Chimera (15 page)

“You'll want a doctor who specializes in human
patients for that.” She got up to unlock the front door. “I hope you'll forgive
me if I say I never want our paths to cross again.”

He couldn't blame her for that. “Thanks for all
your help.”

She shrugged. He started to walk out the door, but
she stopped him by putting one hand on his artificial shoulder. He flinched,
even if she didn't. He'd never gotten used to people touching him there.

“Captain,” she said, “be careful. But find the rest
of them, and make sure nobody else has to go through this. Grief, I mean. It
sucks.”

“I'll do my best,” he promised her.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL
12, T+11:29

Back to work. The next name on the list was
Christina Smollett. She was in New York City, too. Hopefully she was still
alive.

A new cab was waiting for him in front of Julia's
clinic. He climbed in, and the car rolled smoothly away before he'd even had a
chance to tell the driver what address he wanted.

“All taken care of,” Angel told him.

“I appreciate it.” He tapped on his knee with the
fingers of his artificial hand. When he'd been talking with Julia, he'd almost
forgotten the time-sensitive nature of his operation. Now that he was away from
her, the ticking of the clock started to bother him again. “We'll have to make
this next visit quick. What can you tell me about Christina Smollett?”

Angel hummed a little tune while she worked.
“Interesting,” she said, after a minute.

“Anything you'd like to share?” Chapel asked.

Angel laughed. “If I understood it, I'd give you
some analysis. What I'm looking at is just facts. Christina Smollett has a
social security number, a date of birth—August 23, 1959—and a mailing address we
already knew, 462 First Avenue, New York, where you're headed now. Beyond that?
Not much. As far as I can tell she's never filed a tax form, for one thing.”

“That's odd for a woman in her fifties,” Chapel
mused.

“Never been married, no children. No family left,
either—her parents died a while back, both from natural causes and at advanced
ages. No brothers or sisters. She doesn't have a bank account. She doesn't have
any academic records past high school, which . . . let me check
. . . she
did
graduate from, though not
with particularly impressive grades. From there the list gets pretty monotonous.
No driver's license. No history of service in the armed forces. No arrests,
warrants for arrest, or so much as a parking ticket. Never been fingerprinted,
and I can't find a single photograph of her taken after 1971. It's like she
hasn't so much as touched the world in forty years.”

“Sounds like she's been living off the grid,”
Chapel said.

“And
you
sound like
you've got a theory, sweetie.”

“More like a hunch,” Chapel said. “I'm betting
Christina Smollett works for the CIA. Probably in the National Clandestine
Service. She's undercover, or at least off the books.”

“They certainly don't list her on their payroll,”
Angel confirmed.

“Helen Bryant and William Taggart were both CIA
employees. I'm pretty sure every single name on that list is or was as well.
We're tracking down the people who worked on some operation in the eighties.
Probably something the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology got up
to.”

“Aren't they the ones who make the exploding pens
and cyanide-filled false teeth?” Angel asked. “The gadget shop?”

“They do more than that. They were the ones who ran
MK-ULTRA, for instance. That's exactly the shop that Drs. Bryant and Taggart
would work for. And unless I'm way off, I'm willing to bet Christina Smollett
worked in the directorate as well.”

“Let me do some more checking, see what I turn up,”
Angel said.

As the cab rolled into Manhattan the traffic picked
up a little, but it wasn't long before they were on First Avenue. The cabdriver
rapped on the partition and glanced over his shoulder. “You want the emergency
room or the main entrance?” he asked.

“What? Emergency room?” Chapel said. “No, I'm going
to a private residence. A house or an apartment building.”

“Oh, sorry. With that bruise on your head I figured
you were checking yourself in. You sure you have the right address?”

“Definitely. 462 First Avenue,” Chapel
confirmed.

“Buddy,” the cabbie told him, “maybe you
should
have them take a look at your head. That's the
address for Bellevue Hospital. You know—the place where they send all the
crazies.”

