The Cyclops Initiative (11 page)

But then the bedroom door cracked open behind her. Whoever was back there spoke.

“It's okay, Julia. He's not the one they sent to get me.”

It was the sexiest voice Chapel had ever heard. And one of the most familiar.

 

QUEENS, NY: MARCH 21, 16:49

Brent Wilkes opened his eyes.

Above him he saw nothing but gray overcast sky. He wasn't entirely sure where he was at first. There'd been a lot of light and heat and then he'd blacked out. There might have been a loud noise in there, too.

Iraq? That sounded like Iraq. At least the way he remembered it.

There must have been an explosion. That explained a lot of what he was feeling, and a lot of what he remembered.

It brought to mind one mission in particular, a mission in Fallujah. It was after the siege when more than half the city was just flattened. The DoD had sent a bunch of relief money to help the refugees there, a big briefcase full of hundred-­dollar bills. The guy who received the briefcase, the local emergency management head, had taken the money across town and just handed it over to an al-­Qaeda contact.

The money wasn't recoverable, but they needed to save face. So they'd sent Wilkes in to kill the al-­Qaeda guy. He didn't like the mission, didn't like the idea of just killing a guy, even if he was an insurgent. But he didn't like a lot of his missions. He completed them anyway.

That might as well have been the unofficial Marine Corps motto, right there.

For three days he just followed the guy around. Wilkes was dressed up like a Blackwater civilian contractor—­nobody would have bought it if he dressed like an Iraqi. The guy he was tailing made him less than an hour after he hit the ground, but it didn't matter. Nobody wanted to start real fighting again, not with so little of the city left, so Wilkes and his target just danced around each other, each of them looking for a time and a place where they could bump off each other where nobody would see it happen.

On the third day, Wilkes took his dinner in a little restaurant built into the ruin of a hospital. They'd set up awnings and tables and pushed all the broken bricks and rebar into a pile to one side. The food was good, even though he had no idea what he was eating. His target pulled up outside in a limousine with three thugs with AK-­47s, and it looked like time was up.

Then the target guy just stepped on something in the street that looked like a broken plate, just one more piece of debris. It was an IED, of course, which some local kid had put there to get Wilkes when he finished his dinner. The target got it instead.

Mission accomplished, and Wilkes didn't have to lift a finger.

There had been light and heat and a shock wave that hit him so fast he didn't hear it until he was already on his back in the rubble, staring up at a blue sky.

Just like now, except this sky was gray. Not a lot of gray days in Iraq, the way he remembered it. Gray days meant stateside. He was in America, he decided.

Right. New York. It all came flooding back. Angel. Chapel.

After an explosion, if you woke up on your back like this, you were supposed to just lie still. You might have a concussion or, worse, your neck could be broken and it would be hard to tell. Lie still and wait for help to arrive.

Wilkes heard a lot of shouting, somebody yelling for somebody else to freeze. “Okay,” he said. “No problem.”

There were ­people running around, yelling things back and forth. Something hit the ground hard and a piece of broken glass bounced off Wilkes's cheek. Maybe there was going to be another explosion. Maybe there was another bomb.

Eventually a paramedic came over and looked at Wilkes's eyes and asked him what day it was, who the president was. He complied and answered all their questions. That information wasn't classified. Somebody else took his blood pressure.

“He's okay,” they said. “One lucky son of a bitch.”

Which was pretty much how Wilkes had felt that day back in Fallujah.

“Just stay here. There's an ambulance coming,” somebody else said.

“How do I look?” Wilkes asked. “Anything broken?”

The paramedic actually laughed. “No. And you've got the right number of arms and legs, still. But you're covered from head to toe in cuts and bruises. We're also worried you might have a concussion.”

“I've had worse,” Wilkes said. He sat up. The paramedic tried to push him back down, but Wilkes just shrugged the guy off. “I've got work to do.” He remembered when the robot came rushing at the trailer. He'd known something was up so he smashed his way through the blacked-­out windows and out the back of the trailer. Looked like that had been the right move.

