Before the missile could launch, however, Julia Taggart stood up from where she’d been lying in a rowboat a few hundred meters south of the marina and lifted a FIM-92 Stinger missile launcher to her shoulder.
“Ten o’clock high,” Angel said, in her ear.
The launcher weighed thirty-five pounds, but Julia had done a lot of Pilates and she managed it. She slammed the Battery Coolant Unit into the handguard, just as Wilkes had shown her. In the complicated eyepiece, the sky turned blue and yellow, with a big orange dot right where Angel had said it would be.
No need to aim. The Stinger was designed to be foolproof. Fire and forget.
Julia pulled the trigger. Fwoosh. The missile jumped out of its launch tube with a modest noise, followed a second later by a bone-shaking roar as its rocket motor kicked in.
“Drop the launcher and get out of there!” Angel said.
Julia tossed the launcher over the side of her boat and let it sink in the Potomac. She pulled the cord on the boat’s little outboard motor and started downriver, away from the yacht, away from everything.
Behind and far above her, the Stinger tracked the Reaper by its heat signature. It adjusted its course to home in on the drone, and they met in a burst of light and heat and smoke that filled up half the sky. The noise followed a moment later, loud enough to make the boat rock back and forth.
Julia did not turn around to watch.
She did let a little smile cross her face.
“Badass,” she said.
At the last second, Holman clamped her eyes shut and buried her face in her shoulder, as if that could protect her from a Hellfire strike. The noise and light of the explosion made her cry out in terror.
When she finally opened her eyes again and looked up, Hollingshead was standing over her, peering down at her through his thick glasses.
“Charlotte, my boys aren’t fools. They knew you might send a drone.”
Wilkes came thudding down the stairs from the deck. “It’s awesome out there.” He laughed. “Every car alarm from here to Foggy Bottom is going off.”
Holman’s eyes went wide. “You blew it up? You blew up a plane this close to Ronald Reagan airport?”
“To be fair, it was a drone, not a plane,” Chapel pointed out.
Holman shook her head. “Every cop in D.C. is going to be after you now.”
“Because of you they already were,” Chapel told her.
He knew she was right, though. They had only a few minutes before the entire river would swarm with police boats. Still, heading out by water was the better option. Moving overland would be impossible. The capital police drilled constantly for something like this and they would act quickly to shut down every road in the city. Chapel didn’t intend to go very far, but he wanted to be away from the epicenter of the search, and soon.
So he needed to get Holman talking now.
“Director, sir,” he said, “forgive me, but we need to get you dressed, and we all need to get out of here.” Hollingshead nodded and stepped out of the room. “But the big question,” Chapel said, turning to Wilkes, “is whether we take her with us when we go, or just leave her here for the police to find her.”
Holman snorted. “You think I’m worried about them finding me here? I can make up any story I want as to why I’m handcuffed in a traitor’s yacht.”
“I’m sure they’d believe you, too. A respected official of a government agency, held against her will. It would be hard to make anything stick to you, even your involvement in the Cyclops Initiative.”
Holman narrowed her eyes. “There’s a ‘but’ in there, isn’t there?”
“Maybe an ‘unless.’ We can’t make anything stick without evidence. The problem for you,” Chapel told her, “is that we have some now. We have Wilkes.”
“His involvement was highly compartmentalized.”
Chapel nodded. This was where he had to start playing real poker. “As far as you know, yes. But he was there when you ordered us all killed. He was there when you said you planned on assassinating the director. And he kept his ears open the whole time. He met other people in the Initiative as well. Spoke with them. They’re all dead now or out of the way. You’re the only one left. The question you need to ask yourself is this: How much does he know? How much can he prove? And if the answer is anything more than ‘nothing,’ you know you’re in serious shit.”
She winced as if the obscenity stung her.
Chapel took a breath. “This ‘Cyclops Initiative’ thing? It’s over. It failed. Now it looks to me like you have one chance to beat a treason charge,” he said. “And that’s to tell us everything, right now. Otherwise Wilkes is going to find the closest reporter and start giving interviews.”
Holman turned to look at the marine. “You wouldn’t dare. I know you well enough that—”
“You know me? I was a triple agent right under your nose for three years,” Wilkes pointed out. “You know jack, lady.”
Director Hollingshead stepped back into the cabin, dressed now in pants and a blazer over his pajama top. “Shall we head out, boys? I have a motor launch moored in the next slip over. It will allow us to make a, ah, more expeditious retreat than if we tried to move the yacht.”
“On it,” Wilkes said, and he stomped back up onto the deck.
“Sir,” Chapel said, “did you hear my conversation with Subdirector Holman?”
“I did, son.” Hollingshead took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. “So what will it be?” he asked her.
She was breathing heavily by then, as if she were about to have a panic attack. “Rupert — I want your word as a gentleman. You’ll protect me from any fallout.”
