Chimera (13 page)

Arash had come to America in 1979 to escape the
Iranian Revolution. He'd thought he was getting away from violence, that he
could be safe in the States. He'd worked hard to get this cab, to become a
naturalized citizen. He loved America and everything it stood for.

Except—everybody here had guns. And he had seen
more violence in New York City than he'd ever witnessed in Tehran. Twice he had
been robbed at gunpoint, just because he was a cabdriver and had some cash on
him. This was the first time he'd actually been hurt. He found he did not like
it at all.

As he stood there, wondering what to do, his fare
and the woman came out of the closed-down store. He was leaning on her shoulder
like he could barely walk under his own power. What was the meaning of this?
“Hey! Hey, you!” he called to them. “Who's going to pay for this mess?”

The woman stared at him like he was crazy. Like
he
was crazy. “This man is hurt,” she said. “He
needs help.” They were walking away.

“What about me? I'm wounded, too!” Arash shouted
after them. They didn't so much as turn around and apologize. He would have
chased them if he didn't need to stay with the cab.

He fumed for a while. He nearly swore again. But
Arash Borhan had nothing if he did not have a sense of practicality. He got in
his cab and worked hard at getting it free of the wooden barrier. Metal shrieked
and groaned, and the front fender did, in fact, fall off. But eventually he got
loose from the pile of broken wood. It felt like the cab could still drive.
Well, maybe this was not the end of the world, after all.

Then someone rapped on the glass of his window, and
he sighed. In New York, people saw nothing. They wouldn't care if his cab was
half destroyed—they still had places to be. They would want to know if he was
available for a new fare. Crazy! They were all crazy. He rolled down the window,
prepared to tell some angry businessman that no, he was off duty, that he needed
to get back to the garage for repairs.

The nose of a pistol came through the window and
tapped Arash on his cheek.

Wonderful. This day was going to get even
worse.

“I have no money,” he said. “No money!”

The man holding the pistol seemed to think this was
very funny, because he laughed heartily at the thought.

Arash looked at him in horror. This laughing man
was wearing a black suit and had the crew cut of a soldier. But much, much worse
was the dead look in his eyes. Arash knew that look. It was the look he'd fled
when he left Iran. The look of a man who had no conscience. No soul.

“You've got a new fare,” the man said, laughing so
hard he could barely get the words out. “We're going to Bed-Stuy.”

“Whatever you say,” Arash told him, because you did
not argue with such a man. Not when he was holding a gun.

Still it got worse, though.

It could always get worse.

“Oh no, no,” Arash moaned as the laughing man
loaded a dead body into the trunk of the cab. Arash recognized the dead man—it
was the maniac who attacked him and forced him to drive his cab here. “No,
please, no,” he said, when the laughing man told him to get in the cab and
drive.

It was a long way to Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of the
worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The laughing man kept laughing the whole way.
When they reached the address he indicated, Arash saw it was an abandoned
warehouse. The roof was falling away, and the interior was full of rat nests and
the cardboard shelters of the homeless. This was not a good place, not at all.
Arash maneuvered his cab around piles of rubble to reach the very dark heart of
it.

“Good. Now get out and open the trunk,” the
laughing man said, giggling softly to himself.

“God protect me,” Arash whispered. But he did as he
was told. What choice did he have? He looked down at the body curled up in the
trunk. Much of the maniac's head was missing. What did this all mean? What could
it mean?

The laughing man pointed at a red plastic gas can
in the trunk. The dead man's hand was resting on it.

“Take that,” the laughing man said, “and pour it
all over him. Don't be stingy.”

There was no doubt in Arash's mind what was going
to happen here. The laughing man was going to make him burn up his own cab. His
livelihood, the only possession Arash had that was worth anything. This was
terrible.

There was nothing he could do. He opened the gas
can and poured it all over the dead man. The fumes of gasoline stung his eyes,
but that was not the reason he started crying.

“You're hurt,” the laughing man said, tapping
Arash's bloody temple with his gun. This he seemed to find only slightly
amusing. “This guy? He hurt you?”

Arash nodded. He could find no words.

“Well, that's a damned shame,” the laughing man
said.

Arash looked at him through a haze of tears. Was he
going to find sympathy here, in the unlikeliest of places? Arash knew such men
as this—soulless men—could act unpredictably at times. They could even be
charitable if it suited their whim.

“Get in there with him,” the laughing man said.

“I . . . what?” Arash asked.

“Get in the trunk with him. Come on. I'm in a
hurry.”

“This I will not do,” Arash said.

“Yeah, you will. One way or another.”

Arash was a practical man. He knew what danger he
was in, and that he had no options left. He tried to run.

The laughing man shot him in both legs. Then he
dragged him back to the cab and threw him in the trunk. The blood and gasoline
from the dead man soaked into his clothes, filling his nose and mouth and making
it hard to breathe. The pain in his legs was unbearable, and his brain contained
nothing but clouds of pure agony.

He could barely see, could feel nothing but pain.
But still he heard the laughter.

“I can put a round in your head, so you don't have
to burn alive,” the man said, chuckling to himself. “You want that?”

Arash Borhan was a practical man.

He squeezed his eyes shut and nodded in
agreement.

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+10:52

“Hop up there,” Julia said.

Chapel looked around the room. It was a small
examination room in the back of Julia's veterinary office. A stainless steel
table dominated the space, which was otherwise filled with cabinets full of
medical supplies, jars of cotton swabs, dispensers for hand sanitizer, and, of
course, pictures of dogs. A flatscreen monitor on one wall displayed a rotating
screen saver of pictures of Portuguese water dogs.

“Do you have dogs yourself?” Chapel asked.

“I used to. Now my ex has them,” she told him. “Go
on. Up there,” she said, pointing again at the stainless steel table. “It's
clean.”

