PART ONE

 

CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+0:00

The forest was on fire, and the sky was full of orange smoke. Land mines kept cooking off and exploding in the distance, making Sergeant Lourdes jump every single time—and regret it every single time, since it made the barbed wire imbedded in his leg snag and tear some more.

Sweat poured down his face, chilling instantly in the cool night air. There was blood—blood everywhere—but he couldn’t think about that, couldn’t think about what had happened to him, about his injuries, about what was going to happen to his family without him. He couldn’t think about how he probably wouldn’t make it to see morning.

All he could think about was the sentry post, twenty-five yards away. The cramped little box he’d been stationed in for three years now, the box he’d come to loathe, then tolerate, then start to think of as his home away from home. There was a picture of his baby girl taped to one window. There was a flask of coffee in there and right now he was so thirsty, his mouth felt dry as a bone and—

—and he couldn’t think about that. Because his uniform jacket was in there, too, hanging on the back of his wooden chair. And in the pocket of that jacket was his cell phone, his direct link to his superiors. To the people who had to know what had happened. To the people who could fix this, who could make everything okay, if he could just tell them.

Just tell them the fence was down, the perimeter defenses compromised, and the detainees were free.

Sergeant Brian Lourdes had a pretty good security clearance. Not enough to know why those seven men had been locked away so tight. Not enough to know why they were so dangerous they could never be set free. But enough to know what would happen if they ever did get out. Enough to know it could mean the end of America.

Of course that was never supposed to happen. When Lourdes first came to the facility in upstate New York, he’d been amazed at the level of security on Camp Putnam. The razor-wire fences stood twenty feet high, two layers with a fifty-yard stretch of minefield in between. Twenty men monitored that fence rain or shine, every day of the year. There were more than seven hundred cameras mounted on the fence posts, trained in every direction, watching every corner of that fence that surrounded over a hundred acres of forests and fields.

There was no gate in that fence, no way in or out at all. The detainees never left, and nobody ever went in to check up on them. That was how it stood when Sergeant Lourdes was assigned to this job. That was how it was supposed to be forever.

As of tonight all bets were off.

Lourdes grabbed at a tree root and hauled himself across the rocky ground. The wire in his leg felt like it was on fire, but he gritted his teeth and ignored it. He was trained for this. Trained to keep going, no matter what. Trained to know his duty. He dug his fingers down into the dirt and pulled himself another yard. The sentry box—and his phone—was getting closer.

Three years in that stupid box. Three years working the easiest and most boring job Lourdes had ever had. Every morning he had shown up at oh six hundred and logged himself in, then logged himself back out at eighteen hundred sharp. Twice a day he walked his mile-long section of the fence, checking the chain link, making sure animals hadn’t burrowed underneath it, looking for signs of rust or damage. The rest of the time he just sat watching the trees beyond the inner fence, looking for any sign of movement. If he saw a bird in there, or a fox hunting for eggs, he checked a little box on a form on his computer screen and clicked the trackpad to file it. And that was it. There had never been any sign of the detainees. Wherever they were in there they kept to themselves. He’d never gotten so much as a glimpse of any of them.

Three years when nothing—nothing happened.

And then tonight, not an hour after his day started, before the sun even came up, everything changed. A Predator drone had come in just over the tree line, a sleek little machine that flew so low he didn’t even hear its engine until it was almost on top of him. The laptop computer in the sentry box had lit up with warnings and alarms, but by then Lourdes was already jumping out of his box, running to see what was going on.

The drone was only overhead for a second. He just had time to identify it as an unmanned aircraft. But it’s one of ours, he’d thought. It’s the good guys, just checking up on the camp. He lifted one hand to wave at it, thinking that he would get a call on his radio at any second explaining what the drone was doing there. Instead, the Predator had attacked without warning. Rockets had streaked from pods slung under its fuselage—Hellfire missiles that slammed into the ground like giant hammers beating on the earth.

After that things got very loud and very painful. The fence exploded outward, barbed-wire shrapnel scything through the air, tearing branches off trees, making the dirt boil and jump. The drone was gone before Sergeant Lourdes even knew he’d been hit. Just before the pain started, just before he collapsed to the ground in a blubbering heap, he saw what the chopper had wrought.

A section of both fences maybe a hundred yards wide was just . . . gone. The minefield was a series of craters, entirely neutralized. On the far side of the fence a stand of trees had been knocked down, and Lourdes could see all the way in to a clearing lit only by starlight.

Lourdes had been told what to do if something like this happened, given instructions by the same LT who had promised him it never could happen. The satellites watching Camp Putnam, the cameras on the fence, would take care of almost everything. Automatic alarms would switch on and soldiers would be summoned; backup defenses would activate without anyone needing to push a button. But there was one thing he had to do. He had to pick up the phone and call a man in Virginia, a man who would need to know the fence was down. A man who could make everything okay, fix everything, but who needed to hear from an actual human being, needed an eyewitness account of what had happened, before he could get to work. Sergeant Lourdes just had to make that call—he just had to pick up the phone.

The phone—the satellite cell phone he was supposed to keep on him at all times—was back in the sentry box, only a few dozen yards away. Lourdes pulled himself another couple of feet. The pain didn’t matter. The blood he’d lost didn’t matter.

He was so close now. He felt like he could almost reach out and touch the wall of the box. Just a few more yards and—

“There,” someone said, from behind him. “Another one.”

“This one’s mine,” a second voice said.

Sergeant Lourdes closed his eyes and said a quick prayer. Then he rolled over on his back and pushed himself up on his elbows. He had to see. Three years of his life making sure these bastards didn’t get out. Three years making sure they didn’t end the world. He had to know what they looked like.

There were six of them, standing in a rough line near where the fence had been just a few minutes before. Big guys, young looking. Muscular, but not exactly Schwarzenegger types. Their hair was long and unkempt, and they had scraggly beards and their eyes—

Something was wrong with their eyes.

Lourdes couldn’t quite make out their faces. They were silhouetted against the burning trees and the orange smoke that masked the stars. But their eyes should be glittering, reflecting some of that light. Shouldn’t they?

“Freeze right where you are!” Lourdes shouted, and he grabbed for his sidearm. He lifted the heavy pistol and pointed at the closest one, the one who was already jogging toward him. He fired three times, forcing himself to aim with each shot.

The detainee ducked sideways each time, as if he were just stepping out of the way of the bullets. That was when Lourdes realized just how fast the asshole was moving. Time had slowed down, and even his racing heartbeat sounded like a dull, thudding bass line.

The detainee was on top of him so suddenly he didn’t have a chance to breathe. The guy stank, but Lourdes didn’t care about that so much after the detainee’s thumbs sank into his windpipe and pressed down, hard.

Lourdes tried to raise the handgun again, but he couldn’t feel his arm. Couldn’t feel much of anything anymore. His vision was going black.

The last thing he saw was the detainee’s eyes, staring down into his. Eyes that weren’t human. They were black, solid black, like an animal’s eyes.

The detainee leaned in harder with his thumbs, but it didn’t matter to Lourdes. Sergeant Brian Lourdes, U.S. Army, was already dead. So he didn’t see what happened next. He didn’t see his killer’s face split down the middle with a cruel smile.

FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+3:17

Three hundred miles away in an office cubicle, Captain Jim Chapel was trying not to fall asleep at his desk. It wasn’t easy. It was too early in the year for air-conditioning, so the air in the office building at Fort Belvoir was still and lifeless, and the only sounds he could hear were the noise of fingers clacking away at keyboards and the low buzz of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

He sensed someone coming up from behind him and sat up straighter in his chair, trying to make it look like he was busy. It wouldn’t do to have some civilian bigwig come in here and see him slouched over his desk. When the newcomer walked into his cubicle and leaned over him, though, it wasn’t who he’d been expecting.

“So are you going to ever tell me what you did in Afghanistan?” Sara asked, her breath hot on Chapel’s neck. She laughed. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

Chapel didn’t move an inch. Sara—Major Sara Volks, INSCOM, to be proper about it—was leaning over his shoulder, theoretically looking at the same computer screen he’d been staring at all morning. It was displaying yet another memo about the technical details of a weapons system under development by a civilian contractor. He doubted very much she was interested in what it had to say.

Still, old habits die hard. In his head he matched up the required clearance to look at this memo with what he knew of her clearance. She was a major in INSCOM, the army’s Intelligence and Security Command. Which meant it was fine, she was more than qualified to see this, and he relaxed a bit.

Then he realized she was leaning over his shoulder, her mouth only about half an inch from his ear, and that she smelled really, really good. After that he didn’t relax at all. “You know I can’t talk about that,” he said. “Ma’am.”

Chapel moved office every few weeks as his job demanded, and every time he found himself a new cubicle he ended up having a new reporting officer—a new boss, for all intents and purposes. Major Volks was hardly the worst of the lot. She was capable and efficient enough that she didn’t need to yell at her people to keep them working. She was also an audacious flirt . . . at least as far as Chapel was concerned. He hadn’t seen her make eyes at any of the other men in the office, and he was pretty sure he was the only soldier in the fort who got to call her by her first name. The way she spoke to him was ridiculously unprofessional and probably enough to get both of them written up and reassigned, if he’d wanted to make a stink about it.

Not that he minded. It didn’t hurt that her regulation-cut hair was platinum blond, that she had big, soulful eyes and a body sculpted by countless hours in the fort’s excellent fitness center. Or that she had a mischievous grin that made Chapel’s knees go a little weak.

Up to this point she’d kept her comments suggestive rather than brazen. She’d asked him a lot of questions about himself, always prodding for information she had to know he couldn’t give her—like his wartime record, and what exactly his job description was now. It was the kind of flirting people in Military Intelligence did because they spent so much of their time staying secret that even the hint of disclosure was exciting.

She’d also asked him what he liked to do when he went home at night, and whether he enjoyed Italian food. There was a nice Italian restaurant not a mile outside of the fort—the implication was clear.

So far he hadn’t taken the bait.

“We are silent warriors, right?” she said, a hint of a laugh in her voice. “That’s the creed of the MIC.” She leaned in closer, which he hadn’t thought was possible before. Her shoulder touched his back. “All right. Keep your secrets. For now.”

Chapel was no shrinking violet, and he was sorely tempted. And this was definitely the moment. She’d opened a door—it was up to him to walk through. He could ask her out on a date and he knew she would say yes.

Or he could say nothing and keep things casual and flirtatious and harmless between them forever.

Initiating things would put his career at risk—his career, such as it was. A series of boring desk jobs doing oversight on weapons contractors until he retired on a comfortable little pension.

Go for it, he told himself. “I will tell you one secret,” he said. “I love Italian. And, in fact, I was thinking—”

Was it possible she could lean in even closer? She was almost rubbing his back with her shoulder. “Yes?” She reached out one hand to put it on his.

His left hand.

Damn.

He felt her flinch. Felt her whole body tense. “Oh,” she said.

His left arm wasn’t there anymore. He could forget that sometimes, because of the thing they’d given him to replace it. Some days he went whole hours without remembering what was attached to his body.

“It’s . . . cold,” Sara said.

“Silicone,” he told her, his voice very low. “Looks pretty real, right? They did a great job making it look like the other one. There’s even hair on the knuckles.”

“I didn’t know,” she said. “You didn’t say anything . . .”

“It’s not a secret. Though I tend not to mention it until it comes up.” He lifted the hand and flexed the fingers for her. “State of the art.” His heart sank in his chest. He could pretend it was normal, pretend that there was nothing weird about his new arm. But he knew how it creeped people out. “Almost as good as the real thing.”

“Afghanistan?” she asked, her eyes knowing and sympathetic. He’d learned to dread that look.

