Chapel frowned. “But then why make that case? Sir, you lied to the secretary of defense.”
“Sometimes it’s necessary. That room was headed in one direction only. They were going to turn this into another September eleventh. The country can’t handle that kind of panic again. I’ve bought us a little time during which people will be forced to make rational choices.”
“I don’t get it,” Wilkes said.
Hollingshead put a hand on the marine’s elbow. “Son, you’re too young to remember what it was like. On September eleventh, 2001, we were caught completely off guard. The nation had no plan in place for how to handle a terrorist attack on its soil. The result was pure pandemonium. Every agency rushing to action with no information or, worse, bad information. Intelligence organizations openly and viciously fighting over who got to respond and who was to blame. The end result was that we started two wars we couldn’t handle and squandered an enormous amount of blood and treasure. If we can forestall that this time — if we can fix things now, quietly, without letting fear overtake us, then we stand to do an enormous amount of good for the country. If we fail, we will spend the next ten years putting out fires and cleaning up messes and accomplishing nothing.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Wilkes said.
“All right.” Hollingshead led them toward the atrium and the street. “You two will have a car. Let’s head back to the Pentagon. We can reconnoiter at my office. The absolute first thing we need to do is get Angel working on this, tracking whoever hijacked that Predator.”
“Sir,” Chapel said, “that’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Oh?”
“I was on the phone with her this morning and we were… cut off. I can’t explain it, it sounded like the call was dropped. I haven’t been able to reach her since.”
Hollingshead gave him a long, questioning look, but Chapel had no more information to give.
“Blast,” the director said finally. He reached into his pocket and took out a hands-free unit. It looked ridiculous in his ear — like an anachronism, like a caveman wearing a wristwatch. He tapped at it convulsively, calling Angel’s name over and over. Eventually he gave up and put the earpiece away.
“Damnation,” he said, staring off into the middle distance. “This is bad. Very bad. Without her, we’re flying blind.”
“Sir, if I may speak candidly?” Chapel asked.
“Yes, of course, always. You’ve seen how Wilkes speaks to me.”
The marine didn’t even have the good grace to blush.
Chapel tried not to focus on that. “The timing is strange. When I spoke to her she sounded fine, but then she just dropped off the air — just a couple hours after the attack in New Orleans. I’m not a big believer in coincidences.”
“Nor am I. You think she’s in danger?”
“I think that finding out what happened to her might give us a clue as to who attacked the port,” Chapel pointed out.
Hollingshead nodded. “It does raise one massive headache, though.”
“What’s that?” Wilkes asked.
“It means we need to find somebody to help us, somebody who can do what she normally does for us. It means we’re going to have to go begging to the bloody NSA.”
Chapel shared the director’s opinion of the NSA, but really, having to go to any agency outside of the DIA was a problem. Technically, after 9/11, every agency and directorate and organization in the American intelligence community had been streamlined so they could work together — they were all on the same team, after all. A major reason the 2001 terrorist attacks had been such a surprise was that different agencies had all had parts of the puzzle, but nobody had been willing to share information. Each agency was treated like a separate fiefdom with its own jealously guarded secrets.
That was supposed to have changed. They were all supposed to be members of a happy family now. Unfortunately, the very competitive directors and spymasters of those agencies had seen the new rules not as a chance to integrate intelligence but an opportunity to one-up each other. The agencies competed for funds and for prestige all the time. The mass briefing back at Fort Belvoir had shown just how contentious that competition got. If the DIA needed help from the NSA, it would make the DIA look like it couldn’t get things done on its own. If it was the NSA that tracked the drone hijacker, not the DIA, then the NSA stood to benefit — in terms of larger budgets and more influence in the White House. Accepting that he needed the NSA was tantamount for Hollingshead to admitting defeat.
It was a measure of Hollingshead’s character that finding the hijacker was more important than his own reputation.
“Keep trying Angel,” Hollingshead said, leaning over the backseat. “Here. There are three numbers she always responds to.” He took a tiny notebook and a golf pencil out of one of his many pockets and scribbled the numbers down, then tore out the page and handed it to Wilkes. “Make sure you destroy that paper when you’ve got them memorized.” He sat back down in his seat and looked over at Chapel. “You’re sure she didn’t say anything that made you think she was in immediate danger?”
Chapel kept his eyes on the road. The NSA was headquartered in Fort Meade, back in Maryland, which meant driving through the never-ending gridlock that surrounded Washington. “She sounded more worried about me.”
Hollingshead slapped the dashboard. “I wish I’d known before I committed us. Oh, look, son, it’s not, ah, it’s not your fault — I didn’t give you a chance to talk back there.” He sighed and stared out his window. “All right, we’re still on the clock and we have a little time before we get to the NSA. We need to start thinking through how we’re going to find whoever struck the Port of New Orleans. We need a list of possible culprits.”
“Yes, sir,” Chapel said. This was good — it was good because it would make him think about something other than what had happened to Angel. He forced himself to push his brain down a different road. “You said before this was a technological attack — all done with computers. And we know the Predator’s control signal was heavily encrypted. That has to narrow down the search. If the same person intercepted and blocked Angel’s signal, that means even fewer candidates. Her encryption was stronger than the Predator’s. You said Russia and China might have that kind of technology.”
“They might. But in both cases it wouldn’t be something the average citizen could get their hands on. It would take military-grade equipment, or maybe something their spy services would have. We know neither of them wants to start a war.”
“But maybe that wasn’t the point,” Chapel pointed out. “Maybe the whole plan was just to hurt us economically. They would know we would suspect terrorists first — if they covered their tracks well enough, they’d have a chance of getting away with it and us never finding out.”
“We’ll put that on the list, then, but no — that doesn’t feel right,” Hollingshead said. “I’ll admit I’m no, ah, economist. Perhaps they wanted to, I don’t know, short some market for foodstuffs or monopolize some commodity. But a real economist, I’m sure, would point out what they had to lose. Hurting us might give them a tiny advantage, but would it be worth the incredible risk? If we do discover that this actually was soft war, we’ll have to respond with the more traditional sort.”