Chimera

by David Wellington

  IN TRANSIT: APRIL 14, T+59:10

  Chapel holstered his gun and closed his eyes, trying to clear his head. His ears rang with the noise of his own gunshots. He could hear the sirens of Young’s cruiser better now.

  Slowly he opened his eyes. He was looking down at his feet. He was standing in a patch of dry, dusty weeds in the median strip. Quinn was nearby. Covered in blood.

  “Nobody touch him,” Chapel called out. “Stay away from the blood, especially.”

  He could hear his own voice a little better, now. That was good.

  Without even thinking about it he moved his good hand to his side. He could feel the wetness there. He lifted up his jacket and saw his whole side slick with blood.

  Not so good.

  Quinn had shot him. Chapel couldn’t tell if it was a flesh wound or if the bullet had pierced his abdominal cavity. There was an awful lot of blood. His blood. Quinn’s blood. His head started to spin again.

  You hurtin’? Top asked him. In his head, that voice was just in his head, he forced himself to remember that. You feelin’ the burn? You know what that means.

  “Means I’m still alive,” Chapel said, because they’d been through this so many times it was like a litany. Every time Chapel flagged or slowed down during their workout sessions, every time he wanted to take a break, Top would say the same thing.

  And if you’re still livin’—

  “Then there’s still work to do,” Chapel said, out loud.

  He opened his eyes again. He didn’t remember closing them. He kept them open, looked around himself.

  The security guards were standing in a circle around him, around him and Quinn’s body. Some of them looked shocked. Maybe they’d never seen a man’s head blown off before. Maybe they just couldn’t believe Chapel was still standing.

  One of them was holding a walkie-talkie. It squawked and Chapel heard something, heard Reinhard’s voice come through, though he couldn’t make out the words.

  Reinhard—who was in the limo with Judge Hayes. Reinhard—who maybe wasn’t quite as trustworthy as the judge thought.

  “Out of my way,” Chapel said, as he ran through the circle of black suits. They didn’t try to stop him. He got back up on the asphalt, started running as his feet hit solid highway pavement. The limo was still sitting there, across the lanes. It hadn’t moved at all. Chapel ran up to the back door, tried the handle. It was locked at least.

  “Your Honor,” Chapel shouted. “We need to move you out of here now. The assassin might have had backup.” That wasn’t how the chimeras normally worked, but this kill was different. The judge had been singled out by the Voice. It was possible the Voice had a contingency plan. “Your Honor?”

  The door lock clicked open. Chapel grabbed the handle and pulled at the door. Inside the limo it was dark and cool, and Chapel saw two men, Reinhard and Hayes. He leaned inside the door, blinked as his eyes tried to adjust to the darkness inside.

  “Well done, Captain,” Hayes said. “Get in.”

  “Your Honor, it isn’t safe here,” Chapel said, stepping inside the limo. He plopped down on a leather seat and wondered why he hadn’t thought about sitting down before. It felt so good, so good to get off his feet. “I, uh—I need to—”

  “Relax,” Hayes said. Reinhard rapped on the partition between them and the driver. Chapel felt the limo’s engine rumble to life and felt them moving. “Relax. It’s all over, and you did exceedingly well.”

  Hayes reached inside his jacket and pulled something out.

  It was a pistol.

  He shot Chapel twice in the chest.

  DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, COLORADO: APRIL 14, T+59:17

  “Julia,” Angel said.

  “I’m here,” Julia said. “I’m just . . . still trying to understand what you told me. It’s a lot to take in.”

  “I know,” the operator told her. “But something’s happened. There’s no time to talk about Marcia Kennedy right now. Chapel—”

  Julia’s body froze. In an instant she felt like a solid block of ice. “Is he—?”

  “He’s in trouble. He’s moving north toward Boulder. I’ve been tracking him by satellite, watching over him as best I could, but someone up there has been jamming my signal. I’m sure of it now. They’re actively jamming me. Or they were.”

  “What? I don’t understand. They stopped jamming you?”

  “I have no way of telling. He’s in a car moving north. Someone just threw his phone and his hands-free set out of the window.”

  “Do you think he’s . . . still alive?”

  Chapel had known. He’d known he was walking into a trap. A setup. He’d expected to die here in Denver. He’d gone anyway. Julia had been doing her best not to think about it. Now she felt like she might throw up.

  “Normally I can track his pulse and his blood pressure through sensors in his artificial arm, but right now I’m not getting any readings. They could be jamming my signal still, or—”

  “Angel!” Julia interrupted. “Just tell me. Do you think he’s dead?” she forced herself to ask.

  It was a long time before Angel answered her.

  “I don’t know,” she said, finally.

  PART FOUR

  WASHINGTON, D.C.: APRIL 14, T+60:04

  Rupert Hollingshead had always liked the Jefferson Memorial best of Washington’s many landmarks. It was far enough from the Mall that the tourist crowds were always thinner there. In spring it was a wonderful place to enjoy the cherry blossoms. He’d always been a devotee of Jefferson the man, as well, and it was good to sit in the midst of all that neoclassical marble and look up at the man’s wise bronze face and imagine what he would have done in a given situation.