The last thing he wanted was her pity. “Yeah. It’s not a big thing. Listen, as I was saying, I don’t have any plans tonight and—”

“I need to think about it,” she said. She stood up straight. She wasn’t meeting his eyes when she spoke to him, now. “Let me get back to you. Fraternization isn’t exactly permitted, after all, and—”

“I understand,” Chapel told her. And he did. This wasn’t what she’d been expecting. She’d been flirting with a professional soldier, a strong, vigorous man in his early forties with just a touch of gray at his temples. Not an amputee.

She turned to go, and he sighed in disappointment. This wasn’t the first time things had worked out this way. He’d had years to get used to the arm—and how people reacted to it. But damn, he had really hoped that this time—

“I, uh,” she said, and now she did look him in the eye. “I didn’t say no. I said, let me get back to you.”

“Sure,” he said.

She walked away. She looked angry. Like he was the one who had brushed her off.

Well, in a couple of weeks he would be reassigned to a new office, anyway. Probably one where his reporting officer was fat and bald and smelled like cheap cigars. And it wasn’t like it could have gone anywhere with Sara anyway, not with both of them hiding a relationship from their superior officers and hoping they never got caught.

He turned back to his computer and tried to make sense of the memo on his screen. He got about three sentences in before he realized he couldn’t remember which weapons system this memo related to, or why any of it mattered in the slightest degree.

Grunting in frustration he pushed himself up out of his chair and logged off from the computer. There was no way he was going to get any work done, not until he got his head clear, and that meant he needed to go swim some laps.

Just as he stepped out of the cubicle he heard the chime as his BlackBerry received a new text message.

“I cannot deal with you right now,” he told his phone, and walked away.

FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+4:02

When they flew him home from Afghanistan, one of the first thoughts through Chapel’s mind had been that he would never swim again.

He’d grown up in Florida, swimming in the canals with turtles and manatees. He’d gotten his SCUBA certification at the age of twelve and his MSD—the highest level of nonprofessional certification—by eighteen. He’d spent more of his youth in the water than on dry land, at least according to his mother. He’d seriously considered going into the navy instead of the army, maybe even becoming a frogman. In the end, he had only decided to be a grunt because he didn’t want to spend half his life swabbing decks. He had learned quickly enough that the army liked soldiers who could swim, too—it had been a big part of his being chosen for Special Forces training—and he had made a point of doing twenty laps a day in the nearest pool to keep in shape. It had become his refuge, his private time to just think and move and be free and weightless. He’d never felt as at peace anywhere else as he did while swimming.

Now that was over.

A man with one arm can only swim in circles, he’d thought. He had been lying in a specially made stretcher on board a troop transport flying into National Airport. He had spent most of the flight staring out the window, feeling sorry for himself.

His life was over. His career was over—he would never go back into the theater of operations, never do anything real or valuable again. No one would ever take him seriously for the rest of his life—he would just be a cripple, someone they should feel sorry for. He pitied himself more than anyone else ever could.

That had ended when he got to Walter Reed and started his rehabilitation. He’d been a little shocked when he met the man they sent to teach him how to live with one arm. The physical therapist had come into the room in a wheelchair because he was missing his right leg. He was also missing his right arm, and his right eye. He’d been a master gunnery sergeant with the Marines in Iraq and had thrown himself on an IED to protect what he called his boys. Not a single one of them had been injured that day. Just him. “Call me Top,” he’d said, and he held out his left hand for Chapel to shake.

Chapel had reached automatically to take that hand. It had taken him a second to remember his own left hand wasn’t there anymore. Eventually he’d awkwardly reached over and shook Top’s hand with his right.

“See?” Top had said. “You’re already getting the hang of it. You make do with what you’ve got. Hell, I should know it’s not easy, but then, I never expected life to be easy. I know you army boys think life is one long vacation. In the Marines we have this thing called a work ethic.”

“In the army we’ve got this thing called brains; we use that instead,” Chapel had fired back. When they both stopped laughing, there were tears in Chapel’s eyes. The tears took a lot longer to stop than the laughter. Top let that go. He didn’t mind if his boys—and Chapel was one of his boys now, like it or not—cried a little, or screamed in pain when they felt like it. “A soldier who can still bitch is a happy soldier,” Top had told him. “When they shut up, when they stop griping, that’s when I know one of my boys is in trouble.”

There had been plenty of tears. And plenty of screaming. The artificial arm they gave Chapel was a miracle. It would mean living an almost entirely normal life. It functioned exactly like a real arm, and it responded to his nerve impulses so he just had to think about moving his arm and it did what he wanted. It was light-years beyond any prosthetic ever built before. But being fitted for it meant undergoing endless grueling surgeries as the nerves that should have been serving his missing arm were moved to new places, as electrodes were implanted in his chest and shoulder.

If it hadn’t been for Top, Chapel was pretty sure he wouldn’t have made it. He would have eaten his own sidearm, frankly. But Top had shown him that life—even a life limited by circumstance—could still mean something. “Hell, I’m one of the lucky ones,” Top had told him one day while they were doing strength-training exercises.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Chapel said.

“Hell, no. Everything that he took away, God made sure I had a spare handy. There’s only three body parts you only get one of—your nose, your heart, and one other one, and I got to keep all those. Now, my little buttercup, shall we get back to work?”

It had taken a long time for Chapel to confess to Top what he missed the most. “I wish I could still swim,” he said. “I used to love swimming. I can’t get my magic arm wet, though.”

“So take it off when you go swimming,” Top suggested.

Chapel shook his head. “Won’t work. I mean, I guess I could kick my way around a pool if I had to. If my life depended on it I could tread water just fine if I fell off a boat or something. But without two arms, I’m not going to break any speed records. I’ll never swim laps again. That was the main way I got exercise before.”

“I always hated swimming, myself,” Top said. “Never liked going in over my head and getting water in my nose. But okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, starting tomorrow, you’re going to teach me how to swim with one arm and one leg.”

“I can’t do that,” Chapel said. “I don’t think it can be done. And anyway, I’m not a teacher.”

“So you got two things to learn with that big army brain of yours,” Top said. “As usual, the marine is going to have to do the hard part. And probably drown, too. Nothing new about that, either.”

Chapel had known exactly what Top was trying to do. He had wanted to shake his head and say that kind of psych-out wasn’t going to work on him. But he trusted Top by then, trusted him more than he’d trusted anyone before in his life. So the next morning they had gone down to the hospital’s swimming pool with a couple burly orderlies (who still had all their limbs), and Chapel had taught Top how to swim.

Top did drown, twice. Each time he was resuscitated, and each time he got back in the pool. He had to be dragged out of the water by the orderlies so many times they refused to help anymore and quit on the spot. Top put in a requisition for more orderlies, and they kept going. The results weren’t ever perfect. Top swimming with one arm and one leg looked kind of like a drunk dolphin flopping back and forth in the water. He had a lot of trouble swimming in a straight line, and even one lap of the pool left him so exhausted he had to rest for an hour before he started again.

In the end, though, Top could swim. “I ever fall off an ocean liner on one of those celebrity cruises, I guess I’ll be okay,” Top had said when he decided they were done. When he’d successfully swum ten laps, in less than eight hours. “Now, Captain Chapel. Sir. You want to tell me why we went to all this trouble? Sir, you want to tell me why I forced you to do this demeaning task, sir?”

“Because,” Chapel had said, “if I can show an enlisted man like you how to swim, sorry sack of guts that you are, I can surely figure out how to do it with my own glorious and beautiful officer’s body.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Top had said. “Now get in that goddamned pool or I will throw you in.”

Now—years later—Chapel was up to twenty laps at a time, in less than an hour. He would never do the butterfly crawl again, but he’d mastered a kind of half stroke that used his arm mostly for steering and let his legs do all the work. Fort Belvoir had a wonderful pool in its fitness center, and he availed himself of it daily.

There was no feeling like it.

The blood-warm water streamed past him, buoying him up like gentle hands. He didn’t have to think about anything else while he swam—he just focused on his body, on his movements. His muscles moved in perfect concert, his arm and his legs snapping into an old familiar rhythm. His head turned from side to side as he drew in each breath and let it out again in a long, slow exhale. There was no better feeling in the world.

Thanks, Top, he thought, as he kicked off for the start of lap seventeen.

The last time he’d seen Top had been at the master gunnery sergeant’s wedding, less than a year previous. Top had walked down the aisle with two legs and two arms—the only way anyone could tell he wasn’t whole was that he was wearing an eye patch. Chapel had gotten to know Top’s bride a little bit and she had turned out to be the toughest, most sarcastic woman he’d ever met. She needed to be if she was going to keep up with Top.

Lap eighteen. Chapel would have stayed in the pool all day if he could have. He needed to get back to work, though. The frustration and boredom of his morning and of Major Volks’s rejection were gone, or at least he’d worked off enough of that negativity to actually start drafting some memos of his own.

Still. Maybe he’d shoot for twenty-five laps today.

Across the pool. Back. He kicked off for lap nineteen.

And then stopped himself in the water before he’d gone five yards out.

“Hello?” he said.

A man in a pin-striped suit was standing at the edge of the pool, looking down at him. He had a thick white towel in his hands and something else. A BlackBerry, maybe.

“Can I help you with something? Make it quick, though,” Chapel said. “I’m pretty good on the straightaways, but treading water isn’t exactly my forte.”

Anyone wearing that kind of suit in Fort Belvoir was a civilian, and Chapel had a bad moment where he thought the guy might be some kind of CEO from one of the corporations he was watchdogging. The buzz-cut hair said otherwise, though, as did the sheer bulk of muscle crammed into the jacket.

Chapel was trained in Military Intelligence. He’d studied all the different ways to put clues together, to draw conclusions from scant evidence. From just the look of this guy he knew right away that he had to be CIA.

The agency had tentacles everywhere, and there were plenty of them wrapped around INSCOM and Fort Belvoir. They tended to stay in other parts of the fort though, where Chapel couldn’t see them, and he’d always been happy about that. Military Intelligence and civilian spies never got along.

“Listen, if you just came to watch the freak go for a swim, that’s fine,” Chapel said, because the guy still hadn’t told him what he wanted. “But then I’ll just get back to it.”

The agency guy shook his head, slowly. And then he started to laugh. His whole body shook as he guffawed and chortled and chuckled.

Chapel swam over to the edge of the pool and dragged himself out. Water poured off him in torrents as he stormed around the side of the pool, headed straight for the laughing bastard. If fraternizing with Sara could cost him his career, punching out a CIA man could get him thrown in the brig, but at that moment he did not give one good goddamn. Nobody laughed at Jim Chapel like that.

Before he could land the punch, though, the CIA bastard lifted the BlackBerry he was holding and held it up at Chapel’s eye level. Chapel saw that it was his own smartphone. The one he’d left at his desk when he headed for the pool.

The screen said he had twenty-seven new text messages, and three new voice mails. Chapel grabbed the phone and scrolled through the phone’s logs. Every single message had come from the same number. There were e-mails, too, from a military address he didn’t recognize, but he knew with a cold certainty they came from the same person who’d sent all those texts.

“When you didn’t answer,” the CIA man said, still burbling with mirth, “they sent me to come find you. We have to go. Now. The man who’s been trying to contact you is not the kind of person you keep waiting.”

Chapel stared into his eyes. They were hazel, green in the middle and gold around the edges, and they were full of laughter, still.

“Give me that,” Chapel said, and grabbed the towel.

FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+4:03

Chapel read one of the e-mails for the third time, still not sure what the hell was going on. It went on for pages, but most of that was just boilerplate confidentiality statements—legalese describing what exactly would happen to anyone who forwarded or printed out the e-mail. Standard stuff for military intelligence. The only real content of the e-mail was a single line of tersely written text:

Report instanter DIA DX Pentagon for new orders. Reply to acknowledge.

Chapel understood all that just fine. DIA was the Defense Intelligence Agency, the top level of the military intelligence pyramid. DX was the Directorate for Defense Counterintelligence and HUMINT—HUMINT being Human Intelligence, or good old-fashioned spycraft. DX was the group that used to give him his orders back when he was a theater operative in Afghanistan, but he hadn’t worked for them for a long time—these days his work was handled directly by INSCOM, and he hadn’t so much as spoken to anyone in the DIA in five years.

