Wilkes nodded. “I knew that guy deserved a bullet.” He walked over to the nearest shelf and grabbed one of the cardboard boxes stored there. He put his weapon in his pocket, then cut open the box using the knife he’d taken off Contorni’s guard. “Time to go shopping,” he said.
Chapel was not particularly surprised to see that the box contained M4 carbines. Standard gear for the kind of soldiers stationed at the Proving Ground. He lifted one and made as if to offer it to Wilkes, but it was hardly what the mission called for. Wilkes grunted and went to another shelf, this one with larger boxes. “What do you like, Jimmy? Combat shotties? Grenade launchers? You can pretty much take your pick.”
“I usually just carry a handgun,” Chapel replied. He headed over to another shelf and started examining the boxes there. They were all marked as containing stereo equipment. “Something with some stopping power but a nice magazine size. If you come across any SIG Sauer P228s—”
He stopped because he heard Wilkes laughing.
Coming around the side of a shelving unit, he found the marine standing over a very large box full of Styrofoam. Sticking up out of the packing material was a device made from what looked like lengths of green pipe welded together.
“Is that what I think it is?” Chapel asked.
Wilkes had a huge grin on his face. “Harris!” he shouted. “Contorni! You don’t screw around, do you?”
Chapel was laughing despite himself by the time they got back to the motel. Wilkes’s sense of humor could be a little coarse, but sometimes you just needed to blow off a little steam. After running for his life for days on end, it was good to feel a little safe, too, even if he knew that he was about to throw himself right back into the path of the oncoming train.
Julia was watching TV when they came in. “You should see this,” she said, working the remote control to raise the volume. “Things in California are getting worse, not better. They say there’s a virus in the power grid, and it’s spread as far north as Seattle and down to the border with Mexico. The government can’t say when they’ll get it fixed, and meanwhile people are rioting in the streets. Plus, there’s been a run on bread in the Midwest — a loaf of that processed bleached garbage stuff was going for twenty dollars this morning! The country’s about to collapse.”
“Lucky the good guys are on the case,” Wilkes said.
“This is serious,” Julia told him.
“And we’re serious, too,” Chapel said. He’d brought a six-pack of beer. He cracked open a can and handed it to her. She stared at it like he’d just handed her a live lobster, but after a second, she seemed to rethink her position and she took a long sip.
They called Angel, and she came over from the room next door. By then Chapel had a road map of the area around Washington spread out on the bed. It was time to get planning. He offered Angel a beer, too. “Probably our last chance to relax before this thing is all over.”
“We could all be dead tomorrow morning,” Wilkes pointed out.
“Thanks, I’m good,” Angel told him. “Did you see the thing on TV about the president’s speech?”
Chapel was too busy smoothing out the map to pay much attention. “Does he think that he can calm people down by talking to them?”
Angel shook her head. “The pundits say that, given the number of staffers working on it, this is going to be more than just a call for peace. They think he’s going to announce something big. Like maybe that the power outages and the food prices are the work of terrorists. One guy even suggested he was going to declare war on China.”
Chapel looked up when he heard that.
“It was just some crackpot,” Angel said, blushing and looking away. “But that’s out there, now. People are talking about it.”
Chapel shook his head. He didn’t have much use for speeches as a rule. Politicians talked, because that was their job, even when they had nothing real to say. But if there was even a hint of retaliation—
“The president won’t attack China just on principle,” Julia insisted. She looked to Wilkes. “When you were burrowing your way into this conspiracy — was there any sense that this Initiative or whatever was taking orders from China?”
“No, everyone involved kept insisting what a patriot they were. The kind of people who argue over who’s wearing the bigger flag pin.” He shrugged. “I don’t know who’s at the top of this, though. Could be Beijing. But if it is, they’ve covered their tracks pretty good.”
Chapel chewed his lower lip. There were wheels within wheels here, games within games. Bringing China into the mix was probably just disinformation — a way to point the blame away from Holman and her Cyclops Initiative. It didn’t matter what he knew, though. It mattered a great deal what the public believed.
Well. Nothing he could do about that. “No matter what, our move has to be rescuing Hollingshead. So let’s look at that.”
Wilkes nodded. He drained his beer can and tossed it in the corner of the room. Then he leaned over the map and stabbed it with one finger.
“They forced him out of his offices a while back. Tried to make him resign, but the latest I heard was he was just acting like he was taking some vacation days.”
Chapel looked where he was pointing. It was a little bump of land sticking out into the Potomac River, just south of Ronald Reagan airport. “There’s something there,” he said, trying to remember his Washington geography. “Boats. A marina, I think.”
Wilkes nodded. “Let me guess. He never told you where he lived, did he?”
“That was never something I needed to know,” Chapel pointed out.
“He spends most of his time at work, up at the Pentagon. But he sleeps on a yacht down there. He’ll be there right now. But it’s not as easy as coming alongside in a rowboat. Holman pulled a snow job on her boss, the NSA director. She wanted to put Hollingshead in a cell so he could be interrogated. The secretary of defense vetoed that — which did not make her happy — but her boss did authorize her to monitor Hollingshead’s communications and movements twenty-four seven. He also put a bunch of guards around the old guy. MPs, drawn from Pentagon staff, if I heard right.”
“Any idea on how many of them, or where they’re posted?” Chapel asked.
“That wasn’t ever something I needed to know,” Wilkes said.
Chapel nodded. “Give me your smartphone. I need a better map of that marina. If I can see all the access roads and good hiding spots, I can figure out how they’ve constructed their security. And then I can think about how to get in.” He looked up at Angel and Julia. “We should get some rest, too. I’m going to need all of us to pull this off. We won’t leave until after dark, so we have a couple of hours downtime.”
Wilkes stretched his arms. “Sounds good to me. Wake me up if the Chinese start nuking us or something.”
Chapel was too busy working the smartphone to reply. After a minute, Angel came over and took it away from him because she thought he was using it wrong. “Google Maps isn’t going to show you what you need,” she told him. “You want a real street map, the old-fashioned kind. Let me show you how to access those.”
It was good to be back to something approximating normal.
The nation’s fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles had gone through quite a workout in the last twenty-four hours. Every aircraft had been grounded and checked out by a team of mechanics, their hardware stripped down from nose to tail and checked for any sign of unauthorized maintenance or sabotage. Those drones that were not considered vital to national security had been physically grounded, the mechanics actually removing their propellers and emptying their fuel tanks so they could not be commandeered by anyone.