Chimera (16 page)

“You look nice. Nice and handsome. That's a very
good combination in a gentleman caller. I don't get as many gentleman callers as
I did when I was younger,” she told him. “Will you come again, Mr. Selleck?
Please tell me you'll come and see me again sometime. I'd like that very
much.”

Chapel stood up and walked over to the door.
“Perhaps, Christina. I'm, uh, very busy with work right now, and—”

“You know what they say, a young lady with no
social connections is at high risk of recidivism.” It sounded like something a
doctor might have said to her once. “I could backslide. I could lose all the
wonderful progress I've made if I don't get to see people sometimes. If I don't
get to talk to people, get social stimulation, if I—”

She stopped talking then.

Her face went white and her eyes very wide.

Chapel looked down and saw she had grabbed his arm.
His left arm. Her fingers squeezed at the silicone that was wrapped around the
motors there.

She grabbed the fingers of his artificial hand and
brought them up to her face to look at them more closely. And then she started
to scream. Piercing, hysterical cries of utter terror.

“You're not real! You're a robot! You're a
robot!”

Chapel pressed up against the wall to one side of
the door as Christina ran around the room, grabbing the blankets off her bed,
tearing the picture of Tom Selleck off the wall. She held them close to her like
armor, like they could protect her.

“He's a robot,” she shrieked as the nurse came into
the room. “He's not real! Don't let him touch me. Don't let him put that thing
inside me! Don't let him touch me!”

The nurse stared at Chapel as he took Christina's
shoulders and tried to calm her down.

“I have an artificial arm,” Chapel tried to
explain. “A prosthetic. She grabbed it and—and—”

“Just go. Get out—Ruth can check you out,” the
nurse said. He turned to Christina and tried to shush her, his hands stroking
her arms.

“You're not real! You're a machine man!” she
shouted.

Chapel hurried out into the hall and down toward
the nurses' station, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Christina wasn't
running after him. At the station the nurse named Ruth leaned out through her
window. She looked at him, then down the hall toward Christina's room.

“I, uh,” Chapel said. “I seem to have—”

“This is a psychiatric hospital, sir,” Ruth told
him. “It happens. It's best if you just leave now.”

“Not a problem,” Chapel said. He signed the form
she put in front of him and headed for the locked doors that led off the
ward.

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+12:16

Julia's receptionist was taking advantage of
this very weird day to catch up on her filing. Portia Artiz loved her job, but
she didn't know what to make of any of the things that had happened so far. The
morning had been perfectly normal, a parade of dogs and cats coming through the
front room, phone calls and forms to be filled out. Then Julia had said she was
going to her mom's place for lunch and everything had just gone weird.

First Julia had called to tell Portia to cancel all
her appointments, but she wouldn't explain why. She'd been crying on the phone
and Portia begged her to say why, but Julia had a way of not letting anybody in.
Portia blamed that on her mother, who everybody said was such a saint but the
couple of times Portia met her she'd been a real frosty bitch.

Oh, man, she shouldn't even think things like that.
Julia's mom was dead, attacked by some weirdo looking for drugs. The very
thought made Portia's skin crawl. They got junkies in the office all the time,
looking to score from the supply of animal tranquilizers they kept in a closet
at the back of the office. Most of them were scrawny little guys, no threat to
anybody but themselves. They were more annoying than dangerous—they came up with
the craziest stories about why their pets needed the drugs really bad, right
away, and they just didn't give up. Half of Portia's job was getting rid of
them, threatening to call the police if they didn't leave. What if one of those
guys was as jacked up and dangerous as the one who got Julia's mom, though?
Portia shivered as she bent over the filing cabinet.

Someone rapped on the glass door behind her, and
Portia jumped right into the air. She gave out a little squeak and turned to see
a man standing at the door, a big guy with a smile on his face.
Probably another junkie,
she thought, until he held up
a police badge and pressed it against the glass.

He started laughing and Portia realized she must
look hilarious, jumping straight in the air like that. He chuckled wildly and
she couldn't help herself, she had to join in. She giggled behind her hand and
shook her head as she opened the door. “You scared me half to
death,
” she said, still laughing. “What can I do for
you? If this is about that guy who came back here earlier, the one with the
concussion—” she started.

“Nope,” the man said, and then he grabbed her by
the throat and squeezed, hard. Portia's vision started to dim as she struggled
for breath. “Not him. I'm here for your boss.”

MANHATTAN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+12:17

While Chapel waited on the roof of Bellevue
for his helicopter he spoke to Angel, trying to figure out why someone like
Christina Smollett would be a target for the chimeras.

“She's definitely not CIA,” Angel said.

“Definitely. But then why is she on the list?” He
crumpled the list in his hand. “Maybe this is all a snipe hunt. Maybe the list
is meant to send me down the wrong path. Maybe I'm wasting my time chasing
phantoms just so the CIA can have a good laugh at my expense, and—”

“No. The list is real. The names are all there for
a reason,” Angel said, and any trace of flirtation or sultriness was gone from
her voice. “Every one of those people is marked for death, including Christina
Smollett.”

