The Cyclops Initiative (9 page)

“I suppose you're wondering what I'm doing here,” Chapel said.

“I can probably guess,” Wilkes said. “Anyway, it's none of my business. You can explain to the boss when you see him. I'm sure he'll be fascinated.” He peered in through the doorway. “She in there?”

“Yeah,” Chapel replied. “Though she's not exactly what you're expecting.”

Wilkes nodded. “Just come on out of there so I can get by.”

Chapel walked down the stairs and moved to one side of the trailer. As he watched Wilkes step inside, he thought maybe he'd finally get his chance to escape. The cops had no orders to detain him—­maybe he could just slip away.

That hope died when the cop who had been shouting orders before came up and stuck the barrel of his gun right in Chapel's face. Chapel could see sergeant's chevrons on his collar. “Don't move,” he said.

“You heard the man—­I'm on your side,” Chapel said, keeping his hands high.

“Is that what you told Peters?” the cop asked. He jerked his head backward, toward the water tower. And the unconscious cop who was handcuffed to its base.

So much for just slipping away quietly.

QUEENS, NY: MARCH 21, 16:44

Wilkes was inside the trailer long enough for Chapel to get nervous, wondering how long it would take someone to notice the bulge in his tunic where he'd stashed Angel's memory drive. Long enough to start thinking about what was really going on here. Hollingshead had asked him to come here, to get Angel before Wilkes could arrest her. But Hollingshead must have known what Angel really was. Why hadn't he given Chapel better instructions? Chapel was just assuming that the memory drive was important. That Hollingshead needed it for some reason and couldn't let it fall into anyone else's hands. But why? Was there something stored on the drive, something crucial to the investigation into the drone hijacking? But why not let Wilkes recover it, then, and share its contents with the rest of the intelligence community?

Hollingshead must have his reasons, and Chapel owed the man enough that he was inclined to just go along blindly. But what if he had made a mistake here? What if he'd grabbed the wrong drive? His orders, inasmuch as they
were
orders, were to recover Angel. But now that Chapel knew she was just an artificial intelligence, what did that even mean?

He was overthinking this. He needed to focus on getting away from here before anybody thought to search him. “What's your name, Sergeant?” he asked.

The cop still had his weapon aimed right at Chapel's chest. Chapel wondered if the hard drive would stop a bullet. “Don't talk,” the cop said.

Chapel sighed. “Just trying to be friendly. Listen, do you know who we are? Or did you just get a phone call from Washington saying a federal agent needed to commandeer your unit?” That was probably more likely, in Chapel's experience. “Do you have any idea why you're here?”

“We're providing support for a federal operation. I don't even want to know the details,” the sergeant said. “He's going to come out of there and tell me I have to let you go, isn't he? Even though you assaulted one of my men.” He looked disgusted.

“I have no idea what he'll do,” Chapel said, which was the truth. He and Wilkes had never come to like each other, even after months holed up together on the stakeout. Protocol said Wilkes should save Chapel from the cops just because it was good practice not to let your fellow spies get interrogated. But Hollingshead's directorate had never been very strict on protocol. “Look,” Chapel said, “is it really going to hurt so much just to tell me your name?”

The cop frowned. “You want a name? Larry Peters. That's not me, that's the guy you beat up on your way in. I doubt you asked him what his name was before you cuffed him to that water tower. I've worked with Peters for six years. He's had my back more times than I can count. He's a good man.”

“I'm sure he is,” Chapel tried, but the sergeant wasn't finished.

“He's got a wife. Baked cookies for me once, the first time I got shot. If I have to go home and tell her that her husband is in the hospital, or maybe that he's paralyzed because he got in the way of some fed—­”

“He's okay,” Chapel said. “I know how to incapacitate someone without injury.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Chapel didn't know if there was a right thing. The sergeant was getting angry, working himself up. Never a good thing in a man who was pointing a gun at you. “You'd better hope your friend in there comes back out in a good mood. You'd better hope he gives me a very good reason not to press charges—­”

“Sir!” It was one of the other cops. “Sir—­you might want to—­”

The sergeant whirled around to face his man. “What is it, Fredericks? Can't you see I'm busy with our prisoner?”

