He had no reason whatsoever to suspect that that view, that video feed, wasn’t live. That it was in fact a recording of what the ocean had looked like weeks earlier, the last time this particular Gray Eagle had been sent out on patrol.
Paul Moulton had been a very, very good programmer, and an even better judge of human paranoia. He had known perfectly well that at some point the drones would be monitored, that they would be under threat of being shot down. He’d gone to great pains to make sure they kept flying, right until the very last attack.
The Gray Eagle kept feeding false telemetry and video back to Creech as it turned on the wind, breaking away from its previous course. It headed straight for Washington, and Paul Moulton’s final, glorious, posthumous strike.
Chapel’s stomach was tied up in knots. Well, he supposed he was allowed to be a little nervous. What they had planned was one of the most reckless, dangerous stunts he’d ever pulled in the field.
It made him nauseated. Or maybe it was just the quick breakfast he’d wolfed down before they set out. Either way, he put his good hand on his stomach and held it there, as if he’d been cut open and needed to hold his guts from spilling out. There was some pain.
“Son?” the director asked.
“Hrm,” Chapel said. Then he shook himself out of it and turned to face his boss. “Fine, sir. Just anxious. This is the place Angel told us about.”
Hollingshead looked out his window and nodded.
The quaint brick three-story building across the street looked like every other quaint brick three-story building in Georgetown with one exception — there wasn’t a coffee shop or a bank branch inhabiting its ground floor. Instead it just had an unmarked door and a couple of windows covered over by thick curtains. It looked, in fact, so much like a safe house that it couldn’t be one. Any spy wandering past would immediately think they knew what it was, which invalidated its use as a safe house in any way.
Angel was absolutely certain that Patrick Norton was inside. Two of his low-level aides had complained on Twitter about being moved to a new location this morning, and while neither of them had given an exact address, one had said they were headed to Georgetown. Apparently they considered that to be vague enough to count as discretion. Meanwhile the Army Corps of Engineers had sent a team to this building in the middle of the night, and a local webcam had seen them. Angel had noted that they brought in some very high-tech communications equipment, including an entire crate of satellite cell phones. The kind of phones Norton would use if he needed to communicate with his generals during, say, a military coup.
To add to all that, the registered owner of the building was the Department of Defense. It was, she told Chapel, kind of obvious, once you saw the signs.
Chapel was just glad he had the twenty-first-century version of Sherlock Holmes on his team.
In the backseat, the director was growing antsy. “I trust him as much as you do, but if he’s going to provide this diversion—”
“He’ll be here on time. At eight thirty exactly,” Chapel said.
Hollingshead nodded. “Very well. Then I suppose the next step is mine.”
Chapel got out of the car and held the director’s door for him. “Good luck, sir,” he said.
“Hopefully I won’t need it.” Hollingshead looked both ways and then crossed the street, headed straight for the front door of the building. Chapel headed up the street, then crossed and jogged around to an alley that ran behind every building on the block. He made a point of not getting too close — the DoD safe house would have cameras watching its rear door, of course. But he wished he could get close enough to hear what happened when Rupert Hollingshead rang the place’s front doorbell.
They were pretty sure the director would be taken inside. Hollingshead was still the biggest thorn in Norton’s side, the one man the SecDef considered a genuine threat to his grand plan. If he just walked up and turned himself over to Norton, he wouldn’t just be turned away.
They were mostly sure that he wouldn’t just be taken inside and quietly shot. They figured that Norton would want to talk to Hollingshead first. For a little while.
Meanwhile it was Chapel’s job to get inside the building and make sure Hollingshead had a way to get back out again. This was where the plan left a lot of room for improvisation. Chapel had to figure it out on his own, once he was in place.
At least he could count on a little help. His diversion should be showing up at any minute.
“Angel,” Julia said. “Angel — talk to me.”
But Angel was hunched over her laptop, two fingers on the trackpad as she scrolled through endless pages of what looked to Julia like random numbers and letters. She didn’t even glance up.
“Leave her alone,” Wilkes said.
“She hasn’t made a sound in a long time,” Julia pointed out. “That’s not—”
“Healthy?” Wilkes guessed. “Maybe. But it’s the closest she’s going to get. She’s working. She’s working ’cause it’s all she can do right now. The only thing that keeps her from freaking out. So leave her alone.”
Julia knew he was right. Fussing over people was what she did, though, to keep herself from freaking out. She turned her attention to the other people in the bakery. Most of the customers were still packed into the tables and up against the glass display counter. The street outside was just too crowded for them to flee the place when Wilkes commandeered its Internet connection, though a lot of them looked terrified of the big marine.
Julia didn’t blame them. She might be a badass sometimes, and she might have seen plenty of this kind of action since she’d met Chapel, but still, the big dangerous soldier types like Wilkes bugged her. It wasn’t so much that you thought he was going to hurt somebody. It was that he looked like he could, and that he wouldn’t lose any sleep if it happened. It was something about the way he stared at everybody, she thought. Clearly sizing them up, assessing them as potential threats. He just made everyone uneasy.
Maybe she could help with that a little. She lifted her hands in the air until all the customers and the clerks and pastry chefs and the store manager were all looking at her. “No need to worry, folks. We’re actually here to keep everybody safer,” she told them. “To do that, we’re going to need your help for a little while. We need you to stay calm, that’s all.” Her brain reeled as she tried to think of some innocuous reason the FBI would burst into a bakery like this. Then she realized that a real FBI agent wouldn’t give one. “We’ll be done in a few minutes,” she said and lowered her hands. “Thank you very much for your patience.”
It sounded lame when she said it out loud, but it seemed the civilians in the bakery were just glad for any sign that somebody was in control. What was it Hollingshead had said, about people craving leadership? She could see them start to breathe again, saw some of them even smile and roll their eyes at each other — which meant that what had seemed like a terrifying breach of the peace was now, to them, just a mild inconvenience.
At least that was something.
She turned back to look at Angel. The younger woman hadn’t so much as shifted in her chair.
Julia knew what Angel was working on. There were radar dishes and optical sensors all over Washington, thousands of them, all tasked with different things. Some watched to make sure nobody landed a helicopter in the White House’s Rose Garden. Others monitored planes headed into and out of Ronald Reagan International. Some, which hadn’t been reassigned in a long while, were still watching for Russian bombers. Angel was checking all of them, all at once. She was looking for any sign of a drone approaching the Capitol.