Chimera (11 page)

Chapel had gone through Special Forces training
with the Army Rangers. The Rangers were famous for always being the first boots
on the ground—wherever the army went, the Rangers were the first group sent in.
They had a reputation for moving fast and keeping their wits about them. It had
been a while since he'd used it, but conditioning like that doesn't break. He
took the stairs two at a time and put his good shoulder into the door, knocking
it wide open and spilling him into the street.

Just in time to see the back door of the cab slam
shut, and the vehicle take off down the road at high speed. He saw two people in
the backseat. One was Julia.

He was certain the other one was the intruder.

“Hell, no,” he said, and lifted his weapon, aiming
with both hands. The cab was already a hundred feet away and gaining speed,
weaving to avoid other cars. He couldn't risk firing into its cabin in case he
hit Julia by accident, so he snapped a shot at its rear right tire. The bullet
dug a narrow trench through the asphalt, barely missing by a foot.

Chapel wanted to swear. He wanted to shout in
frustration.

Instead he took off at a run. There was no way he
could catch up with the speeding cab—his legs were strong but he was only human.
He had no intention of just giving up, though.

Even if there was no hope at all.

“Chapel,” Angel said. “Chapel! Tan Lexus, just
ahead on your left!”

Chapel didn't waste time asking questions. He ran
over to the indicated car and grabbed the driver's-side door handle. It resisted
him—but then he heard a
chunk
as the door lock
opened.

He had no idea what Angel was planning. He knew how
to hot-wire a car, but it would take too long. This was pointless, it was just a
token gesture, but—

As he slid into the driver's seat, the car rumbled
to life.

“Keyless ignition,” Angel said, “tied in to one of
those always-on satellite services, so if you lose your keys you can just ask
the nice man in India to start the car for you. Or, you know, your favorite
hacker.”

Chapel pulled on his seat belt and stepped on the
gas.

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:04

Chapel jerked the wheel to the side to get
around a slow-moving bicyclist and nearly collided with a line of cars coming
the other way. He swerved back into his lane and accelerated. He could just see
the cab ahead, a block away. There was a red light between them, but he took it
at full speed, ignoring the horns that blared at him and the shouts of
pedestrians.

He had to be careful, had to avoid accidents—it was
far too easy, in the heat of the moment like this, to trade speed for safety. If
he caught the intruder but ran over six pedestrians in the process, why exactly
was he doing this?

The cabdriver didn't seem to have any such qualms.
He sideswiped a city bus and then rocketed across his lane and half up onto the
sidewalk to get around another car. The intruder must have been threatening him
to make him drive like that, Chapel thought. He must be afraid for his life.

From what Chapel had seen, he had good reason to
be.

“Is New York traffic always like this?” Chapel
asked.

“Day in, day out,” Angel told him. “There's another
traffic light up ahead—I'm going to keep it green for you, but you need to watch
out. Jaywalking is the official pastime in this city.”

“Noted,” Chapel said, palming the wheel as he
gunned around a double-parked delivery van. Up ahead in the crosswalk people
were standing in the street, inches from the cars that blasted past them going
both ways. “You can't get these people to actually wait on the sidewalks, can
you?”

“There are some things even I can't hack,” Angel
told him. “Sorry, sweetie.”

Too much traffic. Too many people. On an open
country highway Chapel could have given chase for miles. Here he was going to
kill somebody if he didn't end this, and soon. The bright yellow cab was inching
closer, but the cabbie was taking ever more serious risks. He blasted right
through a fruit cart, sending its umbrella twirling and spattering the road and
passersby with bright orange mango pulp. A woman in a business suit screamed and
threw her briefcase at the cab as it nearly took her toes off.

“I need to get close and drive him off the road,”
Chapel said.

“Hold on,” Angel told him. “Up ahead—perfect! One
lane of the road up ahead is closed for construction. There's a blue wooden
barrier and some orange netting making a temporary sidewalk. Do you see it?”

Chapel squinted at the road ahead. Yeah, the cab
was just entering a new block where the road had been dug up. Big construction
vehicles were leaning on the sidewalk and out into the street, protected from
sideswipes by a blue wooden wall. Three more feet of the road had been cordoned
off with traffic barrels and netting so people on foot could get around the
construction.

“The intersection ahead is clear . . .
now!” Angel said.

Chapel stepped on the gas and the Lexus shot
through the open space, just as the traffic light overhead turned from yellow to
red. The Lexus bounced and jumped on its suspension as he hit a trench dug
through the asphalt, but suddenly the yellow cab was dead ahead.

Chapel pulled around the cab, trying to get level
with it. He could see Julia and the intruder in the backseat. He had her in some
kind of choke hold, and he was shouting at the cabbie through the partition.

There was blood on the partition. Who the hell was
this guy?

He didn't look like the detainees Chapel had seen
in the grainy surveillance footage Hollingshead had shown him. This guy's hair
was cut short and his face was clean-shaven. Of course, that transformation
would have taken only a few minutes in a train station bathroom. Chapel was
certain this had to be one of the men he was looking for. It was just too
unlikely that this was some random criminal who had broken into Julia's
apartment the same day her mother was beaten to death.

Besides, Chapel had seen the way the man moved, the
strength in his arms. That was exactly what Hollingshead and Banks had tried to
warn him about. The detainees were stronger and faster than anyone Chapel had
ever seen.

“Angel,” Chapel said, “the owner of this
Lexus—how's his insurance?”

“
She
's got a
five-hundred-dollar deductible,” Angel told him.

“Send her a check,” he said, and he yanked the
steering wheel over to the side, slamming the nose of the Lexus right into the
left rear wheel of the cab.

