Chimera

by David Wellington

  Then a soft shoulder rammed into his armpit, and he smelled Julia, felt her body press up against his. She was moving, running, and she supported him as he hobbled along. They headed down the road toward an SUV parked fifty yards away, showing no lights. As they got closer he saw Chief Petty Officer Andrews standing next to the open driver’s-side door. She had a smoking flare gun in her hand.

  The rear hatch of the SUV swung open, and Julia shoved him inside, into the rear compartment. Chapel realized he could barely keep his eyes open, that he was so weak he was likely to pass out at any second.

  The hatch swung down to close him up inside the vehicle. He heard feminine voices talking in a low whisper. Heard the engine of the SUV turn over.

  Enough. He let go of consciousness and sank into darkness.

  BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+68:14

  Reinhard stared down at the puddle of blood on the floor of the toolshed. He rubbed his throat where the bastard had choked him. His hand came away stained with red, and he shook drops of semicoagulated blood from his fingers. “This is where I woke up. Just before you arrived. My men were still out in the woods, shooting at flares.”

  He shook his head. “They weren’t trained to handle that kind of Special Forces shit. They were trained to work as bodyguards for celebrities and CEOs. Not to guard against an attack by Army Rangers.”

  He bent down and looked at the set of handcuffs lying on the floor, one cuff open with the key still in the lock.

  “I’ll admit it, I wasn’t ready for this either. Maybe I should have known better. I saw what Chapel was like on the road, when he took down Quinn. But I also saw how much blood he lost. There was no way a man in that kind of condition could do what he did, not without help. You’re telling me there was nobody here. Just a stewardess and a veterinarian out in the woods.” He shook his head again. “No way. I’m telling you, there had to be a whole company of Rangers involved. Otherwise . . .”

  He didn’t want to turn around. He didn’t want to look at the man who had come to debrief him. He didn’t want to admit he’d failed. “We did our best. We followed the script, did exactly what we were told. I’ve worked for the judge a long time. I knew I had to give this my all, and I did. I honestly don’t see how we could have done any better.”

  “Ha,” his debriefer said. It was almost like a little laugh. Not that there was anything funny here.

  “Are you going to tell me I’m fired?” Reinhard asked. “Shit. I know you are. You’re here to tell me I screwed up and I’m off the payroll. Gonna lose my pension, too. I had fifteen years in that. Well, I don’t know who could have done better.”

  “Heh. Hee ha hee,” the man behind him said. “Nobody’s saying otherwise.”

  Reinhard felt his heart skip a beat. Was it possible he was going to walk out of this with a job? He knew what a mess this was. He knew how many kinds of hell the blowback would be. Was it possible?

  He started to turn around to look at the man. “So am I—”

  “Fired? Ha ha ha,” the man laughed. “No.”

  Which would have been good to hear, except the debriefer was holding a silenced pistol in his hand. And the barrel was pointed at Reinhard’s side.

  “One—ha—problem, though. The plan was, Chapel would—hee hee—die while protecting the judge. Ha hee. We were going to present his body to the coroner and—heh—say that Quinn killed him.”

  The gunshot was louder than Reinhard expected. Silencers always were. You expected a flat little cough, like when somebody fired a silenced pistol on TV. Real silencers just muffled the sound of the gunshot a little. He looked down and saw a stain of red spreading across his side. Exactly in the same place where Quinn shot Chapel.

  “See—ha—we still need a body, to make it look right,” the debriefer said. “Heh ha ho. Gotta stick to the—ha—script. That left arm’s going to have to come off, too.”

  SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+69:33

  It was a lot easier opening his eyes, this time. Chapel felt warm and comfortable, like he was waking up after a good nap in a soft bed. He felt a dozen times stronger than before. Something was jabbing him in the arm, but it was easy to ignore. He looked up and saw a stucco ceiling above him, and a light fixture that was a little too bright for comfort. So he closed his eyes again and fell back asleep.

  The pinpoint irritation in his arm woke him again, a little later. It was exactly in the crook of his right arm and it felt like a mosquito bite, maybe. He reached over with his left arm to swat it away.

