Chimera

by David Wellington

  He stopped because as he climbed aboard he got his first look at the interior of the jet. Instantly he knew it had to be Hollingshead’s personal plane.

  Most of the cabin except for the cockpit had been turned into one spacious sitting area. Four leather-covered seats faced one another in the middle of the space. They were huge and looked extraordinarily comfortable. Chapel, who was running on fumes at that point, saw at once that they could convert with a button press into reclining beds.

  Clearly no expense had been spared in making the plane cozy—and elegant.

  The walls of the fuselage were lined in rich, red wood, polished to a nearly mirror finish. The overhead lights were designed to look like tiny chandeliers. At the back of the cabin was a massive oak desk with built-in bookshelves. Chapel took a closer look and saw the books were real. Black elastic straps held them in so they wouldn’t fall out if the plane hit any turbulence.

  Hidden speakers in the ceiling played classical music at a low volume. The plane smelled not like recirculated air but like leather and sandalwood.

  “This is nicer than my apartment,” Julia said. “Bigger, too.”

  A narrow door beside the desk opened and a woman in a navy uniform came out, bearing a tray with two cocktail glasses on it. “Good evening, sir, ma’am,” she nodded, and brought the tray over to a mahogany coffee table that sat in the middle of the four seats. “I’m Chief Petty Officer Andrews, and I’ll be looking after you tonight. Please, have a seat and buckle yourselves in. Our flight time to Atlanta will be a little over two hours, once we’re in the air. Can I get you anything while you wait for takeoff? Magazines, blankets, food?”

  Chapel hadn’t eaten all day, not since breakfast. It was the first chance he’d had to think of it. “I could use a sandwich,” he said.

  “Certainly, Captain. I have a nice roast beef with cheddar in the back. I’ll just put that together for you. Ma’am?”

  Julia looked up at Chapel like she wanted approval to ask for something. He shrugged.

  “I guess . . . I could use a salad or something,” she said, eventually.

  Chief Petty Officer Andrews smiled. “I have a romaine salad with goat cheese and mandarin oranges. For dressing, I have a balsamic vinaigrette, a gorgonzola, or just oil and vinegar if you prefer your dressing on the side. Do you take croutons?”

  “Um . . . yes,” Julia said. Her eyes were wide, as if this were the most bizarre thing she’d seen all day.

  Petty Officer Andrews smiled and disappeared through her little door again.

  “I made such a mistake when I went to vet school,” Julia said, when she was gone. “I should have joined the navy. Is it always like this?”

  Chapel smiled. “Always,” he said. “In the army we ate dirt half the time, and we used rocks for pillows. In the navy they got goat cheese and mandarin oranges.”

  IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+15:37

  The salad seemed to perk Julia up, though he could see in her eyes just how tired she was. While she ate she actually smiled at Chapel and met his eye once or twice and then turned her head away with a little laugh. “It’s funny how comforting having a good meal can be,” she said.

  “I imagine you could use a little comfort right now,” Chapel told her.

  She snorted in exuberant agreement. “I need to feel normal, basically. I need to feel like I’m not about to be shot. And frankly, I need a shower and a change of clothes. And a good nap in a real bed. And a drink! Definitely a drink.”

  “When we get to Atlanta, sure,” Chapel said. “Maybe we both need that.” It had been a very long day, and it wasn’t over yet. “My instinct is to keep moving, to keep working. But if I don’t get a little downtime, I’m going to start getting fuzzy. Then I’ll start making mistakes.”

  Julia met his eye directly and gave him a very warm smile. “I know you’re on a tight time frame. But I want you to promise me something. The first time we get a chance, you have to let me show you how much I appreciate your saving my life.”

  For a moment—just a moment—Chapel thought he knew exactly what she meant by that, and the thought made him feel very hot and bothered. “You don’t mean—”

  Her eyes opened wide, and she put a hand over her mouth. “Jeez! No. I meant you would let me buy you dinner. Or something.” She laughed and reached over and patted his wrist, defusing the sudden tension. “Wow, Chapel. You’re blushing.”

  He turned away, because he could feel the heat in his cheeks.

  “Oh, don’t be embarrassed. It’s cute,” Julia said.

  Nobody had called Chapel cute since he was seven years old. It felt very strange to hear it now.

  “There’s something about you, Chapel. You’re a tough guy, I see that in the way you move, the lines in your face. But there’s an innocence underneath it. Interesting. It’s like I can see that you really believe in what you do. In who you are. You’re not cynical about your job at all.”

  “I took an oath to protect my country,” he said. “I take it pretty seriously.”

  Julia shook her head. “I’ve met spies before. They seemed to feel like having secrets made them better than everybody else.”

  “The opposite is usually true,” Chapel said, furrowing his brow. He was distinctly uncomfortable with where this conversation was going.

  Luckily Julia didn’t push it any further. Though she did say, almost under her breath, “I wish I could see you in your uniform. I bet you look just adorable.”

  Now that was one thing no one had ever said about him. He pretended he hadn’t heard her and went back to his sandwich.