Technically, of course, he still had to answer all the way up that chain, and if somebody at the DIA wanted him to show up at their office and get new orders, he was required to do so. But what on earth could they want him for?

“You know anything about this, Laughing Boy?” he asked the CIA goon.

Laughing Boy shook his head. The very idea seemed to set him off on another chuckling fit. “I just do as I’m told.”

Chapel stared at the man. His involvement in this—even if it just came down to fetching Chapel when he wouldn’t answer his phone—added a whole new wrinkle of weirdness. On paper the DIA and the civilian CIA worked hand in glove, but everyone in the intelligence community knew there was a permanent divide and lasting hatred between the defense department and the civilian intelligence organizations. They never shared anything with each other unless they were legally required to. If the CIA and the DIA were working together, then that could only mean something really bad had happened and that rivalry had been put aside long enough to clean it up.

And somehow that meant they needed a one-armed captain from INSCOM to hold the bucket and the mop.

Chapel rubbed vigorously with the towel at the skin on the left side of his chest. Laughing Boy raised an eyebrow and Chapel grunted in frustration. “My skin has to be dry or the electrodes don’t work right. Do you mind? I need to get dressed.”

Laughing Boy kept giggling, but he stepped aside to let Chapel head for the locker room. Chapel sat down on a wooden bench inside and picked up the arm. It only weighed nine pounds—lighter than the original. Its silicone cover looked exactly like a real human arm up until you reached the shoulder, where it flared out into a pair of molded clamps. Putting it on was simplicity—he simply drew it over the stump of his shoulder until it fit snugly. The arm recognized automatically that it was on and the clamps squeezed down gently on Chapel’s flesh until it was locked into place.

As he did every time he put it on, he ran it through a quick check to make sure everything was working all right. He lifted the arm and then swung it backward, made a fist, and then straightened his hand out like he was about to deliver a karate chop. Finally, to check the fingers he touched each of them in turn with the thumb.

Living nerves in his shoulder and chest had been rewired to replace the ones he’d lost. Sensors in his new hand sent messages to those nerves through subcutaneous electrodes. The neurosurgery had gone so smoothly that now when Chapel touched his artificial thumb to his artificial index finger, he actually felt them rubbing against each other. He could pick up a playing card with those fingers and feel the smooth coating of its lamination, or touch sandpaper and feel how rough it was.

He thought about what Top would say. “There’s guys out there with two hooks instead of hands that learn how to make omelets in the morning without getting egg all over their shirts. You, my boy, are living in science fiction tomorrowland. Is it not a glorious thing to be living in George Jetson world?”

“Sure is, Top,” Chapel said, out loud.

Jerks could laugh at him all they wanted for being a freak. Jim Chapel was whole. Top had taught him that. He was whole and vital and he could do anything he set his mind to. Whatever the DIA wanted him for, he was ready.

He dressed himself hurriedly and then tapped a message on the BlackBerry acknowledging that he was on his way. To the Pentagon.

Coming out of the locker room he found Laughing Boy waiting for him. “All right, you delivered your message,” Chapel said. “You can go now, I’m being a good boy.”

Laughing Boy shook his head and chortled a little. “Nope. I’m supposed to drive you there myself. Make sure you show up.”

“I know how to follow orders,” Chapel insisted. Laughing Boy didn’t even shrug. “Fine. We’ll go in just a second. I need to let my reporting officer know where I’m going—”

Laughing Boy shook his head.

So it was one of those kinds of briefings, then. The kind where you just disappeared off the face of the earth and nobody knew where you went. This was getting weirder by the minute.

Chapel sighed. “Fine. Let’s go.”

POUGHKEEPSIE, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+4:04

Two hundred and fifty miles away, Lieutenant Barry Charles slapped the helmet of the greenest private in his squad. “We ran through this in the simulator just last month, remember? The train extraction—that’s exactly how we’re going to do this. Get all the nice civilians out of the car first, then we take down the target. Don’t let any of the nice civilians get hurt. Don’t let the target get hurt, at least not too much. We’ve got orders to bring him in alive. You children understand what I’m saying?”

The four men Charles commanded all saluted. In their body armor and protective masks they looked like a mean bunch of sons of bitches, Charles had to admit that. They were the best men the 308th counterintelligence battalion had ever trained, and they were ripped and ready.

“Then let’s take this train. By the book, soldiers!”

The men shouted a wordless response and swarmed toward the train. Command had signaled ahead and forced the train to stop ten miles north of Poughkeepsie, out in the sticks where collateral damage would be light. The train’s conductor had confirmed the presence of the target and told them which car he was in. Charles had been given only the quickest of briefings on this mission—a picture of the target and a warning that the man he wanted was potentially armed and definitely dangerous, an escapee from a DoD detention facility upstate—but he had no doubt this was going to be a cakewalk.

“Unlock the doors now,” he called—he was patched in directly with the train’s own radio system and the conductor was ready to do as he said.

Looking up at the train now he saw the anxious faces of commuters and tourists staring down at him. He gave them a cheery wave to put them at ease and then turned to signal to his men. There were two doors on the train car, one at either end. He had four men—one to take the door, one to provide cover. Simplicity itself. He dropped his hand and the men hit the doors running, the pneumatic locks hissing open for them. The metal side of the train pinged in the morning sun. Through the windows Charles watched his men take up stations inside the train, covering one another just like they’d been trained.

There were a couple of screams and some angry shouts, but nothing Charles wasn’t expecting. Civilians started pouring out of the train car in a nearly orderly fashion. About as orderly as you could expect from citizens with no military discipline or training. Charles shouted for them to head as quickly as possible to the safety of a big box hardware store a hundred yards behind him, and they did as they were told.

“Lieutenant, sir, we have him,” one of his squad called. The voice in his ear sounded pumped up and excited. “He’s just sitting there, looks like he might be asleep.”

Talk about your lucky breaks. “Well, whatever you do,” Charles said, “don’t be rude and wake him up. Are the civilians clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” another of the squad called.

“I’m coming up. Just keep your eyes open.”

Charles got one foot up on the door platform and grabbed a safety rail. He let his carbine swing across the front of his chest as he hauled himself up into the airlocklike compartment between train cars. The door that lead into the car proper was activated by a slap plate. He reached down to activate it.

Hell broke out before the door even had a chance to slide open.

“Sir, he’s moving—” someone shouted.

“—does not appear to be armed, repeat, I see no weapons—”

“What the hell? What the hell did he just—”

The door in front of Charles slid open and he looked into a scene of utter chaos. A man with a scraggly beard had picked up one of Charles’s men, and as Charles watched, the target threw the soldier into one of his squad mates, sending them both sprawling over the rows of seats. A third squad member came at the target with his carbine up and ready to fire.

The target reached forward, grabbed the soldier’s arm, and twisted it around like he was trying to break a green branch off a tree.

Charles heard a series of pops like muffled gunfire, but he knew what they actually were—the sounds of the soldier’s bones snapping, one by one. A second later the soldier started screaming. He dropped to the floor, down for the count.

Charles started to rush forward, to come to the defense of his men, but he nearly tripped over what he thought was luggage that had fallen into the aisle.

It wasn’t luggage. It was his fourth squad member. Looking down, Charles saw the man was still alive but broken like a porcelain doll. His mask was gone, and his face was obscured by blood.

Lieutenant Charles looked up at the man who had neutralized his entire squad and for a moment—a split second—he stopped and stared, because he couldn’t do anything else. The man’s eyes. There was something wrong with the man’s eyes. They were solid black, from side to side. Charles thought for a moment he was looking into empty eye sockets. But no—no—he could see them shining—

He didn’t waste any more time. He brought his carbine up and started firing in tight, controlled three-shot bursts. Just like he’d been trained. Charles had spent enough time on the firing range—and in real life, live fire operations—to know how to shoot, and how to hit what he aimed at.

Human targets, though, couldn’t move as fast as the thing in front of him. It got one foot up on the armrest of a train seat, then the other was on the headrest. Charles tried to track the thing but he couldn’t—it moved too fast as it crammed itself into the overhead luggage rack and wriggled toward him like a worm.

Suddenly it was above him, at head height, and its hands were reaching down for him. Charles tried to bring his weapon up, putting every ounce of speed he had into reacquiring his target.

The thing was faster. Its hands tore away Charles’s mask, and then its thumbs went for his eyes.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+4:41

Laughing Boy had a car waiting right outside the fitness center, a black Crown Victoria with Virginia plates. Chapel got in without a word, and the two of them headed straight for the Pentagon.

Chapel didn’t ask for the man’s name. CIA told you what you needed to know and they didn’t like it if you asked them questions. He resolved to keep calling the guy Laughing Boy, if only in his head.

They had a long drive together during which neither of them said more than ten words. Mostly they were about whether there would be much traffic on I-95. Fort Belvoir was just south of Mount Vernon, only a few miles from the Pentagon—it wasn’t a long ride—but you always hit a snarl of traffic when you approached the Beltway that surrounded the District of Columbia. Half the country seemed to be trying to get into D.C. to do some business or just see the sights. The Pentagon was still in Virginia, technically, but that didn’t make things any easier. As the car slowed down to a crawl outside of Arlington, Chapel got impatient and started drumming on his side of the dashboard with his artificial fingers.

Laughing Boy seemed to find that very funny.

There wasn’t a lot, it seemed, that didn’t amuse Laughing Boy. He never stopped laughing the whole time they were in the car together, though as he focused on his driving it dropped to a kind of dry giggling that grated on Chapel’s nerves. When they got to the Pentagon’s parking entrance, he pulled the car into a reserved spot but before he got out he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a bottle of pills.

“Gotta show due respect, right?” Laughing Boy asked, with a hearty guffaw. He popped three pills in his mouth and dry swallowed them. The effect was almost immediate. He grimaced and rubbed at his chest and sweat broke out on his head, slicking his crew cut. Eventually he recovered and looked over at Chapel with a grim smile. “Can’t take those when I’m driving.”

Chapel got a quick look at the pill bottle before Laughing Boy put it away. The pills were something called clozapine—Chapel had no idea what they were for, but he did notice that Laughing Boy stopped laughing after taking them.

Thank heaven for small favors, he thought.

The two of them headed inside through the security checkpoint, where Chapel had the usual hassles that came with having part of your body replaced by metal. The soldiers who did his pat-down and search were at least respectful—he doubted he was the only amputee they’d seen that day. Chapel and the CIA man were given laminates, and a helpful guard gave them directions on how to get to the office Laughing Boy named.

Chapel was not surprised when, five minutes later, Laughing Boy ignored the directions altogether and took him deep into C Ring and to an office on the wrong side of the building. They passed quickly through, ignored by all the clerks in their cubicles, and back to an elevator in an otherwise empty hallway. When the elevator doors opened, Chapel saw two soldiers inside carrying M4 carbines. The soldiers demanded to see their laminates and then let them in. One of the soldiers punched a button marked H and they started to descend.

Chapel was a little surprised by that. The Pentagon was built in five concentric rings of office space, rings A through E. There were two sublevels underground called F and G that he knew of. He’d never heard of an H level at all.

When the elevator doors opened again, he looked out into a long hallway with unadorned concrete walls. The floor and ceiling were painted a glossy battleship gray. Unmarked green doors stood every dozen yards or so down the corridor, which seemed to stretch on forever. There were no office numbers, nor any signs distinguishing one door from another. “How do you even know which office you want?” Chapel asked Laughing Boy as they headed down the echoing hall.

“If you’re down here and you don’t know which one is which, you’re already in trouble,” Laughing Boy told him.

“This isn’t where DIA DX has its offices,” Chapel pointed out. “I’ve seen those before. This isn’t—”

He stopped because Laughing Boy was staring at him. Waiting for him to ask a question. Chapel was certain there would be no answers.