  His left hand passed right through his right arm, meeting no resistance. That made him open his eyes again. He looked over to his left and saw that his arm was gone.

  Oh, yeah, he thought.

  He did not find the fact particularly distressing. He had woken up so many times before, expecting to find himself whole and intact. The first few months it had been a horrible sensation to have to wake up and remember he was an amputee. Eventually he’d gotten used to it, or at least it had stopped waking him up with the cold sweats.

  Leisurely, knowing there was no rush, he turned his head to the right.

  Chief Petty Officer Andrews was lying in the bed next to him. She looked pale and slightly disheveled, but she was smiling.

  Damn, Chapel thought. Julia’s not going to like this. And I don’t even remember getting into bed with the CPO. Or anything we might have done.

  “You’re awake,” Andrews said.

  Julia’s face appeared over Andrews’s shoulder.

  Oh, wow, Chapel thought. What exactly did I miss?

  But Julia wasn’t in the bed. She was standing next to it, leaning over Andrews. Julia wasn’t smiling. “Try not to move your arm,” she said. “If that needle comes out, it’s going to make a hell of a mess.”

  Keeping his shoulder immobile, Chapel tilted his head to look down at his arm. A needle was buried in the flesh there, a needle attached to a plastic tube full of blood. The tube ran to an IV bag, and another tube ran to a needle in Andrews’s arm.

  Andrews laid her head back on her pillow. “Type O negative,” she said. “I’m a universal donor.”

  “You lost a lot of blood,” Julia told him. “I had to give you a transfusion or you probably would have died.” She checked the blood bag and the tubes. “The CPO is going to be tired for a while, but otherwise she should be fine. You, on the other hand—”

  “Where are we?” Chapel asked. His voice sounded hoarse and reedy, but he felt good. He felt better. He wanted, suddenly, to get up and get back to work.

  “A motel room outside of Boulder,” Andrews told him. “It was the closest place that Angel felt was safe. Actually, she advised us to keep going, to get out of Colorado altogether, but Julia decided you needed to be treated immediately if you were going to make it. She started barking orders and Angel had no choice but to listen. Julia would make a great combat medic, you know.”

  “She’s fantastic,” Chapel agreed. “But Angel—”

  He stopped. He’d been about to say they couldn’t trust Angel. But he shouldn’t be able to trust Andrews, for the same reason. They both worked for Hollingshead. The man who’d sent Chapel to Denver so he could die just to make the judge look good.

  He didn’t want to speak his suspicions out loud, however. Not when it was clear that Andrews had just saved his life.

  “Angel was the brains behind this whole rescue,” Julia said. “She tracked you by satellite to that house. She guided us there.”

  Angel had made his arm scare Reinhard as well, and that had certainly helped. What did it mean? Angel had to have been in on the setup. She had steered him toward Denver just as strongly as Hollingshead and Banks.

  “What about the flares?” he asked, trying to piece things together.

  “That was her idea, too,” Andrews said. “I keep a sidearm on board the jet, in case I need to act as an impro
mptu sky marshal. But one pistol-packing CPO wouldn’t have a chance against a small army of security guards. So she told me to take the flare gun from the emergency kit on the plane and told me how to use it—where exactly to shoot the flares so it would look like a bunch of Special Forces types were storming the compound.”

  “Most of the medical equipment I’m using came from that same emergency kit,” Julia told him. “Angel told me to bring it along. There was a full suture kit in there, as well as some antibiotics and painkillers. You owe her, big time.”

  It made no sense.

  Angel had led him right to the trap and told him to walk in. Banks and Hollingshead had come up with this scheme to make the judge look good by staging an assassination. Angel must have known something of the details.

  So why, now, was she helping him? Part of the plan had been for him to die at Quinn’s hands. Hayes had presumably announced to the world that Chapel was dead. If he showed up in public now, alive and with a story to tell, it would ruin the entire plan. Angel should have been helping to kill him, not helping to save him.

