Free The Hydra Protocol by David Wellington Page B

headquarters of INSCOM and the Defense Contracts Audit Agency—two groups he’d worked for before starting his present life as a covert operative. To maintain some kind of cover identity, he still kept an office at the fort. He visited it every few months for appearances’ sake. He kept a change of clothes, there, too, and it gave him a chance to shower and clean up before meeting with his boss.
    From Fort Belvoir it was a short drive and a long stretch of traffic before he could reach the Pentagon. Once there he walked through security, which was actually a nice change of pace because it went so smoothly. Chapel always had a problem with metal detectors since his left arm set off alarms in every airport in the world, but the Pentagon was accustomed to being visited by amputees and they had an officer on duty trained in clearing prostheses. Chapel was inside the building in minutes. He headed back to an unexceptional office deep inside C Ring and then called for an elevator that shouldn’t be there. The armed guard whose job was to ride that elevator all day smiled when he saw Chapel and hit the button for H Ring without being asked.
    The Pentagon wasn’t supposed to have an H Ring. Very few people knew that it did. The elevator dropped through two underground levels and opened on a long corridor of unmarked doors. People cleared for entrance to those doors would know which one they wanted—signs were unnecessary.
    Chapel opened the door to his boss’s office without being announced. Again, it was unnecessary—Rupert Hollingshead would have known Chapel was coming as soon as he walked in the Pentagon’s front door.
    As usual, the transition from the drably painted corridor to Hollingshead’s office was jarring. The door was just simple metal painted an institutional green. The office behind it, by way of contrast, was lined with immaculately polished hardwood and featured a full wet bar with brass accoutrements, overstuffed leather armchairs, and a working fountain that filled the air with a musical sound. The office looked like nothing so much as a gentlemen’s club straight out of nineteenth-century London.
    When it was constructed, the office had been a common room for a suite of fallout shelters meant to be used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a nuclear war. The intention had been to give the Chiefs some measure of comfort in a stressful time. Now it had been appropriated as office space for a man whose life was one constant bout of stress.
    Not that the man would ever let it show.
    “Bit, ah, early for a drink,” Rupert Hollingshead said, coming out from behind the bar. “But if you’d like some coffee, son, it can be arranged.”
    Chapel smiled. “Admiral,” he said. “It’s good to be back.”
    Hollingshead’s eyes twinkled merrily behind round spectacles. The man looked like he belonged in this room. He wore a tweed jacket and a bow tie—the sort almost no one wore anymore, the kind that actually had to be tied instead of clipped on. He looked like an absentminded Ivy League academic more than anything. He even had long sideburns that were far from regulation.
    The look—right down to the facial hair—was designed to put people at ease and make them think this man was a harmless old eccentric who wouldn’t hurt a fly. It completely belied the fact that Hollingshead had been a rear admiral in the navy during the first Gulf War, or that since then he had become one of the most powerful spymasters in the American intelligence apparatus. He was the director of a directorate that did not officially exist, a man who could whisper in the ear of a president in the morning and start a war by dinnertime.
    Hollingshead came over and grasped Chapel’s hands. He always took the left hand as well, as if to acknowledge the artificial arm without being too obvious about it. “So very sorry, son, to hear about the, ah, bends and all that. Won’t you take a seat?”
    “Yes, sir, though I don’t intend to