Chimera

by David Wellington

  “Law?” The voice in his ear chuckled. It was a male voice, a little gravelly as if its owner was a habitual cigarette smoker. There was iron in that voice, but also a little silver—it was the voice of someone used to speaking for a living, like a salesman or a voice-over actor. “I know all about the law,” the voice said. “I apologize for cutting in, but they weren’t going to let me speak to you, otherwise.”

  Chapel bit his lip. This was very, very bad. If someone could compromise his line to Angel, then they could find out everything he’d said to her. They could know all his plans and everything he’d learned.

  He couldn’t imagine that the chimeras could be doing this. They weren’t stupid, but they had shown no sign of having the kind of organization it would require to pull off this kind of stunt. He hadn’t forgotten, though, that someone had to be helping them. Somebody had broken them out of the facility in the Catskills. Maybe, for the first time, he was running up against that shadowy organization.

  “Tell me your name, right now, and who you work for,” Chapel insisted. “That’s not a request. I can have you up on charges for impeding a federal investigation—and maybe treason, too. You’ve made a very bad mistake contacting me like this.”

  “Captain, do me a favor and look at your phone. All will be explained.”

  Chapel frowned, but he looked down at the screen of his phone. The screen went blank and then lit up to show a grainy video feed. He saw what looked like an image of someone’s office, a desk with a green blotter and behind it a window looking out onto a night-shrouded cityscape. After a moment, someone stepped into the frame and sat down behind the desk so the camera could focus on his face.

  Chapel recognized the man right away. It was Franklin Hayes.

  “Your Honor,” he said, despite himself.

  Hayes was the Denver-based federal judge whose name was on the kill list. This was one of the people Chapel was trying so desperately to protect.

  So what the hell was he doing breaking into Chapel’s encrypted line?

  “I know this is surprising, Captain,” Hayes said. He was an older man, maybe seventy, with silver hair but sharp, intelligent eyes. He wore an immaculate suit with a handkerchief perfectly folded in the breast pocket. “I know it’s unorthodox. But I assure you I mean no harm.”

  “Your Honor, I apologize if I was abrupt, but I was serious about the breach of security. This line—”

  Hayes waved one hand in dismissal. “Director Hollingshead wouldn’t even tell me your name,” the judge said. “Director Banks proved a little more tractable. He owed me a favor, from long ago, so I’ve called it in. My friends in Langley were able to tap into your line.”

  So Hayes had connections with the CIA? That was interesting. Chapel made a mental note to look into it. It seemed everyone on the kill list—with the exception of Christina Smollett—was related to the CIA somehow.

  “I’ve been trying to contact you all day,” Hayes said, “ever since I was informed my life was in danger.”

  “Yes, sir,” Chapel said. “I had one of my people call you about that. I wanted to make sure you knew to get to a safe place, somewhere you could be protected.”

  “And I’ve done just that,” Hayes told him. “I’m in my courthouse. I keep a cot here in case I work too late and can’t go home, so I’m relatively comfortable. I have state police crawling all over this building.”

  “Then you should be fine. They can protect you until I arrive.”

  “Captain. Please don’t insult my intelligence. I know what happened to Helen Bryant. And I have some notion of what kind of man is coming here to kill me. Oh, I don’t know all your secrets. But Director Banks filled me in on a few pertinent details.”

  Chapel wanted to strangle Banks, and not for the first time. This case was so secret even the people working on it weren’t allowed to know any details. Yet Banks had clearly spilled some of the unknowns to a civilian, just because he’d asked nicely.

  “I know,” Hayes went on, “that the man in question is more than a match for a few state police. They’re little more than highway patrolmen. I need better protection than this. I think I might rate a personal visit from the one man we know is capable of taking out one of these killers.”

  “I’m sorry?” Chapel asked.

  “I’m saying, Captain, that I want you to come here, to Denver, and protect me personally. Director Banks tells me I’m the highest-value target on your list. That I deserve the best protection. It’s clear that you’re it.”

