The throng looked like the New York peace demonstrations she remembered from the start of the Iraq war — like hippies and college students and people just out for a pleasant afternoon on the grass. But once you were inside the crowd you felt their mood and it was toxic. These people were scared. They didn’t know any way to express that fear except by gathering together and shouting slogans — but Julia was pretty sure that if something bad happened here, anything the crowd didn’t like, they would remember how to riot pretty fast.
“This way,” Wilkes said, bellowing back over his shoulder. He veered into the middle of a drum circle, pushing his way past a dancer who was clearly on so many drugs he didn’t even see Wilkes, much less have a chance to step aside. The drummers looked up in horror as the big marine plowed through them. Julia smiled an apology down at them as she stepped over their ranks, but she was glad for Wilkes all the same.
There was a little moment inside the middle of the drum circle where they could breathe air that hadn’t just come out of somebody else’s lungs. Angel’s hand nearly slipped out of Julia’s. The younger woman was shaking. “I don’t like this,” she said.
“Tell me what you don’t like,” Julia said, pulling her close and getting an arm around Angel’s shoulders. “Talk it out.”
“I don’t trust them,” Angel said. “I keep expecting them to grab us, to throw us down on the ground. To trample us. I think they’re going to just close ranks and smoosh us. Suffocate us.”
“None of that is happening,” Julia said. “They’re people like you and me. Nobody wants to hurt anybody.”
“It’s not a question of what they want, it’s just physics, it’s differential equations,” Angel protested.
“It’s going to be okay,” Julia told her, because what else was she going to say?
“Come on,” Wilkes said. “Stay close.”
Julia hurried to move forward a little faster and obey. The last thing she wanted was to get separated from him in the crowd.
Driving away from the Capitol was a lot easier than getting close had been. Chapel headed up Massachusetts Avenue and then across into Georgetown and soon had left the bulk of the traffic behind — meaning that while they still crawled along in typical D.C. gridlock, at least they were moving more often than not. As he drove, Chapel occasionally glanced in the rearview, looking at the director.
Hollingshead seemed perfectly calm. A little surprising, considering what he was about to do. Hollingshead was a spymaster, a spider in the middle of a web. He had never in his life, as far as Chapel knew, gone out on a field mission. But now he was going to be right in the front lines.
“You all right back there, sir?” Chapel asked.
“Fine, son. Fine.”
“I’m not going to let you come to harm. I promise, sir.”
“Captain,” Hollingshead said, leaning forward a little and smiling in the mirror, “given the situation, it’s perhaps best if we don’t make promises we can’t keep. I know the risks I’m taking with this plan, and how to minimize them. I also know what’s at stake. I’m actually more concerned for you. The lovely Julia tells me you were wounded a little while ago. Shot by your own comrade.”
Chapel grinned in the mirror. “I’m fine, sir.” He shook his head. “You know, it’s funny. This business, I mean. It wasn’t long ago I thought that Wilkes — well — I thought you had brought him in to replace me.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Chapel shook his head. Now wasn’t the time, given what was about to happen. But then again, he was unlikely to be alone with Hollingshead much in the near future like this, with time to talk. “I’m sorry, sir, do I have your permission to speak candidly? I should have asked before.”
“It’s all right, son. After all you and I have been through, I think we can drop a little of the military discipline.”
Chapel nodded. He had heard the way Wilkes spoke to the director, and Hollingshead never called him on it. All right, he would open up a little. “Back before all this began. Back when you had the two of us in that motel room down in Aberdeen running the stakeout. I was convinced you put me there to punish me. And that you brought Wilkes in to see if maybe he would make a better field agent than me. I thought you wanted to get rid of me.”
“Is that right?”
Chapel could feel his cheeks getting hot, but he went on. “After what happened in Russia—”
“Which, I’ll remind you, we agreed not to speak of again,” Hollingshead pointed out.
“Yes, sir. But it didn’t go as well as it could have. Not by a long shot. I thought maybe you had lost faith in me.”
“I see,” the director replied.
And then he didn’t say anything else.
Chapel tried to focus on driving, on keeping pace with the cars ahead of him, but the silence growing inside the car made it feel like the air around him had been pressurized and was about to burst his eardrums.
