Without even waiting to hear an answer, Minchell slapped his piece of paper on the table and handed Norton a pen.
Norton signed.
Hollingshead was on his feet in the next instant, headed out the door. He caught Minchell in the hallway and grabbed the young man’s arm.
Hollingshead summoned up every shred of authority and command he’d ever possessed and put them in his voice. “Explain this,” he said.
Minchell looked at him with tired eyes. He didn’t pretend he didn’t know what Hollingshead meant. “The country is too close to falling apart right now. Revealing that the terrorist attacks came from so high up would be — deleterious to public order.”
“So he goes free? He gets the deluxe retirement package like a deposed dictator? Nobody is going to be punished for any of this?”
“Not exactly. Somebody has to be blamed. The prevailing wisdom,” Minchell said, “is that Moulton was the main bad actor here. He programmed the drones and orchestrated the attacks.”
“He happens to be dead,” Hollingshead pointed out.
“That is a problem,” Minchell replied. “We need to show that we’re tough on this kind of thing. So Charlotte Holman is going to take the fall.”
Hollingshead felt rage building inside his chest. “I promised her she would be spared if she helped me bring down Norton. I gave her my word.”
“The president didn’t,” Minchell pointed out. He slapped Hollingshead on the arm. “Rupert, he’s sensitive to your role in all this. He knows what you did for him.”
“For the nation, you mean,” Hollingshead pointed out.
“Yes, of course. And he’s very grateful. He mentioned to me that he’s thinking he might need a new director of national intelligence.”
“I gave her my word,” Hollingshead repeated.
But he already knew he’d lost.
The food at the new Walter Reed’s cafeteria wasn’t anything special, but Julia was getting used to it. It also had the advantage of being in the basement of one of the main buildings, so it didn’t have any windows. Angel looked almost comfortable as she sat down at Julia’s table.
“I went and saw him, but he was asleep. I sat with him for a while,” Angel said. “How’s he doing?”
It was the main thing Julia thought about these days, so she was always happy to answer that question. “Better,” she said. “His pulse ox is up, which is really good. He’s conscious sometimes. He sleeps a lot but … that’s a good thing. He was in really bad shape. Crazily enough, if he hadn’t gotten shot that day, he’d probably be dead right now. It turned out he had an infection from the time Wilkes shot him. If they hadn’t caught it when they brought him here, it would have killed him.” She ran one hand through her hair. “Funny how things work, huh? When I closed up that wound, I thought I was healing him, but in fact I might have killed him.”
Angel reached out one tentative hand. Julia grabbed it up like a lifeline and held on while her chest surged with all the tears she wasn’t going to let herself cry. Not yet.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“We don’t have to talk about—”
“Goddamnit,” Julia said, “yes, we do.” She stamped her foot under the table. “Give me this, Angel. Give me some small talk. I’ve been in this hospital for nearly a week with nobody to talk to except doctors. And do you have any idea how doctors talk to veterinarians? They assume we wanted to be like them but we weren’t smart enough. It’s about all I can do not to stab one of them. And then show him how good I am at field-treating lacerations.”
Angel laughed, which was good. It helped Julia get things back under control.
“So how are you doing?” Julia asked again.
Angel nodded. Shrugged one shoulder, looked around. She tried to pull her hand back, but Julia held on to it. “I’m good. They have me back to work, which is really good. I’m not supposed to tell you any of this, of course, but Wilkes is doing field agent stuff now and I’m his operator.”
Julia nodded in understanding. She kind of wanted to yell at Angel for cheating on Jim, but that was absurd. “They’ve got you in another trailer, then.”
“Yeah,” Angel said.
“That bastard. Hollingshead, I mean. I can’t believe he’d do that to his own granddaughter. I’m never going to see him the same way again.”
Angel yanked her hand back. She leaned back in her chair and just listened, though Julia could see by her face that she was offended.
“Angel — he owes you better than this. He uses you. He knows you have this, this problem with open spaces—”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Angel insisted.
Julia was on a tear, though. “He knows you’re terrified of being outdoors, so he shoves you in these little boxes and makes you work for him. That’s like — that’s the opposite of what a grandfather should do.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Angel said again.
Julia tried to smile at her. “I know he’s convinced you that what he did was okay. But you have to know he’s using you, that he just wants to hold on to his best operative so—”
Angel nodded. “Are you finished? Maybe you want to judge him some more?”
Julia sighed. You can’t help somebody, she thought, if they won’t acknowledge they have a problem.
“Maybe you’ll let me talk now. When I was fifteen years old,” Angel said, her voice only a little too loud, “I had already graduated from high school, and I was incredibly good with computers, and I was very bored. And within a month I was all set to go to prison for the rest of my life on an espionage charge.”
“I know this story. You were just a kid and you accidentally hacked into a Pentagon database. You didn’t even know what you were—”
“I knew exactly what I was doing,” Angel said. “There was a boy. A very nice boy, who I met online, and who I had a huge crush on. Do you remember what it was like to have a crush on somebody when you were that young?”
Julia nodded.
“This boy meant everything to me. He taught me so many different techniques — hacks, exploits, stuff I didn’t even know was possible. And he never asked me for anything. Until the day he did. He asked me to break into a certain database and get some files for him. I didn’t know at the time that he was actually a persona shared by a group of Chinese spies. That he was a complete illusion made to appeal just to me. I had no idea why he wanted the contents of that database. But I knew how to get in. My grandpa, after all, had access. So I broke into his study and stole his password and that was how I got in. Because I was young and stupid, I got caught. Luckily for all of us, I was caught before I found what I was looking for.”
Julia just stared.
“They took me right out of my bedroom, with no shoes on my feet. They put a sack over my head and drove me to an interrogation center. They told me they were going to send me away forever. I was going to be subjected to extraordinary rendition and taken away to a CIA black prison overseas. They kept telling me I was a terrorist. And then my grandfather stepped in and pulled me out of there.”
“I didn’t know—”
“He took me out of there and sent me home. I didn’t know at the time how much that cost him. He was already in trouble, since it was his password I used. It very nearly ended his career, but he didn’t give up on me. He made sure I didn’t have to go to jail. He wanted to send me home to my parents. Set me up with a nice therapist and lots of nice pills and let me have what they call a normal life. There were conditions, though. One was I was never going to be allowed to touch a computer again.”