  He looked over at Andrews. She was beholden to Hollingshead, certainly, but he doubted she’d known any details about the plan. The fewer people who know a secret, the easier it is to keep. That was the entire rationale behind need-to-know information. So it was highly unlikely she was his enemy.

  He would just have to trust her. “Angel betrayed me,” he said aloud. “She was told to get me to Denver no matter what it took. Because I was supposed to go there and get myself killed while fighting Quinn.”

  Neither Andrews nor Julia looked particularly shocked.

  “It was a setup, do you understand? She was in on the scheme to kill me.”

  Chapel nearly jumped when Angel answered him directly.

  Her voice came from the motel room’s telephone, which must have been set to speaker so Julia and Andrews could consult with her. She must have been listening the whole time.

  “That’s partly true,” Angel admitted. “Chapel, Hollingshead and Banks did collude in sending you to Denver. And, yes, I knew you were walking into danger and I didn’t tell you everything I knew.”

  Chapel glared over at the phone. If she was admitting that much—

  “I thought I was doing my duty. My job. I thought keeping secrets from you, and operating on a secret agenda, was important. It was a matter of national security, and even if I wanted to be honest with you, I couldn’t be. I’m sure you understand that. But then things changed,” Angel said.

  “Changed how?” Chapel demanded.

  Andrews and Julia both looked away. This was between Chapel and Angel, and they didn’t want to be part of it.

  “First, I need to tell you something.”

  Chapel grimaced. “What? You’re going to apologize?”

  “In a way. Chapel, I want to tell you something about myself. Something I’m not supposed to reveal to anyone. I was a hacker, once. Back when I was a teenager, I was pretty good with computers and I had nothing better to do than to try to hack into the Pentagon’s servers. I thought it would be funny.”

  “Why are you telling—”

  “Just listen. I was a high school kid. I didn’t know any better. It was easy, almost too easy to get in. I never saw anything important, really. I didn’t understand any of the data I found. I think it was all just payroll records. So I logged out and forgot about it. Until the next morning when a bunch of soldiers broke down my bedroom door and arrested me.

  “Long story short, I was looking at a lot of jail time because I’d been bored and fooled around where I shouldn’t. I got passed around to a lot of people, psychologists and intelligence analysts and military lawyers, all of them wanting to know how I did what I did. I tried to explain, but none of them understood. They were convinced I was a domestic terrorist, and they were talking about espionage charges. I could have gone to jail for life, Chapel. But then they took me to this one office, in the subbasement of the Pentagon. You know that office. It used to be a fallout shelter for the Joint Chiefs.”

  “You’re talking about Hollingshead’s office.”

  “Yeah,” Angel said. “Director Hollingshead was there. He was nice to me. He was the first person who’d been nice to me since I was arrested. He said I shouldn’t worry, that they knew I was just fooling around. I was so relieved! I asked if I could go, and he got really sad and told me, no, it wasn’t that easy. What he could do for me was give me a job. They would find a job that would use my particular skills. He said it would give me a sense of purpose. It would give my life some meaning.

  “And he was right. I love my job, Chapel. I love being able to make things happen and help agents in the field. I love the fact that I get to do good things.

  “But there’s one problem. Sometimes, I find out that the government isn’t always . . . good. Sometimes I learn things I wish I never had to know. And that makes me wonder where my loyalties really should be.”

  She fell silent. Chapel took a deep breath.

  “Okay,” he said. “Well, we’ve seen plenty of evidence of that lately, haven’t we? So what are you telling me, Angel?”

  “I’m trying to say I’m on your side. That I’m all yours, Chapel, from now on. No more secret agendas. No more withholding information.”

  “I’m supposed to trust this sudden change of heart?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Angel told him. She sounded like she expected him to say that in that case all was forgiven and they could go back to being best friends forever.

  “Really? And what, exactly, made you switch allegiances?”

  Angel was silent for a long moment. “I spoke to Marcia Kennedy,” she said.

  SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+70:03

  “I wasn’t supposed to talk to her, of course,” Angel said. “Director Hollingshead was quite clear about that. You weren’t supposed to continue your investigation. I wasn’t supposed to help you dig up any more secrets. But I had already called her and left a message on her voice mail, asking her if she could help. Asking if she could shed any light on why her name was on the kill list. She called me back, shortly after you were picked up at Denver International Airport. I tried to tell her that I’d made a mistake and that I didn’t have any questions for her, but she wanted to talk about it. She’d been wanting a sympathetic ear to listen to her story for more than twenty years. I couldn’t stop her once she got going, and then, I couldn’t bear to stop her. I had no right to stop her.” Angel’s voice was thick with emotion. “I recorded the call. I record all of my calls. Do you want to hear it?”

  Chapel looked around the room. Julia and CPO Andrews were both staring at him, watching his face. He couldn’t quite read their expressions. He couldn’t tell if they were judging him or just waiting to hear his reply.

  “I’m starting to think maybe I don’t,” he said, and Julia started to turn away. “Angel. Go ahead and play it anyway.”

  Angel said nothing more. She just let the recording play.

  “This is about the—the experiment. I know it is. What? No. No, I want to tell you. I need to. It started in 1984.”

  Marcia Kennedy’s voice was thin and whispery. It sounded like her mouth was dry when she spoke, like getting the words out took real effort. Even distorted by the speaker of the motel room phone, the urgency in the voice was plain.

  “Please, just—please. Please let me talk, I have to get through this in one go or I’ll start—

  “1984, like I said. I was in a hospital then, a hospital in Oregon. I was in one of my depressive phases at the time. It was a bad one. I . . . I tried to hurt myself.

  “They took me to this hospital. They pumped me full of lithium, which is the best drug they have to treat my disease. It works, I guess. It makes me feel normal again. It also makes me so thirsty I feel like I’m going to die, and it makes me gain all this weight, and . . . I don’t
like it. I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I complained about it. They took me to see a doctor I’d never met before. I thought he was going to admonish me for complaining so much, but instead he was very kind. He said he understood that the side effects of lithium were bad, but that I had to take something. He said there was something else they could try. Some new kind of drug that the army had developed.

  “I jumped at the chance. I mean, why wouldn’t I? He said it was experimental, that they weren’t sure what the side effects would be like, but I was so thirsty. I was so thirsty. I had to beg my father to sign the papers, the, the consent forms or whatever, but he did it. He looked so hopeful. He thought they were going to cure me. I just wanted to get out of that hospital so I could go home.

  “They started me on the drug right away. They said it might make me gain weight, and I might have some problems with memory. They weren’t kidding. The trial for the drug ran nine months. I don’t remember more than a handful of days in that time. I remember sitting in a day room at the hospital, playing chess with somebody. She was schizophrenic and she cheated. She cheated at chess; she would just, just make up new rules, and say I had to play by them, but they didn’t make sense. I got really frustrated and I could barely breathe. I remember looking down and there was my stomach. It was huge. I felt like I’d swallowed a bowling ball. I started to cry because I’d gotten so fat. Weight gain was one of the side effects of lithium, too. I guess I thought they must be related kinds of drugs.

  “Except this one didn’t make me thirsty. It made me nauseated. I don’t remember much of those months. But I remember always wanting to throw up. I remember my hair thinning, and my sweat smelled funny. I have little glimpses, sometimes. Little recollections. I remember the pattern of light on a wall, or I see myself in a mirror, and my skin was so clear. It had never been that clear in my life.

  “At the end of the nine months I woke up in this bed, there was blood on the sheets and I had no idea what I was doing there. The doctor, the kindly doctor was there and he held my hand. He held my hand for hours because I was crying, except I didn’t know why I was crying. I felt like something had ended. Like something had been taken away from me but I didn’t know what. He told me I wasn’t thinking straight, that the drug had unexpected side effects. One of them was that it made me hallucinate some things, except I couldn’t remember any hallucinations. He told me it had also interacted badly with my digestive system, which explained the nausea. He said that because of the drug my appendix had become inflamed and that they had to remove it. I had a scar on my stomach, this huge scar right at the bottom of my stomach, right at my bikini line. He said that was where they took out my appendix.