Of course, she had no idea what kind of drone it might be, or what direction it was coming from, or whether it was flying low enough to evade radar. But if she found it, she could try to hack it in midflight. Gain access to its controls and send it back where it came from.
That was the plan, anyway. Angel had said there was maybe a one-in-three chance she could even find the drone, and the odds were even slimmer that she could gain control of it. But it wasn’t like they had much choice.
If she couldn’t get the drone to reverse course, a lot of people in the Capitol were going to die.
A white van pulled up right in front of the DoD safe house. Even before it came to a stop, a security guard in a dark suit came out the front door and started waving his arms at the driver, trying to get his attention. It didn’t work. The driver parked the van and switched off the engine. The security guard tapped at the driver’s window while simultaneously reaching for his phone.
The side door of the van swung open and a man in an army jacket jumped out, crowding the security guard back toward the safe house’s door. The man smiled and his eyes twinkled, and he reached out to shake the security guard’s hand.
“Name’s Rudy,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”
“You can’t—” The security guard managed to say.
He didn’t get any further because somebody else jumped out of the van then, somebody who was very difficult to ignore. This guy was missing an arm, a leg, and an eye, all three replaced by obvious prostheses.
“Morning, son,” the man said. “We’re here to meet with Patrick Norton.”
“You can’t — there’s nobody here by—”
The amputee frowned. “He’s the secretary of defense,” he pointed out.
“Yeah,” the security guard said, “I know who he is, but—”
“Good, then you go fetch him, we’ll just set up here. And before you go telling me I can’t use this particular stretch of sidewalk that my taxes happened to have paid for, I’ll have to point out that you can’t tell me why not.”
“I don’t need to—”
“So I think we’ll just wait here until the cops arrive,” Top pointed out. Behind him, more and more people came piling out of the van, some of them missing arms or legs, all of them carrying cardboard signs decorated with handwritten slogans:
RESPECT OUR VETS
VA CLAIMS TAKE
TOO LONG!
I SERVED MY COUNTRY,
WHY CAN’T IT SERVE ME?
“We’ve got a grievance, see, and we’re not leaving,” Top told the poor security guard, “until Mr. Norton comes down here and addresses it.”
“But what makes you think he’s even here?” the guard asked.
“Well now, friend, I wasn’t entirely sure until I saw the look on your face just now. Why don’t you go tell them we’re here? We’ll wait.”
The security guard took one last desperate look at the wounded veterans marching in a circle in front of the safe house. Then he shook his head in disbelief and ducked back inside.
At the back of the building, Chapel could hear Top and his boys chanting out front, and he knew it was time to make his move.
They frisked him quite thoroughly and then bound his hands with a loop of plastic. Rupert Hollingshead had expected as much. But then they bundled him into a rather pleasant office on the third floor of the safe house, and perhaps out of respect for his age or perhaps for his former rank, they gave him a comfortable chair to sit in.
He sat there as straight-backed as he could and waited patiently. Outside, through the thick, bulletproof windows, he could just hear Top and his boys down in the street. That made Hollingshead smile. One thing had gone right, anyway, and the protesters had shown up on time.
The door opened. A guard with a very serious expression on his face came in and checked the corners of the room, as if he might find heavily armed gremlins had spontaneously appeared there. He looked Hollingshead up and down, then he nodded at someone outside the doorway, someone Hollingshead couldn’t see.
It turned out, thankfully, to be Patrick Norton.
Of all the uncertainties and doubts that flitted around Hollingshead like a cloud of unwelcome gnats, there was at least one thing he was absolutely sure of. No one was going to put a bullet in the back of his head until Norton had left the room. It just wouldn’t do to have the SecDef be a witness to murder.
It behooved him, then, to keep Norton in the room as long as possible. So he put on his merriest face, made his eyes twinkle, and said, “Sir. Forgive me for, ah, not saluting.”
Norton grinned. “Rupert. I’m so sorry to have put you through all of this. I assure you, if I’d known you were coming, we could have met under more cordial circumstances.”
“No doubt. My own fault, but it seems, well, it seems my personal assistant has been, ah, misplaced. Never was very good at making my own appointments.”
“I see,” Norton replied. “Well, under ordinary circumstances, of course, I’d be thrilled to meet with you on anything you like, but I’m afraid today I’m a bit busy. Perhaps if you could tell me what this was about?”
“I thought we might have a chat, sir, about the Cyclops Initiative.”
The transformation that came over Norton’s face was incredible to behold. The man was a politician, through and through. He had spent years bolting armor plate onto the smiling countenance he wore in public, hammering out any quirks of personality, polishing his mannerisms and gestures until any sign of ambition or lust for power were smoothed away. He had worked that face until it showed nothing at all except a love for civil service and the American people.
Now that armor came off, plate by plate, bolt by bolt, in the time it took for a smile to turn into a frown. The eyes hardened. The chin lifted in the air. The brow furrowed.
“You’re a fucking idiot, Rupert,” Norton said when the transformation was done.
“Ah, I wondered when we would get to the, well—”
Norton wouldn’t let him finish. “What is this? You have a microphone hidden in your lapel, you think you’re going to tape me saying something stupid? No, my men would have found anything like that when they searched you. So you came here to try to stop things somehow on your own. Not a chance. You’re an idiot and a distraction. That’s all. A distraction at a time when I really don’t need one. Was that your whole plan? Is that why you brought this gang of cripples out to make noise in the street? You thought you could beat me through sheer inconvenience?” Norton studied him for a moment. “I find it hard to believe. But it’s not like you have much else to play with. Your directorate is gone. Burned to the ground. Chapel’s missing, presumed dead. Your Angel system is dismantled. By now you’ll have realized Wilkes was one of us all along.”
Hollingshead closed his mouth. He couldn’t help but smile a bit.
“I think you got Moulton and Holman. They’re dead, right?” Norton said. “It’s what I would have done in your place. I take your knights away, so you took my queen and my rook? But you’ve already lost this game. I have more people I can bring into play. A lot more. And anyway, in half an hour, it’ll be over.”
Hollingshead nodded. “Yes, that’s what I wanted to talk about.”
Norton grabbed a chair and dragged it over to where it would face Hollingshead. He didn’t sit down, though. Instead, he stood behind the chair, as if he was using it as a shield. As if he expected Hollingshead to lunge at him and wanted some cover to hide behind. Hollingshead tried not to read too much into it.