Chimera (10 page)

Chapel nodded. “Did she know any Greek people?
Maybe someone who would wish her harm?”

“Maybe the guy who runs the diner where she got
breakfast.”

“Cute, but not helpful, Dr. Taggart.”

She sneered at him. “I have no reason to be either,
so far. When are you going to start telling me what's going on?”

He could see in her eyes she was done answering
questions until he gave her something. He tried to think of the best way to be
evasive without sounding evasive. “The man who killed your mother had her name
and address. He also had your father's.”

She stared at him as if he'd told her he was an
alien and he'd just come from the moon. “My mother was assassinated?” she
asked.

“I know that's going to come as a shock—”

“But it's been twenty years. Why now?”

It was Chapel's turn to be surprised. “I'm not sure
I follow. What happened twenty years ago that would make your mother a target
for assassination?”

“I don't know,” she told him. “She never told me
any details. I just know that she and my father both used to work for the CIA,
back when we lived up in the Catskills.”

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:48

The Catskills. That was where the DoD
facility was located, the one where the detainees had been held. It couldn't be
a coincidence. Chapel felt like he was looking at the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,
and two of them had just fit together for the first time.

“You have no idea what they did for the CIA?”

“None,” Julia said. “They were both pretty good at
keeping their secrets. By the time I was old enough to ask—to even wonder about
what my parents did for a living—we had already moved to New York City and they
had moved on to other jobs. I may have asked about their time as spies once in a
while, but they would just tell me to mind my own business and I guess
eventually I got the point.”

Spies—well, that was unlikely. Dr. Bryant hardly
fit the profile. But the CIA wasn't just spies; it employed thousands of
civilians in all kinds of roles. All of whom were required by law never to talk
about what they did. Even mentioning they had worked for the CIA, even to their
own daughter, would be forbidden. “They actually said, ‘we used to work for the
CIA,' just like that?”

“No, of course not. Nothing like that. I only knew
about it because once a year a guy from the CIA would come to our house for
dinner. After we ate, they would send me to my room and tell me to play my music
loud so he could debrief them.”

That was standard practice for the CIA, Chapel
knew. Defectors from foreign countries and anyone who worked on projects
involving national security were debriefed on a yearly basis to make sure no
foreign spies had contacted them and they hadn't accidentally revealed sensitive
information.

“Did you ever overhear anything you weren't
supposed to?” Chapel asked.

“No, never. I was still trying to be a good kid
back then. I thought it would make them like me more. Mom and Dad were both cold
fish, and I was always trying to find some way to get their approval. I used to
look forward to the CIA guy's visits. It made me feel like my life was a little
more exciting than other kids'. He was always nice to me, too. Nicer than my
parents.”

“Angel,” Chapel said, under his breath.

“Already working on it, sugar,” the voice in his
ear said. “Give me a sec.”

Julia stared at him. More specifically, she stared
at his ear. “Oh, God,” she said. “You've got a Bluetooth. What a
nonsurprise.”

He reached toward the hands-free set nestled in his
ear, but he didn't touch it. “I need to stay connected,” he told her.

“The only people in New York who wear those things
are bankers and finance types,” she said. “People who are rich enough that
nobody dares tell them they look like douche bags. We all got pretty tired after
a while of them walking around talking to invisible people all the time. It used
to be you could tell if somebody was a crazy bum because he did that. Suddenly
you had to take that kind of behavior seriously.”

Chapel could only shrug. “Excuse me for one
second,” he told her.

“Whatever,” she said, and turned to look out her
window.

Angel eventually came back on the line. “This one
took some digging. There are a lot of sealed records here . . . Helen
Taggart née Bryant, William Taggart—they were both on somebody's payroll,
definitely, up until the mid-nineties. Tax records only show they worked for an
unspecified government agency. That's unusual—the IRS doesn't mess around. The
CIA should have been generating pay stubs and W-2 forms like anybody else.”

“Sounds like they were being paid out of a black
budget.”

“Which is pretty much a brick wall when you're
trying to follow a money trail,” Angel agreed. “I did find one thing, though,
that's going to make you so proud of me. William Taggart is still working as a
research scientist, and that means he depends on grant money that has to be
accounted for scrupulously. In 2003, he got a grant from an anonymous donor, but
the check was paid by a bank in Langley, Virginia.”

Which was where the CIA had its headquarters.

“That was some inspired detective work,
absolutely,” Chapel said. Not for the first time he uttered silent thanks that
Angel was on his side. What she'd uncovered wasn't cast-iron proof that William
Taggart had worked for the CIA, but it was pretty damning—and it was enough to
confirm what his daughter had said.

“One other thing,” Angel said, “I can definitely
confirm that a William Taggart, a Helen Taggart, and a Julia Taggart all lived
in Phoenicia, New York, until 1995. The elder Taggarts paid mortgage payments
and property taxes there, and the woman you're sitting next to was a student at
the local elementary school.”

“Now you're just showing off,” Chapel said, with a
chuckle. “I don't suppose there are any military bases in that area? Maybe a
detention facility?”

“No likely suspects yet,” Angel said, “but I'm
still looking and—”

“Hey—that's my house,” Julia said, rapping on the
Plexiglas partition between them and the cab's driver. “Slow down. You can let
me off at the corner.”

“Hold on, Angel,” Chapel said. Julia was reaching
into her purse, but he put out a hand to stop her. “This is on me,” he told
her.

“Fine.” She closed her purse and reached for the
door handle.

“I still have some more questions,” Chapel said,
before she could get out of the cab. “If you'll just give me a little more of
your time—”

“I don't think so,” she told him. “You're
definitely not coming inside, and I have to start planning my mother's funeral.”
Her face fell. Maybe she had been able to put aside her grief while she was
talking to him, but he could see it had only been delayed. “It's bad enough
she's dead. I didn't need any of this. I really didn't—”

She stopped in midsentence. She was staring through
the window of the cab, looking up at her house—a modest two-story building not
unlike the one where her mother had lived.