  After today, though, he imagined he would feel differently about the place. He would remember it as where he’d been forced to concede defeat.

  Tom Banks was waiting for him when he arrived. The CIA director looked pleased with himself, of course. No matter what kind of horror show this had become.

  “Your man failed,” Banks said, with barely disguised glee. “He’s dead, dead, dead.”

  “He got three of the four,” Hollingshead said, when the two of them were close enough that they could speak without being overheard. “Really, all in all a good show.”

  “For a cripple, sure,” Banks said, with a chuckle. “Rupert, old boy, old chum, old pal. You do know how to pick ’em.”

  Hollingshead fumed in silence.

  “So go ahead. Say the words,” Banks insisted.

  “Really? Here, and now? Is that proper protocol?”

  “Maybe not. But for my personal satisfaction I’ve got to hear it from your lips,” Banks insisted.

  Very well.

  “I, Rupert Hollingshead, do affirm that as of this moment the CIA should have full jurisdiction over all secret projects resulting from or evolving from Project Darling Green. The Central Intelligence Agency shall be fully responsible for all further activity, oversight, and secrecy concerning said projects and the Defense Intelligence Agency will have no access to any work product or intelligence product resulting therefrom or associated therewith without the CIA’s prior approval and knowledge. There. Is that enough? Or must I sign something in blood?”

  Banks grinned like a feral cat. “I’ve been waiting years for this, Rupert. This project of yours should never have happened in the first place. No sane mind could have approved it, and keeping it going this long was utter stupidity. And now I get to clean up after you.”

  “You don’t seem very put out,�
� Hollingshead observed, “for a man whose workload has just increased.”

  “Because it gives me a chance to do something else I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Hang you out to dry. When the president hears about what you did—what you signed off on—he’s going to demote you down to ensign at the very least. He’ll be fucking pissed, to be blunt about it. And you and your stupid bow ties will never darken my doorstep again.”

  “All of this. All of this, because you hate me,” Hollingshead said, shaking his head. “Because our two agencies don’t get along. All the deaths, all the misery—”

  “Spare me, you old fuck,” Banks said. He turned on his heel and walked away, then. He didn’t even bother with the traditional handshake. Hollingshead watched him go.

  Then he turned and with a sigh settled his bulk onto a marble bench where he could look on Jefferson’s face. Maybe for the last time.

  He took his cellular phone from his pocket and put it to his ear.

  “It’s done,” he said.

  Angel’s voice on the other end sounded downcast. Perhaps she’d come to have high hopes for Chapel as well. “He just took over? Just like that?”

  “Bought Camp Putnam for a song, yes,” Hollingshead replied. “No questions asked. He seemed anxious to get on with things.” The ghost of a smile touched his lips. “It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for him. He has no idea what he’s just inherited.”

  “Director Hollingshead? I’m not sure I understand,” Angel said.

  “Give it time.” Hollingshead ended the call.

  BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 14, T+64:54

  There’s two kinds of people who get to just lie in bed all day, Top said. Babies and cripples. Babies are cute, so they get away with it. Cripples ain’t cute.

  “I can’t open my eyes, Top.”

  You want to be a cripple, that’s fine. Nobody expects anything from a cripple. They just lie there, being a drain on everybody else’s hard work. But that’s fine. Because you’re a war hero, right? You earned the right to do nothin’ all day but feel sorry for yourself. You made that sacrifice. Don’t matter you got two perfectly good legs. You’re all depressed. You’re traumatized. So you’re crippled in the head.

  “I got shot. I got shot three times,” Chapel told him.

  He did not know if he was speaking out loud.

  Darkness surrounded him. Darkness filled his body, an aching kind of darkness he couldn’t understand. He desperately needed to go to the bathroom.

  A man whose body’s crippled, sure, people can look at that and pity him. They can feel sorry for him. A man who’s crippled in the head, people can’t see that. They don’t understand it. Now you and me, we both know about trauma. We both know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night and be back there, back in the mud and the fire and hearing the screams. We understand that. Nobody else ever will. They’ll see you lyin’ in this bed, with two perfectly good legs, and they’ll say, he’s just lazy. He’s just milking it. Our tax dollars are payin’ for him to sleep all day and eat Jell-O.

  Chapel was lying in a pool of something wet. Had he soiled himself? The shame of it was too much to bear. He wanted to just curl up and go back to sleep. He wanted to sleep forever. He had a feeling that was an attainable goal.

  Open your damn eyes when I talk to you, boy.

  “Top,” Chapel said, the start of a protest he didn’t know how to finish. He tried to open his eyes, tried to obey orders. It was so hard, though. His eyelids felt like they had been cemented shut. “Top . . .”

  I’m gonna keep yellin’ at you. I’m not gonna stop. Because I’m no cripple. I got one arm, one leg, and one eye, but I refuse to be a cripple. Cripples don’t work no more. I still got work to do, and you’re it.

  “I’m trying, Top.”

  I know you are. But my boys don’t accept that just tryin’ is enough. My boys—and don’t you dare forget you are one of my boys now—my boys only accept victory. They only accept one hundred percent success. How’s those eyes comin’ along? They open yet?