  “With all due respect, Your Honor, that’s not possible right now,” Chapel said. “I’m in the middle of an investigation, and I can’t break it off now.”

  “I understand you’re on your way to Atlanta,” Hayes said, as if Chapel had said nothing. “That’s good, you’re headed in the right direction. It will only take a few more hours in the air for you to get here, to Denver. I’ll have a car waiting for you at the airport and it will bring you straight to me. I’ll let you know when I have the name of the liaison you’ll be working with—”

  “Your Honor,” Chapel cut in, “I’m sorry, but the answer is no.”

  Hayes waved his hand in dismissal again. “I’ll give you complete autonomy on how you want to set up your defenses. You’ll be in charge of my escort and you can requisition any more units you need from the local police department, should—”

  “I said no,” Chapel said, more forcefully.

  If anything, that just made Hayes look confused.

  Judges had a lot of power. In their courtrooms, they were like gods, able to hand down judgments and throw anyone in jail on contempt charges. Chapel could only imagine how godlike a federal judge must feel most of the time.

  Chapel had met enough generals to know that people like that, people who thought of themselves as omnipotent, stopped understanding the word no. It didn’t just make them angry—they fell out of practice with knowing what it meant. People did what they said, all the time, and nobody ever questioned them.

  So it took a few seconds for the negation to sink into Hayes’s head.

  Eventually he pursed his lips and said, “I can make a lot of trouble for you.”

  “Is that a threat, Your Honor?” Chapel asked.

  “I’m a federal judge, Captain. I don’t make threats.”

  The implication was clear. Hayes didn’t need to make threats—when he could make promises instead. Chapel forced a smile onto his face. He was making a bad enemy here, and he knew it. He was about to inherit all kinds of problems. But for this one brief moment it felt pretty good to tell the judge where to stick it. “I’m in the middle of my investigation. More lives than just yours are at stake. The person of interest won’t reach Colorado—can’t reach Colorado—in less than twenty-four hours from now. If I can’t stop him before that, I’ll see you in Denver before he arrives. But in the meantime I have other work to do. So no, I won’t be coming directly to you.”

  “Now listen here,” Hayes said. “I don’t remember requesting your opinion, and I won’t put up with—”

  A hand fell on Chapel’s shoulder.

  He jumped in his seat. Swiveling around, he saw Julia standing behind him. She was looking down at his phone.

  On the screen, Hayes had gone silent. His face was a mask of utter surprise.

  “Why are you talking to Agent Hayes?” Julia asked.

  “Agent?” Chapel asked.

  The screen of his phone went black, instantly.

  IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+16:14

  “I’m so sorry,” Julia said. “I didn’t mean to see anything I wasn’t supposed to, or . . . or whatever. I just woke up because I heard you shouting at that man, and I came over . . . I guess I shouldn’t have. I’ll go back to my seat now.”

  “No, Julia, it’s fine,” Chapel said, grabbing her hand before she could walk back to her seat. “I’m sorry, I
was a little worked up there. But what did you mean when you called him Agent Hayes? He’s a judge.”

  “He is?”

  “You didn’t recognize him? He’s been in the news recently. He’s about to become a Supreme Court justice.”

  Julia shrugged. “I get my news from the New York Times, not the TV, so I don’t know what a lot of people look like. I mean, I’ve heard about Franklin Hayes, but . . . wow. I guess I never put two and two together. It can’t be the same guy, can it?”

  Chapel squeezed her hand. “Care to let me in on what you’re thinking?”

  Julia inhaled deeply. “This is getting weird.”

  “This case? Yeah, it has its peculiarities,” Chapel said.

  “No,” Julia said. “I mean the way you’re holding my hand.”

  Chapel glanced down and saw he was still holding on to her. He let go. “Sorry. Like I said, I’m a little worked up.”