“Sorry, sir, but—­it's—­well—­”

“What the hell is that noise?” the sergeant asked.

“That's what I was trying to talk to you about,” the cop replied. Then he pointed across the gravel yard at the robot that was noisily trundling toward them.

It was mounted on heavy treads, and it was the size of a very large dog. It had two grasping arms and a rudimentary sort of head—­just a pair of cameras on a metal stalk, and what looked like the edging attachment from a vacuum cleaner. It carried a long metal pole in front of it that looked to Chapel like nothing so much as a fishing pole.

And it was coming straight toward them at high speed.

“What is it?” Chapel asked.

One of the cops answered. “That's our bomb disposal robot. We brought it out in case the trailer was booby-­trapped. The bomb squad guys must have gotten bored and took it out for a spin.” He laughed. “Those
assholes are always playing pranks, 'cause they've got nothing better to do.”

“Any second now they'll make it do a donut,” another cop added, “and then it'll say ‘Johnny Five is alive' or just ‘Wall-­Eeee' or something. Those guys are nuts.”

The robot's treads spun out over the loose gravel, sending up a billowing plume of gray dust in its wake. It did not stop or do a donut or say anything.

“What's that pole on its front?” Chapel asked. “The part that sticks out.”

“Remote detonation arm,” one of the cops said. “Sometimes when you find a bomb, the best thing you can do is just clear the area and set it off where it is.”

“All right, that's enough,” the sergeant said. “No talking to the prisoner.”

Chapel shook his head. “Wait. Just wait a second. Remote detonation—­the way you do that—­” He'd seen bomb removal robots in Afghanistan. When you found an IED in the road out there, you had to call in the bomb ­people, and nine times out of ten they would send one of their robots. He remembered that they got rid of the IEDs by blowing them up there, too. And the way you did that was to detonate it by hitting it with a charge of explosives.

He peered across the gravel at the approaching robot, at its remote detonation arm. There was something clamped to the end of the pole, a big wad of something white and shapeless.

Semtex,
Chapel thought. Plastic explosive. Maybe a pound of it, or maybe more.

And the robot kept getting closer, headed right for them. No—­headed for the trailer—­

“Wilkes!” Chapel shouted. “Out of there now! Everybody scatter and get your heads down!”

There was no time to stop the thing—­it was moving too fast. Still, some of the cops turned and faced it with their submachine guns, looks of confusion on their faces but they could feel it, feel that something very bad was about to happen. Chapel started to run. The sergeant shouted for him to freeze and lifted his weapon to his eye.

Chapel figured he would just have to take his chances.

He ran.

QUEENS, NY: MARCH 21, 16:48

It didn't take long for the robot to cross the last stretch of gravel and ram into the side of the trailer. Chapel didn't so much as turn his head to look back, so when a second later the shock wave lifted all the gravel under his feet and threw him to the ground, he wasn't quite ready. He fell hard on his hands, scraping silicone skin off his artificial wrist, squinting his eyes shut as the dusty gravel pelted his face. It turned out to be a good thing he'd been knocked down. He heard debris whiz past him fast enough it would have taken his head off, felt hot pieces of metal bounce off his back. The noise of the explosion was loud enough that it deafened him, leaving his ears ringing and his chest burning as the air was ripped from his lungs.

Down on his knees in the gravel he reached for the hard drive hidden in his tunic. It was fine—­his body had sheltered it from the blast.

Only then did he look back.

Part of the trailer remained intact, a jagged corner of aluminum sticking up at an angle. Debris was everywhere, some of it smoldering on the gravel—­green chipboards and shards of black plastic and twisted, unidentifiable pieces of metal. He didn't see much blood. The cops in their body armor must have listened to him and gotten their heads down—­only the sergeant looked injured, a big gash running down one of his cheeks. He was staring at something only he could see.