“You really need to be in a hospital right now. You could have internal injuries—­hell, for all I know you're bleeding out right now, I just can't see it.”

He just waved one hand in the guy's direction and headed back to the blast site. Not much left. All the computers and stuff were destroyed and just one corner of the trailer remained, sticking up in the air like a jagged spearhead. Angel was gone. Vaporized.

Well, most of her. In the short time he'd had inside, before the robot came, he'd noticed that one of the hard drives was missing from her server stack. Somebody had taken it.

Chapel. It must have been Chapel.

Which meant his mission wasn't complete at all. And worse—­he couldn't trust the man who'd given it to him. The only way Chapel could have known to come here, the only way he could have beaten Wilkes to the punch, was if Hollingshead had fed him information he wasn't supposed to have.

Well, that was kind of fucked up.

Wilkes walked away from the paramedics, who seemed to have other ­people to worry about. There were a bunch of things he needed to do. First and hardest was that he needed to call the Department of Defense and tell them Rupert Hollingshead was in league with the drone hijacker. That wasn't going to go down well, but it had to be done. Then Wilkes needed to find the highest-­ranking cop who hadn't been blown up in the blast. He needed to start organizing a manhunt.

If he wanted to salvage anything from this mission, he was going to have to get that hard drive. Anything else was failure. Marines like Wilkes found the very idea of failure unacceptable.

He would get the drive, and if Chapel refused to hand it over, well . . .

Wilkes didn't like what he would have to do then. He'd spent months in a motel room with Chapel, and while he thought the guy could be a little self-­righ­teous, he was basically okay. Still. Wilkes didn't like most of his missions. He completed them anyway.

Just like in Fallujah.

BROOKLYN, NY: MARCH 21, 17:58

Chapel reached for the doorknob. He pushed the door open and stepped into the bedroom. And there she was.

“Hi,” she said.

He nodded.

She looked like she was in her early twenties. Just a little over five feet tall. Very cute, in a way nobody would ever call beautiful. She had a little turned-­up nose and big eyes and very short hair that fell in bangs across her forehead. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a T-­shirt that was too big for her. It had a picture of a Weimaraner on the front.

Her eyes were a bright blue he never would have expected.

“You, um,” he said, because what he was about to say was
you're real,
which sounded pretty stupid even in his head.
You're human
was just about as bad.

“Are you going to arrest me?” she asked.

Chapel bit his lip. “No,” he said. “No, Angel. No. I'm here to rescue you.”

And then he reached for her and she ran to him and they just hugged each other.

She was real. She was human. She cried a little. Chapel never wanted to let her go.

BROOKLYN, NY: MARCH 21, 18:04

“I can't believe you managed to save this,” Angel said, turning the hard drive over and over in her hands. “This could be really useful.”

Chapel didn't want to talk about the hard drive.

They sat next to each other on the bed, their hands folded in their laps. So strange. He'd spent years with her whispering in his ear, her voice so real to him he could almost feel her breath on his neck. Now that she was right next to him in the flesh he felt like he'd never met her before, that they were just getting acquainted.

But then she would speak and it was all still there. The relationship they'd built up, as colleagues. As friends.

She kept looking at him out of the corner of her eye as if she couldn't believe
he
was real, as if she'd never expected this either. Imagine that.

“I thought—­” He shook his head. “What was that whole trick with the neural network all about?”

She smiled. “That was me trying to be clever. A while back, when I was working with Wilkes, he kept saying he didn't believe I was a woman. That I was some fat guy in a stained sweatshirt who just wanted to fool him. Then he suggested maybe I was just an AI, not human at all. I thought the idea was interesting, so I downloaded the closest thing that actually exists—­an Eliza variant. A program designed to fool someone into thinking they're talking to a human being.”

“So when somebody came to find you in the trailer, and the computer started talking to them—­”

“They would think that it was true, I was just an AI all along. Any half-­competent computer tech would see right through it, but I figured it might give me a little extra time to get away.”

