Free The Cyclops Initiative by David Wellington Page A

identity.
    Right?
    That was supposed to be impossible—­she’d said so herself, but—­
    As the train shot through the tunnels under Manhattan, Chapel forced himself to think like an intelligence operative. To actually look at this thing with logic and deductive reasoning. What if Angel was guilty? Just as a hypothetical?
    It would explain, perhaps, why she’d gone dark. Why, in the middle of a conversation, she’d cut her own phone connection. Maybe she’d gotten some word that she was about to be arrested and so she’d disappeared. Maybe Chapel would arrive at the coordinates Hollingshead gave him and find that she’d run off with a briefcase full of foreign money. The fact that she’d been unreachable ever since didn’t look good.
    Then again—­the timing was off. Chapel had spoken to her a half hour after the Predator attack in New Orleans. She hadn’t sounded like somebody in a hurry or like someone who had just committed treason. She’d sounded like her old self. Unless they had some serious dramatic training, it was next to impossible for somebody in that situation to sound cool and collected. It was why they trained airport security guards to look for ­people who seemed agitated and sweaty. No matter how committed you were as a terrorist, you couldn’t hide your own body’s reaction to what was going on.
    Angel had sounded breezy and unconcerned. And then she had just disappeared.
    The other big clue to her innocence was that Hollingshead clearly believed in her. He’d risked a great deal sending Chapel after her, moments after he’d given Wilkes the order to bring her in. If Chapel’s new orders ever got out, Hollingshead would earn himself a cell right next to Angel’s in Guantánamo Bay.
    So there were two things pointing to her innocence. Not that either of them would hold up in court.
    Rationally—­purely hypothetically—­Chapel considered the possibility that Angel had carried out the attack . . . under Hollingshead’s orders. That the two of them were in collusion, paid by a foreign power to destroy the economy of the United States. Both of them traitors. And now, if Chapel helped Angel escape, he would be signing on with their cause, a patsy in their grand plan.
    Complete bullshit, of course. Chapel had known Angel and Hollingshead for years. He trusted them a lot more than he trusted anyone else in the government. He would believe that half the U.S. Senate were foreign spies before he would accept that Hollingshead had betrayed his country.
    He heard a chime over his head and looked up, half expecting to see a time bomb wired to the roof of the subway car. It was that kind of day. Instead it was just a prerecorded announcement. “The next stop on this train will be Queens Plaza,” the voice said.
    Chapel nodded to himself. A ways to go yet—­the coordinates were for a place way out on the edge of Queens, not far from JFK airport. He still had time to think.
    But he was already sure of one thing. He was going to find Angel. Angel, the most important woman in his life, the woman he’d never actually met before. He was going to meet her face-­to-­face for the very first time.
    And he was going to save her. No matter what that meant.
    QUEENS, NY: MARCH 21, 16:22
    Apparently it meant breaking the law.
    Chapel’s smartphone showed that Angel’s coordinates were located inside a railroad yard, a big triangle of Queens real estate surrounded by fences covered in barbed wire. Through the chain-­link fence Chapel could see boxcars quietly rusting on sidings, endless stretches of railroad track curling through a wasteland of gravel where weeds sprung up uncut between wooden ties that had cracked and broken from years in the sun. A desolate, quiet place, normally, the stillness punctuated only by the occasional distant whistle or the sudden metallic thud of switches moving in