Chimera

by David Wellington

  “What have you got there?” Chapel asked, nodding at the concealed hand.

  The man frowned in embarrassment. He opened the door wider and Chapel saw he held a long sword. “Just come in, please. I’m Julius Apomotov, and this is my house.”

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: APRIL 13, T+39:52

  Chapel and Julia stepped inside and Apomotov closed the door behind them, struggling to shut it against the wind.

  The house’s foyer was all polished wood and sparkling glass chandeliers. Tapestries hung on the walls and a suit of armor stood next to a stairway leading up. The sword clearly belonged with the armor.

  “The best I could find, under the circumstances,” Apomotov said, lifting his weapon. “I’ve never believed in guns.” He squinted, his eyes magnified by his thick glasses, and then shook his head. “That is, I believe they exist, but—” He shook his head again, in frustration. “Never mind.” He glanced down at the sword in his hand as if he didn’t know where it had come from. For lack of anything better to do, he dropped it in an umbrella stand. “Come in, come in. Eleanor is waiting for you. She’s holding up remarkably well, under the circumstances.”

  He took their coats and hung them in a closet near the door. Then he stood there for a while, one hand lifted in front of him as if he was going to point at something. He snapped his fingers. “Chapel. Chapel. I had a student named Chapel once. Mark Chapel. Quite gifted. Any relation?”

  “I’m not sure,” Chapel said. “My family’s from Florida.”

  “Oh good God, no, no relation then,” Apomotov said. “Mark wouldn’t be caught dead beneath the Mason-Dixon line. Through here, please. He was a Connecticut boy, bled Union blue if you cut him.” Apomotov stopped in place and turned to look at them. “Not that I ever cut him. You understand.”

  “Of course,” Chapel said.

  Apomotov led them into a wide parlor behind the stairs. It was tastefully decorated, except for the hundreds of crossbows hanging on the walls, each of them suspended on individual wires from the crown molding. “There,” he said, waving at a couch on the far side of the room. An elderly woman there was struggling to stand up and greet them.

  “Eleanor Pechowski, I presume,” Chapel said.

  “You must, absolutely must, call me Ellie,” the woman said, coming over to take Chapel’s hand. “You’re Chapel, of course, the one that very nice young woman keeps saying is my shield against trouble in these dark times. And who’s this? Who’s this?” she asked, looking at Julia.

  “She didn’t introduce herself,” Apomotov said. “I thought it best to let her in anyway, under the circumstances.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Julia said. “I’m Julia Taggart.”

  “Ah!” Eleanor Pechowski—Ellie—said. “Aha! Your name precedes you, dear.”

  “I, uh, I take it you knew my father,” Julia said, looking uncomfortable.

  “And your mother as well. Come, sit. Have some refreshment. Julius, be a dear and fetch more cups.”

  The elderly man nodded and headed off deeper into the house.

  “An absolute gem of a man,” Ellie said when he was gone. “One of the leading lights in Russian medieval studies, a scholar of no small renown. Demented now, of course, quite as crazy as a moth meeting its first lightbulb but still a stellar human being. Took me in when I was told my own—far more modest—apartment wasn’t safe anymore. Why aren’t you two sitting down?”

  Chapel hurried to take a place on a divan near a roaring fire. Julia joined him, sitting closer than he’d expected.

  “You’ll take something to drink, of course,” Ellie said, sitting down herself and lifting a teacup from a table near her. She tucked her legs up under herself on the couch. Chapel saw she wasn’t wearing any shoes, and that there were holes in the toes of her pantyhose.

  “Tea would be . . . lovely,” Chapel said.

  Ellie snorted in derision. “At this hour? It’s whiskey or nothing. Now tell me—exactly—why you are here.”

  She fixed Chapel with eyes that could have bored through steel plate. Even if he hadn’t known, he would have guessed right away she’d been a schoolteacher once.

  “Well,” Chapel said, “I wanted to make sure you were safe, and—”

  “ ‘Rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed,’ ” Ellie said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s an old phrase from The Devil and Daniel Webster. It means I’m just fine. There’s been no trouble and I’ll have Julius to protect me if need be.”

  “I’m sure he’s loyal, but—”

  “Then there’s the squad of plainclothes policemen sitting in a car out front, where they’ve been for nearly two days now,” Ellie added. “I must remember to send Julius down with some sandwiches and a thermos of coffee later. Cold duty this time of year, and this is a cold year even for Chicago.” She clucked her tongue. “Captain Chapel, I’m old. I know I’m old. I do not believe I am yet an old fool. I know the danger I’m facing. I also know you wouldn’t be here, sitting and chatting with me, just to be cordial. I take you for a man with far better things to do than comfort spinsters. So why don’t you ask the question that you’ve been holding on the back of your tongue since you walked in the door?”

  “All right,” Chapel said. “I need you to tell me everything you know about the chimeras, and Camp Putnam.”

  In his ear Angel sounded very worried. “Chapel, sweetie, she’s not necessarily cleared to talk about—”

  He pulled the hands-free set out of his ear. When his phone began to ring in his pocket, he switched it to vibrate. “Excuse me,” he said.