MANHATTAN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+11:55

Chapel reached for his wallet to pay the
cabdriver, but the man waved his hand to say no. “All prepaid, and I'm not going
to take advantage of a guy like you,” the cabbie said, smiling broadly.

“A guy like me?” Chapel asked.

“No offense, friend, no offense meant. I have a
mother in Ohio, she's like you, okay? So I understand how hard it can be.”

Chapel started to reach up to touch his artificial
arm, then stopped himself.

“When you have trouble keeping track of things,
right? When maybe you have memory problems. My mom's got the Alzheimer's, she's
doing all right, though.”

“That's . . . good,” Chapel said. “I'm
glad to hear it. Thanks.”

Clearly the man thought he had brain damage or
something. Humiliated and still a little confused by what he was doing there,
Chapel climbed out of the cab and looked up at the façade of Bellevue Hospital,
which looked like any other glass-fronted building in New York except it had the
name “Bellevue” written up one side. Having only seen the hospital in movies
before, he would have expected some huge brick monolith with tiny barred windows
from which the occasional scream could be heard.

Maybe he
should
check
himself in. He was definitely feeling disoriented and confused. Julia had said
he was recovering nicely from his concussion, though. “Angel, do you have any
thoughts about what's going on, here?”

“Just one, sugar. I'm starting to understand why
Christina Smollett is so far off the radar. She's been a resident here since
1979. She's a patient in the psychiatric hospital.”

Chapel frowned. “How old was she when she checked
in? Wait—I can do this one in my head. She was born in 1959 so she would have
been nineteen or twenty. I don't see how she could possibly have done any work
for the CIA before that. And I seriously doubt the CIA has any undercover
operatives in there.”

“You still want to go in and talk to her?” Angel
asked. “I can make the arrangements.”

“Yeah, I should at least see if she can give me any
new leads.” Though Chapel wondered what a woman who'd been living in a
psychiatric hospital for over thirty years could possibly know about genetic
freaks with extra eyelids or the inner workings of secret government facilities.
Still, he was here. “I won't take long. Can you have a helicopter ready to pick
me up when I'm done?”

“There's a helipad on the roof. It's not open to
civil aviation, but I can get you in and out before anyone knows you're there.
In the meantime . . . okay, you're good. You've been added to the list
of approved visitors for Christina Smollett. I've listed you as being in law
enforcement.”

“Thanks,” Chapel said, and he hurried for the
entrance. There was a metal detector inside and a couple of bored-looking
uniformed security guards, one of whom was reading a newspaper. The other wrote
down Chapel's name on a clipboard and then waved him through to a bank of
elevators.

On the way up Angel gave him directions to the
correct ward. The Psychiatric Hospital was behind a series of locked doors that
security guards had to open for him. The place was clean and brightly lit, but
it looked old and tired all the same, the walls painted in drab institutional
colors and the endless doors all the same. Following Angel's directions, he
finally reached a nurses' station where a man in purple surgical scrubs waved
him over. “You're here to see Kristin, right?”

“Christina Smollett,” Chapel said, glad as always
that he had Angel to smooth the way for him. Without her it might have taken
hours to get this far.

“Christina? We have a Kristin Smollett,” the nurse
told him. “Huh. Ruth? Ruth!”

An older woman in a starched white uniform came to
the window of the nurses' station and peered out with sharp eyes.

“Ruth,” the male nurse asked, “Christina Smollett.
Is that the same as Kristin?”

“Yes,” Ruth told him, handing him a manila folder.
“She'll be in her room this time of day. Dinner's in an hour; be sure to be done
with your visit by then, sir.”

“It shouldn't take that long,” Chapel assured
her.

The male nurse led him down a long corridor. He
leafed through the folder while they walked. It looked like it was Christina
Smollett's medical record.

“Funny,” the nurse said. “I've been working here
six years. I always thought her name was Kristin.”

“She never corrected you?” Chapel asked.

