“Angel’s already gone,” Wilkes pointed out. “She was just a computer, and I smashed the last of its hard drives back in Pittsburgh.”
“Seriously,” Moulton said, “did you believe that? I never did.” He went over to Angel and pulled the gag out of her mouth. She tried to bite him, but he pulled his fingers away fast enough to avoid injury. “It was a cute trick, that neural net you left for us in your trailer,” he told her. “But did you really think we’d fall for it? I follow all the latest advancements in artificial intelligence. I know what neural networks are capable of, and I’ve been studying you for years. There was no way a machine could do all the things you’ve done, Angel.”
She didn’t bother denying it. “Fine, you’ve got me. I have to admit I’m impressed.”
Moulton didn’t respond verbally, but Chapel could tell those words meant something to him. How long had he been following them around, really? How long had he been watching their every move?
“I’m curious about one thing,” Angel said. Maybe just to buy them more time before they were shot. Maybe because she was curious. “How did you know we were coming here tonight?”
“This is the data center where everything started,” Moulton said.
Angel shook her head. “No, I get that. But you knew we were coming here tonight. I don’t believe you’ve just been sitting here for days, waiting for us to figure things out.”
“No,” Moulton admitted. “That’s true.”
“You had to get all those robots out here. And Wilkes and yourself. All at the same time,” Angel pointed out.
“It took some work, yeah.”
“So how did you know?” Angel asked.
“I’m an analyst. I crunched the numbers,” he said. He took a deep breath as if he were about to give a lecture. “When you went online, in Pittsburgh. With all those video-game consoles — that was very clever, by the way. But red flags went off all over my screens. It was obvious that it was you, Angel, and not anybody else. Wilkes stopped you, but I knew you were still out there. That you might have a copy of the server logs from when I zombified your system. So I went through those logs myself, looking for anything you might find, anything you could use. I got inside your head, thought like you, mined the data like you would. And I found those stray packet headers, the ones with the plain text IP addresses. And I knew you would see them too.”
“So it was a race,” she said, “to see which of us could get here first.”
“Yep. And I won.”
Angel nodded. “You’re pretty good,” she said. “But then, I knew that already. It would take somebody damned good to do what you’ve done. Like hijacking that drone.”
Chapel felt his jaw fall open.
He’d thought that Angel was just stalling, trying to put off her death as long as she could. Now he understood. She had a plan.
She was going to talk her way out of this.
“I mean, that would have taken some serious skills,” Angel went on. “It wasn’t as easy as just, I don’t know, calling in an air strike. You had to make it look good. Like a terrorist did it. But what kind of terrorist could do all that? You needed to break the encryption on the command signal. You needed to work the duty logs to make sure there even was a Predator over New Orleans that day. And you really needed to be on top of your game to know about that shipment of low-level radioactive waste. I mean, it had a falsified bill of lading, right? It was contraband. But somehow you knew exactly where it would be, and when.”
“I work for the NSA. We know lots of things.”
Angel nodded. “You knew what was inside that cargo container. You knew the havoc it would cause if it was blown up in the right place. You got it right where you wanted. Did you hack into some kind of shipping database and change some numbers, make sure it ended up in New Orleans on the right day?”
“I’m not a hacker,” Moulton told her, his voice rising nearly an octave in pitch. Chapel remembered what had happened when he’d called Moulton a hacker back at NSA headquarters. “I’m an analyst. Anyone can break into a database and fudge entries until they create chaos. It takes a real talent to read the numbers, to see the opportunities in what’s already there.”
“So it was you,” Angel said. “You’re the hijacker.”
Chapel looked not at Moulton but at Wilkes. He knew that he was the one Angel was really talking to. Somehow the assassin had been seconded to the NSA, turned against his former colleagues from the DIA. But if he knew what Moulton and Charlotte Holman really were, if he understood that they were the terrorists, the real culprits — maybe he would stop this, right here. If they could just convince Wilkes—
“Go ahead and say it,” Wilkes told Moulton.
Moulton looked like he really wanted to rub his hands together. To laugh maniacally. Instead, he visibly forced himself to stay calm. “Yes, that’s right. I hijacked the Predator. I’m also the one who blew up your trailer, and the one who wrecked the California power grid. I’ve got other projects, too, ones that haven’t started yet.”
“Dear God, why?” Julia asked.
He turned to look at her. “There are some things you don’t even tell dead people.”
“Wilkes,” Chapel said, “you heard him, he’s a terrorist. He’s going to bring the whole country down if you don’t stop him. If you don’t—”
“Oh, come on,” Moulton said. “You haven’t figured it out by now? First Lieutenant Wilkes works for us. He always has. He was instrumental in our plan to destroy Hollingshead’s directorate. I know you thought he was one of yours, but that’s just because we wanted you to think that. He’s a double agent.”
“Okay. Enough,” Moulton said. “I know you’re trying to flatter me with all these questions. It’s not going to work. It’s time for the three of you to go.” He turned to Wilkes. He mimed firing a pistol with his hand.
Wilkes lifted his silenced pistol. But he didn’t fire, not right away. “Huh,” he said.
“Is there a problem?” Moulton asked.
“I’m just wondering. I mean, I thought Angel was a computer. Now we know she’s flesh and blood. You sure you don’t want to take her back to Fort Meade for questioning? She might know something. And what about Taggart there? She’s a civilian.”
Moulton looked very confused. “When we brought you on, we were told you were a team player. That you followed orders without question.”
“Yeah, sure. I mean, you want me to shoot, I shoot,” Wilkes said.
“So shoot, already.”
Wilkes nodded. He lifted the pistol again. “Okay. Just one thing. Triple.”
Moulton’s look of confusion didn’t change. “What?” he asked.
“I’m a triple agent,” Wilkes said.
And then he shot Paul Moulton through the head.
PART 4
When the secretary of defense landed on your airstrip late at night, you didn’t tell him to come back in the morning.
Creech Air Force Base in Nevada didn’t look like much on the ground. Just a standard prefab building like a million others the military owned. The decrepit casino next door, with its flashing lights and the jangle of its slot machines, made the base almost invisible in the desert night.
Quite intentional, of course.
Patrick Norton and a small entourage of hangers-on were moved quickly inside and down a corridor lined with doors that were identified only by a series of numbers: GCS-1, GCS-2, and so on. The local base commanding officer, a colonel by rank, was kind enough to show them one of the rooms, since everyone in the group had security clearance. Inside each GCS, or ground control station, stood a tall server rack humming away and a tiny cubicle filled with flat-screen monitors. There were three chairs sitting in front of the desk. “Typically a flight is crewed by a pilot — the stick jockey,” each colonel said, with that conspiratorial grin military men got when they use jargon, “an aircraft sensor operator who mans the controls for the aircraft’s instruments — the sensor — and a flight supervisor who can make mission decisions in real time — the screener.”