Chimera (The Subterrene War)

by T. C. McCarthy

  “C. L. Chen, no; nor have I heard of Sunshine. But Samuel Ling is a genetic engineer. He had a small shop in the gene-therapy section of Khlong Toei.”

  I nodded. “Did Ling ever work with the Thais—to reverse your spoiling?”

  “Ling is a very smart man but not that smart. Six months ago we lost a couple of our sisters; they disappeared from their living quarters, and someone suggested that we look into Ling. When we entered his offices, they had been cleaned out—except for the remains of my two sisters, vivisected, analyzed, and dead long before we got there. Otherwise, the offices were empty and pristine, and we do not expect Ling’s return.”

  “Did you run here with Margaret? Did you travel with her when she originally came to Thailand?”

  The girl shook her head. “No. Margaret was blessed. She is the only one to have met Catherine, the most perfect of all.”

  At the name, all of them bowed their heads, and Jihoon and I glanced at each other. The spoiling affected all the major organs, including the brain, and their manner would have made me think they were all crazy except that the men were human—would never have experienced the spoiling, whereas the satos’ own immune systems turned traitor. This was weird, but it wasn’t a sign of insanity.

  “What was so special about Catherine?” Jihoon asked.

  Apparently it was another joke, and they all chuckled. She shouldered her carbine and lit a cigarette, handing them out to the others. “They send you to hunt us but don’t teach you about Catherine? You are nothing for us to fear then.”

  And all of them left. They filtered out through the other side of the courtyard, and although my initial thought was to follow, narrow windows dotted the walls around us and there was no telling if someone watched. It felt like there were crosshairs on my forehead. The sun inched lower, and the day had gotten late anyway, so we both turned and headed back for the ghetto entrance.

  “What do you think, Chong?” I asked.

  “That was the craziest stuff I’ve ever seen. You hunted them?”

  “Yeah. But they weren’t like that. The ones I chased rotted alive, incapable in some cases of even seeing. We just saw a sato in perfect form. A killing tool. She could have wiped us both before we even started to draw, and they can all rot in hell.”

  He grunted and then looked at me. “Why do you hate them so much?”

  “Who?”

  “Them. Satos.”

  I started walking faster, thinking about Phillip’s father and the jungles. “We have a long way to go, Chong, and frankly, you don’t know me well enough to start asking that kind of crap.”

  We were lost. The maze of rusting and crumbling structures wasn’t at all familiar on our return trip, and the best I could manage was to make sure the wharf cranes were at our backs as we tried to find the gate. After a half hour of searching, we turned a corner and stepped into an area that looked like an amusement park for all its neon and terra-cotta. A narrow route went straight through sets of buildings that were newer than the rest and that resembled what I imagined to be Japanese architecture—more so than either Thai buildings or the makeshift housing typical of what we’d seen so far. These were built by people who had money. Outside each shop hung signs, along with flashing images that showed pictures of animals or body parts.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked Jihoon.

  “Genetic engineering. That sign says organ repair, and there’s a shop farther down selling small dragons, safe for children. I’m surprised the Thais haven’t cracked down.”

  “Well, as long as they restrict themselves to animals and gene therapy, it shouldn’t be a problem—especially if they pay off the officials.”

  A man in a long rubber apron stood in front of one shop, smoking while he gestured to us with rubber-gloved hands. “Come in, come in.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You need new liver, yes? I can tell.” He chuckled and looked at Jihoon. “Your friend heavy drinker. The skin says it all. And the nose.”

  “You know,” said Jihoon, “he might be right. You do look a little yellow.”

  “Screw you.” But it struck me that this must have been where Chen had camped out, somewhere in the area. I nodded to the man and followed him in with Jihoon.

  The shop’s waiting room was gleaming white, its tile extending from the floor almost to the ceiling, and a tiny robot crawled across it, cleaning every centimeter with pulses of disinfectant. One wall had a menu. The writing was in Japanese and Thai, but next to each item was a picture of an organ—everything you could ever want replaced.