  It took every ounce of his strength. It was like trying to rip a phone book in half. But Chapel opened his eyes.

  He couldn’t see much, just blurry shapes and shadows. The light hurt when it hit the back of his eye sockets. It felt like each individual beam of light was drilling into his skull. But his eyes were open.

  Some of the blurry shapes were moving. They moved around him, bent over him. They were people, looking down at him.

  “Jesus,” someone said. “He’s awake!”

  “How the hell is he still alive?” someone else asked. “He must have lost a gallon of blood already.”

  “He can’t last much longer,” the first voice said, though it didn’t sound sure.

  “Get Reinhard. If we have to kill him ourselves, Reinhard will know how.”

  BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 14, T+65:12

  Chapel was lying on a cement floor in a pool of his own blood. It ran down his side, under his legs, and into a drain in the floor. He could hear it dripping away. He could feel it oozing out of his gunshot wound.

  His shirt was off. He could look down and see the wound, caked in gore. He had two smaller wounds in his chest, just tiny pinpricks.

  His artificial arm had been removed. It lay on a table on the far side of the room. The silicone skin had been completely cut off, revealing the complex assemblage of pistons and actuators underneath.

  His good arm was handcuffed to a pipe that ran along the wall behind him. The cuff around his wrist was loose enough that it didn’t cut off the circulation to his good hand, but not so loose he could slip out of it. He wasn’t going anywhere, even if he did feel strong enough to stand up. Which he didn’t.

  Those were all facts.

  As for anything else, all he had were suppositions and theories.

  The judge had shot him twice in the chest—that must have been where the pinpricks came from. The judge must have hit him with a tranquilizer gun. Chapel remembered Jeremy Funt’s story of how Malcolm was recaptured after his escape. William Taggart had taken him down with a tranquilizer gun. Most likely, Chapel thought, the judge had been given such an unusual weapon in case he needed to use it against Quinn. The judge would have known about the unpredictable nature of chimeras and been armed accordingly. The fact he hadn’t been given a high-powered revolver instead meant that the judge had wanted to make sure he kept Quinn alive—at least long enough to serve his intended purpose.

  So the judge had known about Quinn’s presence in his security detail. He’d known everything.

  The wound in Chapel’s side was serious. It would eventually cause him to bleed out. It was only a flesh wound, though—Quinn’s bullet had cut through his skin and muscle but failed to penetrate his abdominal cavity. If it had hit any major organs, Chapel would already be dead. He’d gotten off pretty easy, actually. If the wound had been properly treated and bandaged, he would be on his feet and ready for action even now.

  No one had treated it or bandaged it in any way. He’d been handcuffed in this little room and left to bleed.

  There were four men in the little room with him. Security guards in black suits. They wore their sunglasses again—apparently they were done with following Chapel’s orders. When he begged them for help, for a bandage, for water, they didn’t even glance in his direction. Two of them were playing cards. The other one just stared out the room’s sole window.

  Chapel had to fight constantly to stay conscious. He did not know if he was always successful—he might have blacked out once or twice by the time Reinhard came into the little room and checked on him.

  The head of the judge’s security detail poked and prodded at the wound in Chapel’s side, reopening the crust of blood there. Chapel could feel fresh blood leak from the wound.

  “Where’s the judge?” Chapel asked, not expecting any kind o
f answer.

  Reinhard surprised him. “He’s in Boulder, at a press conference. Covered in blood—your blood. But otherwise fine.”

  “Press conference?”

  “Earlier today, the judge was attacked by a mysterious assassin, didn’t you know that? Hundreds of people on the highway saw it. If it wasn’t for a brave war hero who was guarding him, the judge would have been killed.”

  Chapel forced words out of his dry throat. “Awful shame, though, that the war hero who took the bullet for the judge died before they could get him to a hospital.”

  Reinhard nodded, looking impressed. “You’ve figured most of this out, haven’t you?”

  Chapel took a deep breath before saying anything more. “This was all a false flag operation,” he said.

  “Yeah?” Reinhard asked.

  “The judge is up against a tough confirmation hearing in the Senate because he’s supposed to be soft on terrorism. An assassination attempt by some domestic terrorist group would give him a great platform to wave the flag around and talk tough, make himself look bloodthirsty. But you and I know better. We know this whole thing was a setup. But you can be trusted not to talk. As for me, the judge doesn’t know what I would do. So he’s going to make sure I don’t ruin this for him. You can’t kill me yourself, though. That would look wrong when they did the autopsy. So you’re going to let me bleed to death, then turn my body over to the local coroner. Nobody will think to look for traces of tranquilizer in my blood, because there won’t be enough blood left to test. The cause of death will be obvious so no uncomfortable questions will be asked.”

  Reinhard laughed. “You’re smarter than we thought. When you just walked into this, we kind of thought you were an idiot.”

  Chapel tried to shrug. Hard to do with only one shoulder, and that arm handcuffed. “No. Not an idiot. Just predictable. It was my job to track down the chimeras. I would go wherever they did.” He rested for a while before speaking again. “Tell me one thing. Are you working for Banks? Or for Hollingshead? Which of them is the Voice that gives the chimeras their instructions?”