noticing that we’re taking our car out of the lot.”
“Good,” Julia said. “That gives me a little time to relax. I still like the occasional road trip, but it’s more draining than I remember. If you want to take a nap, you can use the bed. I’m thinking I’ll take a very long, very hot bath.”