“I could see in her eyes she believed me. I’d come so far, implicated myself enough by spying on Hollingshead for her, that there was no going back. When I said I was willing to kill you, that was what it took for her to let me in. To really trust me.
“To start telling me what was going on.”
Julia got up and moved over to Chapel’s side. “This is how the intelligence community works? This is what you deal with all the time?”
“No,” Chapel told her. “Most of the time it’s just guys in offices, shoving paper around. Writing up security estimates and analyzing photographs. Every once in a while, though…” He shook his head. “When national security is at stake, people get a little nuts. You’re talking about the last bunch of people in America who still believe in the government. In its necessity, anyway. Threats to that government make the knives come out.”
Wilkes shook his head. “This isn’t just some internal beef, though. It wasn’t just you three I was supposed to be willing to kill. She told me a lot of stuff at that meeting. Suggested a bunch of things that might happen. She had to know, see. She had to know how I would react.
“She asked me, if her group organized an attack on civilian targets inside the borders of the United States, what would I do? I said I would assume she had a good reason. She seemed to like that.
“She laid it out for me. The whole thing with the cargo container full of radiological waste and the kamikaze drone. She watched me pretty close while she talked about it. I got the idea that if I winced or looked upset, then somebody would come bursting in and cap me right then and there.
“So I made a point of not wincing or looking upset.
“Once things were in motion, I had no contact with Hollingshead. I had to play this thing out. My orders were to get on Holman’s good side and stay there as long as I could. Dig into her organization as deep as I could go. I did manage to swing things a little for you guys. I told her that Angel really was an AI. Obviously Moulton didn’t buy it, but I think Holman was convinced. That meant I just had to destroy that hard drive, not actually kill Angel.”
“And me?” Chapel asked. “You shot me. Were you willing to kill me just to make things look good for your new boss?”
“Jimmy, please,” Wilkes said, looking pained. “You know my MOS. I shot you. I didn’t kill you. If I planned on actually killing you, you would be dead right now. No, I just needed your blood all over that place. I thought maybe Holman would be satisfied with that, given how many other things she had on her plate. But she got obsessed with it. With the idea you were still out there, still alive.”
“Which raises another question,” Chapel said. “Why us? Did we do something to her in a past life that meant we needed to be killed? Was it just because Hollingshead didn’t want to go on a second date?”
“What?” Julia asked, looking very confused.
“I’ll explain later,” Chapel told her.
Wilkes laughed. “That’s the funny part. When you talk to her, to Holman, or some of the people she introduced me to — all they want to talk about is Hollingshead’s DX department. He’s a goddamned legend out there. Maybe because of how he took down Tom Banks a couple of years ago. Maybe because of some of the missions he’s sent you on, Jimmy, the ones that actually worked. But they talk about him like he’s some kind of superhero, and they know that when there’s a superhero in town, the villains always lose. They decided to make the DX — specifically Hollingshead, Angel, and you — their scapegoats for one simple reason.
“They figured you were the only ones who could stop them.”
Chapel didn’t bother feeling flattered. He understood the real message there. “So they honestly think they’re going to get away with… what? Protecting the country? With selective drone strikes on domestic targets? How is that supposed to work?”
“Nobody bothered giving me the big picture. Just the operational parameters,” Wilkes pointed out.
Chapel looked away. “You say there were other people. It wasn’t just Holman and Moulton working against us. You said there was a whole conspiracy, a secret network inside the intelligence community. How big do you think this is? How far up does it go?”
Wilkes lifted his shoulders dramatically. Let them fall again. “I don’t really know. I know Holman gets orders from somebody else. She’s a subdirector at the NSA. That suggests to me there are people at the director level. Maybe higher. As for how many of them there are, Hollingshead estimated that it included people in every agency. That’s one thing we’ve got to remember here. It’s not like every one of the ninety thousand employees of the NSA are in on this plot. It’s just small workgroups here and there.”
Chapel frowned. “Cells. Like a terrorist organization uses.”
“The comparison is pretty fucking apt,” Wilkes told him. “Considering what they’re doing.”
“Okay. But one thing I want to know — why break your cover now? Why come out of the cold right in the middle of things?”
Wilkes laughed. “Maybe because maintaining my cover would have meant killing you and the ladies here while Moulton watched? I let you guys get away from me once and Holman nearly ripped my head off. Maybe I could have come up with some way of keeping you alive here tonight, but she never would have trusted me again.”
“So instead you killed Moulton,” Chapel pointed out.
“It’s what I do.”
“It was stupid,” Chapel said. “We could have interrogated him. We could have learned so much from him.”
“Sure, during which time he could have found some way to contact Holman and tell her what happened.” Wilkes shook his head. “You have your way of operating, I’ve got mine.”
Chapel slammed his fist against a steel server rack, making it ring. The noise made Angel jump, but he was frustrated enough not to apologize. “Right now we’ve got no way of operating at all! We’ve got scraps of information that don’t add up. We have no idea which direction to jump, no idea how to hit these people where they’ll feel it.”
“I know one thing,” Wilkes pointed out.
“Oh? And what’s that?”
“What their next move is,” the marine said. “I know their next target.”
Chapel nodded slowly. “Yeah?” he said. “What are they going to do? Crash the stock market? Disrupt the Border Patrol? Close a major airport?”
“Nope,” Wilkes said. “They’re gonna assassinate Hollingshead.”
A carved wooden clock on an end table ticked away the seconds as the first rays of dawn came in through tall French windows. At one point a member of the custodial staff came into the room and stared at a painting on the wall for nearly a minute. Finally he reached up and tilted it a few degrees to one side, straightening it perfectly. Then he left.
Charlotte Holman and Patrick Norton sat through the whole thing, stiff-backed, on a white damask pattern loveseat that had probably belonged to Dolley Madison.
They had taken her phone away from her when she went through the security station. She was going quietly crazy.
Norton checked his watch. Again. Then he looked up at an unassuming door in the far wall. He turned to catch Holman’s eye. “Have you ever been this close, before?”
“To the Oval Office?” Holman asked. “No, no, I… I haven’t.”
Norton smiled at her. “It’s always the same. He always makes you wait. Actually, I’ve known three of them, and it was the same every time. They need to make sure you understand how things work. That you sit here at the pleasure of your commander in chief.”
Holman chuckled. “I wouldn’t have thought that was a point that needed to be stressed,” she said.