Chimera

by David Wellington

  Chapel’s mouth fell open. That was—that was a horrible thought. That was beyond thinking about. “But we don’t have it,” he insisted.

  “How can you know that for sure?”

  “Because I would feel it. I would know somehow!”

  She stared at him. “You do know I have some medical training, right? I mean, I’ve patched you up a couple of times now. They call me Doctor Taggart. I went to school for this. I know exactly how easy these things spread. I’m going to go out on a limb here. The chimeras didn’t just pick this up naturally, did they?”

  “No. The virus is human engineered,” Chapel confirmed.

  “You mean weaponized,” she said.

  The word hung in the air like the first drops of rain before a hurricane hits.

  “I don’t know,” Chapel said. “It’s—”

  “Classified. Which might as well be a yes.” Julia got up and walked into the bathroom. She started washing her hands vigorously. It looked like a reflexive action, something she’d learned to do whenever people started talking about viruses around her.

  He had forgotten she was a doctor. He’d forgotten she probably knew a lot more about viruses than he did. He should have been honest with her.

  When she came back to the door of the bathroom and looked out at him, her eyes were haunted. “I need to be quarantined,” she said.

  “No,” Chapel told her. “No, we can’t—”

  “You do, as well. Anybody who’s had contact with a chimera.”

  “No! That was what Laughing Boy was after. I refuse to accept his actions were appropriate,” Chapel demanded.

  “Call up Angel. Call her right now. Tell her we’re volunteering to go into quarantine. We shouldn’t be out in public.”

  Her legs quaked visibly beneath her. She dropped to the floor, her hands rushing up to cover her face.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Chapel, we could be dying right now, and not know it. That fucking chimera might have killed me just by breathing in my face. We could already be dead. What the hell have you done to my life?”

  Chapel might have said something, but just then his phone began to ring. He dug it out of his jacket and stared at it. The number on the screen read (000) 000-0000.

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+28:55

  Chapel set the phone down on the bed. It continued to ring.

  “Just answer it,” Julia told him.

  Without a word he touched the screen to answer the call. He placed the phone against his ear.

  “Chapel,” Angel told him, “please put me on speaker. You both need to hear what I’m going to say.”

  Chapel did as he was told. He set the phone down on the comforter on top of the bed. He sat down in a chair and tried not to look at Julia.

  “Doctor Taggart,” Angel said, “I know what you just heard must come as quite a shock.”

  “You . . . heard all that?” Chapel asked.

  “Give me some credit, Chapel. I’m a spy. I eavesdrop for a living. You muffled one of my microphones, but you forgot there’s a normal wired telephone in the room.”

  Chapel looked over at the bedside table and saw it, an old beige model with a big red light that lit up if you had messages. It was such an antique piece of technology now that he hadn’t even registered it. That had been a dumb mistake. Chapel knew about infinity mikes, bugs that allowed any telephone to be used as a listening device—even if the handset was resting on its cradle. He should have thought of that.

  “Doctor Taggart,” Angel said, “you’ve already shown your strength. So I won’t lie to you now. Chapel’s correct. You may have the virus. You may be infected already, or you could be a carrier. If you are, then you may need to be quarantined. And most likely that quarantine will be lifelong, or at least as long as it takes us to come up with some cure for the virus.”

  Julia wasn’t looking at the phone. She had wrapped her arms around her knees and was gently rocking back and forth.

  “I can give you a little comfort, though,” Angel went on. “Information on the virus is strictly need to know. But if anybody needs to know, it’s you. The virus is about as fragile as the HIV virus. Once you have it, there’s no way for your immune system to conquer it. But it is difficult to get from casual contact. When you were with the chimera, did he bite or scratch you? I know you’ll tell me the truth.”

  “No,” Julia said, rubbing at her nose with the palm of her hand. “He grabbed my wrists and held me down. He screamed in my face. He may have abraded my skin, and he may have gotten some saliva on me.”

  Angel sighed in relief. “That’s good. That’s pretty low on the risk scale. We can’t totally rule out an infection, but . . . your chances are good. I promise.”

  “Yeah?” Julia said, looking up.

  “Beyond that, the virus has a pretty long incubation period. Several months, in fact. And you’re not contagious, even if you do have it. You won’t be for a long time.”

  “Okay,” Julia said, letting out a deep breath.

  “Director Hollingshead feels the best place for you now is with Chapel. He can make sure you stay safe. We don’t want you to come in just yet. At the moment, we can’t even detect the virus if it’s in your system. When that changes, we’ll make sure you’re tested—so you’ll know. You’ll know for sure. Only then do we need to start talking about what to do next.”

  “Thank you,” Julia said.

  “We will take care of you. No matter what, we’ll make sure of that.”

  “I appreciate it,” Julia said. A teardrop fell from her left eye.

  “It’s the very least we can do. Now, I’m going to have to talk to Chapel in private for a while. And I imagine you could use some time to be alone with your thoughts, after everything you’ve learned.”

  “That would be nice,” Julia confirmed.

  “Chapel, please put in your earpiece. Maybe you could go outside and let Julia be alone while we talk.”