“Never mind,” Chapel said.

“Good dog.”

The CIA man took the lead, setting off at a good clip, and Chapel followed. He did a double take when, for the first time, he saw the back of Laughing Boy’s head. There was a bad scar there—more of a dent—where the flesh had turned white and no hair grew.

“Come on,” Laughing Boy said. “We’re already late.” He stood next to a door exactly like all the others, his hand on the knob.

Chapel hurried to catch up with him. Laughing Boy turned the knob and revealed the room beyond—which was nothing like what Chapel had expected.

THE PENTAGON: APRIL 12, T+4:59

Classical music filled the air, soft and almost lost under the sound of falling water coming from a splashing fountain in the center of the space. The room beyond the unmarked door was lined with wooden shelves full of leather-bound books, and the floor was covered by a rich blue carpet. There were, of course, no windows—they had to be a couple hundred feet underground—but the fountain kept the room from feeling claustrophobic.

Armchairs upholstered in red leather were gathered around the room in small conversation areas, while to one side stood a fully stocked wet bar with comfortable-looking stools. On the other side of the room stood a massive globe in a brass stand and a giant map cabinet with dozens of drawers.

It didn’t look like an underground bunker. It didn’t look like an office, either. It looked like a private club, the kind of place where old diplomats would sit and discuss foreign affairs over snifters of brandy.

“Fallout shelter,” someone said from behind Chapel’s shoulder.

He turned and saw a man of about sixty dressed in a three-piece suit and a bow tie. The suit was tweed—elegant but not exactly stylish—and the man in it looked like a throwback to the nineteenth century, with long sideburns and a pair of tiny wire-rimmed glasses. He smiled warmly as Chapel stared at him.

“You’re wondering where you are, of course,” the man said. He held out a hand and Chapel shook it. “This whole level was supposed to be a private fallout shelter for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I doubt it will surprise you to know they demanded it have a pleasant little tavern. The other rooms on this level aren’t like this, sadly. Mostly they’re full of metal cots and preserved food from the 1960s. This room is my favorite.”

“It’s . . . nice,” Chapel offered. Maybe a little stuffy for his taste, but it definitely beat his cubicle back at Fort Belvoir.

“Rupert Hollingshead,” the man said, and let go of Chapel’s hand. “I’m the one who sent you all those pesky text messages. I am also, despite appearances, a member of the DIA directorate, though not of DX, I’m afraid.”

“Captain James Chapel, sir, reporting,” Chapel said, and gave Hollingshead a salute. If Hollingshead was DIA, then he had to be military, either a full bird colonel or a brigadier general. The fact that he was out of uniform didn’t matter one whit.

Hollingshead returned the salute. “Oh, do be at ease, Captain. As I was saying . . . fallout shelter, yes. Never used for that purpose, of course, and abandoned for years. When I needed a quiet little place to set up shop, I figured it would do. The walls are concrete six feet thick and it’s swept for listening devices every day. Can’t be too careful. I do apologize, Captain, but will you allow me to show you a seat? Time is rather . . . ah. Short.”

“Damn straight,” someone else said.

Chapel hadn’t noticed the bar’s only other occupant until he stood up from his chair. This one was much more what Chapel thought of when he imagined a high-ranking intelligence official. He wore the customary black suit, power tie, and flag pin. He had heavy jowls that made him look a little like Richard Nixon, and he stood a little hunched forward as if his posture had been wrecked by years of whispering into important ears.

The two of them, Hollingshead and this man, couldn’t have been less alike. But Chapel could tell right away they had the same job. Spymasters—the kind of men who were always behind the scenes pulling strings and counting coup. The kind of men who could start wars with carefully worded position papers. The kind of men who briefed the president daily, but who never let their faces show up on the evening news.

Chapel had been in intelligence long enough to know that you never, ever questioned or messed with men like that. You saluted and you said sir, yes, sir and you did what they said and you never asked why.

You couldn’t keep yourself from wondering, though.

“That’s Thomas Banks,” Hollingshead said. “CIA, though—shh! Don’t tell anyone I told you that.”

He gave that warm smile again and Chapel couldn’t help but return it. He found himself liking Hollingshead already.

Banks, on the other hand, was going to be a hard man to love—that was evident from his whole manner. “We need to get this started,” he growled. “We’ve already lost five hours. Five hours we’ll never get back.”

“Of course,” Hollingshead said. “As for your friend here, will he be staying?”

Chapel and both officials turned to look at Laughing Boy, who had taken up a position just to one side of the door. Laughing Boy didn’t so much as squirm under the scrutiny.

“He’s been cleared. Your man is, too, I assume,” Banks said. “What are his qualifications? Doesn’t look like much.”

“Captain Chapel’s a war hero, actually,” Hollingshead said. He went over to the bar and poured himself a glass of water. He raised one eyebrow at Chapel, but Chapel shook his head to say he didn’t need anything. “If you were to ask him about his past, I’m sure he would be unable to tell you a thing, and quite right. His entire service record and most of what he’s done since he came home is oh, quite classified. So I’ll have to sing his praises myself. He was one of the first to put, ah, boots on the ground as they say, in Afghanistan, as part of Operation Anticyclone.”

“What, that mess with the Taliban?” Banks asked.

Chapel had kept quiet about Afghanistan so long even hearing other people talk about it made him feel weird. He kept his peace, though—a captain didn’t speak to men at this level until he was spoken to.

“Hmm, yes. He was dropped into Khost Province with a number of Army Rangers. The idea was they would make contact with some highly placed mujahideen and arrange with them to support our incursion there. This was right after September eleventh, of course, when we still thought we had friends in the Khyber Pass. Chapel and his men grew beards to honor the local customs, and, more important, they carried briefcases filled with cash. The men he was supposed to meet with were, after all, the same men the United States had once armed and paid to fight the Soviets. That all happened on your side of the aisle, Banks, I’m sure you remember—”

“That was before my time,” Banks grunted.

“Of course. Of course,” Hollingshead said, waving away the protest. “The point is, Captain Chapel did his job and made contact. Sadly, the men he was meeting with had already chosen their path and decided the future lay with al-Qaeda. When the negotiations, ah, collapsed, the captain found himself on the wrong end of a rocket-propelled grenade. This unfortunately killed all the Rangers with him and left Captain Chapel badly wounded. His captors refused to give him medical attention until he told them every single thing he knew about U.S. troop movements in Afghanistan. He refused. By the time our boys rescued him, his arm had gone septic and had to be removed.”

“He’s a cripple?” Banks demanded.

“Look for yourself, Banks. He’s fine.”

“This is the best man you could find me? I guess on short notice—”

“Captain Chapel has my complete confidence,” Hollingshead shot back. His eyes flashed with anger. “He is exactly the man we need.”

“What’s he been doing since we scraped him up and brought him home?”

“Oversight on weapons system acquisitions. It should come as no surprise to anyone here gathered that the private firms we employ see defense contracts as an opportunity to rob America blind. Captain Chapel here is in charge of keeping an eye on them and bringing them to justice when they actually break the law.”

“So he’s a professional snitch,” Banks said.

Hollingshead sighed a little. “I prefer the term whistle-blower. The point is, simply, that you are looking at a man with Special Forces training, field experience, and a finely tuned mind for police work. Who, not least of all, knows how to keep a secret. Am I beginning to approach your idea of a satisfactory candidate?”

“Maybe,” Banks said. “Considering the desperate circumstances, and the sensitivity of the matter—”

“There’s certainly no time to find anyone else,” Hollingshead said, with those flashing eyes again. Chapel got the sense that for all his genial nature, Hollingshead loathed Banks with a passion. Banks just seemed like he hated everyone.

Hollingshead took a sip of his water. “Captain Chapel,” he said, “I’m afraid there’s no room for ceremony here. We need you to come work for us and I’m sorry, but you aren’t allowed to say no. As of this moment, you’ve been seconded to this office and I will be your new reporting officer.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Chapel said.

“And God help you, I’ve already got a job for you. God help us all.”

THE PENTAGON: APRIL 12, T+5:19

Hollingshead went behind the bar and pressed a button hidden among the whiskey bottles. On the far side of the room a shelf of books slid away to reveal a flatscreen monitor. It displayed the DIA seal, a stylized earth orbited by red ellipses and surmounted with a torch.

“This is going to be a quick briefing,” Hollingshead said. He sounded apologetic. “Since most of what we have is strictly need to know. I can’t stress enough how sensitive this mission is.”

Chapel wanted to ask why he was privy to it, then. He was hardly the man for a top secret mission, not anymore. But he kept his mouth shut.

“A little more than five hours ago—that would be ten past six in the morning—a person or persons unknown carried out an attack on a Department of Defense facility in upstate New York. At this time we suspect domestic terrorism.”

“It doesn’t matter why it happened,” Banks insisted. “Stick to the what.”

Hollingshead took another sip of water. “Very well. The purpose of the facility is classified, but I can tell you it housed seven individuals who were not allowed to leave.”

“Permission to ask for a clarification, sir?” Chapel said.

“Absolutely granted,” Hollingshead told him.

“These men were prisoners?” Chapel asked.

“Need to know,” Banks said. In other words, Chapel wasn’t cleared to even know that the prisoners were in fact prisoners.

“The DoD refers to them as detainees,” Hollingshead said.

Ah, Chapel thought. Prisoners, yes. But not criminals incarcerated in a prison. Individuals held, most likely without trial, for unspecified reasons. That suggested they were terrorists, or at least that they possessed information regarding terrorism, and had been held under extraordinary rendition.

Chapel bit his lip. He was already jumping to conclusions and the briefing had just started. The first thing he’d learned during his military intelligence training was to never assume anything.

“Six of the individuals escaped from the facility. The seventh is presumed dead. Why we presume this is—”

“Need to know,” Banks jumped in.

Hollingshead nodded. “The six who left the facility were tracked to the best of our ability, of course, and we are very good at that sort of thing. Two of them were picked up en route and . . . neutralized. The remaining four were followed by satellite reconnaissance as far as a train station in Rhinecliff, New York, where we picked them up on a closed-circuit camera.” He pressed another button and the television screen flickered to life, showing grainy black-and-white footage of a train platform.

Chapel leaned forward to get a better look.

Four men were on the platform. They paced back and forth, acting agitated. It was hard to tell them apart—they all had shaggy hair and beards and their clothes were little more than rags. A train pulled up to the platform and one of them got on. The other three didn’t even so much as wave good-bye.

“The four you see here each took a different train, headed to a different destination. About the same time I started texting you, I dispatched counterintelligence units to pick them up before they got off the trains. Sadly none of these units was successful.”

“The detainees never showed up at the destinations? They left the trains en route?” Chapel asked.

“Ah. No. The units were—well. They are units no more.”

“The detainees killed your people?” Chapel asked, amazed. The DIA didn’t mess around with terrorists (assuming, of course, these were terrorists, he reminded himself). If they sent squads of soldiers to pick up the detainees, they would have gone in heavily armed and ready for anything.

“The detainees are dangerous people,” Hollingshead said. “They’re stronger and faster than—”

“Need to know,” Banks said, nearly jumping out of his chair.

Damn it, Chapel thought. He had a bad feeling about where this was going. They were going to ask him to lead an investigation to track these men down, but they weren’t going to give him enough information to do it properly. Government bureaucracy at its very worst, and he was the one who would have to take the fall.

He said nothing, of course. These men were his superiors. He didn’t have to like Banks or approve of the man’s obsessive need for secrecy—but he did have to treat him with respect. That was part of what being a soldier meant.

“We have to find these men, and soon,” Hollingshead said. He switched off the flatscreen. “You see, they are carrying—”

“Need to know!” Banks said, nearly shouting.

