“Assuming that when that day comes, the generals and admirals just decide to hand power back to the people. Without a fight.”
Holman shook her head. “Maybe it won’t be that easy. But it’s necessary. It has to happen.”
“Except it isn’t going to,” Chapel told her.
“What?”
“It’s not going to happen now. The Initiative is over, one way or another. Because you’re going to tell me how to stop it.”
All the air seemed to drain out of the room. Holman was beat, and she clearly knew it. But she was a proud woman. The kind of person who thought she knew better than everyone else, who was clear minded and certain about her right to be in charge. Chapel might as well have just slapped her across the face.
He might have felt bad about that, if she hadn’t been responsible for dozens of people losing their lives and the West Coast descending into chaos.
“You’re going to start by telling me the names of everyone you know who’s part of the Initiative,” Chapel told her. “Let’s begin with the top level. You must have been pretty high up, since you were in charge of the operational end. But from what I’ve heard so far, none of this was your idea, originally.”
“No,” Holman said.
“So who’s in charge? Who’s number one in this thing?”
She blinked at him. “You don’t know that? But — you must. I assumed … I… It’s Patrick Norton.”
Chapel’s mouth went dry. He really wanted to sit down.
“Wait,” he said. “Hold on. The secretary of defense—”
“Yes. The SecDef. He was the initiator for all this. He’s overseen it every step of the way. Who else could engineer a military coup?”
Chapel had to go lean against a wall. He glanced at Angel. She looked just as shocked as he felt. He’d known this thing went pretty far up. But the cabinet—
“You didn’t know,” she said. All the color had drained out of her face.
She must have just realized that Chapel was bluffing. That he had far less information — and control over the situation — than he’d claimed.
He supposed it had to happen eventually.
Holman pursed her lips. She looked like she could barely sit still in her chair. “I think I may have made a mistake. You said everyone else was dead or under wraps. I assumed that meant you had Norton, too. That you had him in a room like this somewhere.” She shook her head. “What a fool I’ve been. You didn’t know anything, did you?”
“Let’s get back on track,” Chapel said. “Tell me about—”
“No,” she said, her eyes wild. “I agreed to talk because I thought the Initiative was going to fail. My God, I gave Rupert far too much credit. You haven’t stopped Norton. You haven’t stopped anything.”
“We can still—”
“No, Captain. No. You can’t. It’s already in motion. This is the day it happens. The day of the coup. And you aren’t ready for it.”
Upstairs, they gathered around a kitchen table. Wilkes, Angel, Hollingshead. And Julia, who had a right to hear this if anybody did.
“Tomorrow morning — this morning, I guess,” Chapel told them, “in about five hours, the president is going to make a speech before Congress. An emergency address to talk about the riots in California and how scared everyone is. From what we know, he’s going to reveal that it’s all been a series of terrorist attacks. We think he’s going to blame the Chinese, although I doubt he’ll come out and say so directly. As far as we can tell he has no idea about the Initiative or about Norton. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going to get to finish that speech.”
Hollingshead blinked rapidly behind his thick glasses. “Son, are you saying — they’re going to, ah, assassinate the president?”
“I believe that’s the plan,” Chapel said. “And not just him. The vice president will be there. So will the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate. If they all die, well… the head of the Initiative, Patrick Norton, has been chosen as the designated survivor for this speech. As secretary of defense, he’s sixth in line to become acting president. If the secretaries of state and the Treasury are at this speech too, which is likely, then he could become commander in chief in one blow.”
Julia gasped. Angel looked like she might be sick.
“Holman wouldn’t give me any details of the attack. She shut down as soon as she realized Norton was still at large. She thinks he still has a chance to pull off a military coup. And if he does—”
“Then it won’t matter what we know,” Wilkes said. “He can throw us all in jail without a trial. Execute us without any fuss. Even if we tried to talk to reporters, he could just shut down the media. There’d be nothing stopping him.”
Chapel nodded. “And between now and then — we can’t show ourselves in public. The police were already looking for us, and after we fired a Stinger missile that close to the airport, they’ll come at us with everything they have.”
“I saw a news report,” Julia said. “Somebody’s covering up the fact we shot down a drone. There were lots of reports of the explosion, of course, but they’re claiming it was a Cessna that crashed before it could land at Ronald Reagan.”
Chapel nodded. “About what I expected. But believe me, there are still plenty of cops looking for us, cops who know the truth. We won’t be allowed to just walk up to the president and give him a friendly warning.”
“We can’t drop him an e-mail, either,” Angel said. “The NSA has every one of us flagged. If we try to go online or even call somebody on the phone, we’ll just be telling them where we are.”
“So what do we do?” Julia asked. “Just sit here and wait for them to find us and scoop us up?” She looked around at the rest of them.
Nobody seemed to have an answer for her.
“Come on,” she said. “You can’t just let him kill all those people. If he blows up the entire Capitol building, he’s going to get a bunch of innocents, too.” She grabbed Chapel’s arm. “You’re the good guys,” she said. “We are the good guys. We need to stop this asshole. We can’t let him win.”
Hollingshead took off his glasses and set them on the table in front of him. “No, my dear. We can’t.” He looked around at the rest of them, his eyes as hard as wrought iron. “We won’t,” he said.
Chapel agreed with all his heart.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”
They set Angel up with a laptop, but she had no idea where to start. “I can go online if I set myself up behind an onion router,” she told them, but then she shook her head. “But then I’ll be anonymous. No way I can even access my old DIA files. I can send the White House all kinds of warnings, but they’ll get logged and dismissed because they come from unconfirmed sources. I might as well phone in a bomb threat.”
Julia looked confused. “Wouldn’t that be enough? I mean, if there was a bomb threat to the Capitol, wouldn’t that be enough to get them to cancel the speech? They have to take those seriously, don’t they?”
Wilkes laughed. “You kidding? You know how many times a day the president gets a bomb threat? The Secret Service looks into ’em, but only as time allows, and only if there’s some real chatter or analysis from their security advisers.”
“Think about it,” Chapel told her. “Let’s say you’re a political opponent of the president’s. You want to keep him from getting anything done. Why not pay a bunch of people to call in a bomb threat once per day? If he had to change his schedule every single time, he’d be paralyzed. If we had time, maybe we could mail some talcum powder to the Capitol, that would probably shut things down for a few hours while they tested it for anthrax residue. But we can’t do that now.”