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: APRIL 13, T+39:53

  “Hee. Ha heh. Ha.”

  Tyrone Jameson had been a trauma nurse for twenty-two years. He’d seen his share of horrors in that time, working in the ER at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. He’d seen people come through the doors who looked like they were chopped in pieces—and who had eventually walked out again under their own power. He’d seen people gone out of their mind on drugs take gunshot wounds to the face and not even feel it.

  This asshole took the cake.

  “Ha. Heh . . . ha,” the man said. He swung his injured foot off the bed and put it down on the floor. Put his weight on it.

  The man screamed—and laughed at the same time.

  “Jesus, buddy, just—just lie down for me, okay? Will you do that for me?” Tyrone asked, his hands reaching to grab the guy’s shoulders and push him back down onto the bed.

  The look the patient gave him made Tyrone’s blood turn to icy slush.

  “Ha.”

  The jerk had lost two toes. The front half of his foot looked like hamburger when he came in. Now it was encased in a hard cast and a metal brace just to keep the foot from falling off. And he was putting weight on it.

  And laughing about it.

  “Hee hee ho,” the man said, standing up on wobbly legs. He grabbed for his shirt, which was hanging on a chair next to the bed.

  “Look, I can see in your face, you think you’re some kind of badass tough guy,” Tyrone said, not sure what to do. He should call for security, get some orderlies in here and a doctor to sedate the man. But he was scared. He was honestly scared of what his patient would do to him. “But if you try to walk out of here, you’re going to undo all the good the surgeon did. You’re going to wreck that foot permanently.”

  He could only watch as the man got dressed, one painful button at a
time. He never stopped laughing.

  As he headed for the door, clearly intending to check himself out against medical advice, Tyrone just shook his head. “You need to lie down, buddy. You need to spend the next six weeks in that bed. Or you’re doing yourself a real disservice.”

  “Ha. Hee. Can’t wait,” the patient said. He turned around to give Tyrone a nasty look. “I’ve got a body to find, and burn. And then I’ve got to kill a bunch of people. Ha. Hee ha hee. It’s going to be a full day.”

  Tyrone shook his head. “No, seriously. Seriously—”

  The man’s smile was worse than his laugh. It was the kind of smile you would expect to find on a corpse.

  “Doesn’t it hurt?” Tyrone asked, because he couldn’t find any other words.

  “Hee ha ha ha! Like you can’t imagine,” the patient admitted. “Now. Where—hee ha hee—do I go to find a taxi out of here?”

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: APRIL 13, T+40:07

  “The chimeras. Well,” Ellie said, “that is quite an interesting thing to be asking about. You do understand I’m absolutely forbidden to speak of that with anyone? I signed more than one nondisclosure agreement.”

  “I wouldn’t ask if the need wasn’t great,” Chapel told her.

  “I have no doubt,” Ellie said. “And I’m sure you know more about security clearances and needs to know and the like than I do. One hates to break the law, though. You’re in some kind of trouble, Captain, I can see it in your eyes.”

  Julia glanced over at him in surprise.

  “I’m beginning to think so, ma’am. I’m beginning to think my own people are using me as a pawn in a game I can’t see yet. And since those same people don’t seem to want me to talk to you about this, I’m thinking I definitely need to know whatever information you have. I understand your reluctance, but I have to insist.”

  “Hmm,” Ellie said, watching him closely.

  “There are lives at stake,” Chapel tried.

  “Of course,” Ellie said. “There always are.”

  Chapel saw in her eyes that she was waiting for him to say the right words. She wanted to talk to him, but she wasn’t going to give up what she had for free. He took a deep breath. He was making a big leap of faith, he knew. But he needed this information. “The chimeras are loose. They’ve left their camp and are at large, with a list of people they want to kill. Your name is on that list. Julia—Dr. Taggart here—wasn’t on that list, but they tried to kill her anyway.”

  “They are quite dangerous, yes,” Ellie said, still giving nothing away.

  “Not just them. Somebody helped them escape.”

  “Ah,” Ellie said, leaning forward. “Now that’s interesting.”

  Chapel nodded. “I intend to find out who it was. And make sure they’re punished,” he told her. “Somebody is using the chimeras, somebody has turned them into his personal death squad. I won’t let him get away with it.”

  She smiled, and he knew he’d won her over. She sat back and looked up at the ceiling as if gathering her thoughts. “Have you met any of the chimeras? Ian, perhaps?”

  “Not Ian. Malcolm and another one, who I’m told was named Brody,” Chapel said.

  “Oh, my. Oh, my my. The look on your face tells me something,” Ellie said, leaning back on the couch. She took a deep sip from her teacup full of whiskey. “That’s the look of a soldier. Are they . . . ah?”

  “Yes,” Chapel said.

  “At least they’re at peace, then. For once in their lives.” Ellie sighed deeply. “I was their teacher. I disciplined them when need arose, and I daresay I was stricter than they would have liked. But I did care for them. You can’t not love your students, even the stupid ones.”

