“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.
“Get out of my goddamned way,” Wilkes bellowed, and a group of protesters dressed like Revolutionary War — era soldiers blanched and quivered and finally moved. Wilkes reached back and grabbed Julia’s arm and hauled her forward.
“Angel,” she called out. She’d lost contact in the press. “Angel! Wilkes, where did she go?”
Wilkes didn’t reply, except to pull her up onto a sidewalk. Then he dove back into the crowd, and when he returned, he hauled Angel behind him with a vise grip on her arm, tight enough to make her cry out in pain. Julia started to yell at him to stop hurting her, but the look on the marine’s face stopped her cold. Then he raised an arm and pointed. Ahead of them was the glass front of a little shop — a bakery, by the look of it. He pulled the door open and got the women moving inside.
The shop was full of people but not quite so packed as the sidewalk had been. Every table had people clustered around it, a lucky few in chairs. A line of people was crushed up against the counter, all of them craning their necks around to try to see through the plateglass front of the store. Following their gaze Julia saw nothing but the constant crush out on the sidewalk and, off in the distance, the white obelisk of the Washington Monument framed by blue sky.
“This isn’t the right place,” Angel said. “This isn’t right! We wanted the Internet café. I need real access. This isn’t right!”
“Let’s just catch our breath in here for a second, first, before we head back out there,” Julia told her.
“Back? Out there? No no no no no no. No,” Angel said. “No, I won’t go back out there. Don’t make me go back out there!”
“But you said it yourself,” Julia told her. “You need Internet access.”
Angel’s face was wild, blotchy with fear. Her eyes were rolling like those of a panicked animal — something Julia had seen all too often in her veterinary practice.
Julia had to fight down the urge to slap her. The younger woman was sick. She was having a panic attack. Under any other circumstances she would have felt sympathy. She would have done everything in her power to calm Angel down. But now—
“Wilkes,” Julia said. “We need to get her access.”
The marine nodded. He reached in his pocket, and for a second Julia thought he would pull out a gun. Instead he took out a slim piece of leather like a big flat wallet. He flipped it open and held it over his head.
“FBI,” he announced. All over the bakery people cried out, as if they expected to be arrested on the spot and dragged off to a police station. Despite the fact that even if that had been the case, even if Wilkes really had been arresting anyone, he would never have been able to get them half a block down the sidewalk in the crush out there. “I need the manager of this place, right now.”
A middle-aged woman with streaks of gray in her long hair stood up from one of the tables. She looked terrified as she raised one hand.
Wilkes nodded at her. “Wi-Fi password. Right now.”
“I — what?” the manager asked.
“Right goddamned now,” Wilkes said again.
“It’s—”
“Don’t say it out loud,” Angel interjected. Julia saw that she’d regained control of herself, a little. Angel looked around the bakery, at all the people craning forward to get a better view. “Otherwise everybody’s going to use it and that’ll slow the network down. Here. Type it on my phone.”
The manager nodded and did as she was told, looking grateful that at least Wilkes wasn’t shouting at her anymore.
Over the Atlantic, the MQ-1C Gray Eagle banked and turned on its long mission guarding the sea lanes. It was flying on automatic pilot — a stick jockey back at Creech Air Force Base was watching the controls, of course, and after the Reaper had gone rogue the night before, every last thing the Gray Eagle did was closely monitored. But at the moment it was just keeping station, exactly as it had been programmed to do, running endless laps over the ocean waves.
This time, the base commander had assured the SecDef, there would be no deviation from standing orders. If the Gray Eagle were to fail to make a turn at the proper time, or if any of its systems came online when they should have been dormant, the drone would not be given a chance to do harm. An F-16 with a human pilot at its yoke was already in the air, ready to strike. All it would take would be one terse order from Creech and the Gray Eagle would be shot down.
The base commander had wanted to do more, of course. He had urged the SecDef to ground the entire drone fleet. The explosion over the Potomac had been covered up in an efficient manner, but the commander still had no idea exactly what had gone wrong or why his people couldn’t seem to replicate the problem in simulation. A drone had just exploded without warning — and miles from where it should have been.
Given recent events, the only logical thing to do was to ground the fleet. But then the SecDef had responded in no uncertain terms. The drones were vital to national security. They would stay in the air. And you just didn’t question orders that came from that high up.
So the base commander stayed on post all that morning, watching over the shoulders of stick jockeys and sensors as his robot planes carried out their given tasks. He was ready at the slightest provocation to send the kill signal, but he never had to.
The Gray Eagle, after all, never deviated from its mission. Or at least… it didn’t appear to.
The base commander had to be reassured that the Gray Eagle was where it said it was. He could look at the telemetry data that gave GPS coordinates, altitude and the like, but all that could be easily faked. More reliably, he could watch the live video feed from the drone’s camera eye and see the furrowed blue of the Atlantic roll by underneath the Gray Eagle’s nose.