Chimera

by David Wellington

  “I need to borrow your phone,” he told her.

  Julia looked up at him. Her eyes were blank. “My whole life,” she said, her voice a flat monotone. “My whole life that was going on and they never told me. My parents were doing that. They were doing all of that.”

  It had finally happened—the endorphins and adrenaline were gone, and she’d fallen into the abyss of her own thoughts. Just as she’d said she expected, it had become too much for her to bear. Without another word she handed over the phone.

  Chapel dialed from the piece of paper in his pocket. “Chief Petty Officer Andrews,” he said, “I’m coming to you right now, and I have a flight plan to file. The destination is anywhere in the Catskills Mountains, in New York State.”

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA: APRIL 13, T+41:46

  On the phone, Franklin Hayes was livid. Tom Banks toyed with the idea of just hanging up on him.

  But no. The judge was too important to Banks’s plans for the future. Especially the next few days.

  “He’s headed where?” Hayes demanded.

  “The Catskills. You know what he expects to find there. Don’t make me say it, even on an encrypted line.”

  Hayes was silent for a second. “You think he’ll learn anything?”

  “It’s hard to know. My jurisdiction stops at the fence. What may still be inside there, if anything, is Hollingshead’s business. It doesn’t matter.”

  Hayes wasn’t about to be diverted from his previous ire. “Whatever. I need him here, in Denver. I need him here now.”

  Banks agreed. Chapel needed to be in Denver as soon as humanly possible. This jaunt to Camp Putnam was going to slow down a lot of plans. Not for the first time, Banks wondered how much Chapel had figured out. Whether he was starting to guess what the real game was here, and what the stakes were.

  It seemed unlikely. Chapel had proved he was tougher than nails, but he’d also made a lot of dumb mistakes—like dragging the cute veterinarian around with him. A smart operative would have left her behind.

  He couldn’t just assume Chapel was an idiot, though. And he definitely couldn’t just ring him up and tell him what to do. The one-armed asshole had to be led around like a bull with a ring in his nose. If you pulled too hard on the ring, he would just plant his feet and refuse to move. You had to be subtle about it. Make him think he was still in charge of his own destiny.

  “I’ve got to go,” Banks told Hayes. “I think I can solve our mutual problem, but it means making a very delicate phone call.”

  “To whom?” Hayes demanded.

  The judge had no need to know, but for once Banks relented. “Rupert Hollingshead. I’ve got to light a fire under his ass.” Chapel trusted his boss. Time to exploit that particular mistake.

  IN TRANSIT: APRIL 14, T+43:07

  They landed in the Catskills with no fuss. The airport there was little more than a short runway between two forested hills, a place for hobbyist pilots to park their Cessnas. It was just big enough to accommodate the jet.

  “There are some pretty rich people up here, in the middle of nowhere,” Chief Petty Officer Andrews told Chapel. “This isn’t the first G4 to land on this strip. What do you want me to do now?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Me, the pilot, this plane. Do you want us to wait here for you?”

  Chapel thought about that for a second. “What are your orders from up top?”

  Andrews studied his face for a moment before answering. Perhaps she was trying to decide what his security clearance was. “I’ve received no new orders since I picked you up in Atlanta. Though—there was one thing. I was told to watch you closely and provide an update on your psychological state.” She was being careful, he saw, choosing her words precisely. She hadn’t told him who was supposed to get that update.

  “Okay. Don’t get in trouble on my account,” he told her, knowing perfectly well she wouldn’t. If orders came in to leave him stranded in the Catskills, she would take her plane up and away on a moment’s notice. “If you don’t get any other orders, stay put. Refuel if they have the right facilities here. We might need to leave in a hurry.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” she said, and saluted him. Her way of saying she would follow her orders—wherever they came from. Reminding him, perhaps, of the chain of command.

  He returned the salute anyway, then went to wake Julia. She’d just managed to fall asleep and she was surly getting up, pushing his hands away and pulling her hair down over her eyes as if she wanted to block out the light. She didn’t say anything, though, as he led her down the stairs to the ground.

  It was cold out, though not as frigid as Chicago. What Chapel hadn’t been expecting, though, was how dark it was. There were a few lights on the airstrip’s sole building, a hangar about five hundred yards away. The jet behind them showed its own lights that blinked on its wingtips. Otherwise the world was wrapped in a thick blanket of dark cloud that only a few stars could penetrate. The moon was down, and Chapel couldn’t see more than a dozen yards in any direction.

  No one was waiting for them on the tarmac. Not a soul.

  That was a good thing, of course. It meant Chapel wasn’t about to be arrested—or worse. It meant Hollingshead wasn’t ready to reel him in, not quite yet. Maybe the admiral wanted to give him a chance to come in on his own. Or maybe he wanted to see just how far Chapel would push.