  After they finished their meal, Julia curled up in her leather seat, covered in a thick wool blanket that looked very warm, and was out like a light. Chief Petty Officer Andrews came out and touched a button on the arm of Julia’s chair. It reclined smoothly and without noise, so gently Julia didn’t even wake up. The chief petty officer expertly slipped a pillow under Julia’s head. She smiled at Chapel, then disappeared as silently as she’d come.

  Chapel watched Julia’s body rise and fall with her breathing for a while. He thought about how she’d held him when he rescued her from Laughing Boy. About how good it had felt to have her body pressed up against his. He’d felt like a hero, then.

  He watched her brow wrinkle and knew she must be dreaming.

  She was beautiful. Beyond that, there was something more to her. Real substance. She was strong and smart and kind. He hadn’t met anyone like her in a long time. He’d brought her with him to keep her safe. That was all. She had kissed him, but she’d said she wasn’t trying to start anything. Whatever he was feeling now she probably didn’t return it. How could she? He was a man with one arm. That was enough to put anybody off. Maybe she’d just kissed him out of pity. She’d called him cute and adorable, but those were words women used to describe babies and kittens, not men they wanted to get to know better in a romantic way. Weren’t they?

  Damn. He needed to stop thinking like that. He needed to stop thinking about Julia as anything but an asset that needed to be protected.

  He turned his seat to face the window and watched lights blinking on the tarmac. He had to get his mind off Julia. He grabbed his phone and his hands-free set out of his pocket. He put the hands-free set in his ear and forced himself to close his eyes. “Angel,” he said, “I don’t know if you’re listening. I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  “Magic words,” Angel t
old him. “Do you have any more of them?”

  “I was letting this case get to me,” he told her, “when I accused you of having your own agenda. That was wrong of me. You’ve done nothing but help me. You’ve been an utter godsend. I’m starting to see that I could never do this without you.”

  “That’s a start,” she said.

  “This case—this operation—is like nothing I’ve ever had to do before,” Chapel told her. “I’m starting to get worried. There are three more chimeras out there. There’s no way I can catch them all before they kill someone.”

  “It’s looking pretty grim, I’ll admit,” Angel told him.

  “And now I have Laughing Boy to worry about. He’s killing people, Angel. He’s killing anyone who comes in contact with a chimera, just in case they’re infected. He was going to kill Julia.”

  “I know.”

  “I couldn’t let that happen,” he said.

  “I know. Director Hollingshead wasn’t very happy when he heard you’d brought a civilian along for the ride, of course. But I explained everything to him and made him see it was necessary to prevent another death.”

  “You did that for me? Even after what I said?”

  “I care, Chapel. I care about people, just like you do.”

  Chapel nodded to himself. He was very glad to hear it. “So he’s . . . okay with this?” He glanced over his shoulder and saw Julia’s sleeping face half covered by her blanket. She was beautiful like that, in repose. When she wasn’t angry or grief-stricken. He wondered what it would have been like to meet her before all this. In just ordinary circumstances. But then again, how could that have ever happened? A veterinarian in New York and a defense intelligence analyst in Virginia would have very little to talk about. Almost nothing in common. “He won’t demand I turn her over to the CDC?”

  Angel was silent for a moment. After recent events, Chapel worried she might not come back on the line. “She could be infected, Chapel.”

  “I know,” Chapel sighed. He’d known it from the moment he’d found Laughing Boy inside her clinic. She had, in fact, been exposed to the chimera, and if it so much as scratched her while they were in the back of the hijacked cab together, she could have the virus already. “If Hollingshead orders it, I’ll bring her in. Turn her over to his doctors so they can screen her for the virus. Treat her if necessary. But I can’t just send her off to face Laughing Boy on her own.”

  “He won’t order that. Even if she does have the virus, she’s probably better off with you where you can watch her and make sure she doesn’t spread it. Still—it’s just going to make your job harder if you have to babysit her at the same time.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. She’s proved herself to be pretty resourceful, and she might have information I need. Answers to questions I haven’t even figured out how to ask, yet.”

  “Fair enough. Hollingshead says it’s okay, she can travel with you. Just make sure she doesn’t learn anything too sensitive, and it should be all right.”

  “That’s good,” Chapel said. “About Laughing Boy—what can we do about him? If he’s running around killing people, then he must have gone rogue, right? Please tell me that Banks didn’t order him to kill Julia. Please tell me we can have him arrested and remove him from the field.”

  “I wish I could,” Angel said.

  Chapel tapped at the armrest of his seat with his good fingers. “The CIA doesn’t just kill American citizens. I mean, it has, and I suppose things happen that I don’t get to hear about. But—”

  “Chapel, he was authorized to do this. And the authorization came from higher up than Banks.”

  Chapel grabbed the armrest hard enough to make the leather creak. “So he’s got a license to kill? That’s something from the movies. Only the president can authorize the execution of American citizens without a trial.”

  “Higher up, I said,” Angel told him.

  Chapel shivered at the thought. “Is the threat of this virus really that high? That they would just kill people on suspicion they might have it?”