Chapel saw no sign of Wilkes. Had he made it out of the trailer? It didn't look good.

Poor bastard. Chapel might not have liked him much, but he was a fellow silent warrior. An intelligence operative. Even his family would never know how he died, the sacrifice he'd made to stop the hijacker.

The sergeant turned and looked at Chapel. His eyes still weren't focusing, but he seemed to be getting over the shock of the blast. He looked like he was shouting, but Chapel heard his voice as only a whisper. “Somebody,” he said. “Somebody arrest . . . get that . . .” It was like he only had a thin stock of words left to him and he was burning through them fast. “His fault,” he managed. “Somehow.” Then he waved one arm in Chapel's direction.

The cops who had recovered faster started to get up, started to reach for their weapons. Chapel got shakily to his feet. He felt like every bone in his body had been disconnected from all the others, like if he moved too fast he would just dissolve into a big pile of Jell-­O. Little spots kept dancing in front of his eyes.

One of the cops managed to stagger toward him and shout something Chapel couldn't really hear. His ears were still buzzing from the explosion.

But then another of the cops looked up in the air and shouted “Shit!” and started dancing backward. The others looked up and followed suit.

The pebbled glass door of the shower from the trailer—­still miraculously intact—­was spinning in the air above them like a thrown playing card. As soon as Chapel saw it, it was like the law of gravity had been momentarily suspended but now was going to be enforced with a vengeance. It came down hard on the gravel and shattered in a white cloud of glass fragments that shot out in every direction.

Chapel knew a lucky break when he saw one. The cops were distracted. He dashed for the water tower. His living arm felt weak and near useless, but he'd learned to trust his artificial arm in situations like this. He jumped and hauled himself up onto the tower, then over the fence.

All before the cops even thought to start shooting.

QUEENS, NY: MARCH 21, 17:02

On the streets of Queens nobody noticed one dazed-­looking man in a tattered army uniform. They were too busy watching the parade of fire trucks and ambulances and police cars that tore down every street, converging on the train yard. Chapel kept his head down and kept moving, knowing he had a little breathing room—­but not much—­before the local authorities started looking for him. The cops back at the trailer had gotten a good look at him and his description would go out to every unit in the borough before long. Without Wilkes to vouch for him, they would have no reason not to pick him up. And once they had him he would be stuck in jail for a while. Normally, Angel would have been able to spring him—­but right now she was switched off. He couldn't rely on his government credentials, either, since he'd been officially relieved from duty.

No, if he was caught now, he would be on his own. And the cops would have lots and lots of questions, questions he couldn't answer.

He needed to get as far away as he could, as fast as he could, but that presented a problem. He had no idea where exactly he was or how to get back to the subway station. Queens had a weird street grid with avenues, roads, streets, and places all identified by number, and the numbers tended to run into each other so you could easily find yourself on Thirtieth Place, which ran parallel to Thirtieth Street to where it met Thirtieth Avenue. Added to that, all the street addresses were given as a pair of numbers that roughly corresponded to the nearest Avenue (usually), so an address could be 30-29 Thirtieth Avenue on the corner of Thirtieth Street. Even Chapel's smartphone was going to have trouble with that.

First things first, though—­he needed to get cleaned up. Eventually someone was going to notice that he looked like he'd just survived a bomb blast, and they would call the cops just to be helpful. Chapel ducked into a coffee shop off one of the avenues, intending to buy a bottle of water so he could use the restroom. He didn't need to bother. All the employees of the place were standing by the plateglass windows, looking out at the street.

“Hey,” one of them called out to him as he headed for the back of the shop and the restroom.

Chapel froze. “Yeah?”

“You see anything?” she asked. She was a young woman with freckles wearing a stained apron. She didn't even give Chapel's ruined clothes a glance. “There's nothing on the news, and Twitter just says there was an explosion.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. We're gonna close up in a minute and go look for it.”

This was New York City. A city still haunted by September eleventh, but also a city where ­people ran toward explosions and attacks and horror so they could get a good video of it on their phones.