  “Just . . . never mind,” she said. “Look, I told you a while back about how I knew my parents were in the CIA. Because an agent came to dinner once a year to debrief them. His name was Agent Hayes, and I’m pretty sure it was the same man you were just talking to. He looks a little older, obviously, but, yeah, that was him.”

  “That’s actually really important,” Chapel told her. “It helps me fill in a couple of blanks.”

  “You’re welcome, I guess,” she said.

  “I need to talk to somebody about this. I might have some more questions, but first—”

  “I’ll be right over here,” Julia said, walking over and patting the headrest of her seat. “In the meantime, though, I think I’ll go back to sleep.”

  “Uh, okay,” Chapel said.

  Their eyes met and something passed between them. Chapel wasn’t sure exactly what, and he didn’t have time to think about it. Maybe she was starting to think she’d made the wrong decision, coming along with him. Or maybe . . .

  He put that thought out of his head right away. That couldn’t possibly be right.

  “Angel,” he said, to clear his mind. “Angel, are you there?”

  “I’m back,” Angel told him. “What happened there?”

  “Franklin Hayes broke into your signal. The Franklin Hayes. He had some help from Banks, by the sound of it.”

  “Banks hijacked my line?” Angel sounded mortified. “That son of a . . . I can’t believe it. Well, I mean, I believe he would do such a thing. I just can’t believe he actually pulled it off.”

  “I think we need to assume from now on that he can hear everything we say,” Chapel told her. “I don’t like that much, but—”

  “I’ll do what I can to change that,” Angel told him. “It means switching to a new system, cutting myself completely out of the network for a while, rebuilding my public and private keys, getting a whole new block of IP addresses. I’ll be offline while that’s going on—I won’t be able to contact you at all. And it’ll take some time.”

  “We don’t have a lot of that,” Chapel told her.

  “I know. It’ll take about four hours, and even then I can’t guarantee he won’t pull that stunt again. But it’s something we need to do. Director Hollingshead will freak out when he hears about this. Oh my God, I have so much work to do here. I thought I was secure! I mean, I’ve got firewalls in here, I’ve got 256-bit encryption, I’ve got defenses nobody’s supposed to know about. All of it military spec. I’m supposed to be invisible here. I feel like somebody broke into my house and went snooping through my underwear drawer, Chapel.”

  “I can imagine,” he told her. “Angel, before you go offline, I just need to know a couple of things. I need you to look at Franklin Hayes. Apparently he worked for the CIA at some point. Can you confirm that?”

  “Should be no harm in looking. Wow. That was easy. It’s on his public website. Yep, before he became a judge he worked for the CIA, back in the eighties and early nineties.”

  “As an asset?”

  “No, as a lawyer. Nothing clandestine,” Angel said. “The CIA has its own cadre of lawyers. Just like the Mafia does and for the same reason—because so much of what it does is illegal. It looks like his time there was pretty mundane. His records aren’t even classified. Let’s see what I can pull up.”

  Chapel waited while she tapped at her keyboard.

  “Huh,” she said, finally. “Interesting. Franklin Hayes was lead counsel on a couple of high-profile cases. Civil liberties lawsuits, mostly—American citizens claiming the CIA had trampled on their rights. Ninety percent of his cases were settled out of court, but that isn’t unusual. Corporate lawyers have the same ratio, typically. I’m running through the list of his cases . . . huh. Oh, boy. Chapel, you’re going to like this.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “One of the cases was brought by the family of a young woman who had been committed to a mental hospital for schizophrenia. She claimed the CIA had sent one of their spies to sneak in her window every night and . . . ah . . . take advantage of her in her bed. The case was thrown out for lack of evidence. The judge who heard it chastised the family for wasting the court’s time. Franklin Hayes was counsel for the agency on that case.”

  “Why is that relevant?” Chapel asked.

  “Because the name of the girl was Christina Smollett.”

  IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+16:23

  “Holy shit,” Chapel said. He wasn’t a big fan of pointless vulgarity, but this situation seemed to warrant it. “That’s no coincidence.”