  “I don’t have a lot of information on it. But clearly someone thinks so,” Angel told him. “This is way beyond top secret stuff. What we do know, and this from confidential sources, is that the disease caused by the virus is incurable and almost impossible to detect until it’s way too late to do anything.”

  “Jesus.” Chapel glanced at Julia again. She could be a ticking time bomb right now. She could be incubating the virus while she slept. And there was no way to know for sure. “That doesn’t excuse his behavior. We need to find a way to stop Laughing Boy now. Before he can kill anyone else.”

  “Chapel,” Angel said, “I want to tell you something. You were right.”

  “What?” It had been a while since somebody had said that to him.

  “I do have my own agenda,” she told him. “Or rather, my agenda is the same as Director Hollingshead’s, and it may not match up with yours. We’re not like Director Banks and his operative. We don’t want to just kill people to keep this thing under control. But we do intend to control it, regardless of what that takes. Director Hollingshead can’t stop Laughing Boy. He doesn’t intend to try. He may not like Laughing Boy’s methods—but he agrees with Banks, at least in principle, about what needs to be done. If Julia does have the virus, we won’t kill her. But we will lock her up for the rest of her life in a facility like the one the chimeras escaped from. Because we have no other choice.”

  PART TWO

  IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+15:48

  When Chapel was convinced Julia wasn’t going to wake up at any moment, he took care of one task he’d neglected all day. Removing his jacket and unbuttoning his shirt, he plugged his artificial arm into a power outlet near his seat, using a retractable cord built into the shoulder. While he waited for it to recharge he called Angel again and asked her about the next two names on the list. “Start with the one in Chicago, first,” he said.

  “Eleanor Pechowski,” Angel replied, and he heard her clacking at her keyboard. “Eleanor, who are you? Let’s see. She’s a retired schoolteacher.”

  “That doesn’t sound like someone a genetic freak would want to kill,” Chapel pointed out. “Maybe a disgruntled former student . . .”

  “She worked for the UN, for a while,” Angel went on. “In UNESCO. Let’s see . . . she lived in New York City at the time, on Roosevelt Island. Looks like she taught English, math, and American history to the children of UN delegates. Maybe she fell in with the black helicopter crowd.”

  Chapel rolled his eyes. “Please tell me you’re not a conspiracy nut, Angel,” he said.

  Angel laughed. “No, I was just kidding. But just to work at the UN schools, Eleanor Pechowski had to have a security clearance. So the intelligence community would have been aware of her.”

  “It’s a pretty tenuous connection. Just because somebody did a background check on her doesn’t mean she ended up working for the CIA. And the last time I checked, the agency didn’t hire a lot of English teachers. Okay, what about Jeremy Funt, the one in Atlanta? What’s his story?”

  “That one’s easy. He was a government employee, and all his records are right here. Nothing hidden at all.”

  “Tell me he worked for the CIA,” Chapel said, leaning forward and nearly pulling the plug on his arm.

  “Not exactly,” Angel said. “He worked for the FBI.”

  “Huh,” Chapel said. That didn’t make much sense. The CIA and the FBI had little to do with each other, other than both being government agencies. They weren’t even overseen by t
he same cabinet department. “Is it possible that’s a cover?”

  “Not unless it’s an extremely good one. His service record is an open book, here—and it shows him working a steady load of cases from 1981 to 1996, all pretty standard stuff, missing persons, kidnappings, wire fraud. The one question mark is that he left the bureau in 1996 at the age of forty-five, long before mandatory retirement. With a file like that, normally you’d expect that he left the bureau in disgrace, that he messed up somehow and was forced to retire, but there’s no indication here he was anything less than a solid asset to the bureau.”

  “So Funt just dropped off the bureau payroll with no explanation, huh? That’s interesting. And at least he sounds like a more likely target.” He had no idea why the chimeras would want to kill Funt, but if he had to prioritize targets, an FBI agent sounded higher in value than a retired schoolteacher. It sounded like Atlanta might have been the right choice after all. “Angel, what else can you tell me about this guy? What does he do for money? Does he have any family in Atlanta?”

  “I’m looking at that right now. It looks like—hold on. Chapel, give me a second here, there’s something wrong with one of my laptops. Looks like somebody got a keystroke logger in my system, but that’s—hey!”

  “Angel?” Chapel asked.

  “Somebody’s piggybacking on my signal,” she said, sounding indignant. “Just who the hell do they think they are? Hacking me, why, I ought to—”

  Static filled Chapel’s ear and then the signal went dead.

  “Angel?” he called. “Angel, come in. What just happened? Angel?”

  A new voice spoke to him.

  “Captain Chapel, I presume,” the voice said. “You and I need to have a little talk.”

  IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+16:02

  “Listen, I don’t know who the hell you are, but this is an encrypted line,” Chapel said, pulling his phone out of his pocket. The screen showed he was still connected to the number (000) 000-0000. There was no indication anything had changed. “Intruding on this channel is a violation of any number of laws, and—”