“You think you still have a chance,” Norton said. His eyes narrowed as he watched Hollingshead very closely. “You think you have some play that will still bring me down. You had some kind of plan. But then you did the dumb thing and came here. What’s to stop me from having you shot right now?”
“Nothing,” Hollingshead said.
The SecDef raised an eyebrow.
Good, Hollingshead thought. He’d gotten the man to be quiet for a moment. Maybe now they could have a real conversation. “I know perfectly well that you aren’t going to let me leave this building alive. But I had hoped we could talk for a few minutes, first.”
“Got it,” Angel said. Julia came racing over to look over her shoulder, though of course she couldn’t make any sense of the strings of numbers and letters on Angel’s screen. “There,” Angel said, pointing at a log entry that looked like all the others.
“You can just… look at all this, and see a drone coming at us?” Julia asked.
“No, of course not. But I can read a weather radar report. This radar is looking for clouds, right? So it has to screen out anything it sees that isn’t made of water vapor. It’s reporting here that it found something that it should ignore. There’s a metallic object the size of a Predator or a Reaper or whatever reported here, at such and such an altitude, and that altitude fits with the flight profile we’re expecting. It could be something else, of course. A small helicopter would match those numbers, and there are plenty of helicopters over D.C. But look at this.” Angel tapped a key. Only a few of the characters on her screen changed.
“I have no idea what you just did,” Julia pointed out.
Angel sighed. “Look, it’s gone. This is one second after the first screen. The metallic object doesn’t show up on the weather report this time. Which means it was moving so fast it passed right through the area that radar was sweeping in less than a second. A helicopter wouldn’t move that fast.”
Julia squinted at the screen. “That’s not a lot to go on. It could be some other kind of airplane—”
“It could just be a glitch. It could just be a coincidence. Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” Julia asked.
“There’s no such thing as a coincidence. That’s our drone. And it’s going to be here very soon.” Angel ran her hands through her hair. “I need to concentrate,” she said. She looked at all the people in the bakery. Half of them looked back at her.
There wasn’t much Julia could do about that. She knew Angel was struggling under the weight of all those stares, but the sidewalk out front was so crowded it looked like the mass of people out there was about to burst in through the plateglass windows. Julia couldn’t clear the bakery.
“How about I get you something to drink?” she asked instead. “Do you want some coffee?”
Angel glanced over at the counter. “I only drink soda. Not coffee. This place doesn’t have any soda.”
“No,” Julia agreed.
Angel leaned over her computer again, as if she could climb through the screen and escape that way. “A scone, then. Blueberry.” she said.
The security guards flooded out into the street where Top and his boys were protesting. There was a lot of shouting about the First Amendment and a lot more shouting about how the protesters needed to clear the street right now.
Chapel didn’t stick around to listen to all of it. He took a deep breath, then walked right up the alley to the back door of the safe house, right in view of its cameras. The alley was deserted when he started.
It didn’t stay that way. The back door swung open and a man in a black suit stepped out. He had a pistol in his hand and a big hands-free unit in his ear. “Sir,” he said. “You need to not be here.”
Chapel kept coming, his head down, his hands shoved in his pockets. No point in subtlety here. The guard’s job was to keep this alley clear. He wasn’t going to listen to anything Chapel had to say.
So Chapel just waited until the guard started to raise his pistol. The man still didn’t intend to shoot, just intimidate.
Which gave Chapel the advantage, since he had no such qualms.
Among the piles of handguns and assault rifles and carbines and grenade launchers in Contorni’s arsenal, Chapel had found an entire crate full of military-grade Tasers. He had one in his pocket now. He shot the guard right in the chest and watched him shake and gag and then fall to the ground in a heap. Once the Taser had stopped clacking away and the current had stopped flowing, Chapel reached down and grabbed the hands-free unit out of the guard’s ear. He dropped it on the pavement and crunched it under his heel.
Then he dug his fingers into the incapacitated guard’s neck and slowed the blood flow to his brain. Not enough to do any permanent damage. Just enough to knock him out for a while.
When it was done, Chapel stepped inside the back door of the safe house. Beyond was a spacious kitchen full of stainless steel sinks and copper-bottomed pots hanging in neat rows on the brick wall. There was nobody else in sight.
Chapel closed the door behind him and locked it up tight. For good measure he grabbed a chair and shoved it under the doorknob at an angle. When the guard woke up, he would have a hard time getting back inside.
There was another security camera in the kitchen, watching the door from the other side. Chapel had expected as much. Hopefully nobody was watching those cameras — the bulk of the security detail being busy elsewhere.
There was a great deal of pushing and shoving and brandishing of signs, but it was clear the guards were about done with fooling around. “Now listen here, friend — and I do want us to be friends, ever so much,” Top said as one guard tried to grab him by the shirt. “I want you to consider just exactly how this is going to look for the news media. Now, you and I both know that I’m some cussed fool who has refused to listen to any kind of reason, while you’re just a workingman trying to do an honest job. And that’s exactly the kind of moral equation that might lead you to start thinking you can lay hands on me. But I’ve got four different media outlets sending camera trucks in our direction right now. And when the two of us — cussed fool and workingman — are under the television lights, I wonder if things won’t get a little less clear? If maybe it’ll look like you’re assaulting a multiple amputee who was intent on just a little harmless exercise of his First Amendment rights.”
The guard pulled a gun and pointed it in Top’s face. “Move now,” he said.
“Point taken,” Top said. “And I salute your initiative. But I’m afraid we have a new problem to contend with. I hope we can work together to find an amicable solution to this one, but I fear—”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” the guard demanded.
“It would appear,” Top said, blinking his eyes in mock contrition, “that I’ve accidentally handcuffed my arm to the door handle of this van. And I’ve completely forgotten what I did with the key.”
“Come on,” Angel said. She pouted at her screen. Took a bite of scone.
For a long, heavy second nothing happened.
“Come on!” she shouted as she lifted her hands away from the keyboard.
“Everything okay?” Julia asked.
“Arrgh!” Angel groaned. She tapped her fingernails on the table. “A couple of years ago somebody put a virus on the servers that run these stupid drones. Back then the command signal channel wasn’t even encrypted. The virus didn’t even affect that channel, just the back-end stuff, but still, they had to go and add serious military-level encryption to the command channel and make my life really, really difficult.”