Hollingshead stared at his opposite number. He didn’t turn red in the face or bare his teeth or ball his fists. It was clear to Chapel, though, who had been trained to read people, that Hollingshead was about to blow his top.

“I appreciate the sensitivity of this situation,” Hollingshead said. Chapel could tell he was picking his words carefully. “But you’re putting my man in danger by keeping him in the dark like this.”

“You know what’s at stake,” Banks said.

“And I’m telling you,” Hollingshead replied, “that if you don’t clear this particular piece of information right now, I’m pulling out of this operation.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Banks said, with a snort. “You know this needs to get done. You know what we stand to lose.”

“Indeed. Oh, yes, indeed I do. Which is why, after ejecting you and your agent from my office, I’ll take this right to the Joint Chiefs. And write it up for the president’s daily briefing, where I’ll suggest that we mobilize every soldier we can get our hands on until this is taken care of. Of course, the press will want to know why we’re doing that.”

Banks looked like he’d been hit in the face with a shovel.

“This is bigger than you or me or our little fiefdoms,” Hollingshead went on. “It should be handled out in the open, frankly. I’m of half a mind to do this even if you relent. But I’ll give you one chance to reconsider.”

Banks set his mouth in a hard line. He grasped the arms of his chair hard enough that the leather creaked. Chapel expected him to jump up and walk out of the room. But he didn’t.

“They’re carrying a virus,” Banks said, finally. “A human-engineered virus.”

THE PENTAGON: APRIL 12, T+5:31

Chapel had no idea what to do with that news.

It made him want to take a shower. It made him want to shower in bleach.

He couldn’t help but ask the first question that came to his mind, whether or not he was a good soldier. “A virus . . . are we talking Ebola or the common cold, here?”

“Neither, and that’s the one bit of luck we’ve had,” Hollingshead told him. “It’s bloodborne, not airborne. They can only infect others by direct contact, and then only if they break the skin.”

“That sounds manageable. What’s the chance of them bleeding on someone? It’s got to be pretty slim,” Chapel said. His relief made his heart skip a beat.

Then he saw the look on Hollingshead’s face—and the identical expression on Banks’s features.

“Why is nobody agreeing with me?” Chapel asked.

“I mentioned the detainees were violent,” Hollingshead said. “I was understating the case, honestly. They’re . . .” He glanced at Banks and then at Laughing Boy, who was still standing by the door. “Mentally deranged is the nicest term I can think of. I can assure you, the chances of them breaking someone’s skin—or, to be frank about it, biting them—is quite high. In fact it seems to be their chief joy in life.”

“All right—that’s enough,” Banks said. He went over to the bar and poured himself a highball. “That is the absolute limit of need to know. Tell him what he has to do, Rupert, so he can actually get to it.”

Hollingshead took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “Easy enough to say, of course. Much easier than it will be to do. But we need you, Captain Chapel, to go into the field and recover these men.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Chapel said, standing up. “You want me to lead an investigation to locate them, so we can send in appropriate squads to pick them up. I’ll need to rendezvous with local police and National Guard units in New York State to—”

“No.” Hollingshead held up his glasses so he could look through them, presumably so he could find any remaining smudges. Or maybe so he just didn’t have to look Chapel in the eye. “No. Nothing that simple. We’re asking you to go into the field and deal with these men personally.”

“You mean I’m to track them down . . . on my own,” Chapel said, because he was certain that was what Hollingshead had just said. Even if it made no sense whatsoever. “Four men who each took out—single-handedly—a rapid response team.”

“We’re saying that we need you to find them and remove them from play,” Hollingshead said.

“Remove them from play?”

“If you get a clear shot on them,” Banks confirmed, “you take it. Bringing them in alive is not required. They’re much more valuable to us dead than they are on the loose.”

“You want me to kill them,” Chapel said.

“It’s the damned sensitivity of the thing,” Hollingshead said.

For once Banks had more to say. “The public can never find out what’s happened. It can’t learn where they came from, and it can’t learn what they’re carrying. We can’t risk any more high-profile incidents. It’s been hard enough covering up what happened to the original teams.” The CIA director swallowed his liquor with a grimace. “It has to be just one man, to keep our involvement quiet. Secrecy is imperative here.”

Jim Chapel was no stranger to the need for secrecy. He’d spent his professional life keeping secrets and not asking questions. He knew how this sort of thing worked, and he knew what Banks wasn’t saying. That the blowback from a leak in this operation would be devastating. Which meant that these detainees weren’t just terrorists, and the human-engineered virus they were carrying wasn’t the product of some black laboratory in a rogue state.

It was something the government had made. The government of the United States. The detainees—the psychopathic, violent, homicidal detainees weren’t just dangerous criminals. They were guinea pigs. Specimens that the CIA or the DoD or maybe both had experimented on. And letting that fact out of this room was unthinkable to Banks.

He noticed one other thing, too, from what Banks had said.

When Banks talked about the public—meaning the American people, the citizens of the United States—he referred to them as an “it.”

He was beginning to see why Hollingshead hated this man.

THE PENTAGON: APRIL 12, T+5:35

“You’ll need to leave immediately,” Banks told him. “You’re going to have to work damned fast if you’re going to catch them. We’ll do everything in our power to help you—everything that doesn’t damage national security.”

“I know we’re asking a very great deal of you, son,” Hollingshead said. “I wish I could give you opportunity to volunteer for this mission. I wish I could let you turn it down. Tell me, Captain, what are your thoughts right now?”

“Permission to speak candidly, sir?”

Hollingshead came over and put a hand on his shoulder. “Permission to swear a blue streak if you like. Permission to call us every foul name you can think of. Just be honest and tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I think you called in the wrong man,” Chapel told them.

Banks and Hollingshead both stared at Chapel in shock.

From behind him, he heard Laughing Boy let out a little chuckle, which was cut off quite abruptly as if he were trying to suppress it.

Chapel could hardly believe he’d said it himself. For ten years he’d been slowly dying in a desk job he hated. Doing basic police work when he’d been trained to be out in the field, making a real difference. How many times had he dreamed of a moment like this, of being called back to active duty? Because it would have meant he was whole again. Not just three-quarters of a human being, but a vital man of action.

But part of what made him want that, part of why he could even hope for it, was his desire to do the right thing. The thing that made sense not just for him but for the country he served. And there must have been a serious miscalculation somewhere here.

He shook his head. “This isn’t a matter for Military Intelligence. You have four men out there, loose in America, who sound as much like serial killers as anything else. That’s the jurisdiction of the FBI, the last time I checked. If they were detainees under extraordinary rendition—even then—at most you should be working with the U.S. Marshals Service. They’re the ones who track down escaped fugitives.”

“I don’t have time for this shit,” Banks said.

“Sir, with all due respect—I’m the one running out of time,” Chapel told him. “There’s one other thing I have to say, though. One thing I need to make clear. You have the wrong man because I am not a hit man. I don’t kill people for money.”

“You know how to use a gun, don’t you?” Banks demanded.

“The army taught me that, yes,” Chapel agreed. “But I know you’re a civilian, sir, and you may be operating under a common misconception about soldiers. We aren’t in the business of killing random people. The mission of the armed forces is to extend U.S. policy through force only when necessary, and to use other means whenever it is humanly possible.”

Hollingshead nodded slowly. He was a military man, Chapel was sure of it, so he already knew this.

“So when I find these men, I’m going to do everything in my power to bring them in alive. Or at least capture them in the safest way possible.”

“Then you’re a fool,” Banks told him.

Hollingshead clapped his hands together in obvious excitement. “Then you will do it? You’ll get them back for us?”

“Sir,” Chapel said, standing at attention, “I do not remember being asked for my acceptance of this mission, sir. I remember being asked for my opinion.”

“What the fuck ever,” Banks said, rising from his chair and frowning in anger. “I asked for a killer and you brought me a goddamned Eagle Scout.”

It was, in its way, the nicest thing Banks had said about Chapel yet. He knew he wasn’t going to get anything better.

THE PENTAGON: APRIL 12, T+5:42

“I know it seems like a hard task we’ve given you,” Hollingshead said, shrugging in apology.

“I’m just not sure how I’d even begin,” Chapel admitted.

“There, at least, we can help you.” Hollingshead drew a folded-up sheet of paper from his pocket. As he unfolded it and smoothed it out he said, “Now, you can’t ask us how we came by this, son, or what these people have in common. But we are—let’s say eighty percent—sure that our detainees will attempt to make contact with the people named on this list.”

He handed the paper to Chapel. There were eight names on it, each matched with a last known address. He didn’t bother reading the names yet, instead looking up at the two men facing him. “Permission to guess something, sir?”

Hollingshead chuckled. “That, I think, we can allow.”

“If I were an escapee from a . . . from a DoD facility, the first thing I’d want to do was to make contact with my family. Friends, professional contacts . . . anyone I could trust. I’m assuming that’s where these names come from.”

“Look, Banks. Look—he’s already on the case,” Hollingshead said, with a warm and generous smile. “I told you he was our man.”

“He’s already making mistakes is what he’s doing,” Banks countered.

Hollingshead’s smile faded. “I’m afraid that’s true, son.” He looked Chapel straight in the eye. “Those aren’t family members or friends,” he said. “The word for them is—ah, there’s no good word for it, let’s say—let’s call them—”

“Intended victims,” Banks said.

Chapel frowned. He glanced down at the list again.

“It’s a kill list,” Banks went on.

Chapel nearly dropped the piece of paper.

Hollingshead waved his hands in the air as if he wanted to calm everyone down. “That sounds so very dramatic! It’s not wholly inaccurate, though. The one thing we are certain of is that our detainees are going to go after these names and do everything they can to murder them. Keeping these people alive—”

“—is secondary,” Banks butted in. “Taking out the targets is the only thing you need to worry about. But with this list at least you know where they’re headed.”

Chapel scanned the list quickly, not bothering to memorize the names. He was more interested in the addresses for the moment. In his head he put together a map of the locations. New York City, Atlanta, Vancouver in Canada—that was going to be a jurisdictional nightmare—Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Alaska. That was an awful lot of ground to cover. But it was better than just going door-to-door throughout the entire continental United States, asking if anyone had seen a shaggy-haired man with a murderous disposition.

When he had the map in his head, he glanced over the names. A couple of them were doctors, by the look of it—or Ph.D.s, at least. He only recognized one of the names. “Hayes. Franklin Hayes—he’s a federal judge. He’s been in the news recently.”

“The president chose him to be the next justice on the Supreme Court,” Hollingshead said. “He’s just waiting for the Senate to confirm his appointment.”

Chapel wondered if that made his job harder or easier. Harder because if someone was gunning for a high-ranking judge it would be tough to keep it out of the papers. Easier because a man like that would already have some security.

“He’ll be the first one you make contact with, of course,” Banks said. “He’s the highest-value target.”

Chapel shook his head. “With all due respect, sir, he won’t.” He tapped the list with his artificial index finger. “Judge Hayes is on—what? The Tenth Circuit Court? The address for him here is in Denver. If the detainees are limited to traveling by train or by bus—” He glanced up for confirmation.

“So far that’s what we’ve seen, yes,” Hollingshead confirmed. “They don’t have driver’s licenses or passports. They won’t be able to board an airplane. And they don’t know how to drive a car. That’s a small bit of luck, eh?”

“—then it will still take two days for one of them to arrive in Colorado.”

“That sounds right,” Hollingshead confirmed.

Chapel nodded. “Meanwhile we’ve got two names here in New York City. An hour and a half from the Catskills by train. A detainee could already be there. Two people are already at risk. It has to be my first stop.”

“Whatever!” Banks said, throwing his hands in the air. “Just do it. Hollingshead, I want constant reporting on this. Total accountability from your office.”

“Of course,” Hollingshead said. He was staring Chapel right in the eye while he spoke. “I’ll make sure to keep you in the loop.”

