Chimera

by David Wellington

  It had come out of nowhere. Chapel should have expected it, though—he knew what the chimeras were like. They were implacable killing machines. He raised his pistol to point right at Samuel’s face—

  —but before he could fire, Samuel had smacked the flashlight out of Julia’s hand and dashed into the shadows. Chapel tried to track him, sure he would flank them and attack where they weren’t expecting him. He swung around wildly, pointing his weapon into every corner of the room, trying to cover all angles while Julia groped around on the floor for the light.

  By the time she had it, Samuel was gone.

  He’d simply vanished without a trace.

  “It’s broken,” Julia said.

  Chapel turned to look at her. She was holding up the flashlight and flicking its switch back and forth. “It’s broken,” she said again.

  Chapel wondered how they would find their way back to the gap in the fence without it—but then he realized he could see her face, even in the darkened church. A little pink light lit up her cheek. It made him think of the sunset on Stone Mountain, the day they’d made love.

  He turned around and looked at the door of the church. Its frame glowed with the same pink light. He staggered outside, tripping on debris, and saw a haze of light over the tops of the skeletal trees.

  He’d been so wrapped up in Samuel’s story that he hadn’t noticed the sun coming up. It was dawn light streaming in, dawn light he’d seen.

  Which meant he had a major problem on his hands.

  CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+48:20

  “Samuel!” Julia called. “Samuel! Come back!”

  Chapel reached for her arm. “Julia, you have to let him go.”

  “He needs help,” she told him. “Medical help. Or are you going to tell me he’s a chimera and he doesn’t deserve it? Because one of them killed my mother?”

  “I’m going to tell you we’re screwed. The sun is up.”

  “It tends to do that this time in the morning,” she told him. She looked angry, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t angry with him. He guessed she was angry at her parents, who had created Camp Putnam and populated it with sad monsters. So angry she couldn’t help but express it, and he happened to be standing nearby.

  “Listen, we’ll come back for him, I promise. But there are people out there who need to be saved right now.” Like Franklin Hayes. Chapel still didn’t know why Hayes was on the kill list. But it sounded like he’d been singled out for special consideration. Banks and Hollingshead had both told Chapel that Hayes was the most important target on the list; he’d assumed they just thought that because he was politically connected. It looked like the Voice—and the chimeras—had their own reasons to hate him.

  Chapel glanced at the sky again. “We need to get out of here now. Once the sun is up, sneaking past that guard will become impossible. We barely made it in the pitch dark. And if he catches us—”

  “I see your point,” she said.

  Together they raced for the trees. Finding their way back wasn’t going to be easy—they had wandered quite a ways in the dark, just following the forest paths, because they hadn’t known what they were looking for. They’d had a working flashlight, too. Even with dawn coming up, the trees screened out most of the light and it was still almost midnight dark under their groping branches.

  Chapel headed southeast, his best guess at where the gap in the fence lay. He knew there was almost no chance of reaching the exit before the sun was fully up, but he had to try. Any amount of cover could make a difference. Every beam of light that hit the gap would make it harder to escape unnoticed.

  The path wound and snaked about, and he cursed every time they had to double back because the trees were just too thick to pass. Growing up he’d spent some time in Florida’s swamps and he knew all about undergrowth and how it could tangle you up. He knew forests like this and he knew they were death traps—even if this one didn’t have any alligators in it, or sucking bogs so deep you could fall in and never be found. This forest had its own dangers.

  He tried not to think about that. He tried to keep one eye on his feet, watching for exposed tree roots or piles of leaf litter that could hide all kinds of obstacles. But the forest just wasn’t built for running.

  “There,” Julia said, finally. She was out of breath, but she grabbed his arm with one hand and pointed with the other. “That shack. I remember it.”

  Chapel could see why. It was a collapsed hovel like all the others they’d seen, maybe one of the places the chimeras had retreated to when Ian told them to split up. Only one wall remained intact, the roof having collapsed and taken the other walls with it. But the intact wall was decorated with hundreds of tiny skulls. They looked like fox skulls to Chapel.

  “My God, it’s even creepier in daylight,” she said.

  Chapel grunted in frustration. He looked up and saw the sun had fully risen. It was too late to try to just sneak out.

  Even though they were so close to the gap in the fence. “That was the first shack we saw when we came in, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Julia said. “The fence is just a little ways over there.” She pointed at a stand of woods that looked like every other group of trees.

  “It is?” Chapel asked. “How can you know that?”

  “We came north by northwest when we entered. We’d gone less than a quarter mile when we saw this place.”

  Chapel could only stare at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “How could you know that?”

  She just stood there for a while catching her breath. “Girl Scouts,” she told him. “Orienteering award.”

  “You,” he said, “keep surprising me with just how incredible you are.”