“You're divorced?” he asked, still not
complying.

“No. Ex-boyfriend. We were together since grad
school. It got to the point where I wanted to get married and have children. He
disagreed. Now he lives on a farm upstate. With my dogs.” She looked at the
flatscreen, which was showing at that moment a dog running across a field, its
ears flapping behind it. She rubbed the corner of the screen as if she were
petting the animal. “They're better off up there, of course. They need space to
run, and the city air is no good for dogs. Are you going to get on that table,
or should I consider this a symptom of mental deterioration?”

Chapel smiled. He did what he was told. The table
had clearly been meant to hold the weight of a big dog at most. It creaked under
him but it held.

“There are two kinds of head injuries,” she told
him, rummaging in a drawer to take out a small flashlight. “The kind that go
away on their own, usually pretty quickly, and the kind that kill you. It can be
hard to tell them apart. Open your eyes very wide and look straight ahead, not
at me.”

Chapel complied. She shone the light into his eyes,
dazzling him. He tried to remember the ride over here. He recalled her dragging
him out of the gutted department store where he'd left the body of the detainee.
He remembered being put in a cab, and then not much more until they'd reached
this place. There had been a receptionist out front, but the office was mostly
deserted—Julia had canceled all her appointments for the day after finding her
mother's body.

“I'm missing some time,” he said. “I don't remember
the ride here, really.”

“Blackouts like that are common with concussion. Do
you feel nauseated?”

“No,” he told her. She brought out a tongue
depressor and he obediently opened his mouth.

“Good. Now swallow for me.”

He gulped down some air. “I appreciate this, Doc,”
he said.

She shrugged. “Just call me Julia. You may have
saved my life, so that seems fair.” She smiled. Her face was only inches away
from his. She put a thumb on his left eyelid and pushed it back, staring deep
into his eye. When she let go, he had to blink.

She was very close. He couldn't help but smell her
faint but sweet perfume and feel the warmth of her body so near his.

“When that maniac jumped in the cab and told the
cabbie to drive, I thought for sure he was going to kill me.”

Chapel pulled himself back from what he'd been
thinking. He put out of his mind how good she smelled, and instead he studied
the woman's face. She was a lot tougher than most civilians he'd met, mentally
and emotionally. She could handle this. “That was his plan. He killed your
mother to make her . . . I don't know. Feel guilt for something she'd
done. He thought killing you might make her see the light. The fact that she was
already dead, that his plan made no sense, doesn't seem to have occurred to
him.”

Julia nodded. She shoved her hands in the pockets
of her stained lab coat. “I gathered as much from what he said to me.”

“He spoke to you? In the cab? This could be
important,” Chapel insisted.

“Don't get too excited. He just kept saying he was
going to make my mom pay. That she owed him, and that I was how he was going to
fulfill that debt. That was all he said—well, that and he kept threatening the
cabbie if he didn't go faster. At one point he reached through the opening in
the partition and grabbed the cabbie's ear. He nearly tore it off. I'm going to
assume—because I know you won't tell me even if I'm wrong—that he was on drugs
of some kind. Speed, or perhaps PCP. That's the only explanation I have for why
he was so strong.”

Chapel knew there was a question hidden in that
statement. She was asking if he knew of another reason. He didn't, so it was
easy to stay quiet. Even if he'd had an explanation, he couldn't have given it
to her.
I am a silent warrior,
he thought to
himself, repeating the creed of the army Military Intelligence Corps.

She reached up and touched his face again, more
gently this time. Her hand was very warm.

Without warning, she leaned in and kissed him. Her
lips were soft and warm, and when they pressed against his, her arms went around
his neck. For a moment he couldn't think straight.

Then she let go of him and walked across the room
to put her flashlight back in its drawer, as if nothing at all had happened.

“Not that I'm complaining,” he said, “but what was
that for?”

“Because you saved my life, and because, I guess,
you avenged my mother,” she said, her back turned toward him. “And maybe because
I wanted to. Don't worry. I wasn't trying to start something. When you walk out
my door, you're never coming back. I know that.”

“Listen, Julia, I—”

“We need to make sure your brain wasn't damaged,”
she said, clearly intending to change the subject.

“I feel a little light-headed . . . now,”
he said, smiling at her.

But she was done with whatever had passed between
them. She was back to her professional mien. She folded her arms and leaned
against the counter behind her. “Your pupils are normal, which is very
encouraging, but I'm going to ask you some questions. What city are you in?”

Chapel frowned. Seriously? She was just going to
kiss him and then immediately pretend like nothing had happened? He shrugged in
confusion. “New York,” he told her.

“Good. What's today's date?”

“April twelfth.”

She nodded. “Very good. What agency do you work
for?”

Chapel reared back. He shook his head.

Julia sighed and folded her arms. “I've met enough
spies in my life to recognize the type, Captain Chapel. I know you're in the
intelligence community. You're tracking down assassins sent to kill former CIA
employees. This has something to do with work my parents did twenty years ago,
and—”

“Stop,” he said. “You don't want to continue in
that line.”

“Oh?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Is that a
threat?”

“It's an apology, though I guess I didn't phrase it
very well. I'd love to tell you what's going on,” Chapel said. “Really. I think
you deserve to know. The problem is, I don't really understand it myself. I was
given a very minimal briefing and sent after these men. Anything I do know about
them, I can't share with you.”

She stared at him for a while, perhaps giving him a
chance to relent. If so, he didn't take it. Eventually she just nodded and
turned away.

And that . . . was that. Whatever had
happened, whatever had made her kiss him—whatever might have happened was over.
She was done with him.

He had a strong urge to run away. Like he'd done
something wrong. There was one thing he had to ask her, though.