  “Those prices old,” the man said. “No good now. Liver therapy, five thousand.”

  “Bhat?” I asked.

  “Dollar.”

  “Too steep, friend,” I said, shaking my head. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you tell me what you know about Samuel Ling.”

  The man’s face paled, and he ducked behind his counter, pulling off both gloves. “Don’t know Samuel Ling. Shop is closing now, you go.”

  “Watch the door,” I said to Ji and waited until he had taken a position outside before turning back to the shopkeeper. “You’re a genetic engineer?”

  “Yes. But you go.”

  I shook my head and put one hand on my pistol. “No, I stay. Samuel Ling. Where is he?”

  “You don’t understand.” The man looked panicked now, his gaze shifting back and forth between the front door and me. “Ling has many friends in Bangkok. Colleagues.”

  “All you have to do is tell me where he went. Then I’ll leave. If you don’t, not only could I put a few holes in you, but look at my uniform, pal. I could have every Thai official in here until you’d make more money by burning the place to the ground and selling charcoal.”

  “He’s gone,” the man said.

  “I know that. Where?”

  He ran a hand through his hair and then shrugged. “I don’t know Ling. But friend say he bragged about having institute. In Burma. That all I know.”

  I stared at the man and pulled my fléchette pistol out, but when he started to cry and begged me to believe him, I guessed he’d told the truth. I handed him my credit chit.

  “Take a hundred dollars.”

  With the transaction completed, I left, grabbing Jihoon’s arm and pulling him through the alley.

  “What’s the rush?” he asked.

  “Ling. If the shop guy was that scared of someone who’s not even here, Ling must have a lot of contacts who still owe him, and I’d bet you anything that the first thing that guy will do is tell them about our visit.”

  To his credit, Jihoon didn’t ask any more questions and moved with me, keeping pace. The sun was about to set. With any luck, I figured, we’d find the gate and hightail it back to the hotel before the curfew started, but I had that feeling now, like something was about to go wrong, because Khlong Toei had changed. The crowds had vanished as if they knew something we didn’t, and I imagined a current running through the place because it was a living thing, a single entity with a unified consciousness taking in everything at once instead of a collection of individuals. We started jogging once we hit a restaurant area, and Jihoon looked over his shoulder for the fifth time.

  “We’re being followed,” he said.

  “How many?”

  He shrugged, and we quickened our pace when the ghetto’s wall came into view. Now all we had to do was trace it north to our gate—any gate—and get the hell out.

  “Four. Armed with clubs or something. Not Thai, maybe Japanese.”

  “Follow my lead and don’t hesitate; just waste the bastards.”

  I pulled my pistol and ducked behind a stall, the vendor shouting at me in English to go away and that he didn’t want trouble. Then he screamed something else in Japanese. The guy pulled out a broom and started whacking me with it until I pointed my pistol at him, at which point he dropped the broom and ran. But it had distracted me. Jihoon shouted a warning, too late, so I didn’t see it w
hen a guy came from the other side, shouting and swinging a club in a downward arc at my head. I blocked it with my pistol, but the impact knocked the weapon from my hand. It skittered over the concrete. The guy, who looked Asian and wore a T-shirt so tight that every muscle showed, raised his club again and grinned. But before he could strike, three fléchettes buzzed and cracked by my head, hitting the man in his throat; he grabbed his neck with both hands, dropping the club and gurgling as he died.

  Jihoon had already wiped two more. The last one ran back the way he had come, and we stood, sprinting for the wall and then heading north once we reached it. I stopped to grab my fléchette pistol, ramming it back into the holster.

  “We need to get out of here before any cops show,” I said, panting.

  “It was self-defense.”

  “Yeah, but do we really need to get tied up in Bangkok’s legal system? It’s bad enough I’ve gone around asking point-blank about Chen, so having to explain everything to the cops just isn’t on my to-do list. Besides, if those guys were connected, self-defense might not be on the menu.”

