“The bigger the chief, the taller the totem pole,” Norton replied.
Holman was a woman of a certain age; all the same, the remark struck her as something distinctly out-of-date. The kind of casual remark you might have heard in this room fifty years prior. She considered whether she should say something, if only in the interest of friendly advice.
She didn’t get the chance. The door — the door — opened and they both had to jump to their feet. If the president walked into their room, it would never do for them to be seated.
But it wasn’t the man himself. It was his chief of staff, Walter Minchell, a trim, intelligent-looking man with a nearly invisible fringe of red beard. He raised one hand and gestured for Norton to come closer, even though there was no one else in the room. “He wanted me to convey his apologies,” Minchell said. “He’s too busy to speak with you directly.”
“Too busy?” Norton asked. “The country is falling apart and—”
“And that’s what’s keeping him,” Minchell insisted. “He’s got so much on his plate that he can’t do face time right now.”
“Young man,” Norton said, “you do understand that I am the secretary of defense? That he himself appointed me to handle the security of the country?”
“I understand,” Minchell said, “what he told me, and what he said I could tell you if you tried to bully your way in. He says he put you in charge of stopping this thing. But since then it’s only gotten worse. Hundreds of thousands of people in California with no power, no water — ships lined up outside of New Orleans crammed full of rotting food while grocery stores in the Midwest can’t stock their shelves. Half the Northeast locked down with a manhunt that has yet to produce a single captive.”
He glanced at Holman as he related this final fact. She made a point of not flinching.
“If,” Norton said, “the president has lost confidence in my abilities—”
“No,” Minchell said. “That’s not the takeaway here.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Norton replied.
The chief of staff scratched at his chin. “We need results, Mr. Secretary. We need them soon. You have got to start producing bodies. But in the meantime, the president is going to address the nation tomorrow night. Come clean with the fact that these are terrorist attacks and talk about what we’re doing to find the culprits.”
“That’s not the wise move right now,” Norton insisted. “If he would just meet with me so we could discuss this—”
“That’s exactly why you’re not meeting,” Minchell told him. “There’s nothing to discuss. You need to give him data. Anything you’ve got so it can go into the speech. Oh — and there’s one more thing. You’ll be the designated survivor on this one.”
Norton inhaled very slowly.
Whenever the president gave a major speech, one where the vice president was also present, he always appointed a designated survivor. A member of the cabinet who would not be allowed anywhere near the location of the speech so that if something terrible happened like, say, a terrorist attack, at least one top-ranking member of the executive branch would still be around to maintain control.
Being chosen as the survivor could mean one of two things. It could mean the president had faith in your ability to lead the country in case of his demise. Or it could mean he disliked you so much he didn’t want to see you, even accidentally, at a crucial time.
“I understand,” Norton said.
“Good,” Minchell told him. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work.”
Without even glancing at Holman, he disappeared back through the door.
“I’ll get you that data,” she told the SecDef.
Norton just turned on his heel and started walking away.
In the backseat, Angel held herself perfectly still. Her small body was crammed into the car door, and one of her slender shoulders propped up the majority of Wilkes’s considerable weight. He had fallen asleep back there, more or less on top of her. They’d been driving for hours like that.
Chapel watched her in his mirror. Angel’s face was frozen into the expression of someone who is trying very hard not to think about what was happening to her.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Fine,” she replied, in a clipped tone he didn’t like.
He decided he would pull over at the next chance he got. Let Julia drive, and put Angel up in the front seat. Maybe the marine just stank — Chapel remembered spending months in a motel room with Wilkes, and that the man didn’t have the best hygiene practices. But maybe it was something else. Angel looked a lot like she had when they’d forced her to get out of the car up on the ridge in Kentucky. Like she was being tortured.
He glanced over at Julia and saw a look on her face that was not entirely dissimilar.
“What about you?” he asked.
She took a long, deep breath. When she answered, she looked straight ahead through the windshield. As if she didn’t want him to see what was in her eyes. “I think that I saw Wilkes kill a man last night. Just… just shoot him in the brain. I think that ten minutes before that I was certain he was going to kill me. I think that I remember the way he tied us up, which was not exactly gentle.”
“He’s a bit rough-and-tumble,” Chapel admitted.
“He’s a monster,” Julia said. She glanced back over her shoulder, as if to make sure he was really sleeping. “He was acting a role, he says. Pretending to stalk us. Shooting you just to make it look like you were dead.” She shook her head and red hair bounced around her shoulders. “He’s crazy, Jim. I don’t know how you can even think about trusting him.”
“Because the alternative is letting Hollingshead die,” he told her.
There was nothing else, really, to say. Chapel needed allies desperately, and Wilkes had offered himself up for the job. Now that he’d killed Moulton, he said it was only a matter of hours — a day at the most — before his cover was blown. Before Charlotte Holman sent somebody else to track him down.
But in the meantime, Wilkes could be a powerful weapon. They knew where Holman would strike next, and a general idea of how she would do it. She, on the other hand, had no idea that she couldn’t trust Wilkes.
The plan had come together in Chapel’s mind almost instantly. It was simple, like any good plan. It was also incredibly dangerous. But that had never stopped him before.
First things first, though. They were going to need some equipment. It was Wilkes who pointed out where they could get it.
Chapel knew that Angel and Julia were terrified of their new teammate — and that they would never trust him. Chapel didn’t know if he could trust Wilkes, either. But he did know that with the marine’s help, there might just be a chance to come out of this alive.
So he headed east, driving as fast as he dared, straight through the night.
Wilkes had a smartphone that he could still use. It made life a lot easier for them. He found a motel in a quiet part of town, a nice enough place that was clean and where the staff were happy to take cash. “Gotta love Yelp reviews,” he said.
Angel seemed happy enough just to get out of the sunlight and into a dark room where she could lie down for a while. Julia, on the other hand, asked far too many questions. “Where are you going?” was the hardest one to answer.
“We need to acquire some supplies. Some stuff that’s hard to get,” Chapel told her.
“Like what?”
Chapel glanced over at the car. Wilkes was in the driver’s seat, his hands on the wheel. As still and quiet as a robot waiting for instructions.