“As for you,” Banks said, jabbing a finger in Chapel’s direction, “you do what you’re told, you keep your mouth shut, and you end this problem as fast you goddamned well can. You need something from CIA, we’ll provide it, as long as you keep our name out of things. You have a sidearm? You’re going to need one. And I want you in civvies while you’re working on this. I don’t want the public to see an army asshole running around in full dress uniform, shooting at our targets.”

“I would need to go home and change.”

“There’s a rack of civilian clothing in the room back there,” Hollingshead said, gesturing at a door at the back of the bar. “You can take your pick. As for a sidearm, I’ve already thought of that.” He reached behind the bar and produced a black pistol with the squared-off lines of a SIG Sauer P228—a weapon Chapel had handled more than once, since it was common issue among the armed forces. The army, which had to have its own name for everything, called it the M11.

“Nice weapon,” Chapel said. At least here he could impress his superiors with his knowledge. “9x19 mm ammunition—the favorite cartridge of police and military units everywhere. Good stopping power, but without the kick of heavier ammo so you don’t have to refocus after each shot. A short slide and barrel so it’s easily concealed. Normally it takes a thirteen-round magazine but you’ve put the fifteen-round magazine from a P226 in there—you can tell by the way the magazine sticks a little way out of the grip. Not the fanciest gun in the world but one of the most dependable.”

Hollingshead glanced at Banks, looking impressed. Banks just shrugged.

Hollingshead set the pistol down on the bar and came over to shake Chapel’s hand. When Chapel held out his right hand, Hollingshead grasped it—then grabbed Chapel’s artificial left hand as well. He didn’t flinch at all when he touched the silicone. “All right, son. Go get changed while I finish up here with our civilian friend.”

“Sir,” Chapel said. He headed through the indicated door and found a little room beyond, a cloakroom by the look of it. Two Z-racks of men’s suits stood there, each suit wrapped in plastic like they’d just come back from the dry cleaner’s. Along one wall was a dresser full of crisp white shirts still wrapped in cellophane.

He took off his cap and started to unbutton his jacket when he heard voices from the bar room beyond. He closed the door to the cloakroom but not all the way. He wanted to hear what they had to say.

“—goddamned cripple, at least tell me that robot arm of his isn’t his shooting arm,” Banks grumbled.

“I assure you, I didn’t just pick Chapel’s name out of a hat,” Hollingshead replied. “He’s the man we want—the man we need for this. Given some of your preconditions and your damnable sensitivity issues.”

“You’d better be right. For all of our sakes.” Banks grumbled something else Chapel couldn’t make out. Then he raised his voice and spoke more clearly. “You’ve got just as much to lose here as I do, Rupert.”

“A point I am firmly aware of. Now why don’t you and your crop-headed monster get out of my office, so I can get back to controlling this situation?”

Chapel had to grin at that. Crop-headed monster. He could think of worse names for Laughing Boy—plenty of them—but that one fit just fine.

When he’d finished dressing, he stepped back out of the cloakroom to find Banks and Laughing Boy gone. They hadn’t even bothered to wish him good luck. Not that he minded much.

“Look at you!” Hollingshead said. “I wouldn’t recognize you. Which I suppose is the point.”

Chapel ran a hand down the front of his new suit. “I haven’t worn one of these in a while. I’ve got my dress uniforms for formal occasions, and when I’m off duty, I’m more of a polo shirt and jeans man.”

“How’s the fit? In the, ah, shoulders?”

Chapel had ended up taking the slacks from one suit and the jacket from a bigger one. He needed extra room in the shoulders for two reasons. One was to give the clamps that held his arm on more room. The other was to give him space to conceal his sidearm.

They taught you all kinds of fun stuff in spy school, including how to dress yourself. “It’s good.”

He pulled down on the cuffs of the suit jacket and stared at the dark fabric. It was the wrong color. It wasn’t green or blue. It wasn’t a uniform. “Sir,” he said, in a small voice—because if the army had taught him one thing above all others, it was how to show respect to a superior officer. “Sir. Please. I hate to even say this out loud. But . . . I am a cripple. I am too old for this job, and too long out of active duty. If this mission is as important as you say—”

“Son, I’m going to mark this little moment of doubt down to pressure. The stress of a new and daunting assignment.” Hollingshead stood up straight and Chapel couldn’t resist coming to attention. “We’re going to pretend you never said that. And if you ever call yourself that horrible name again—cripple—I’m going to start believing it, and I can’t afford that. You are the right man for this job. The only man for this job. Now. I’d ask if you’re ready, if you need more time,” Hollingshead said, “but we don’t have that luxury. I’ll take you to the helipad now, and you can get started.”

THE PENTAGON: APRIL 12, T+6:21

As Hollingshead led Chapel up through various layers and corridors of the Pentagon, every soldier they passed stood to attention and saluted. Clearly they knew the man—and respected him. Chapel found himself grinning, despite the screwed-up situation he’d landed in. This was a whole other world from the cubicle farm at Fort Belvoir. This was the game—the Great Game, they used to call it.

As they made their way through the lobby toward the helipad deck, a squad of soldiers at the security checkpoint stopped in the middle of searching visitors and lined up by the door like they were competing for who got to hold it open. They watched Hollingshead like he was about to perform some kind of magic trick. Hollingshead might look like a stuffy old professor from Yale or Harvard, but these men knew better.

“I have a question, sir,” Chapel said.

“You’re free to ask, of course.” Hollingshead’s mouth curled in a funny kind of smile. “I’ll tell you anything I can.”

“I just wanted to know—how should I be addressing you? If I’m working for you now, I’d like to know whether I should call you Colonel . . . or General.”

“Are those my only options? They used to call me Commodore. Then it was Rear Admiral.”

“Sir,” Chapel said, his spine stiffening. “Beg your pardon. I didn’t realize you were in the navy.”

“Try not to hold it against me,” Hollingshead said. He waved the guards away and pushed the doors open himself, letting a gust of fresh air come blasting into the security lobby.

A helicopter—a Bell 407, painted in civilian colors and with no DoD markings at all—was waiting on the Pentagon’s helipad. Its rotor was already spun up by the time Chapel and Hollingshead arrived.

The noise of the chopper was enough to make it difficult for Chapel to hear what Hollingshead was saying. He’d been rambling on about what kind of support Chapel would have in his mission—an unlimited budget, the ability to requisition police and National Guard units as required—but Chapel hadn’t been listening with more than half an ear. He was too busy trying to remember what he knew about New York City, a place he’d only been a handful of times in his life.

“Captain,” Hollingshead said, nearly shouting over the roar of the helicopter’s engine.

“Hmm?”

“Captain! I’m about to commit an act of treason! I’d appreciate it if I could have some of your attention.”

That made Chapel focus, and quickly. “Admiral,” he said.

“You have a number of questions, I’m sure, which haven’t been answered yet. I can’t tell you everything, but I can give you a little more than you’ve heard so far.”

Chapel could barely hear Hollingshead’s voice over the roar of the rotor blades, but he leaned close to catch every word. He understood how serious this was.

“What happened this morning, at the camp, was a disaster. It was supposed to be impossible. It was also, in a way, the luckiest break we’re likely to get.”

“Admiral?”

“The CIA—Banks, specifically—was supposed to be in charge of any escapes from that camp. He had someone in our ranks there—a mole—who was supposed to call him if such a thing happened. For reasons no one knows, the mole failed to make that telephone call. Because it is a top secret DoD facility, it was put on my desk instead. My office was given oversight on this. I mobilized the capture teams immediately. You’ve guessed by now what happened to them. I was quite prepared to send more men, as many as it took—this is that big a threat. But by that time, Banks had finally heard what was going on. He went straight to the president and demanded he be given this operation.

“Because time was of the essence and I was already working on this, the commander in chief decided I should remain in charge. But Banks was given veto power over every move I made. He has not been shy about using that power. It was his decision to send a single man rather than multiple teams. He is far more concerned about maintaining secrecy in this matter than in actually capturing the fugitives.”

“But if they’re that dangerous—”

“He feels that allowing the public to know what’s going on would be an even greater threat to national security,” Hollingshead said. He shook his head sadly. “He’s a smart man, but I can’t say I approve of his priorities. He insisted that it had to be one man for this job. He wanted to send that goon of his, but I insisted I choose the man. Any number of twenty-five-year-old Navy SEALs came to mind, but no. I wanted someone who could be discreet, somebody with some experience—no cowboys. This isn’t a job for a hit man; this is far more surgical. I picked you.”

“I appreciate your faith in me, sir,” Chapel said. Even though he couldn’t claim to understand it.

“You’re going to curse my name before this over, I don’t doubt it. But I need you in this role. You are the last chance to keep this thing in Military Intelligence hands. If you fail, I fail as well. Banks will gain total control over this operation. He’ll send his goon in and I think you can guess what would happen then. The cretin will kill every shaggy-haired man in a five-hundred-mile radius. The collateral damage will be astonishing, and terrible. You and I both swore an oath to protect the American people. It’s you who’s going to have to uphold that oath, because there can be no one else, now.”

“I’ll—I won’t let you down,” Chapel promised.

“I know what we’ve handed you, Captain. I know how I would feel about being given a mission like this and then being told I couldn’t know any of the details. We’re playing a rotten joke on you, frankly, and I’m sorry. It was Banks who insisted we send you out into this with an incomplete briefing, as well.”

“I understand the need for secrecy, sir,” Chapel said.

“I daresay you do. What neither you nor I understand—at least not completely, not yet—is just how much is going on behind the scenes. Banks is playing a very deep strategy here. He’s keeping me from telling you everything I know. But he can’t keep you from finding things out on your own.”

“Sir?”

“Keep your eyes open, out there. Put the clues together. If you’re going to actually pull this off, that’s the only way. Figure out what we’re not telling you—and why we can’t tell you. Banks won’t like you peeling back the lid of his box of secrets, but he can’t stop you, not if you’re smart about it.”

Chapel nodded in understanding.

“Whatever you do,” Hollingshead said, “keep yourself alive. It’s imperative to me that you don’t get killed out there.”

“I—sir, that’s—”

“Because, Captain, I don’t have time to find a replacement. Now get going! I’ve got a little surprise for you en route. You’ll get to meet your new partner.”

He shook Chapel’s hand and headed back into the Pentagon.

Leaving Chapel all alone—with a job to do.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+6:29

In Brooklyn an old woman was just being roused from sleep. The bedside light came on with a click, and Dr. Helen Bryant’s eyes flickered open. She had been in the middle of her midday nap and felt somewhat annoyed at being awoken. Then she looked up and saw a face looming over hers and fear caught flame inside her chest.

“Please,” she said, clutching the sheets in her fists. “Don’t hurt me. I don’t keep any drugs here. They’re at my clinic.”

The face hovering over her was broad and cruel. Male, perhaps twenty-five years old. His hair and beard were hacked short, as if he’d cut them himself, and his eyes were hidden by large sunglasses. If she’d been a little more awake, she might have known what that meant.

“Relax,” he told her, his voice a low growl that held a purr of violence ticking over like an idling engine. She tried to sit up, but a thick hand pressed down between her breasts and pushed her back. She couldn’t fight that hand—it was like struggling against an industrial press. She could feel the bones of her rib cage flex as he pushed down harder. “I said relax. My name is Brody. You know what I am.”

“You’re not here for drugs,” she said, because she was beginning to understand who Brody was. What he was.

“I said you know what I am,” Brody said. “Don’t mess with me.” He leaned down over her, close enough she could smell the dirt on his skin. “I came a long way to find you. I had to know.”

He reached up and took off his sunglasses. She had known already what she would see underneath, but still she gasped. His eyes were black from side to side. There were no irises, no whites, just featureless shiny black. Looking into them she felt like she was looking into a darkened room—anything at all could be in there. There would be no predicting Brody’s behavior, she knew. He seemed calm enough now, but he could erupt in violence at the slightest provocation. He was strong enough that if that happened, one little old lady was not going to survive his wrath.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “How did you get out?”