  The darkness was also a bad thing, though, because they had a ways to go yet in the middle of the night. “Angel,” he said, “what are the chances of getting some transport out here?”

  “Sorry, Captain,” the operator said in his ear. She sounded like she had better things to do. “You can turn around and get back on that plane. Follow your orders. Otherwise, you’re on your own.”

  “Understood,” Chapel said.

  Crap. He’d gotten used to Angel’s help. He’d gotten used to having cars waiting for him everywhere he went, and helicopters when the cars weren’t fast enough.

  Well, he still had his training. Army Rangers didn’t have angels sitting on their shoulders when they were dropped behind enemy lines. They were taught to improvise as necessary.

  A little parking lot sat on the far side of the hangar. Three vehicles were parked there—two compact cars and a pickup truck. Chapel glanced through a window on the side of the hangar. There was an old man sitting in there, applying daubs of paint to a canvas the size of a barn door. Chapel saw no sign of anyone else—most likely the man in the hangar was simply a night attendant, there to make sure nobody ran off with the row of private planes parked inside the cavernous hangar. Loud music came through the window, something wild and classical. The attendant probably hadn’t even heard the G4 land on his runway.

  So far so good.

  The compacts were most likely stored there for the use of people flying in for the weekend—people who lived somewhere else but wanted to be able to drive around when they got up here. The pickup probably belonged to the painter, but it was the best choice for where Chapel was headed. It would also be the easiest vehicle to acquire. The doors weren’t locked. He stuck Julia in the passenger seat—she did as she was told without complaint or acknowledgment. Then he bent down under the dashboard and pulled some wires away from the fuse box. “You can’t do this on modern cars,” he told Julia, who didn’t even look at him. He was talking to fill up the silence. “The computers in them know better. But the older models were designed to be fixed by their owners, so everythin
g’s out in the open.” He found the two wires he wanted. With his fingernails and teeth he stripped a little insulation off them, then rubbed them together until the pickup coughed to life.

  As Chapel threw the truck in gear and rolled through the open gate of the airfield, there was no sign the painter was even aware he’d just been robbed.

  PHOENICIA, NEW YORK: APRIL 13, T+44:19

  The night was impenetrably dark. The skeletal branches of trees loomed over the road on either side, blocking out even starlight. The truck’s headlights could illuminate no more than a few gray weeds sticking up through the gravel of the road. Chapel had to take it slow, consulting the GPS in his phone every time the road branched or turned.

  Occasionally they passed by an open field and the silver light of the overcast was just enough to see by. Old wooden buildings crouched on that open land, barns and farmhouses. Few of them showed any lights of their own.

  Suddenly Julia sat up straight in her seat and peered through the truck’s window, her hand on the glass.

  “I know this place,” she said, as he slowed the truck down to a crawl. “I remember this.”

  Chapel couldn’t see anything but darkness and more trees. “You sure?” he asked.

  “We’re on the road to Phoenicia,” she said. “I grew up there.”

  Chapel had forgotten that much of Julia’s youth had been spent on these back roads. Her parents had lived here, working by day at Camp Putnam where they were raising a small army of genetic misfits, coming home at night to check her homework and take out the trash. He shook his head. “What was it like?” he asked.

  She shrugged and made herself small in her seat again, withdrawing once more. For a second he thought she wouldn’t answer, that that would go beyond the bounds of their new professional relationship. Then she made a small noncommittal noise and said, “It was all right, I guess. I went skiing a lot in the winter, and in summer my friends and I would steal some beer and go tubing.”

  “Tubing?” Chapel asked.

  Julia actually smiled a little. “It’s the local sport, I guess. You get an old inner tube from a tractor tire and you throw it in the river, then you sit with your butt in the hole and your legs dangling in the water. The current takes you downriver while you lie back with the sun in your face and the water splashing you to keep you cool. The river keeps the beer cold for a long time.”

  “Sounds pretty idyllic,” he said, to keep her talking.

  “Now, yeah. When I was a teenager, I thought it was boring as hell. I used to dream about when I grew up and I could move to New York City. I was going to be a reporter, for a while, until I realized that newspapers couldn’t compete with the Internet. Then I was going to be a famous blogger.” She laughed, a welcome sound in the dark cab of the pickup. “There are some things really I miss about this place. In Phoenicia there’s a restaurant called Sweet Sue’s. They make the best pancakes in the world.”

  “I’ve had some pretty good pancakes,” Chapel told her. “Down in Florida we used to get panqueques from street vendors. They served them with fruit and honey on top.”

  “No comparison,” Julia said. He could almost hear her roll her eyes. “At Sweet Sue’s the pancakes are like half an inch thick, and lighter than air. Except they fill you up fast. I could never eat more than one of them at a sitting, but my dad would order four of them, which is the equivalent of saying you want to eat an entire birthday cake all at once. He never managed to finish and Mom would scold him for wasting perfectly good carbohydrates. Then she would pull out a pen and work out how many grams of fat he’d just eaten and how many calories he would burn if he walked all the way home.”