  “Sweet,” she told him. “Now. How do we do this without getting shot?”

  Somewhere nearby someone stepped on a pile of pine needles.

  Somebody who wasn’t one of them.

  Chapel whirled around—and saw motion between two trees. It still wasn’t light enough for him to see what it was. Maybe an animal. Maybe Samuel.

  He put out one hand to signal to Julia that she should stay very still and not speak. She seemed to get the point. Chapel closed his eyes and just listened for a moment. He heard more footsteps, coming closer. Very slowly.

  “Damn,” he said, very softly. Mostly to himself. Then, much louder, “I am a federal agent. I am armed, but my weapon will remain in its holster. My companion is a civilian, and she is not armed.”

  Julia stared at him like he’d gone crazy—at least, until a few seconds later, when soldiers poured out of the trees and surrounded them.

  IN TRANSIT: APRIL 14, T+49:06

  They took away Chapel’s phone, his hands-free set, the scuffed-up phone Samuel had called the Voice, and of course, his pistol. They left him his arm, even after one of the soldiers pulled the glove off his left hand and found what lay beneath. They handcuffed him with his hands behind his back, then forced him at gunpoint through the gap in the fence and into the back of an old M35 truck—a “deuce and a half,” a two-and-a-half-ton truck of the kind the military used all over the world.

  What happened to Julia he didn’t get to see. None of the soldiers hit him or mistreated him in any way, so he could only hope they’d extended her the same courtesy.

  He did not ask any questions or speak at all except when they demanded he identify himself. He gave them his nam
e, his rank, and his serial number. They didn’t ask for anything else.

  He got a good look at their uniforms and saw they were navy—most likely they’d been drawn from the Naval Support Unit at Saratoga Springs. Sailors, then, seamen rather than soldiers. They weren’t SEALs, he could tell that much, but they were well trained and efficient. They carried M4 carbines—but not M4-A1s, which meant they probably weren’t Special Forces.

  Observing little details like that helped him keep his cool. Just like Julia had dealt with the horrors of Camp Putnam by falling back on her medical training.

  Besides, he had little else to do while he waited to find out what was going to happen to him.

  The back of the truck was cold and drafty—it lacked a hard top, instead just having a canvas cover. It smelled like grease and old boots. That was a comforting smell to Chapel—it reminded him of his early days in the army. It also made him think he wasn’t being detained by the CIA.

  That was something, anyway. He consoled himself while the truck bounced and rolled over gravel roads, carrying him away from Camp Putnam.

  In time the truck stopped and the engine was switched off. Chapel closed his eyes and listened to every sound he could hear. He heard the sailors moving around the truck, heard them click their heels as they saluted someone. He heard other vehicles moving around. And yes—there—the sound of a helicopter’s rotor powering down.

  He heard boots crunching on gravel outside the truck. Heard sailors come closer, and he knew they were coming to get him. He had no idea what to expect.

  He was unable to keep his jaw from dropping when Rupert Hollingshead jumped up into the back of the truck and stared at him with a cold and angry eye.

  NAVAL SUPPORT UNIT SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+50:21

  “Admiral,” Chapel said. “Please forgive me for not saluting.”

  Hollingshead just glared at him for a while. The DIA director was wearing an immaculate suit with a perfectly folded handkerchief in his breast pocket. His bow tie had a pattern of anchors on it, but otherwise he looked very much the civilian, just as he had the last time Chapel saw him, back at the Pentagon.

  He was carrying a stool, a folding three-legged stool that he assembled and set down next to him. Eventually he sat down on it and crossed his legs, his hands gripping one knee. He said nothing, but he kept looking at Chapel, utter disappointment on his face.

  The silence between them took on its own life. It made Chapel want to squirm. It made him want to explain himself. He did not do these things.

  Eventually it was Hollingshead who broke the silence. “The life of an officer is quite lonely, at times. You see, son, an officer can’t afford to have friends.”

  Chapel stayed at attention. He had not been put at ease.

  “An officer always has a superior to whom he must report. No friends there, I assure you. Then he has men and women under his command. A good officer will have good people—if they aren’t good people when they are assigned to him, he turns them into good people. That’s what I was taught by my commanders, anyway. He learns to respect them, their hard work, their sacrifice; these things make them special in his eyes. They make him proud, and he comes to, ah, love them, in his very special way, I suppose. But he can’t ever forget he’s responsible for them. That their actions, in a very real, very concrete way, are his actions, and so—when it becomes necessary—when he must—he has to punish them. In accord with their offenses. When they break the rules, you see.”

  When Chapel was sixteen he’d been caught, once, sneaking out of a girl’s bedroom window. The man who’d caught him was the girl’s father, who didn’t approve of her seeing Chapel. The girl’s father had been carrying a pistol at the time.