  “I don’t want to let her out of my sight, not after the last time, when Laughing Boy—”

  “Laughing Boy is in a hospital about twenty miles from you, waiting to see if he’s going to keep his toes,” Angel said. “By the way, Doctor Taggart—nice shooting.”

  Julia laughed, though there were tears in her eyes. “You know I was trying to kill him, don’t you?”

  “He deserved nothing less. I’m just glad you made him pay. Now. Chapel?”

  “Okay, okay,” Chapel said, and grabbed the phone and the hands-free unit. “You going to be okay?” he asked Julia.

  She glared at him.

  Crap. It looked like Angel had relieved a little of her fear—but just enough to let her get angry at him again.

  Maybe stepping outside for a while was an excellent idea.

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+29:02

  A long balcony ran outside the motel room, allowing access to all the rooms on that floor. Chapel felt exposed walking up and down, past all the curtains of the other rooms, but there was nothing for it. “Was all that true, what you told her?” he asked.

  “Absolutely. I imagine it’s going to be some comfort to you, too, sweetie,” Angel said. There was a distinct note of sadness in her voice. “After all, you had a lot more physical contact with the chimera than she did.”

  “And there are three more of them out there,” Chapel said. “I’m going to probably have contact with them as well.”

  “You’d be in your rights to be concerned about that,” Angel told him.

  “I know what my job is. I didn’t join the army because I thought it was going to be safe.”

  “I’m sure Director Hollingshead will be glad to hear that.”

  Chapel didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to think about the fact that he might spend the rest of his life locked up in a camp in the Catskills. “We need to get ba
ck to work,” he said. That was the best way to take his mind off it, he knew.

  He filled her in briefly on what Funt had told him. About CIA hit squads and Laughing Boy—and that Funt definitely knew something about the chimeras. He even knew the name of the one coming for him.

  “I guess that explains why he’s on the kill list,” Angel pointed out.

  “Absolutely. Christina Smollett is still a mystery, but it’s starting to look like this is definitely a CIA hit list. I want to take a look at the rest of the names. My feeling is that William Taggart and Franklin Hayes are the next two targets after Funt. But maybe I’m wrong. Who else do we have?”

  Angel tapped away at her keyboard for a while.

  “Marcia Kennedy and Olivia Nguyen,” Angel said. “Kennedy is in Vancouver and Nguyen lives in Seattle.”

  Chapel nodded to himself. They would both be safe for the moment—it would take longer for the chimeras to get to either of those cities than it would take them to get to Denver. “What do they do for a living?” Chapel asked.

  “Huh. Kennedy works at a flower shop. She’s filed some tax forms, but not regularly—only for about ten years in the last twenty. She’s a Canadian citizen, but she wasn’t born there. Looks like her parents moved to Canada in the nineties and she went with them. She was naturalized in 1998, the same year as her parents.”

  “So it’s a close family—do they live together?”

  “No . . . but,” Angel said, and clucked her tongue for a second as if she was thinking, “the parents have a house in the suburbs. She lives a little closer in to the downtown area in a studio apartment. Okay, here. The lease is cosigned by her father, Arthur Kennedy. Looks like she was the one who signed the lease in the first place, but the building owners sued her for failure to pay her rent in 2002. After that the father cosigned, and it looks like the rent’s been paid faithfully ever since.”

  “She probably doesn’t make much money working in a flower shop,” Chapel pointed out.

  “True . . . wow. Cool. I’ve got to remember how to do this.”

  “You found something?”

  “Her résumé is online, with one of those services that helps you get interviews. Interesting. She’s worked on and off at the flower shop, on for eight or ten months, off for four or six months. Just about every year she seems to quit, and then comes back and gets rehired a while later.”

  “That sounds promising. Maybe the job at the flower shop is just a cover, and she takes off long stretches every year to do undercover work for the CIA.”

  “Watching Canada to make sure those rascally northerners don’t try anything?” Angel asked, with a laugh.

  “I’m looking for connections here,” Chapel said. “I admit that’s a stretch.”

  “Let me take a look at something. Her medical records should be online and easy to get since Canada has nationalized health coverage. Oh.”

  “What did you find?”

  Angel clucked her tongue again. “Let me just check what this does . . . okay. Sure. She’s on carbamazepine. That explains a lot.”

  “What is it?” Chapel asked.

  “Carbamazepine is an anticonvulsant,” Angel said, “which would suggest epilepsy, but it’s also used in the treatment of severe bipolar disorder. Which fits her information pretty well. She can function for most of the year but every so often she probably gets a period of intense depression where she can’t get out of bed, so that’s why she works sporadically and why she had trouble paying her rent.”

  Chapel leaned on the balcony railing and closed his eyes. “You’re saying she’s mentally ill. Just like Christina Smollett.”

  “Her disease probably isn’t as profound, but, yeah,” Angel told him.

