They worked side by side for an hour and at the end they had a hole about six feet long and four feet deep. Chapel took Moulton’s legs and Wilkes took the dead man’s shoulders and they got him inside without any fanfare. Chapel wondered for a moment if he should say something, offer up some prayer. Moulton had tried to destroy every part of his life, but still. You were supposed to respect the dead.
But then Wilkes started shoving dirt over the body, flecks of it collecting on Moulton’s eyes and lips where they were still wet. Chapel looked away.
When the hole was filled in, they tamped down the loose earth as best they could. And then they just walked away.
Somebody would come. Someone from the NSA would come out here, probably as soon as they realized that Moulton had stopped reporting. They would come and they would probably find the shallow grave very quickly. Moulton would be dug back up and given a proper burial. Chapel had to believe that.
He scrubbed at his hands with a dry towel — there was no running water in the decaying mansion — and headed up the stairs. Wilkes followed right behind him. Up at the doors to the data center, Chapel turned and looked Wilkes right in the eye. Tried to stare him down. Make him falter.
It didn’t work. Wilkes was a poker player. He didn’t give anything away, not with his face.
Eventually, Chapel shook his head. He turned and opened the doors to the data center and stepped inside.
Angel sat at a workstation, paging through data on a big flat-screen monitor. Julia stood just behind her, one hand on Angel’s shoulder. She turned to look at Chapel with a question in her eyes.
He didn’t have anything remotely like an answer for her.
“Okay,” he said, not bothering to look at Wilkes. “Start talking.”
“It was three years ago that Hollingshead brought me in on this thing. I was back from my last tour, in Afghanistan. I guess you know by now what I am. My operational specialty.”
Chapel nodded, but said nothing.
“I got a call saying to go to such and such an office in the Pentagon. I went there and sat down and once he finished with all the song and dance, you know, cleaning his glasses, offering me a drink, all that stuff — I asked him who he wanted me to kill.
“He smiled and said nobody. He said he had a different kind of problem, one he needed me to solve. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about at first. I don’t think, back then, that even he knew all the details. But he was worried.
“He’s a man who knows how to keep his ears open, I’ll give him that. Like any good spymaster, he keeps tabs on his opposite numbers — all those directors and administrators and special deputies, at CIA and NSA and NGA and OICI and INR and all the other acronyms. He knows what they get up to, what operations they’re running. I suppose he needs to know that so he doesn’t end up stepping on their toes, like, by sending you out on a mission the CIA already has covered. There’s a constant flow of information between the agencies.
“Thing is, not all this information comes from official channels. Some of it is just chatter. Rumors, call them, or stuff that got overheard when maybe it shouldn’t have been. And back when this started, some of that chatter was starting to make Hollingshead very nervous. He had the sense that there were people in the intelligence community who were forming some kind of quiet alliance. A network with its own agenda, that crossed agency lines and didn’t report to anybody officially. It was a network he was definitely not invited to join.
“Every time he tried to get close to the people in the network, they would shut down. Some of them were more blatant about it than others. It was clear they had orders not to give him so much as the time of day.
“He wasn’t willing to use the word ‘conspiracy,’ when he told me about it. He still thought maybe it was just some totally legit thing, a way for agencies to share information without having to call official meetings. But he needed to make sure. That was where I came in. He had my whole file, details on every one of my missions. He said he needed a poker player. Somebody with incredible patience, somebody who could hide his intentions as long as it took. Somebody who could think three moves ahead.
“He told me about you, Chapel, and why you wouldn’t work for this assignment. He said you weren’t a good enough actor. Your style was all wrong. He didn’t want a commando, he wanted a sniper. He’d had Angel run through a bunch of personnel files, looking for the right man, and my name was the first one on the list.
“Which still didn’t tell me exactly what he wanted me to do. Turned out the answer was simple: pretend I didn’t like him.
“He made sure it looked like I had good reason. He talked to all the right people about how I was some kind of monster. How he’d recruited me because he didn’t like the idea of a trained killer ending up at the wrong agency. He told people he had no real use for me and just wanted to keep me where I couldn’t cause any trouble.
“My job was to make a little noise about how I felt like I was being treated unfairly. To spread some gossip about how I didn’t want to work for Hollingshead anymore, that I was interested in transferring out of his directorate. I had some old friends from back in Iraq, civilian contractors from Blackwater, a CIA guy I knew, and we would get together and play cards sometimes. That was where I started hinting that I was unhappy.
“Hollingshead figured that if he was spying on the conspiracy, it would spy on him, too. That whoever ran the thing would jump at the chance to turn one of his own people against him. Turned out he was right.
“It wasn’t anybody at the NSA who contacted me originally. It was my CIA buddy who worked as my handler. Not that he was ever real clear on what our roles were. He said if I wanted to get back at Hollingshead, he had a way. One that he swore up and down wouldn’t hurt national security, but actually make it stronger. He even suggested that Hollingshead was a problem, that maybe he needed to be taken out.
“It was all done with such a soft touch, I barely knew I’d been recruited. We were just two guys shooting the shit. It was months and months and months before he said he wanted to introduce me to his secret boss. I was going to meet a woman named Charlotte Holman. I was supposed to do whatever she said.
“For a long time, that just meant spying on Hollingshead. Feeding her data about his movements, about what he had you and Angel doing. In exchange, she said, she would see about getting me transferred. Get me a job somewhere I would be appreciated.
“Hollingshead made sure the info I gave her was real. That meant making himself vulnerable to her. But it also meant she started trusting me. She started talking to me about what she called the Cyclops Initiative. A plan, a big plan, that was going to make America safe for a very long time. I wasn’t allowed to know many of the details, but she said it was going to look very bad but it would be a good thing in the end.
“She said I was going to be a big part of that. A hero.
“It wasn’t until about a week before the attack on New Orleans that she told me she was going to need proof that she could trust me. She said things were getting critical, that she wanted to know if I was willing to take a more active role. I asked what that meant. She asked me if I was willing to help her take down Hollingshead’s directorate, bust it open at the seams. I said sure — I mean, I was supposed to hate the guy, right? Then she asked me if I was willing to kill some people. I didn’t need to ask for names, I knew who she meant. Hollingshead, Chapel, Angel.
“I said, no problem. That was what I was trained for, after all.