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:10

Metal screeched and safety glass shattered.
The steering wheel jumped in Chapel's hands like a wild horse trying to break
free of a rider, and the car under him skidded and floated over the asphalt, all
control lost. The cab spun around and broke through the blue wooden barrier,
sending broken scraps of wood flying in the air. Orange netting wrapped around
the windshield of the Lexus, obscuring Chapel's view. A moment later the air bag
exploded in his face and he couldn't see anything.

“The cab has stopped moving,” Angel told him.

The air bag deflated almost instantly, and Chapel
already had his seat belt off. He shoved the door of the Lexus open and ducked
out, keeping his head low. He didn't think the detainee had a weapon but he
wasn't about to find out the hard way.

Dashing around the front of car, he came at the cab
with his handgun in a two-handed grip. He saw the cab was up on two wheels, its
front end propped up by broken wood and a pile of gravel on the far side of the
barrier. It wasn't going anywhere.

Someone tumbled out of the passenger door. He
raised his weapon but lowered it again when he saw it was Julia. She looked
banged up, a little, but he didn't see any blood on her. “Dr. Taggart,” he
called. “Are you all right?”

“He went through there,” she shouted back, pointing
at a building on the far side of the broken barrier.

He had to hand it to this woman. She was a civilian
and she'd been through more than her share of shocks and horrors for one day,
but still she kept her wits about her. She knew what was important—catching this
man. She could look after herself.

Chapel clambered over the shattered barrier and
ducked around the side of the gravel pile, a giant backhoe giving him cover on
his other side. Dead ahead was the building she'd indicated. Its ground floor
was lined in sheet glass windows, but they'd been covered over with brown craft
paper held on with duct tape so he couldn't see inside. The door of the building
might have been locked up tight, but now it was hanging open on one hinge. He
recognized the detainee's handiwork.

“Angel,” he said, “what does this building look
like inside?”

“It's been gutted. Used to be a department store,
but it went out of business two years ago. The current owners tore out all the
copper wiring and anything else of value and have left it empty ever since.”

“So you're telling me there's no power in there. No
lights.”

“I'm afraid so. Be safe, Chapel.”

Not much chance of that.

Chapel shoved his back up against the window just
to the right side of the door. The door hung open wide enough for him to get a
glimpse inside. He saw a bare concrete floor, with pillars here and there
holding the ceiling up. Piles of construction debris, an old wheelbarrow, and a
stack of two-by-fours sat inside. The light streaming in through the broken door
only illuminated a small patch of the floor.

He saw no sign of movement. For all he knew the
detainee had just run through this building and out a back door. If he had, the
chase was over.

Every instinct in Chapel's body told him that
wasn't true. That he was standing right outside of a death trap.

He shoved the door out of its frame with one foot.
The remaining hinge gave way, and it fell outward, smashing onto the sidewalk.
Chapel ducked inside before the noise had stopped and got his back up against
the nearest pillar.

He could hear nothing. The place stank of mildew
and dust. Nothing alive but rats had been in there for a long time.

Chapel held his breath.

He waited.

Finally he heard what he'd hoped for. A footfall,
the sound of someone big, human sized, crunching the dust underfoot.

“This building is surrounded,” he shouted. “Your
only chance is to turn yourself in. I promise we won't hurt you.”

“I've been hurt before,” the detainee said.

His voice came from much closer than Chapel had
expected. He couldn't be more than ten feet away.

“Thanks to you, I know what it feels like to be
shot.”

“Yeah? How was that?”

“It woke me up pretty good. Made me not want to get
shot again.”

A sense of humor. Not what Chapel had expected. The
detainee's voice was deep, but not gruff. It had no accent as far as Chapel
could tell—which meant the detainee probably wasn't of Middle Eastern descent,
nor Russian. He had considered the idea that the detainees might have been
foreign combatants, al-Qaeda or Taliban who had been brought to the States for
questioning, but the voice sounded altogether wrong for that.

“How are we going to play this?” Chapel asked.

“Why don't you step out where I can see you. Then
we'll figure it out together.”

The voice was calm. There was no fear in it. No
rage, either. Chapel had seen what this man did to Julia's apartment—and to Dr.
Bryant's body. That had taken real anger, blinding fury. But this man sounded
about as angry as if he was trying to solve a difficult Sudoku puzzle.

“You sound like a reasonable man,” Chapel said.

The voice laughed, with genuine mirth.

“You don't know anything about me,” the detainee
said. “Otherwise you wouldn't make that mistake.”

“I know you killed Helen Bryant, and that she was
just the first name on your list. I know you went to Julia Taggart's apartment,
probably to kill her, too—even though she isn't on your list at all. Care to
tell me why you did that?”

“Bryant had to see. She had to understand what she
did to us,” the detainee told him. There was an undercurrent of anger in the
words, now, and Chapel knew he'd struck a chord. “As for the daughter, well. Her
child—the person she made to love. To really love. I wanted to show her, show
her how that hurt!”

So much for reasonable. It sounded like every word
the detainee spoke now was making him angrier.

“Look, calm down; I'm actually here to help you,”
Chapel said.

“They have to die! They all have to die for what
they did!”

Damn. Chapel had really set the guy off. He was
screaming now, his words slurring with rage. Who went from calm and collected to
homicidally angry that fast? “Just talk to me—explain it to me,” Chapel called
out. “Please! I want to understand!”

“Understand? You can't fucking understand
this!”

“I want to—”

Chapel didn't get to finish the thought. The
detainee hit the pillar Chapel hid behind, then, hard enough to shatter it into
chips of concrete and twisted rebar. Hard enough to send Chapel sprawling
forward, right into the pool of light coming in through the door.

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:14

Chapel nearly dropped his pistol as he fell
forward. He barely managed to get his hands under him as broken concrete pelted
his back and smacked into his head. He felt blood slicking down one side of his
face, and his ears were ringing. Slowly he turned around to look behind him.