  What could it mean? Why on earth would the chimeras be targeting mentally ill women? It was the one fact of the case that he couldn’t comprehend at all. Christina Smollett and Marcia Kennedy couldn’t possibly have done any meaningful work for the CIA, or the DoD, or any other governmental agency. They would never have passed the necessary background checks to get clearance. They didn’t have backgrounds in genetics research, either. They even lived on opposite sides of the continent . . . it just didn’t add up.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. You’ve already told me there are no red herrings on this list. No false leads. But this is looking just plain weird. I hate to ask, but—Olivia Nguyen. Is there anything there?”

  Angel worked her magic for a while in silence. When she came back on the line, she sounded almost afraid to tell him what she’d found.

  “Her address is listed as 2600 Southwest Holden Street, in Seattle.”

  “It’s a hospital, isn’t it?”

  “A psychiatric hospital, yes. She’s been a patient there since 1981.”

  STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+34:48

  Chapel and Julia waddled forward in line with the tourists and sightseers headed to the top of Stone Mountain. Chapel had traded his button-down shirt for a polo that let him fit in a little better. Even this early in the year, most of the people in line for the Skyride were wearing T-shirts and shorts, though most of the women carried windbreakers or sweaters. It was supposed to be cooler up top.

  “You still giving me the silent treatment?” Chapel asked.

  “Huh,” Julia said, not looking up. She read aloud from a brochure she’d picked up while Chapel bought their tickets for the cable car. “I didn’t know. This was the first project for Gutzon Borglum. He didn’t finish it, though.”

  Apparently she was talking to him, now. She just wouldn’t look at him.

  He didn’t suppose he blamed her. He’d made a fair share of mistakes with her. He should have told her about the virus. He should have found some way to protect her without bringing her here, without nearly getting her blown up. He should have killed Laughing Boy when he had the chance so she would be safe now.

  That was a lot of should haves. It was going to take a while before things thawed out between them, he thought.

  “Who’s Gutzon Borglum?” Chapel asked, shuffling forward. The line was taking forever. He’d wanted to be on top of the mountain at least an hour before his scheduled meeting with Funt, but it looked like they would have to wait for the next car.

  “The man who carved Mount Rushmore,” Julia told him. “The monument at Stone Mountain was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy,” she read, “in 1916. It took nearly fifty years to complete.”

  Chapel leaned to one side to take a look at the mountain. He’d had other things on his mind and hadn’t really bothered to check out the sculpture.

  “It’s the largest bas-relief in the world,” Julia read.

  Chapel could believe it.

  Stone Mountain lived up to its name. It looked like a single piece of enormous rock towering over the nearby landscape, a dome of gray granite almost denuded of trees. From where Chapel stood it rose over him like a sheer wall. Carved into that massive rock face was a portrait of the South’s three greatest heroes: Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. From a distance the carvings hadn’t looked like much, but from the base of the mountain they were colossal and incredibly detailed. It looked like the three giants on horseback were going to leap out of the stone at any moment and go racing across the country, capes flapping in the wind, the heads of the horses rearing, as the three men rode to glory.

  Angel snorted in his ear. “What the brochure doesn’t tell you is that this is where the modern Ku Klux Klan was officially organized, and where they had their big rallies until the eighties.”

  “During the Olympics,” Julia read, “Stone Mountain facilities were used for the archery, tennis, and track cycling events.” She folded the brochure and put it in her purse. “Are we going to have to wait for the next car?” she asked, and a moment later they watched the Skyride lift away from the ground, headed upward across
the carving toward the very top.

  “Looks like it,” Chapel said.

  “Chapel,” Angel said in his ear, “I know what I said last time, about your being a jerk when you left Julia behind. But I also know you made the right choice, no matter how angry she is with you now. You should leave Julia down here. Just try to say it in a nicer way this time.”

  “Not a chance,” he told her. Julia looked at him for a second as if she thought he was talking to her. Chapel tapped the hands-free unit in his ear and Julia rolled her eyes and turned away.

  “Listen, sugar,” Angel said, “if Funt is up there and you start asking him questions with Julia around, she’s going to hear everything. That’s not a good thing. Secrets don’t work if everybody knows them.”

  “The last time I spoke with him I left her behind. Look how that turned out,” Chapel said. “No, I can’t let her out of my sight anymore.”

  “Director Hollingshead doesn’t want her hearing any of this,” Angel pointed out. “You know that, Chapel.”

  Chapel sighed. He knew it perfectly well. He knew he was exceeding the limits of need to know. He was, frankly, taking a running leap and jumping as far as he could humanly get past those limits.

  He glanced at Julia. She was part of this. She had a right to know. And maybe that exceeded the right of Hollingshead and Angel and the entire government to keep things from her.

  He couldn’t very well say that, of course. He was a silent warrior. The kind of man who could be trusted to keep his mouth shut.

  Or at least, he’d thought that was who he was.

  “She’s coming with me,” he told Angel.

  The operator was silent for a long time. “You’ve been given a lot of latitude on how you work this case,” she said, finally. “That latitude can be taken away. If Director Hollingshead needs to rein you in, he will.”

  “Is that a threat, Angel?”

  “It’s a friendly warning!” she said, sounding exasperated. “I want you to succeed, sweetie. I want you to win this thing. Why are you fighting me?”