“Not tonight it’s not,” the MP said.
“Sorry, I had no idea,” Chapel told him. They were almost close enough to touch. “Here, my ID,” he said.
The MP lowered his rifle a little, reaching for what he thought Chapel was going to hand him.
Except instead of a driver’s license it was a Glock 9 mm.
“Shit,” the MP said.
“Yeah,” Chapel told him. “Now, if you’ll—”
Maybe the MP thought Chapel was going to kill him then and there. He moved so fast he might have thought he was fighting for his life. His rifle came up, not to shoot Chapel, but to knock the pistol out of Chapel’s hand.
The move surprised Chapel. He lost the gun, and his hand suddenly stung with pain.
Chapel knew what to do next. The only thing he could do if he didn’t want to die or be arrested right here. Time seemed to slow down as he went through the movements he’d had drilled into him a thousand times.
Step in — he moved his left foot in between the MP’s feet, closing the distance between them, making it impossible for the MP to shoot Chapel or use his rifle as a club.
Unbalance your opponent — Chapel brought his good arm up, bent at the elbow, and shoved it into the MP’s neck, pushing the man to one side, off his center of balance. The MP had no choice but to change his footing or fall over. The MP did the obvious thing — he tried to dance sideways, to get his balance back. Which set Chapel up perfectly for the third movement.
Trip and control — Chapel’s left foot twisted around the MP’s calf and suddenly balance just wasn’t possible. The MP went crashing to the ground, with Chapel’s foot directing him until he was lying on his back, his arms splayed out to the sides to try to break the fall.
In a second Chapel had his spare pistol — his P228 — out and in his hand. “Don’t move,” he told the MP. “And don’t make a sound.”
The man nodded in agreement.
That was when Angel’s voice came back in his earpiece. “I’ve got that imaging now, sweetie,” she said. “We can get started.”
“Actually, there’s been a change of plan,” Chapel said.
North across town, about a mile away from the White House, Wilkes sat in his car and waited for a signal. He had a bag of potato chips and a two-liter bottle of soda and he would have been perfectly happy to sit there all night if the mission hadn’t required exact timing. As it was, he was beginning to get concerned.
In sniper school they’d taught him that worry was pointless. If you wasted time on things you couldn’t control, you harmed your readiness for the things you could. Far better to spend your time maintaining your equipment, or feeding yourself to keep up your energy, or doing anything more constructive than worrying about what might or might not be.
They’d taught him that lesson very well. Well enough that now he was only peripherally aware that there was less than an hour remaining before Hollingshead’s scheduled execution. Even if things worked perfectly from here, he was going to have to make great time.
At least one thing worked out. Fifteen minutes late, maybe, but there was the signal. A newspaper tucked into the slats of a decorative bench across the street.
Wilkes flashed his headlights twice, very quickly. There weren’t very many people out and about on the street to be annoyed. None of them seemed to notice.
Well, one person had. A dark shape stepped out of an alley and moved quickly to the passenger-side door of Wilkes’s car. He unlocked it, and the shape opened the door and ducked inside.
“It wasn’t easy getting away,” Charlotte Holman told him. She was dressed in a black trench coat and had her hair wrapped in a kerchief. “The SecDef is keeping me at his side twenty-four seven until after the president’s speech tomorrow. Supposedly so I can give him constant updates. I think he’s actually starting to get afraid of me.”
Wilkes favored her with a big friendly smile. He held out the bag of chips in case she wanted one. The way she turned up her lip told him she didn’t.
“You’ve been out of contact for a while,” she told him. “I haven’t heard anything from either of you in far too long. I think you’re a bad influence on him.”
“Him?” Wilkes asked.
“Paul. Paul Moulton. Where is he? He should be here with you.”
“Funny thing about that,” Wilkes told her. “He’s dead.”
Her eyes went very wide. “When?” she asked. “How?” She shook her head. “Never mind. It was Chapel, obviously. He’s alive, isn’t he? Goddamnit, I knew right from the start we should have followed him from NSA headquarters and killed him quietly before he could even get to New York. But Moulton thought we needed to establish a connection between him and the Angel system. Poor Paul!” She took a deep breath. “His sacrifice won’t be in vain.”
“Maybe,” Wilkes said.
She stared at him. “Don’t tell me there’s more bad news.”
“Just one thing,” he said, slapping his hands together to get some of the grease and fragments of potato chip off his fingers. Then he grabbed the stun gun at his side and brought it around very fast, fast enough she probably didn’t see it before its prongs touched her neck.
A nice thing about running an operation in a marina was that you could always find plenty of rope. Chapel had his captive MP trussed up and gagged and dumped in an old rowboat before anybody had time to call for help. There was a problem, though. The MP had a walkie-talkie on his belt and any second now his superior was going to call him to ask for a report. Chapel had had the same problem back at the beginning of all this, outside of Angel’s trailer. At the time, he had just had to accept his time was limited. That wasn’t going to work here.
“I’ve got an idea,” Angel said. “Take out your phone and snap a picture of the radio for me.”
Chapel did as he was told. “What exactly will this achieve?” he asked.
“It tells me the make and model of the walkie-talkie,” Angel replied. “Knowing that, I can look up the specifications for it on the Internet. Knowing the specifications… here. Turn it on and see what happens.”
Chapel adjusted a knob on the face of the radio. A squeal of white noise came from the speaker.
“Walkie-talkies all work on different frequencies,” she explained. “This brand is a multichannel unit, but all those channels are in the same general part of the spectrum. I’ve tied into the local cell-phone towers, and now I’m jamming all the possible frequencies this radio can pick up.”
“I had no idea you could do that.”
“Sugar,” Angel said, “we’ve been out of touch too long. You’ve forgotten the principle rule when dealing with me. I can do anything, as long as it’s attached to a computer. In fact, I can do more than this. Give me a second.”
Chapel huddled over the radio, watching the marina in every direction. It didn’t take long for Angel to come back.
“Once they realize they’re being jammed, the MPs might get suspicious and start looking around for the source. So now I’m spoofing them as well.”
A deep, masculine voice swam up out of the static from the walkie-talkie. Chapel couldn’t understand much of what it was saying in the midst of all that white noise, but he definitely heard the voice say “all clear.”
“Who is that?” Chapel asked.
“That’s me,” Angel said. She laughed. “I recorded my own voice, then slowed it down and changed the pitch a little. I have no idea if any of the MPs sound like that, but given the static it might be enough to fool them.”