“To the best of my ability,” he said and gave her a little bow. “Of course, in exchange for my protection—”
“Everything,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything.”
PART 5
“Okay,” Angel said. She tapped the keypad of her laptop, and a green light came on next to the camera. “We’re ready.” She glanced over at Chapel, and he supposed she was asking him what to say next, but he had no idea. He’d never done this before. So he just nodded.
Angel swallowed and looked straight into the camera. “The following is an interview with Charlotte Holman, subdirector of the National Security Agency, recorded March twenty-sixth, 20 —, starting at… 3:18 A.M.” She nodded once at the camera, then turned the laptop around so that the camera faced Holman. “Please confirm your identity.”
“I’m Charlotte Holman.”
Chapel walked over to where Angel sat in a folding metal chair. It was one of two, and they comprised the only furniture in the tiny room. They were in the cellar of a DIA safe house just across the river from Washington. A place where foreign spies were taken to be debriefed. Hollingshead believed it was the safest place they had access to, a place the NSA didn’t know about.
The perfect place to carry out an interrogation. “All the levels look good?” Chapel asked Angel. “You’ve got plenty of memory?”
“It’s all fine, Chapel. Go ahead and start. You can—”
“Hold on,” he said. His stomach had just flip-flopped. It had been doing that every so often. He’d assumed it was just nerves, or the fact that he wasn’t eating properly. Normally it just twitched a couple of times and that was it. This time it lasted longer. It didn’t hurt, it just felt weird.
Angel’s expression changed to one of concern. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Fine. A little exhausted. I’ll try to get some sleep after this, if I can,” he told her. Then he walked over to where Holman sat. He remained standing as he interviewed her.
“We want to ask you some questions,” Chapel said. “About the Cyclops Initiative. First off, I’d like to know why.”
Holman’s brow furrowed. “Why?”
Chapel pinned her with his gaze. “Why you crashed a Predator drone into the Port of New Orleans. Why you took down the power grid in California. Do you admit that you did those things?”
“Yes, of course. We also manipulated the stock market. Oh, and we released a virus into the Internet that slowed down electronic transactions. That was one of Paul’s favorite parts of this. He was really quite proud — you see, the people who run e-commerce sites are always looking for ways to speed up transactions, to make it easier to buy and sell online than it is in the real world. Just adding code to sabotage those transactions wouldn’t have worked, because the software engineers would have noticed it right away and cut it out on their own. What Paul did was add an upstream checksum function at the level of the banks funding the…” She stopped herself. She blinked as if remembering where she was. “I… I’m guessing you didn’t know about that. You look surprised.”
“We’ll get to that later. But you’re not answering my question. Why did you do all this?”
“To soften the economy,” Holman said, with a smile. “Do you have any cigarettes? I gave up smoking years ago, but this feels like a good time to start again.”
“No. I don’t have any cigarettes. Answer the question, please.”
“The question?”
Chapel fought to control himself. “Why?”
“We attacked the economy because we wanted people to care.”
“What people?”
“The American people, of course. That’s where the name comes from. The Cyclops part. The American people are like a Cyclops, a giant of immense power but capable of seeing only one thing at a time. For years now, the leaders of the country have known this. They’ve used it to shape the discourse, to move national politics in the direction they want. Look at the Iraq war. After September eleventh, the people couldn’t see anything, couldn’t deal with any issue except terrorism. The Bush White House claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — well, who knows. Maybe they really thought that was true. Or maybe it was a convenient excuse. They got the war they wanted. Later on, after the economic collapse in 2008, the only thing the people could talk about was the economy. About money. Which provided the impetus to bail out the banks, the auto industry, later on the insurance companies and the hospitals. All of it on the dime of the people who were already hurting financially. Because we told them it would improve the economy.”
Chapel gritted his teeth. “Maybe we can save the conspiracy theories for later.”
Holman laughed. “Theories? This is all a matter of historical fact. For a generation now, the two political parties have exploited the public’s single-mindedness to line the pockets of their friends and cronies. They’ve dismantled the American state piece by piece, sold it off to the highest bidder—”
“Enough,” Chapel said. “This isn’t a propaganda video. Get to the point. You don’t like the way the country’s being run, fine. So you started your own conspiracy to fight that?”
“The Initiative is made up of people who understand that the real problems of this country are being ignored,” Holman told him. “Climate change running amok. Income inequality so profound the only logical outcome is class warfare. Globalism and automation leading to double-digit unemployment. These are the things that need to be addressed, and yet no politician will touch them. It was clear to us we needed to remove the politicians from the equation.”
Chapel raised an eyebrow. “And how exactly do you plan on doing that?”
“By putting power in the hands of the one branch of government that doesn’t take its orders from a fickle public: the military. The point of the Cyclops Initiative is to engineer a military coup in the United States.”