  “Definitely not,” Angel said. “I’ll forgive you for sullying my ears with such language,” she went on. “Because right now I feel like fucking swearing myself. I have no way of knowing what the connection actually amounts to. I’m being honest with you here, Chapel. I don’t have any information on what the CIA might have actually done to Christina Smollett. But there has to be some relevance. The CIA did something to her, and she associated it in some way with being sexually assaulted.”

  “And Franklin Hayes smoothed it over,” Chapel said. “Covered it up.”

  “Worse than that. He tried to countersue the family for besmirching the name of the CIA,” Angel went on. “The judge dismissed the countersuit but agreed to seal all testimony heard in the case. The whole thing was spun as some crazy girl making impossible accusations, and the CIA just didn’t want the public to make something out of nothing. But if there wasn’t something there, we wouldn’t be talking about it right now.”

  “I’m not a big fan of the CIA right now,” Chapel said, which was putting it mildly. “But even I don’t believe they’re in the business of raping schizophrenics.” The words felt ugly in his mouth, but that was what they were talking about. He sighed. “If the records are sealed, I guess there’s no way for you to find out what the testimony said.”

  “This was back in the late eighties, before anything was digitized,” Angel told him. “Assuming it wasn’t actually destroyed, all that testimony is locked away in a filing cabinet somewhere. Short of breaking into a courthouse and stealing the physical papers, no one is ever going to see it—and that’s more your area than mine.”

  “I’m no thief,” Chapel told her. “I’m not about to do that. So we’ll have to find some other way of getting the information. Someone has to know what happened. Franklin Hayes, for instance. I bet he knows all about it.”

  “Too bad you just turned him into an enemy,” Angel pointed out.

  “Did you hear our conversation?”

  “All of it. In fact, so did Director Hollingshead. I woke him up and let him listen in. He’s very interested in what Banks did to my computers. And so am I. Chapel, I need to get started on sweeping my gear and moving to new servers. We can’t let them just eavesdrop whenever they want. In fact, if they know what we’ve just been talking about . . . well. They’re not going to like the fact we made this connection.”

  “True enough. Al
l right, Angel. Do what you need to do. We’re still a ways from Atlanta, and after we land, I’ll be doing some legwork anyway. I’ll need to check in with—”

  “Chapel, until we’re secure again, it’s better if I don’t know the details.”

  “Got it. Thank you, Angel. Thanks for everything.”

  She didn’t respond. The hands-free unit in his ear had already switched off.

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA: APRIL 12, T+17:53

  The jet set down at Hartsfield-Jackson airport in the middle of the night. Chief Petty Officer Andrews brought them cups of hot coffee and croissants while they taxied to the gate and waited for clearance to debark. Chapel had to admit that if he had to fly, this was the way to go. Hollingshead was a lucky man. Before he knew it, he and Julia were whisked through the terminal and out to where a car was waiting for them.

  The driver seemed surprised when they said they had no luggage. “Not even an overnight bag?” he asked.

  Chapel just shrugged. Fatigue was starting to get to him. He needed to sleep, but that wasn’t in the cards. He gave the driver Jeremy Funt’s last known address.

  “Seriously? That’s down in Capitol View. Not the best neighborhood,” the driver told him.

  “It’s where we’re going,” Chapel said.

  “You’re the boss.” The driver got the car moving and thankfully had little to say after that. Chapel tried watching through the windows as they rolled along, trying to get a feel for this new city. It all blurred together into lights and pools of darkness. He focused on the street signs instead.

  After about twenty minutes he leaned forward, a little alarmed. “You’re driving in circles,” he told the driver.

  Had Banks set him up? Was this some kind of ploy to delay him? Or was there something more sinister going on? Was he going to be taken somewhere quiet and quietly shot?

  He started to reach for his weapon.

  “What are you talking about? I know this city like the back of my hand,” the driver said.