“Well,” Hollingshead said finally. “Well now, son. I suppose — from a certain perspective, ah, that is. Well.”
“Sir?”
Hollingshead cleared his throat. “I suppose you could say most of that is true.”
“I — sir, I—” Chapel’s tongue froze in his mouth.
“You could say that. If you were feeling particularly uncharitable. You’re not a fool, Chapel. I suppose I should have expected you to see what was going on. Though of course I couldn’t tell you any of the facts of the case. As you know now, Wilkes actually had his own very specific mission — to infiltrate the Cyclops Initiative. That was why I gave him such light duty at the time. As for yourself, I put you in that motel because of what happened in Russia, yes.”
“Sir,” Chapel said. “If you found my behavior less than satisfactory—”
“Not,” Hollingshead said as if Chapel hadn’t interrupted, “as a punishment. As a sort of rest cure. For years I’ve sent you on mission after mission and you’ve performed flawlessly. But I knew how much I was asking and that eventually it would become too much. After your mission in Russia, I knew you were right on the edge of breaking and I could not afford to lose such an important asset. So I gave you light duty so that you could recuperate.”
“Oh,” Chapel said.
“As for replacing you, well, that was somewhat true as well.”
“It… was?”
Hollingshead grunted in affirmation. “It isn’t very easy for me to say this.”
“Sir?”
“I’m getting old. Too old to do my job. Please don’t suggest otherwise. I won’t have any false flattery. I’ll be eighty years old before the decade is out. It’s only a matter of time before my faculties begin to decay. I’m going to have to retire — assuming, of course, I live through this day.” Hollingshead gave a little laugh that didn’t sound very merry. “Assuming we have jobs tomorrow. Or a country to serve. Anyway. I’ll need to retire soon. Which means that I will need a replacement.”
He leaned over the front seat. “Son,” he said very softly, “I was hoping that would be you. I wanted to bring Wilkes into the fold as an agent whom you could direct. I want to make you the director of DX.”
Chapel put his foot on the brake. He stopped the car in the middle of the street until he could catch his breath. The cars behind him started to lean on their horns, but he took another couple of seconds before he started moving forward again.
“I don’t know what to say, sir,” Chapel managed to get out.
“Then don’t, since of course this is all, well, provisional. Contingent. Just tell me one thing. You’ve had a chance to work with Wilkes out in the field. Do you think he would be a good fit with any future directorate we build?”
It gave Chapel something else to think about, for which he was very grateful. He collected his thoughts and tried to think of the right way to answer. “He’s good. Very good at fieldcraft, and he can definitely handle himself in a fight.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“No,” Chapel said, “no, sir, it doesn’t. Because I’m struggling with finding a nice way to say no.” He took a breath. “Wilkes saved my life when Moulton would have killed me. He got us this far. I owe him a lot. But he’s — he’s a thug.”
“Really?” Hollingshead asked. “You know I chose him personally.”
Chapel swallowed uncomfortably. “I know that, sir. And you know I don’t like to question your decisions. But he kills people.”
“Part of the job,” Hollingshead pointed out.
“No, sir. No. Sometimes it’s necessary.” But it wasn’t what a field agent should do. Chapel had struggled with this the whole time he’d worked for the director. “Sometimes it’s necessary, but it’s always a mistake. When I have to, I will take a life. But I know it means I didn’t do my job well enough, and every single time, I’ve regretted it. It’s my absolute last option when I’m out in the field. But for Wilkes it’s the first. It’s what he’s trained to do, and it’s what he looks for.”
“As they say,” Hollingshead said, “when one has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail? Interesting.”
“I hope I haven’t offended you, sir.”
“Chapel,” Hollingshead said. He leaned back against his seat. “Jim,” he went on. “I asked for your opinion. If you’re going to replace me, you’re going to need to learn to take a stand.”
Chapel nodded. “If I were the director, my first act would be to transfer him somewhere else. I owe him, I even kind of like him. But I won’t work with him again.”
“That’s what I needed to hear,” Hollingshead said.
A few minutes later they arrived at their destination.