  Jihoon nodded. A gate was in sight with two Thai Army guards chatting and leaning against the barrier as the sun set. We slowed to a walk, not wanting to look like anything was wrong.

  “How’d those guys find out about us so fast?” Jihoon asked.

  “Either the shopkeeper was more plugged in than I thought, or our friends with the Gra Jaai let someone know about us. Out of courtesy.” I thought for a second and then added one more possibility. “Or someone was following us the whole way and questioned our friend, the genetic engineer, as soon as we left.”

  We showed the Thai guards our passport chits and let them scan our retinas, after which we were back in Bangkok proper and broke once more into a jog, heading north on the sidewalk. I was breathing easier now. Still, my age showed, and both legs screamed with the effort of running so I had to fight to hide my discomfort, not wanting Jihoon to realize that it was a struggle.

  “Did you learn anything from the Japanese guy?” he asked.

  I waited to answer, trying to catch my breath. “Yeah. Chen is in Burma.”

  “Christ.”

  “Well, if we go to the front, we’ll be heading in that direction anyway.”

  I don’t know if my voice had betrayed the fact that I was about to give out, but Jihoon slowed down. “You wanna walk for a little while?”

  “If you want to, Chong.” But secretly, I was relieved at the suggestion, maybe liking Jihoon a bit more. “And you were good.”

  “At what?” he asked.

  “At wiping that guy before he clocked me.”

  In the morning we’d head into the bush. The colonel had left a message at the hotel, letting us know that our gear had arrived and that a vehicle would be waiting for us outside the hotel at 4:00 a.m.; knowing that it wouldn’t be long—a matter of hours before making my return to the jungle—made it hard to sleep. I risked opening the drapes in the darkness and lit a cigarette, sitting in one of the room’s chairs to look out over Bangkok. The stillness broke with an occasional pop, far-off gunfire that the heavy air muffled so it sounded like a cracking branch. Bangkok was a tinderbox, a mixture of immigrants who even after at least two generations hadn’t assimilated and who panicked at the threat of yet another war; just the word Chinese was enough to send them into riotous panic, maybe with a little help from foreign operatives sprinkled throughout the city. Even this late, tiny red lights flared up and then dimmed from windows in buildings across the street, the glow of cigarettes from others who couldn’t sleep. We were a brotherhood of strangers bound by anxiety.

  And bumping into the sato had unnerved me. Jihoon still didn’t understand, or he’d be awake like me, worried that once we reached the line they would surround us, an army of satos who would see me as a murderer. There had been more to Margaret than the holo image. I’d studied what was on the chit, an account of what the girl had seen in Russia, having escaped one of their gulags and made it south through the Chinese invasion of eastern Siberia and into North Korea, where she had braved a nuclear wasteland, finally making it into Unified Korea. Everything had moved so quickly that I hadn’t thought of it before: Who had taken Margaret’s account of events? She was here in Thailand, so it was possible that someone had gotten the chance to interview her, but I doubted it, and the thing that the sato had said echoed in my thoughts: “They send you to hunt us but don’t teach you about Catherine.” Who was Catherine? They’d mentioned her in my briefing, but there hadn’t been any data in the files they’d shown me, so something crucial had been omitted and it drove me crazy to think that the answer was just beyond my reach, eluding me no matter how hard I tried to grasp it.

  I took another pull on my cigarette and watched as an APC lumbered down the street, its wheels crunching over broken glass and concrete; the vehicle’s turret motor whined. By reflex, I hid my cigarette behind my hand and waited for the crushing boom of the thing’s cannon, expecting to have to dive to the floor again, but so far everything stayed quiet. Once it had passed, my concentration returned. Margaret. She had seen something, had information that the brass wanted—or information they suspected she had—and according to Jihoon, the operation in Spain may have been related, but something didn’t make sense. The Koreans were spooked and had jump-started a genetic warfare program. But after the war in Kazakhstan, with its associated casualty figures and the holo clips of satos wasting on camera, almost the entire world, including Unified Korea, had jumped on the Genetic Weapons Convention, signing and ratifying it overnight—maybe not so much out of sympathy for satos as for a fear that nobody could compete with our, China’s, or Russia’s production programs. So it would be better if nobody had satos. And the Koreans, also overnight, turned their back on the agreement, despite the fact that if anyone found out, it would be their ass. All of Asia would cry for their heads. A pack of cigarettes later and the answers still wouldn’t come, so I stubbed the last one out and glanced at the clock, sighing with fatigue as I stood and turned on the light.