  Julia gasped in shock.

  “Oh, young lady, did you think a teacher wasn’t allowed to call someone ‘stupid’? Part of our job is to evaluate them, you know. And there were a few of the boys who were stupid, quite as dumb as the proverbial rocks. Others were brilliant. They all possessed what we used to refer to as animal cunning.”

  “You were a teacher with UNESCO, weren’t you?” Chapel asked, prodding her to go on.

  “Oh, yes, back in the eighties, back when I thought I could still save the world by teaching it not to end sentences in prepositions. I was rather more idealistic back then. I specialized in children with developmental and emotional issues. That was why the Defense Department wanted to hire me. That and my security clearance.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chapel said. “You worked for the DoD? I thought the chimeras were a CIA project.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that. I know the man who recruited me was wearing a uniform, that’s all.”

  Chapel nodded. No need to jump to conclusions. “So the DoD approached you about a teaching assignment. When was this?”

  “Nineteen ninety,” Ellie said.

  “So they would have been pretty young,” Chapel said. “Did anyone ever tell you why they were created—or why they were detained?”

  “Absolutely not. Before you ask, yes, I did wonder. I burned with curiosity about that for a long time, but when you ask the same question a hundred times and are routinely told you don’t need to know the answer, you eventually give in and stop asking. I’m sure you can understand that.”

  “Yeah,” Chapel said. “Yeah, I can.”

  “Captain, the word ‘yeah’ does not belong in the English language. The word you want to use is ‘yes.’ As in, ‘yes, ma’am.’ ”

  Chapel felt himself blush. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Ellie frowned and picked up her teacup again. “I think this will be a very long night if I make you guess which questions to ask and then tell you what I think you should know. Why don’t I just go through the story as I remember it?”

  “All right,” Chapel said.

  Ellie knocked back her cup in one gulp and began.

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: APRIL 13, T+40:12

  “It was 1990 when they first approached me. A captain of the navy whose name I don’t remember—I never saw him again—came to my school on Roosevelt Island in New York. He asked if I had any experience administering intelligence tests, specifically culture-neutral IQ tests. I explained that I had been doing just such a thing for more than ten years. I asked why he wanted to know, but of course he didn’t answer. A few months later, during my summer break, I was asked to come up to the Catskills for a weekend and to bring anything I needed to administer such a test to a group of two hundred children, all of them four years old, all of them boys. In exchange I would be paid handsomely for my time, but I had to agree not to tell anyone where I was going or why.

  “Back then I was just a little older than you are now. Still young enough to think an adventure sounded fun, rather than exhausting. So I went. I was certainly not expecting what I saw. Camp Putnam was about a hundred acres of ground enclosed by an electric fence. There were guard towers and quite a number of soldiers. Inside the fence were the boys. They were adorable, and even when I noticed what was so strange about their eyes, I couldn’t help but feel they were the healthiest, most curious bunch of four-year-olds I’d ever met. I’m sure I asked a thousand questions that day, but I did not receive any answers, as you can imagine.

  “I did the job I’d been brought in for, administering the tests. Julia, dear, your parents were really quite interested in the results. They kept asking me if I would stay and tabulate the results then and there. They offered me more money. It was summertime, w
hen every teacher needs more money, so I did as they asked. As it turned out, I ended up staying at the camp for eight more years.

  “The boys were incredibly healthy and most of them had quite high IQs. They never seemed to get sick, and when they fell out of trees or skinned their elbows, they healed with astonishing speed. The soldiers played with them and treated them very well—at that time—but nobody, no one at all had considered they needed to be educated. In the end I had to volunteer to be their teacher. The prospect of these boys growing up in that camp, unable to read, unable to do basic math, was just startling to me. I was under the impression, you see, that they were orphans or something. That they were being raised there by the military but that when they were old enough they would go forth into the world, that they would get jobs and marry and have happy lives.

  “I sometimes think your father, Julia, hired me on simply because it was easier to do that than to disillusion me.

  “In many ways that was an idyllic time and I was quite happy. The Catskills are a beautiful place, and I fell in love with country living. In the summer I would hold class in a field of wildflowers deep in the camp. In the winter we would all crowd into a cozy little schoolhouse, the boys wrapped up in blankets around woodstoves. Beyond that—I was electrified. It was an incredible opportunity for someone like me. There were no televisions in Camp Putnam. No radios or newspapers. I could teach these boys to become men, to become upstanding gentlemen without any of the distractions or temptations of modern life. I imagined the papers I could write based on my observations, the awards and grants I could win with the data I collected. I will admit I was not above the scientific impulse that drove people like Taggart and Bryant.

  “That changed, though, in 1993. That was the year of the first death.

  “The boys had always fought among themselves. They were quick of temper, though at the time we thought that was just a product of their environment. Boys will be boys, we said. They squabbled over any little thing that one of them had and the others lacked. If a guard gave one of them a candy bar, we knew it would end in a fistfight as one of the other boys decided it by rights belonged to him.