The Cyclops Initiative by David Wellington Read Free Book Online Page A

him to hear it. “But while I’ve been playing secretary, I thought of something. What if it was internal?” he asked.
    Chapel forced himself not to take his eyes off the road.
    â€œWhat are you suggesting?” Hollingshead asked.
    â€œSomebody needs to ’jack a Predator, well, they need to write all kinds of code, pull all kinds of crazy computer tricks.” Wilkes chuckled. “Unless they already had the key, right? The CIA is operations for a big chunk of the drone fleet. And back there, at the briefing, they said it. The CIA had logged out this particular Predator. Why make things complicated? What if the CIA staged this attack?”
    â€œBut why?” Chapel asked.
    â€œWho knows?” Wilkes said. It sounded less like an admission of ignorance than that he just didn’t care. “I can think of a reason they’d want to take down Angel, though. You three—­you, sir; Jimmy here; and Angel—­you took down Tom Banks a ­couple of years ago. Gave the CIA a real bloody nose.”
    â€œI suppose we did do that,” Hollingshead replied. “And revenge is a perfectly sound motive in this sort of thing. But there’s one problem. We took down Tom Banks and his directorate of the CIA quite successfully. He’s not there anymore, nor are any of his ­people. He was replaced by Harry West. An old friend of mine—­in fact, he got the job because I personally recommended him.”
    â€œSo we can cross the CIA off the list,” Chapel said. “At least that’s something. I really don’t want to think this was an inside job—­that somebody in the intelligence community dropped a dirty bomb on U.S. soil.”
    â€œI imagine none of us do. Though part of our job is to take on the unthinkable,” Hollingshead said. He leaned forward and gestured through the windshield.
    Up ahead a sign by the side of the road indicated that the upcoming exit ramp was only a quarter of a mile away. NSA EMPLOYEES ONLY , it read.
    â€œTake this exit,” Hollingshead told Chapel. “They’ll be expecting us.”
    FORT MEADE, MD: MARCH 21, 11:18
    Military vehicles sat on either side of the off-­ramp, and an armed guard stood in the middle of the road, waving them in. Hollingshead rolled down his window and held up his identification and the guard just nodded. He gave them some quick directions toward their destination and then warned them what would happen if they wandered too far off course. Chapel made a point of following the directions exactly.
    NSA headquarters, in comparison to the NGA building they’d just left, looked like a boring rectangular office building—­nothing special. Of course Chapel knew that appearances could be deceiving. The glass panes that fronted the building were all one-­way mirrors that had been coated with a film of copper so no one could bounce a radio signal through them. Information entered the building through a thousand conduits, but none ever came out.
    The building stood in the middle of the largest parking lot Chapel had ever seen. An attendant came out and guided him into a numbered spot. “Kept it open just for you,” the man said with a big grin. “You’ll want to head into that white building there, the Visitor Control Center. Have a great day!”
    Together the three of them headed into the indicated building, where a line of metal detectors and backscatter booths waited. Sighing, Chapel started to unbutton his uniform tunic again, intending to take his arm off before someone asked him to. Before he could get more than one button undone, however, a woman in a blue blazer came running up. “No need, sir, no need!”
    â€œI have a prosthetic arm,” he told her, launching into a speech he’d used a thousand times before. “It’ll set off the metal detectors and—­”
    â€œYes, Captain, we know,” she said, reaching for his