“I’ll ask the fucking questions!” Brody shouted. He grabbed the metal bed frame underneath her and yanked hard, throwing the mattress, the box spring, and Dr. Bryant to the floor. She struggled with the sheets wrapped around her neck and arms and tried to scuttle away as he reached down with inhuman speed and grabbed her by the shoulder.

“No,” she screamed, as his fingers closed around her clavicle and crushed it into powder. Pain ran screaming up and down her body as her arm twitched wildly against the floorboards. “Please—please just—tell me what you want to know! I’ll tell you anything!”

Brody let her go. “That’s better.” He walked over to the door and shut it carefully. For a while he didn’t look at her. He stared down at his hands, at the floor. “That’s . . . better. Just everybody relax.” Was he talking to himself, as much as to her?

He sat down in the chair by her dressing table. He dropped into it hard enough to make it creak, as if he wasn’t used to fragile furniture. She supposed he wouldn’t be. “You left us there. You just left us.”

Dr. Bryant was in horrible pain, but she knew she had to do something. The telephone on the bedside table was useless. There was no way help could reach her in time. There was a pen, there, however, perched on top of the crossword puzzle she’d been working on before she fell asleep. She grasped it with her weak left hand and fumbled the cap off.

“You—you didn’t want us anymore,” Brody said, his anger back to a low simmer. Dr. Bryant knew that the comparative calm wouldn’t last. He rubbed at his hair and face with both hands. “I guess we didn’t work out, huh?” A nasty grin crossed his face. “I guess we just weren’t good enough.”

Dr. Bryant dropped the pen. She’d managed to scrawl a message on the wall next to the bed frame. Nothing complex, but enough that the right people would understand what it meant. Assuming the right people ever saw it.

“Brody,” she said, “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t—”

“You said you were our mother! You stood up on the platform, and you shouted it through a loudspeaker. You were our mother, and you were going to take care of us! Make sure we were okay!”

“We did what we could,” she pleaded. “It wasn’t safe to—to get any closer. We sent you food, and clothes. Toys—”

“You’re pretty stupid for a doctor, huh?” Brody asked. He dropped to his knees next to her and smashed her across the face with a hand like a lion’s paw. “Stupid! Stupid! I know how to read, you stupid bitch! You gave us books. You gave us books so we could read. Did you think we wouldn’t figure out what a mother was supposed to be?” He struck her again and again. “In the books, the mothers hugged their children. They loved them! You never loved us,” he said, and his voice was a roar.

“It wasn’t safe,” she begged, in between blows. “It wasn’t safe—we couldn’t—we couldn’t—please stop! Please!”

Brody stopped hitting her across the face. For a moment he glared at her, his nostrils flaring. “This isn’t going right.”

She could only stare up at him. Blood ran down her face in streams.

“This isn’t what I expected. I thought I was going to come and talk to you, just talk. That I could learn something here. But I just keep getting frustrated.” He shook his head from side to side.

“Brody,” she managed to squeak out, “Brody, I’m hurt. I’ll . . . I’ll tell you anything. I’ll . . . I’ll be your mother if you want, just—”

“You know what I am. You know we don’t do well with frustration,” he said. Then he grabbed her by her hurt arm and threw her across the room to smash against the vanity table on the far wall. She just had time to see her own screaming face in the mirror before she crashed into the glass with a shattering, tooth-rattling noise.

Brody hurt her more after that but thankfully she felt very little of it. She was dead long before he was finished.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+6:46

Partner?

Chapel thought maybe Hollingshead had meant the helicopter pilot. When he climbed on board, though, he saw that the pilot was an air force kid who couldn’t be more than twenty-five—and who had no idea who Chapel was, where he was going, or what his mission was.

Chapel pulled on a crash helmet and moved the integrated microphone around so the pilot could hear him. “New York City—as fast as we can get there.”

The pilot confirmed, and in a moment they were airborne. The chopper cut a wide arc around the Pentagon then slewed northeast, headed straight over Washington.

Chapel sat back in his seat and let his gaze wander over the landscape. He considered taking a nap. It was going to be a long flight and there wasn’t much he could do until they arrived. He was too keyed up, though. Too excited—and scared—and worried—to even think about closing his eyes.

Instead he could only let his mind race, thinking over everything he needed to accomplish, everything he could reasonably do to catch the detainees before they killed again. And about how it might already be too late for the first name on the kill list.

He was lost in his own thoughts when a voice spoke in his ear.

“Good morning, Captain,” a woman said.

It was the smokiest, most sultry voice Chapel had ever heard. It was like someone was stroking his ear with a velvet glove.

He glanced over at the pilot, then back at the empty seats behind him. Whoever this woman was, she wasn’t onboard.

“No,” she said, with a chiding laugh. “I’m not there with you.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Why don’t you go ahead and think of me as your guardian angel?” she suggested.

“What do you mean, guardian angel?” Chapel asked.

The pilot of the helicopter glanced over at him briefly, then shrugged and went back to flying the chopper. Apparently the pilot wasn’t hearing the voice in his ear.

That was probably for the best.

“Director Hollingshead asked me to keep an eye on you, cutie,” the voice said. “I work directly for him, normally, but for the next few days I’m all yours.”

“He mentioned something about a partner. What’s your name?”

“Well, my initials are NTK.”

He smiled despite himself. In other words, her very name was Need to Know. “So you’re the secretive type. I can handle that,” he told her. “Let’s just run down the list, shall we? What is your current location? What’s your rank? What’s your official job description?”

“All those things are classified, and you know it. You’re playing with me,” she said.

“Just establishing some ground rules. All right. Let’s try another one. Are you going to be waiting for me when I land in New York?” Chapel asked. “Surely you can answer that, since I’ll find out one way or another in an hour.”

“Captain, I’ll always be with you. But this is as physical as I get. The sweet little voice in your ear, making helpful comments and keeping you company. I’ve already been briefed on your operation, and I’m looking for ways right now to help.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

The voice sighed, just a little. “Let’s put it this way. While you’re in the field you’re not going to have a lot of time to check your voice mail or look things up on Wikipedia. I’ll do all that for you. If you need a map to your next target, I’ll send it straight to your phone. I guess, if you really wanted to get on my bad side, you could call me your secretary. I’ll keep you up to date, I’ll file your reports with the DIA, and I’ll make any phone calls you don’t have time to make. But I can be so much more to you. I can coordinate with law enforcement and the National Guard. I can make sure people know you’re coming and stay out of your way. I can get into any computer system and make it purr for you.”

“Any computer? You’re a hacker?”

“What an ugly little word that is. But yes. Any computer, any microchip that’s hooked up to the Internet. For instance, I can do this.”

She went silent for a moment and Chapel wondered what it was she thought she was doing—breaking into his bank account? Changing his e-mail password?

Then he saw his own hand come up in front of his face. His left hand. The hand rotated to face him and then the fingers wiggled. His hand was waving at him.

Sweat broke out on his forehead. He hadn’t told the arm to do that—he couldn’t even feel what it was doing. He grabbed the wrist of his artificial arm and forced it down into his lap. It tried to fight him, to break out of his grip, but he held on as hard as he could.

Apparently this guardian angel could take control of his arm. Any time she wanted. It had a wireless Internet connection built in, he knew that—the microcomputer built into its circuitry had to get firmware updates from time to time—but he had never considered for a moment before that that might be a security flaw.

If she could do it—anybody could.

Adrenaline surged through his body, and he fought down an urge to tear the arm off his shoulder and throw it out the helicopter’s window.

Slowly he fought to regain control of himself. He glanced over at the pilot. The kid was looking at him out of the corner of his eye. He was frowning. He must have seen the whole thing.

The embarrassment helped Chapel slow his heart rate and start breathing again.

“Angel,” he said, because she still hadn’t told him her name.

“Ooh, I like that,” she said. “From now on, that’s what you’ll call me.”

“Angel,” he said, almost growling, “don’t ever do that again. Seriously.”

“I know that was a little naughty of me—”

“Angel!” he interrupted. “I’m an amputee. I lost a part of myself once, do you understand? Can you understand why I would be a little sensitive about losing it again?”

She said nothing. Hopefully she was feeling terribly guilty and was too embarrassed to say anything.

“Let me show you what that was like,” he told her, because he was very close to getting furious. Nobody messed with his arm. “I’m not supposed to know anything about you. But I know you aren’t military. You’re a civilian.”

“That’s—that’s strictly NTK,” she gasped. “Who told you that?”

“You did.”

She didn’t sound so playful anymore. “Damn it, Captain. If I have a breach, I need to know about it right now. This is national security tech I’m working with here—if it’s been compromised—”

“Relax,” he told her. “Nobody’s hacked your system. I just used my amazing powers of deduction. You referred to our mutual boss as Director Hollingshead. That’s probably his official job title. But anyone who’d ever served in the armed forces would know better—they would call him Admiral Hollingshead.”

That long, uneasy silence again. Maybe she was thinking that if he could figure that out he was dangerous to her. Maybe she was about to tell his arm to strangle him.

When she came back on the line, though, her voice was as sweet and sexy as it had ever been. “I think I’m going to like you,” she said. “You’re going to keep me on my toes. Well, we have just tons of work to do, don’t we? Where do you want to get started?”

Chapel shook his head. This was not exactly what he’d expected when Hollingshead told him he was going to get a partner.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+7:32

“First things first. I’ll be in New York soon. The address I’m headed for is in southern Brooklyn. Is there a helipad nearby?”

“Very near by. The address you’re thinking of,” Angel said, “is in Brighton Beach, and there’s a heliport less than a mile away, just the other side of Marine Park.” Chapel’s BlackBerry turned itself on and vibrated in his pocket. He took it out and looked at the map shown on the screen. Angel highlighted both the address he wanted and the location of the heliport. “You caught a break there—it’s about to turn into rush hour in New York. If you had to touch down in Manhattan, you could have been looking at an hour ride on the subway.”

“Considering my mission I don’t think the subway would have been appropriate,” Chapel pointed out.

“Sweetie, in New York, during a workday? The subway is the only way to get around. But seeing how close you’ll be, I’ll have a car waiting for you when you arrive. See how useful I can be? I’ll get you a visual reference on the address as well, so you know when you get there and don’t have to go hunting for house numbers.”

“Good,” Chapel said. “How long until I land?” He glanced out the window and saw urban sprawl beneath him, but that meant nothing—most of the land between D.C. and New York was built up to one degree or another.

“Not for another half an hour yet.”

“Okay. You have my list of addresses.” He didn’t want to call it a kill list, not when the pilot might be listening. “Can you get phone numbers for each of those names? I want to call them all now and make sure they know they’re in trouble.”

“That’s just a piece of cake, sugar. But are you sure you want to do that?”

“Why not?” Chapel asked.

“Not to be a pill, but part of your job is making sure this doesn’t get any public attention. If you tell these people that crazed lunatics are coming for them, what’s to stop them from going to the media?”

Chapel frowned. “If I talk to them the right way, make sure they know that’s not in their best interests, I think we can minimize that. The last thing these people want to do is advertise their locations. I just want to make sure they get somewhere safe, like a police station or an army base. Somewhere we can protect them.”

“Director Banks isn’t going to like that,” Angel chided.

“We don’t work for him. I’ll handle any blowback. But I won’t have these people made into sitting ducks. I’ll do anything in my power to keep them alive.”

Angel clucked her tongue. The sound was annoyingly loud in Chapel’s headphones. “I should really run this past Director—Admiral—Hollingshead.”

“Do what you have to do, Angel, but get me those phone numbers. These are human beings. They’re American citizens. They have a right to protect themselves. That’s not something the intelligence community gets to take away when it’s convenient.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Jim—”

“Call me Chapel. Everybody does.”

“Okay. Chapel. I’ll get those numbers. And I’ll make the calls for you, that’s part of my job. I’m sorry I questioned you. I don’t ever get to meet the people whose lives I touch. Sometimes I forget that sort of thing.”