Chapel nodded. It was a good plan. Exactly the kind of thing the Angel he knew—­the real Angel—­might come up with. “You knew we were coming for you?” he asked.

“I figured out something was wrong pretty quickly,” she said. “All of my outgoing ports went dead—­I was talking to you at the time, and suddenly you were just gone. I checked all my hardware and everything was working fine. I was certain I was being attacked. So I got out of there because I knew if they could do that to me, if they had the tech to shut me down, they could figure out where I was, too.” She shrugged. “Maybe, after working with you for so long, I just got paranoid. I was terrified they were going to come and kill me.”

“It isn't paranoia if they're really after you,” Chapel pointed out.

She laughed. Angel laughed. It was a sound that always made the hair stand up on his arms, and it did so then, too. “I hadn't left that trailer in a long time. Being outside was . . . difficult. I had no idea what to do, where to go. I came here because I knew this address—­you used to live here. And I thought Julia might help me.”

“It was a good call,” he told her.

“Thanks. But once I was here, once I was sure nobody was going to come bust down the door, I had no idea what to do next. Julia let me use her laptop and I was able to dig in enough to see that there was a secret warrant out for my arrest, signed by the director. I didn't know who I could trust. I told Julia to call you—­she really didn't want to, but she could see we needed you. The problem was, for all I knew you were the one who was coming to grab me.”

“It was Wilkes—­he was the one the director sent. But then he asked me to get you first. To make sure you stayed free.” He told her about the scrap of notebook paper Hollingshead had dropped in front of him. “He knows you're being framed, but with the rest of the intelligence community against you, he also knew he had to play their game if he wanted to stay in the loop.”

“So he's officially called for my arrest?”

“Officially,” he said.

She sat there lost in thought for a while. He didn't push. Even though they were running out of time.

Finally she looked over at him and asked, “Chapel, what do we do now?”

He wished he had a real plan to give her. But all he could say was, “We keep moving.”

BROOKLYN, NY: MARCH 21, 18:17

Chapel led Angel out of the bedroom and into the living room, where Julia was perched in front of the television. “I'm trying to get some news about what's going on,” she said, “because I know neither of you can tell me.”

“It's just better that you don't know,” Chapel tried, but he knew Julia and he knew she wouldn't just accept that.

“It's bad, right?” Julia asked. She looked frightened. Chapel hated seeing her that way. “It must be, if Angel had to come out in the open. And it must be bad for you, too,” she said to him. “You're not supposed to be here, are you?”

He'd forgotten how quick she could be. “It's bad, yeah. But we're going to fix it. Listen. I really want to thank you. You took Angel in when you didn't have to.”

Julia stared at him. “Are you kidding? She saved my life once. You remember? When that guy from the CIA was trying to kill me, the one who couldn't stop laughing? She got me out of that in one piece. I owed her.” She turned back to the TV. “Besides. Do you know what she was wearing when she showed up here? A jogging bra and yoga pants. If I turned her away, she would have frozen to death.”

Chapel turned to look at Angel.

“The last time I left my trailer,” she said, “it was warm out. I didn't have time to check the temperature today.”

“The last time? When was that?” Julia asked. “Six months ago?”

“Maybe,” Angel admitted.

Chapel and Julia both stared at her then. But there was no time to ask any more questions. “We have to go,” he said. “I'm sorry. I really wish we had more time. Julia, I really wish we had a chance to talk. But the police will already be looking for us.”

Julia nodded. “Okay. What can I do to help?”

A wave of relief surged through Chapel. He'd known he could trust Julia, but things were tense between them and he wasn't sure how she would feel about what he was going to ask for next.

“I need your car,” he said. Her eyebrows shot up and he was certain she would say no, so he tried to explain. “The bus and train stations are too risky—­too many surveillance cameras. And there's no way we're flying out of here. I could steal a car, but if the owner reports it and—­”

But Julia put a hand on his arm. “Go on, take it! You paid for half of it, anyway,” she said, smiling.