  “You really were raised by scientists,” Chapel said. When she didn’t respond, he nodded at the road. “You know this road? You know where it heads?”

  “Yeah—out to nowhere. There are some farms on the far side of the mountain, but from here it’s fifty miles of just trees and little creeks and crazy people.”

  Well, he couldn’t disagree. They were only a few miles from Camp Putnam.

  CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+44:37

  Chapel parked the pickup well clear of the camp. Based on Ellie’s directions the fenced-in area was surrounded on most sides by mountains and hills, but a one-lane gravel road snaked alongside a river for a while and then ended at a guardhouse very close to the perimeter. It was the best guess Chapel had for where the fence had been breached when the chimeras were released.

  He stepped out of the truck and into a chaos of stars.

  The overcast had cleared away while he drove, and now the sky was a blanket of light. He could clearly make out the gauzy trail of the Milky Way, but he had trouble figuring out the constellations because there were just too many stars up there he wasn’t used to seeing. As he watched, a meteor streaked by overhead, silently burning in a trail of fire that was gone so fast he thought maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him.

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Julia replied, coming to stand next to him. “Funny place to put something straight out of a horror movie, right?” She opened the truck’s glove compartment and rummaged around inside until she found something. She pulled it out and Chapel saw she’d found a flashlight, a big heavy Maglite of the kind security guards used. He realized he hadn’t thought of that. He hadn’t considered what it would be like tramping around in the dark woods with no light at all.

  Not for the first time, he felt lucky he had her with him.

  He inhaled deeply. He needed to focus. He had to smuggle a civilian into a compromised facility. Well, he’d been trained for this. “Okay. There shouldn’t be too many guards down there. The place is empty, now—they just need someone to keep curious people from coming in and taking a look around. We do need to be careful, though. From now on we need to be silent and keep our heads down. Just follow me, and don’t switch on that light until I tell you it’s safe.”

  She nodded to indicate she understood.

  Together they moved out, staying as low as possible. Chapel kept them under trees or near bushes when possible. He had no idea what kind of surveillance equipment the camp boasted, nor did he want to find out.

  He led Julia down the side of a hill toward the end of the road. There was enough cover to screen them but not as much as he would have liked. Anyone with night-vision goggles or—worse—active infrared would have spotted them in a second. As the minutes ticked by and no one ordered him to halt he forced himself to keep his fear at bay.

  At the end of the road stood a single sentry post, and beyond, the fence—or what was left of it.

  Twisted chain link had been pulled down and stacked in heaps by the side of the road. It looked like it had been torn out of the ground by the hands of giants. Beyond lay a wide stretch of open ground scored here and there by roughly circular patches of bare earth. That must have been where land mines had exploded—Chapel figured the patches were just the right size to have been craters before someone had filled them back in.

  Beyond the zone of tortured ground lay trees and darkness. This was definitely the way in. The only way in, since he was certain the rest of the fence remained intact.

  He saw no sign of working cameras or floodlights or machine-gun nests. All good. The one thing between Chapel and his goal was that sentry box. It was a narrow little box the size of a tollbooth. Inside sat a single soldier reading a magazine. A single lightbulb over his head provided li
ght—but it would also make it hard for the soldier to see outside, to see anyone sneaking up on him until they were lit up by the same bulb he read by.

  Sloppy, Chapel thought. The light should be outside the box, illuminating the approach of the road. Of course, the soldier had no reason to expect anyone now. Camp Putnam was empty, a forgotten relic of a history no one knew. And it was unlikely anyone would hike up here in the dark, especially at this time of year. If anyone did come up here, say a lost motorist, they would be showing headlights that the soldier would see coming from half a mile away.

  Chapel led Julia in a wide path around the box, getting as close to the remains of the fence as he could without giving away his position. A stand of trees had grown almost right up to the fence. It would give them good visual cover. When he’d picked the right spot, he hunkered down and put a hand on Julia’s shoulder, keeping her down as well.

  And then he waited.

  Julia never said a word while they waited. She didn’t fidget, except to shift her weight from one foot to the other now and then. She kept her eyes on the sentry box, just like Chapel. For someone with no military training she had an incredible amount of patience and that most important talent of a covert operator: the ability to sit still.

  Chapel knew she would eventually lose her cool, that she would have to move to alleviate cramped muscles or just to keep from falling asleep. It would happen to him, too. He had no idea how long it would take.

  In the end they got lucky.

  The soldier in the sentry box was keeping himself awake by drinking caffeinated soda. He had a big two-liter bottle of cola that he sipped at from time to time, wincing at its bite or maybe because it had gotten warm. The problem with using soda to keep yourself alert was that it was a diuretic. Less than half an hour after Chapel picked his hiding spot, the soldier was forced to answer the call of nature.