“And we’re not getting any,” Wilkes growled.
Angel shook her head. “I know, I know — Jesus. There are four bombs on this thing.” She rubbed at her face. “Viper Strikes.”
Julia had no idea what that meant, but clearly Wilkes thought it was bad. He actually went pale when he heard it. “Not Hellfires. You’re sure.”
Angel grunted. “I can tell the difference! And that’s very bad, very, very bad. Because. Because I think I know how to stop this thing.”
“So do it already,” Julia insisted.
“I can release them,” Angel said as if Julia hadn’t spoken. “I can send the rails hot signal, and the bombs will just… fall off the bottom of the drone. Before they were supposed to. That means they won’t hit the Capitol.”
Wilkes nodded. “And they’re Viper Strikes. Glide bombs, with GPS targeting. But they won’t have targets.”
“Yeah,” Angel said. She took a deep breath.
“What’s the big problem?” Julia asked. “Just do it already.”
Angel looked up at her. “Julia, the drone is already inside the Beltway. If I release those bombs, there is absolutely no way of saying where they’ll go. They’re glide bombs, which means they can fly a little on their own, they don’t just fall straight down. Normally they’re guided to their targets, but because they won’t have any target information, they’ll just glide on the wind until they hit something. Maybe they hit an IRS building and blow up everybody’s tax returns. Or maybe they hit schools and hospitals. If I do this, we can’t predict how many people will die. But we’ll be dropping four bombs on a crowded population center, and I guarantee you they’ll hit somebody.”
“It means saving the president, and everyone else in the Capitol,” Wilkes pointed out.
“You think he’s got more of a right to live than anyone else?” Angel asked. Julia was surprised at the younger woman’s tone — she made it sound like an honest question, like something that could be debated.
“Yeah, I do. I think right now this country needs the president,” Wilkes replied. “I think without him we’re utterly screwed. So if you don’t want to push the button — I will. And make up your mind right now, because we’re out of time.”
Angel stared at him for long, desperate seconds during which Julia felt like she couldn’t breathe. Like her heart was just going to stop beating.
Then Angel nodded and broke the spell.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
She tilted the screen of her laptop back up and reached for the keyboard. Her finger hovered over the enter key. Then she tapped it, just once and closed her eyes. A shudder went through her small body. “Forgive me,” she whispered.
Julia put her hand over her mouth. She couldn’t bear to think what they might just have done.
She didn’t get a chance to think about it. Someone on the other side of the bakery shouted “Hey!” and everything stopped.
All three of them turned to look at the middle-aged woman who had called out. She was holding her cell phone up as if she wanted to show it to everybody. “I had four bars,” she said. “Four bars!”
A guy in a business suit took his own phone out of his pocket and stared at it as if it had turned into an avocado while he wasn’t looking. “No signal,” he said.
Angel stared at the man in horror. Then she looked down at her laptop. “No,” she said. “No, no, no — not now!”
Julia looked out the plateglass windows at the front of the shop and saw something incredible. All over the sidewalk, as far as she could see in any direction, people were taking out their phones and staring at them, tapping wildly at the screen as if that would help, holding them high up in the air in an effort to catch even the slightest cellular signal, all to no avail. Her attention was drawn back when Angel tapped at the laptop screen, specifically at the icon in the status bar that indicated what kind of Wi-Fi signal the computer was receiving.
The icon had turned a useless gray, indicating the laptop had no signal at all.
“Not now!” Angel said again, grabbing her hair in both hands.
Chapel fell backward, half intentionally, trying to get away from the bullets that smashed into the wooden stairs all around him. He went down hard on his left arm — his artificial arm, which was good because if he’d landed on his right arm like that, it would have broken. The prosthetic twisted under him as he shoved himself downstairs, almost sledding over the risers until he reached the bottom. Then he twisted around to get the banister between himself and the shooter.
He was pretty sure he’d been hit, at least once. Looking up he saw blood on the risers and knew it was his. He also saw his Taser up there, sitting three steps down from the top of the staircase.
From above he heard the sound of a walkie-talkie, the voice of someone desperately trying to connect to his superior. There was no reply. Maybe the superior was busy out front with the protesters. Maybe he was the guy Chapel had Tased out back. What a lucky break that would be.
Chapel just hoped he would live to make use of it.
He didn’t dare look — he had to keep his eyes on the top of the stairs, in case the shooter came back. But with his good, living hand, he reached down and tried to figure out where he’d been hit.
Two places, it turned out. Once in his right hip, though that just looked like a flesh wound. Once in his back, where he found a neat little hole that was leaking blood in a steady stream. That was a lot scarier. He couldn’t reach the wound well enough to even put pressure on it.
Upstairs he heard a footstep creak on a loose floorboard.
He’d lost his Taser. But of course he’d come armed with more than one weapon. He drew a 9 mm handgun from one of his pockets and worked a round into the chamber. He hadn’t wanted to kill anybody today. The guards in the safe house all worked for the Department of Defense. They were his colleagues. But if he had no choice, then—
Another footstep.
The shooter swung out into open space at the top of the stairs and fired three shots down in quick succession, none of them coming close to hitting Chapel, but it was enough to make him dive behind his cover. When he dared to look again, the shooter was gone.
Damn. The shooter had the high ground. To get a clear shot Chapel would have to run all the way up those stairs, leaving himself exposed the whole time. The shooter could just pick Chapel off at his leisure.
But if he stayed down at the bottom, Chapel knew he would bleed to death before he could get to Hollingshead.
He tried to think of what to do. He tried to—
More gunshots fell around him, still wide of the mark. Close enough to make Chapel throw his artificial arm over his head for protection.
The shooter pulled back and Chapel heard the floorboard squeak again.
Maybe. Just maybe, he thought.
The stairs ended at an abrupt landing and turned to the right up there. Where the staircase met the ceiling was exactly where the shooter’s floor began. That creaky floorboard had to be about a foot and a half from the top riser, about… there …
Chapel heard the creak again, and this time he was ready. He aimed his pistol at the ceiling and fired six shots, one after the other.
Somewhere in the roar of the shots he heard a scream. He thought.
For nearly a minute he just sat there, bleeding. Waiting for the creak of the floorboard or the sound of gunshots coming from above. In the end, though, neither of those things gave him his signal. Instead, he looked up and saw the circular holes he’d punched through the ceiling with his own shots. A nice, tight grouping right where he thought the shooter had been.