  At that particular moment, listening to Hollingshead describe the burdens of leadership, Chapel remembered that long ago summer’s night with exquisite fondness. As scared as he’d been, as ashamed, it wasn’t a patch on this.

  “I’d like you to answer some questions, Captain, just so I can sleep better tonight. So I can be content in knowing I did the right thing, here.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” Chapel said.

  “When Angel relayed to you my direct order that you were not to come to the Catskills, but to instead proceed directly to Denver, was your equipment functional? Your telephone and your—your—hands-free unit, I believe it is called?”

  “Sir, yes—”

  “Just yes or no, please.”

  Chapel bit his lip. “Yes,” he said.

  “So you did hear her correctly? The order was received without transmission errors? You understood the order and acknowledged it?”

  “Yes.”

  Hollingshead nodded. “All right. Let’s try another question. Were you at any time under the impression that Julia Taggart had a security clearance that would allow her to know—oh, anything—about your current mission?”

  “No, sir, but—”

  “Just yes or no, Captain.”

  “No.”

  Hollingshead sighed. “So when you interrogated Jeremy Funt, say, or when you spoke with Ellie Pechowski—oh, I heard everything she told you, I’ll be having words with her as well. Oh, my, yes. And let us not forget, when you infiltrated a Department of Defense secure facility with Julia at your side, were you in any way operating under the delusion that Julia had a need to know what you found?”

  Chapel supposed he deserved that. What he didn’t deserve was to be spoken to like a child. But he held his tongue. “No,” he said.

  “No. No, I don’t suppose you would have been that foolish. You were recommended to me as a man who actually understood secrecy and the importance of national security. I might ask you many more questions, son. I might sit here all day asking them. I might also have you brought up on charges of espionage and treason, which—while perhaps not the best descriptions for the very, very foolish things you’ve done—are the best words I have to describe them. You—”

  “Sir. Permission to speak candidly,” Chapel said. Interrupting Hollingshead was insubordination, but compared to espionage and treason it wasn’t much of a crime.

  “Oh, but of course, son, I’d never dream of anything else. I so very much want to hear your explanation for what you’ve done.”

  Chapel inhaled sharply. “She had no need to know, as we define that term in the intelligence community. But if anyone on earth had a right to know, it was her.”

  Hollingshead waited, a patient expression on his face, as if he expected Chapel to say more. Chapel chose not to do so.

  “Let’s put her aside for a moment,” the admiral eventually said. “We’ll also put aside the utter naiveté and silliness of your last statement.”

  Chapel bit his lip to keep from responding. The shame he felt had kept his anger under wraps until then. It had kept him from even feeling it. But there was a time to just accept that you were being chewed out, that you deserved to be called a fool. And there was a time when that stopped.

  He was getting pretty close to that moment.

  Hollingshead sighed and continued. “Let’s instead talk about how I failed you. How I made an utter mess of this thing.”

  “Sir?”

  “I said something to you just before you left the Pentagon. I told you to follow the clues. To figure out what was really going on here.”

  “Yes, sir, you did, which is exactly what I’ve been—”

  Hollingshead lifted one
hand.

  Chapel fell silent.

  “I meant, you see, and—now this is where it becomes my fault—I meant that you should figure out what the CIA wanted out of all this. Why, say, they were so anxious to handle it themselves. I don’t believe you’ve done much in that regard, other than shooting the toes off a special agent. Instead of the investigation I wished you to complete, you took it upon yourself to dig up the secrets of a very old, very moribund project that it behooves no one—no one at all, son—to know about. About which you certainly have no need to know.”

  “My orders were to catch or kill the chimeras, sir. To know how to do that I needed to know what they were,” Chapel said.

  Hollingshead’s eyes sparkled.

  Which made Chapel think he’d made a mistake.

  “Ah! Finally! We have some insight, a little window into the soul of James Chapel and why he chose to do all this. But that doesn’t make it all better. Or does it?”

  “No. Sir,” Chapel said, though it made his teeth grind.

  “No, no, because you found nothing in the camp. Because, of course, there was nothing to be found but some very old, very sad secrets. You wasted all that time, son. You wasted it for nothing.”

  Chapel opened his mouth, but then he closed it again quickly.

  Hollingshead didn’t know about Samuel. He didn’t know Samuel was still alive.

  It was probably best for Samuel that it remain that way.

  But after what Chapel had seen in Camp Putnam—after what he’d learned—he could not remain silent. He had taken a vow to serve his country. To obey his superior officers. But there were times when even that vow had to be broken.

  “You’re wrong, sir. I did find something there.”

  It was gratifying to see Hollingshead look surprised for once. The man who knew everything, the spider at the center of the web of secrets, looked like he’d been punched in the face. His eyes were very wide as he waited to hear what Chapel said next.