“It’s an occupational hazard. We’re in the business of protecting people, but to do that, sometimes we can’t tell them the whole truth. Sometimes we have to lie to them, frankly. If you do that long enough, you forget that it’s not a good thing. People like Banks forget that’s a regrettable necessity, not the whole of their job. I won’t make that mistake, not if I can help it.”

“Thanks, cutie. Okay, I’ll take care of that. Anything else?”

“I need as much information on those people as you can dig up. I need to know what they do for a living, where they hang out after work, what kind of family they have.”

“Want their shoe sizes? I can get those,” Angel joked.

“I somehow doubt that,” Chapel told her.

“Seriously? Do you know how many people buy their shoes online these days? People are lazy. They’ll do anything they can online because then they don’t have to get off the couch. Look at me—I’m saving the world and I can do it from my bathtub, if I feel like it.”

Chapel fought down the urge to ask if she was in the bath right at that moment. He had work to do. Focus, he thought. “Okay. Okay. The real thing I want to know is why they’re on that list. You have any idea about that, Angel?”

“I didn’t get any details you haven’t already heard,” she told him. “Looking at this list, I don’t see any immediate connections. Maybe something’ll come up as I get more facts on them. Let’s start with the first name on your list—the one in Brighton Beach. Name, Bryant, Dr. Helen. Lives on Neptune Avenue. Sounds like a fun place. Occupation: Genetic Counselor.”

“What’s a genetic counselor?” Chapel asked.

“Let me Google her . . . ooh, she’s got a website! I love it when they have websites. Nice-looking lady, if your taste runs to older women. Looks like she’s an ob-gyn. She sees pregnant women and helps them find out if their babies are healthy, and what they can do if it turns out the babies have genetic problems. Oh my God, that must be the saddest job in the world sometimes. Can you imagine?”

“I’ve never had kids. Never got the chance,” Chapel said.

“A man of your age should have a wife, Chapel. A wife and lots of happy little healthy babies. I’m finding all kinds of stuff about Dr. Bryant here. Looks like she’s pretty famous in certain circles—she’s won all kinds of awards, gotten commendations from numerous institutes, worked for the National Institutes of Health for a long time . . . did fieldwork in Africa during the early part of the AIDS crisis. Weird, looks like there’s a police bulletin about her too. Let me just take a peek . . .”

Chapel imagined Angel crouched forward looking at her computer screen, scanning through dozens of web pages at once. When she didn’t come back on the line after a few seconds, he began to wonder what she’d found. “Angel? Is everything okay?”

“No, sweetie. It’s not. At least, not for Dr. Bryant.”

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+8:02

“Goddamn it, no!” Chapel shouted, and he punched the instrument panel of the helicopter with his good fist. The pilot started to protest, but the look on Chapel’s face must have warned him off. “She can’t be dead. I can’t be too late.”

“The police are already on the scene,” Angel told him.

“Damn it,” Chapel said, but more muted this time. He’d known how tight the time frame was, known that people had already died at the hands of the detainees. But this was the first civilian—the others had been military personnel. That didn’t make their deaths much easier to bear. But they’d known what they were getting into, or at least known they were dealing with dangerous people. Nobody had even told Dr. Bryant she was in danger.

“Do you still want to go to Brooklyn?” Angel asked. “I can change your flight plan and take you to the next address instead.”

“No,” Chapel said. “No. I need to see the crime scene. There might be some evidence there that can help me track this bastard. And we know he was in the area recently—maybe I can catch him now before he moves on to the next target.”

“All right, Chapel. You’ll be on the ground in a few minutes.”

The chopper curved in over New York Harbor and then made a straight line across Brooklyn, an endless sea of two- and three-story buildings, rows of brownstones and warehouses and churches punctuated in only a few places by taller structures. The pilot shed altitude as they came in over a rectangular slice of greenery by the ocean. It looked like a salt marsh. On the far side Chapel saw the heliport, a commercial pad with a few civilian choppers sitting dormant. Chapel slapped the pilot’s shoulder in thanks, and the kid gave him a thumbs-up. Before the skids had even touched asphalt, Chapel jumped out of the side hatch. It felt good to have his feet on solid ground again, though he knew it would take a while before his head stopped thrumming with the sound of the rotor blades.

The chopper lifted off again as soon as he was clear. It would head for the nearest air base where it could refuel, in case he needed it again in a hurry. In a few seconds it was gone from view and Chapel could hear nothing but ocean waves and distant car traffic. The silence was a dramatic change.

“Did you get me that car?” Chapel asked, and when Angel didn’t answer, it took him a second to realize he’d left his headphones in the chopper. He reached for his BlackBerry, wondering how he would make contact with her—she hadn’t exactly given him her phone number.

Before he had a chance to call the DIA and ask to be connected to the sexiest-sounding woman working there, someone called his name and he looked up.

A courier in a FedEx uniform came jogging up and handed Chapel a package. He signed for it, and the courier left before Chapel could figure out who was sending him a parcel at a heliport he’d never heard of an hour ago.

He tore open the package and found a cell phone inside, still in its box. There was a plastic blister package in the parcel as well, holding a tiny in-ear attachment for the phone.

He managed to get all the packaging undone without too much trouble. The new phone was a touch-screen model that was all screen and no buttons. He’d always wanted one of those, frankly—the tiny keys on his BlackBerry were hard to use with his less sensitive artificial fingers. He put the earpiece in his ear and powered on the phone. It looked like its batteries had a decent charge.

“Let me guess,” he said, as the screen lit up. “Is that you, Angel?”

“Hi, sweetie,” she said. “I figured it was time for an upgrade.”

“You know, it’s DoD policy that we only use BlackBerrys,” he told her. “This brand is a no-no.”

“It’s got sixteen times the memory and twice the screen resolution. I’m a high-definition kind of girl. It works with the 4G network and Wi-Fi and the best hands-free transceiver on the market. Namely the one in your ear right now. Keep it there—and keep the phone in your pocket—and we never have to be apart. Sound good?”

“I’m receiving you loud and clear.”

“Good. And, sweetie, you don’t have to shout. Just talk normally and I’ll hear you. In fact, I’ll hear everything you do, so I can give you advice on the fly. Your car is waiting at the entrance to the heliport. We’ll get you to Dr. Bryant’s place right away. In the meantime, I’ll walk you through the process of migrating all your data from your old phone. I can do most of that for you from here.”

What was it Top had told him about living in George Jetson land?

“Okay,” Chapel said, as he jogged out of the chain-link gate of the heliport. A black car—a Crown Victoria, just like the one Laughing Boy drove—was waiting for him. He had an appointment with a dead woman.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:12

Neptune Avenue was lined with modest houses and convenience stores, pizza parlors and medical clinics. The air smelled of the ocean and pasta sauce and was filled with the noise of cars and thumping radios. Dr. Bryant’s house was a simple two-story structure with bars over its windows and a steel-core reinforced door.

“Looks like she was worried about security,” Chapel said. “Not that it helped.”

“That’s pretty standard for New York,” Angel told him. “Police records say she’s had a couple break-ins before, as well. People who saw her name on the door—saw she was a doctor—and broke in looking for drugs.”

“Does she keep an office here?” Chapel asked.

“No, this was just her home. Her office and her lab are a few blocks away. This is kind of a run-down area for somebody like her. I guess she wanted to live near her patients. By the looks of things, they were mostly Russian immigrants.”

“You have access to her medical records?”

“Nothing privileged, though I could probably get that without too much trouble if you need it,” Angel told him. “I don’t see anything that stands out, right now. I don’t see anything that would have made her any enemies.”

“One was enough,” Chapel said. He gritted his teeth and walked up to the door. A single strand of yellow police tape crossed the opening, and a uniformed police officer was standing just inside. She stared at his ID with a skeptical eye, but she let him through. Angel had already talked to the local cops and let them know he was coming.

The house was dark inside, and it took a while for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he saw the place was full of police photographers and detectives drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. He would have preferred to visit the scene alone, but that wasn’t an option.

He heard someone crying loudly in the back of the house—probably a kitchen back there; he could see the side of a refrigerator through an open door. The last thing he wanted at that moment was to be questioned by a grieving relative, so he headed up the stairs instead—that was where Angel told him Dr. Bryant had been discovered.

“I’m getting some preliminary reports now; they were just filed by the detectives on the scene,” Angel said in his ear. “Chapel, this isn’t going to be pretty. It sounds like she was beaten to death in her bedroom.”

“I’ve seen dead people before,” he told her.

A detective in a cheap suit, wearing a police laminate on a lanyard around his neck, looked up and stared at Chapel. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

Chapel flashed his ID again, but the detective shook his head.

“How about you just tell me, instead of making me read the fine print on that thing? I figure you have a right to be here or we would have turned you away at the door. But you’re no cop. I’m guessing . . . military?”

Chapel bit his lip, but said nothing.

The detective scratched at the stubble on his chin. He looked like a tough old bastard. He looked like a drill instructor Chapel had known in basic training, frankly. He looked like the kind of guy who was used to being lied to and didn’t like it at all.

“I can’t answer your questions,” Chapel said. “I can’t tell you anything. This murder is of interest to—”

“DHS,” Angel whispered in his ear.

“The Department of Homeland Security,” Chapel said. It was a lie, but it wasn’t a ridiculous one.

The detective’s eyes went wide. “Yeah, okay. I know that score.” He stepped aside and let Chapel past.

“That was too easy,” Chapel said under his breath.

“This is New York, sweetie. This is where 9/11 happened. They understand terrorism here—and nobody will bother a DHS agent.”

“Good thinking, Angel.” Chapel stepped through another doorway and walked into the crime scene proper.

He may have seen dead bodies before. He had seen the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan. This was different, though, and his breath caught in his throat.

Dr. Helen Bryant was lying on the floor, twisted into an unnatural shape. She’d been thrown into a mirror and pieces of broken glass were everywhere, a shoal of them covering part of her face. That was a small mercy. She was an elderly woman. A little old lady. No little old lady should ever have this happen to them. It was just so . . . wrong.

One of the detainees had done this. Chapel suddenly wanted very much to kill the son of a bitch. He wanted to make the guy suffer.

Chapel forced himself to squat down and take a closer look, much as he wanted to just turn away and shake his head. He made himself look at the wounds on Dr. Bryant’s body, the broken bones, the lacerations. There were no gunshot wounds, and no sign that she’d been cut with a knife.

The bastard had done this with his hands.

“Do you need us to move her?” someone asked from behind him. It wasn’t the detective who had questioned him. This was a paramedic, or maybe somebody from the coroner’s department. “We’re almost done taking fiber and hair samples. If you need something, just ask.”

Chapel looked up at the paramedic. She was black, in her midthirties, and she looked like she was in awe of the DHS agent who had graced her crime scene with his presence.

Damn, Chapel thought. Angel’s ruse had gotten him this far, but now it might cause problems. If the cops thought this case was somehow connected to terrorist activity, they might start asking questions. Well, he decided, that was for Angel or Hollingshead to take care of. He had tougher problems to solve.

He put his hands on his knees and started to straighten up. Turning his face away from the body, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. “What’s that?” he asked.

The paramedic came over to stand next to him, taking care not to step on any evidence as she did so. Together they looked at the bedside table. A book of crossword puzzles and a pen lay on the floor next to the bed, and just above them, on the wall, someone had scrawled a single word.

Chapel moved closer. The letters were shaky and hard to make out, as if they’d been written by someone with a broken arm, someone in a panic, somebody who knew she was about to die. He had no doubt that Dr. Bryant had written the word.

She must have been trying to leave some kind of clue, maybe even to identify her killer. She could have been more clear about it, Chapel thought, and then scolded himself for thinking uncharitable thoughts about the dead. Still, he had no idea what the message meant:

CHIMERA