“What's wrong?” he asked. “Beyond the obvious?”

“Captain Chapel,” she said. “I didn't leave the
lights on when I left this morning.”

He leaned across her to look up at the house. There
were definitely lights on in the second-floor windows. As he watched, someone
walked past the window, someone big and definitely male.

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:59

“Dr. Taggart,” Chapel said, “give me your
house keys, and stay in this cab no matter what happens.”

Her eyes searched his face. She wasn't stupid. She
knew this couldn't be a coincidence. Still, she clearly had her doubts.

“I am not kidding,” he told her.

She nodded once and reached in her purse to fish
out her keys. She slapped them into his outstretched right hand.

He tapped on the partition between them and the
cabbie. “Wait here. Keep the meter running—it'll be worth your while.”

The bearded cabdriver just shrugged.

Chapel stepped out onto the sidewalk. With his
artificial left hand he brushed the front of his jacket, just to remind himself
his sidearm was still there.

Approaching the house he saw right away that he
wouldn't need the keys after all. The front door had been forced open. It was a
heavy steel-core door with a Medeco lock, a lock that was supposed to be
impossible to pick. Whoever had opened the door hadn't bothered to try. He'd
simply smashed the lock mechanism, maybe with a sledgehammer. Chapel looked up
and down the street but saw nobody watching him. Breaking that door must have
made a lot of noise but nobody had come to investigate.

He shook his head and pushed past the swaying door.
There was a second door inside, a security door with an electric buzzer. That
door, too, had been smashed open and the buzzer was whining a plaintive cry.

“Up the stairs. It's the apartment on the left,”
Angel told him.

The building had been a single house once, from the
look of it, but had been subdivided at some later point to make four apartments.
Chapel headed up the stairs and found himself in a narrow corridor between two
identical doors. These were simple wooden doors, child's play to kick in. It
looked like both of them had been bashed open by force. Maybe the intruder
didn't have an Angel to tell him which door he wanted.

Chapel drew his weapon. He reached for a safety
switch before remembering there wasn't one on the P228. The handgun had an
internal safety—the first pull on the trigger was a double action, cocking the
hammer a moment before the handgun fired. That meant his first shot would be
slightly slower than expected.

It had been a long time since he'd fired a pistol
at anything but a paper target. Chapel set his jaw and pushed open Julia's
apartment door with his foot.

From behind the door he heard shattering glass. Had
the intruder jumped out a window? No—he could see blue glass fragments all over
the floor.

The apartment might have been nice, tastefully
decorated and cozy, once. He saw framed pictures of dogs on the walls and a
bricked-in fireplace. Other than that the place was a shambles. The furniture
had been broken into sticks of wood. Books had been torn from their shelves and
thrown across the floor. Foam stuffing from ripped-up pillows and cushions
floated on the air.

The place hadn't just been ransacked. It had been
demolished.

A loud clattering, rattling noise broke his
concentration. Stainless steel cooking implements—salad tongs, spatulas, slotted
spoons—bounced and danced across the floor. The intruder must have pulled out
one of Julia's kitchen drawers and just thrown it through the opening to the
kitchen.

Careful not to trip on anything, Chapel advanced
into the room. He was still blocking the main exit, but he stayed far enough
from the kitchen entrance to not be surprised if the intruder came running
out.

He cleared his throat. Summoned up his best command
voice. “Stop where you are! You're under arrest!”

Silence filled the apartment. To one side of
Chapel, a broken lamp rolled off a table and landed in a snowdrift of old tax
forms. He managed not to jump, even as keyed up as he was.

“Step out of the kitchen. Lie down on the floor in
here with your fingers locked behind your head,” Chapel demanded.

The intruder took a step toward him. Chapel could
hear the stamping footsteps on the wooden kitchen floor. He could hear the
intruder breathing heavily, now, too. Chapel felt like his senses were coming
alive, growing stronger. He remembered this focus, this clarity, from the days
when he'd worked in the field.

“Step out of the kitchen,” he repeated. “Lie down
on the—”

The intruder didn't just emerge from the kitchen.
It was like he exploded out of it, like he was a bullet fired from a gun. Chapel
had never seen a human being move that fast—before this moment, he would have
sworn it was impossible.

He jerked the trigger of the P228. His instincts
were good, his reflexes just as sharp as they'd ever been. He was certain he'd
hit his target, that the 9 mm round had caught his target in his shoulder.

The intruder didn't slow down at all. He collided
with Chapel, knocking him over, sending them both rolling into the remains of a
couch. Chapel saw a massive fist lift in the air, the arm behind it curling as
the intruder readied a devastating blow aimed right at Chapel's head.

He managed to yank his head to one side. The fist
came down with a thunderous crack. Chapel felt splinters dig into his ear and
the side of his face. He glanced to the side and saw the intruder's fist buried
in the shattered floorboards.

Impossible,
Chapel
thought.
This is impossible—

And then strong arms grabbed him and hauled him
into the air. He kicked and struggled, because he knew how hard it was to lift a
human being who refused to let his center of gravity stay in one place. The hand
gripping his leg squeezed. Hard. Chapel felt the muscle there, honed by years of
swimming, crush and start to tear.

Then the intruder tossed Chapel into a corner of
the room and made a break for the apartment door.

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:03

Chapel picked himself up off the floor and
shook some dust off his jacket. His head swam for a minute, but he fought the
wooziness off.

No damn time to be
hurt,
he told himself. Except it sounded like Top's voice inside his
head. “That's right, Top,” he said out loud. And then he dashed for the
apartment door and down the stairs.