“You haven't visited her before, have you?” the
nurse inquired. He caught Chapel trying to read over his shoulder, and he
snapped the manila folder closed.

“No,” Chapel admitted.

The nurse gave him a shrewd look, but then he
shrugged. “Somebody like Kristin, somebody who's been taking antipsychotic
medication for a long time, it kind of . . . eats away at them. It
keeps them from acting out, and it makes the disturbed thoughts go away. But it
doesn't leave a whole lot else in there.” He lowered his voice to a
conspiratorial whisper. “Looking at her medication history, it's like reading a
book on the history of nasty pills. The stuff we give here now is okay, it's all
new wonder drugs. But back in the eighties she was mainlining Thorazine, and
that stuff turns you into a zombie. I'd be pretty surprised if
she
can even remember her name.”

MANHATTAN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+12:07

The nurse unlocked a door and gestured for
Chapel to head into the room beyond. “I'll be out here when you're done, so I
can check you back out.”

Chapel thanked him and stepped inside.

The room was small but not cramped, pleasant
without exactly being comfortable. There was a bed and a dresser inside, and one
window that looked like it couldn't be opened. Christina Smollett was sitting on
the bed. She might have been fifty or seventy. Her hair was long and gray, and
it looked like it had been carefully brushed on one side and left tangled and
knotted on the other. She wore a sweat suit, and she was staring at the one
piece of ornamentation in the entire room, a picture taped to the wall. The
picture was of Tom Selleck, a twinkle in his eye and a cocky grin half hidden
behind his famous mustache.

She didn't move at all when Chapel came in. She
didn't seem aware of his presence. He walked over in front of her, not wanting
to block her view of the picture but needing to get her attention. “Ms.
Smollett?” he asked. “Christina?”

She blinked when he said her name, but didn't move
her head. Her lips were curled in a simple smile. “He always looks so nice, in
his shows,” she said. “Like he would be friendly if you met him.”

She sighed happily.

Chapel took a deep breath. “Christina, my name is
Chapel. I need to ask you some questions. I need to know if you've ever met a
Dr. Helen Bryant or a Dr. William Taggart.”

She stuck out her lower lip and shook her head in
the negative. “I know lots of doctors, though, and they don't always tell me
their names. I've known a whole bunch of doctors. Doctors like me. They say I'm
a perfect patient.”

“I'm sure you are,” Chapel told her. “How about
Franklin Hayes? He's a judge. Have you ever met a judge?”

“Oh, no. There would have been a judge at my
commitment hearing. But they didn't take me to that. Mommy said they didn't want
to upset me. I used to be very easy to upset.” She looked back at the picture on
the wall. “Do you think he would be nice, if you met him in person?”

“Tom Selleck?”

“Is that his name? I . . . I have trouble
with names sometimes. I'm sorry. I'm being a terrible hostess. Can I offer you a
cup of coffee? If you're hungry, I could probably make something.”

Chapel glanced around the room by reflex, but of
course there was no coffeemaker in the room, much less any kind of kitchen
facilities.

This was going nowhere. Christina Smollett's mind
was mush, to be callous about it. She wasn't there. He took the kill list from
his pocket and ran down the rest of the names, but she just shook her head at
the sound of each one.

What on earth did this woman have to do with
chimeras and kill lists and CIA secret projects? He couldn't see any connection
at all. More to the point, why would the detainees—the chimeras, as he was
coming to think of them—want to kill this woman in the first place? She was no
danger to them or anybody else.

If she had ever known a secret, a secret that could
damage national security, it was long gone.

“You're very handsome,” she said, and looked down
at her hands. A blush spread across her cheeks. “I don't see a lot of white
people in here. Most of the nurses are Spanish or Negroes.”

“ . . . okay,” Chapel said. “Christina,
it was nice meeting you, but I think I should go now. Be . . . well.”
He couldn't think of anything else to say, and for once Angel was no help. “Be
safe.”