Angel nodded agreeably.
Chapel moved closer to her and lifted his arm, thinking he would give her a quick hug to end things. But she shied away, putting her hands up to ward him off.
“No offense,” she said, “but right now, you kind of stink of it.”
He backed off.
Without saying anything more, Julia produced a couple of nearly fresh dollar bills from her pocket. Angel got the soda she wanted — something sweet with lots of caffeine, her favorite — and left without saying another word. When she was gone, Chapel leaned up against the vending machine and tried not to let his confusion completely overcome him.
Julia put a hand over her mouth and shook her head back and forth. “Jim, I’m so sorry—”
“Looks like you misread some signals, there,” he told her.
She looked toward Angel’s room, as if there would be some sign there to help her understand what they’d just heard. “Whoever did this to her …” she said.
“What, you mean hiding her away in trailers her whole life? It was that or send her to prison,” he said. “Anyway, she’s agoraphobic. She wants to live like that.”
Julia shook her head. “Sure. It makes her feel safe to be inside, away from people. But you don’t treat an alcoholic by locking them inside a bar.”
He had to admit she had a point.
“She’s missed out on so much,” Julia said. “If I ever find out who did this to her, who made her what she is — I’m going to tear their balls off.”
Teaming up with Wilkes had one major advantage: he had a credit card.
In fact, he had an unlimited corporate card from the NSA. The card was issued to a company called “Interstate Holdings,” but it drew on the endless coffers of one of the biggest black budgets in the country. It had been given to Wilkes when he was sent out to hunt for Chapel and Angel, and nobody had cut it off yet.
As a result, when Chapel headed out of the motel and south on the highway toward Washington, he was driving a slightly better car than he’d had before. Julia had the old beater that Ralph had bought for them, since she had her own destination to get to.
If they were going to save Hollingshead, they needed to approach the problem from several different angles. They had to split up.
The biggest issue they faced was that they didn’t know how it was going to be done. Originally Holman had wanted Wilkes to kill the director — she’d told him as much, maybe as a test to see what he was willing to do for her. But after Wilkes failed to kill Chapel in Pittsburgh, she had lost some of her faith in the marine. She’d told him she had a contingency plan in place and that he shouldn’t worry about it.
Which could mean just about anything. One of the MPs guarding Hollingshead might be a plant. Or they could have a sniper ready to shoot the director from half a mile away. The only real piece of data they had was that it was supposed to happen at midnight.
The plan they’d eventually come up with had been to get Chapel close enough to Hollingshead to protect him — and then to put pressure on Holman to call off the assassination. If half of the plan failed, the other half might still work.
It was a gamble, but Chapel had taken worse bets.
Chapel skirted Baltimore — he could not afford to get stuck in traffic — then rejoined 95 just before the Beltway. Working his way down past the airport and into Alexandria took some doing, but he knew these roads like the back of his hand and he was able to stash the car not too far from the marina where Hollingshead lived.
The marina sat at the north end of what was technically an island, though it came so close to touching the banks of the Potomac that it was hard to tell. The island had managed to avoid every wave of development in the twentieth century and was almost unused except as parkland. Chapel supposed that the people wealthy enough to keep their boats at the marina liked it that way. The northern half of the island was basically a giant parking lot for boats, a haul-out facility filled with small pleasure craft up on trailers. South of there were the actual slips where the bigger vessels, the ones that couldn’t be brought on land for the winter, still bobbed in the river. Hollingshead’s yacht was about as far as you could get from the road, of course — that was how these things always worked. Chapel had considered going in by water, shimmying up a dripping line with a knife between his teeth like a pirate, maybe. But he couldn’t get his artificial arm wet and he wasn’t willing to part with it, so he had to approach by land.
The problem with that, of course, was that Charlotte Holman had posted armed guards all over the marina, to stop Hollingshead from meeting with anyone.
Good thing Chapel had been trained for this kind of job.
Another thing they’d bought with Wilkes’s magic credit card was a hands-free unit and a burner phone. As Chapel slipped between two parked boat trailers at the edge of the marina grounds, he put in the earpiece and slipped the phone into his pocket.
“Angel,” he said. “You there?”
“You know it, baby,” she replied.
He tried very hard not to let the sound of her voice send shivers down his spine. He failed. It was just how they worked together.
And it was magnificent.
“It’s so good to have you back where you belong,” he told her. “Perched on my shoulder, working as my guardian angel.”
“Tell me about it. I’ve been so useless up to now. It’s good to be back on a mission with you, even if I have to do it from this Internet café. There’s three other people here. So I may have to watch what I say.”
“Do they look like hired killers or NSA spies?”
She laughed. “No. They look like sleepy grad students from the university, trying to get their papers written before class tomorrow. But you can’t be too careful.”
“Fair enough,” he replied.
“Give me some time here to work up the imaging,” she told him.
Chapel took a second to breathe. He looked out at the lights of Washington across the river, watched them dance as they were reflected in the water. In the distance he could hear lines jingling as they slapped against bollards, hear the repetitive dull thudding of the boats bobbing in their slips. The night air was crisp on his exposed face and he felt himself centering. Feeling good. It had been way too long since he’d worked a mission like this, the way it was supposed to be done.
Of course, complacency could get you killed.
His back began to ache from crouching so low, so he straightened up a little to put his weight on different muscles. He closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath.
And that was when he was spotted.
“Hey!” someone called out. “Marina’s closed!”
Chapel craned his head around to see a man in a gray shirt and dark pants — a navy uniform. He was carrying an M4 rifle and he was maybe twenty yards away.
No chance of taking the guy down from that distance, not with Chapel’s sidearm still tucked in its holster. No chance to run away, either.
“Come on out of there,” the MP told him. “Hands out.”
Chapel nodded and stepped out from between the boat trailers. It was dark enough that he didn’t think the MP would be able to see his holster. If he played this calm, it might give him another few seconds before he was arrested. “Sorry, Officer, I was just—”
“Don’t call me ‘officer,’ ” the MP said. “Reach into your pocket very slowly and take out your ID. You own one of these boats?”
“That’s right,” Chapel said. Slowly he moved his good hand toward his back pocket. Where his wallet might be, if he was carrying one. “I have the registration card right here.” Did boats have registrations like cars? He had no idea. But it sounded good. Smiling, he walked straight toward the MP. “I left some important stuff in the boat last time I was down here, figured I would just duck in and get it, is that okay?”