  “Half an hour,” I said, shaking Jihoon’s foot to wake him.

  He rubbed his eyes. “Got it. You look like you didn’t sleep.”

  “I didn’t. Something tells me we’re going to run into a lot of satos out there, and if there’s one thing I hate more than them, it’s the bush. You take the first shower.”

  Jihoon went into the bathroom, and I turned the light off again before walking back to the window and peering out. The moon was setting in the distance, and shadows hid most of the area except for a spot under a single streetlight that had somehow avoided destruction over the last two days. I was about to close the drapes when something moved. A figure hid in a doorway across the street and I froze, watching as whoever it was worked his way closer to the hotel, until he found a position in an alley. If we’d had our gear, I could have used the vision hood to get a better view, but for now all I could do was stare, hoping that something would happen to give me a look. Eventually there was a glint. The flickering streetlight hit something metallic, and my skin crawled before it occurred to me that I was standing by the window, and I dropped to the floor at the same time a stream of tracer fléchettes cracked through the opening to slam into the far wall. My gun belt was still on. I crawled to the door, opened it, and then stood to sprint for the staircase, jumping down the steps in an effort to make the street before the sniper had time to escape. By the time I made it to the lobby doors, where I hid behind a column with my pistol drawn, the night staff yelled to me that they had already called authorities and asked if everyone was all right.

  Keep moving, I told myself. Getting out through the door would be too obvious, so I charted a course to the next column and then sprinted for it, waiting for the fléchettes to crack again, and then jumped through one of the broken windows, firing into the alley where the man had hidden. But by the time I reached it, it was empty; whoever it was had bailed. I spat and kicked a piece of rubble, angry because I wa
s already sweaty from the day before and now there would only be time for a quick shower since my watch said it was already quarter to four. A growl of vehicles sounded in the distance. Soon the Thais would be there, and I ran back up to the hotel room, realizing that I’d forgotten to check if Jihoon had been hit.

  He was half-dressed by the time I got back.

  “Where’d you go?” he asked.

  “You didn’t hear that?”

  Ji shook his head. “What?”

  “Someone opened up on me from across the street. Sniper.” I pointed to the holes in the wall, and he whistled.

  “That’s good.”

  I stared at him in shock. “Are you a nutcase? What’s good?”

  “Well,” he said, pulling on his boots, “now we know that whoever is after us is a really bad shot.”

  I pulled my uniform shirt off and headed for the bathroom, shaking my head. Nothing made any sense anymore. It was the worst mission possible for someone at my point, a guy on his last legs and in need of retirement, and it got worse with every passing second.

  “Hey, Chong,” I called from the bathroom.

  “What?”

  “Even if we have no clue what’s going on, someone is getting ticked off. Maybe that’s good.”

  FIVE

  Outbound

  Nothing had changed since my earlier experiences in Bangkok, which felt like they’d happened yesterday: the Royal Army never hurried unless it was to panic. We waited. Then waited some more. The Thais took their time in preparing for the trip to the front, and we’d be heading northwest toward the Thai-Burma border with a supply column that consisted of six-wheeled trucks in a thousand different forms—cargo, troop carriers, but more than anything, alcohol tankers and armored personnel carriers. Every fourth vehicle was an APC. The Thai version was smaller than the American one, suited to the vile roads we’d have to travel, and if they hadn’t improved any since I had last visited (the mountain passages were more like goat trails and were wide enough for only one vehicle) then God help us if someone came in the opposite direction. I wouldn’t go inside any of the vehicles, not even the APCs, and Jihoon looked up at me from the assembly field.