Chapel looked up at the sky as if he would see
Angel floating there.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

“You know things you aren't telling me,” he
said.

“Now, sugar,” she said, her voice softening again.
“You already knew
that
. Don't be silly, there are
all kinds of secrets that I can't—”

“In fact, you knew all about Christina Smollett
before I came here on this fool's errand,” he said, very carefully.

“How could I know that?”

“Because you called here, back when I asked you to
let the targets know they were in danger. You knew she was a patient in
Bellevue, you must have—because you talked to somebody here. Her doctors, the
security guards—somebody.”

“I . . . spoke to them. Yes.”

“You didn't mention that before I got here. You let
it be a little surprise for me. We're not exactly on the same team, are we,
Angel?” he asked. “I'm trying to save lives here. I'm trying to stop a bunch of
killers. And you're not on board for that. Not fully. You have another agenda
you're working here, and it's not about keeping these people alive.”

He waited for her reply. For her to try to smooth
things over, to explain things away. But she didn't say anything.

Eventually the helicopter came to pick him up.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL
12, T+12:22

Seen from the roof of Bellevue the sky over
New York City was a deep blue-black. Up this high Chapel could even see a few
stars, though most of them were lost in the haze of light that seemed to rise
from the city like mist. On the western horizon a last streak of pink marked
where the sun had gone down.

Out there,
Chapel
thought,
out past that sunset there are three more of the
bastards already moving toward their targets.
Implacable killers
moving fast, like sharks that had caught the scent of blood. And he had just
thrown away the best weapon he had to find and fight them.

“Angel,” he said, “please come in. Angel?”

There was no response.

“Angel,” he said, “I'm sorry if I was rude.”

She didn't reply.

“Sir?” the pilot asked, leaning across the crew
seats of the chopper and shouting over the noise of the engine. “We need to get
airborne.”

Chapel nodded and climbed into his seat. A helmet
waited for him there—he picked it up and started to pull it on when he realized
he would have to take the hands-free unit out of his ear for it to fit.

His main connection to Angel. Well, she could reach
him through the helicopter's radio if she felt like talking. He put the
hands-free unit in his pocket and pulled the helmet on. Adjusting the
microphone, he asked the pilot, “What are your orders?”

“Sir, I'm to take you to Newark Airport; that's
just the other side of the Hudson River. There you will find a civilian jet
waiting for you to take you wherever you want to go. I'm supposed to ask you
where that is, sir. They need to file a flight plan before you arrive or you
won't be able to take off.”

Where indeed? The next names on the list, in
geographical order, were in Atlanta and Chicago. He had to pick one and hope
that he wasn't haring off after another distraction. If he chose the wrong one,
if he wasted time on another red herring, he could be sentencing an innocent
person to death. He pulled the crumpled list from his pocket.

He tapped his artificial fingers on his knee. The
target in Chicago was named Eleanor Pechowski; the one in Atlanta was a Jeremy
Funt.

Angel might have been able to help him. She might
have told him which of them was a higher-value target for the chimeras. But
Angel wasn't talking to him.

He remembered something he'd heard Teddy Roosevelt
had said. In a crisis, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The second
best was the wrong thing. The worst thing you could do was nothing.

He had to make a decision. He had to just pick
one.

“Atlanta,” he told the pilot. “I'm going to Atlanta
next.”

So he could start this whole crazy chase over from
scratch.

“Might as well settle in, sir. This'll take a
little while,” the pilot told him.

Chapel nodded and looked out his window. They were
already lifting off the hospital roof. The helicopter made a wide arc around a
skyscraper and headed west, toward the sunset. At least he was making some
progress.

It had been a long day and he felt like closing his
eyes, maybe even getting a little sleep. The very first thing they taught him in
the army was how to sleep wherever he might be, whenever he got the chance. He
closed his eyes and tried to calm down his racing mind. Tried not to think about
dead doctors and monsters that were part human and part something else.

Before he could nod off, though, he felt his phone
jump in his pocket. He let it vibrate for a second, wondering who could be
calling him. Maybe it was Angel, he thought. Or Hollingshead calling him to
bitch him out for the way he'd treated Angel.

It was neither of them. The phone listed the number
as having a 718 area code. He vaguely remembered that was the code for
Brooklyn.

He only knew one person in Brooklyn. “Julia?” he
said, answering the call. “Did you think of something that I needed to—”

“Chapel!” Julia said. She was shouting, but he
could barely hear her over the noise of the helicopter. Only a few words got
through. “Chapel, you—to come—man here—police—says he's police—don't know who
else to—think he's—kill me!”

The phone beeped three times and the words
CALL FAILED
appeared on the screen. Chapel wasn't used
to this phone—it worked differently from his old BlackBerry—but he managed to
call up the recent call menu and tried to call her back. The phone beeped three
times, telling him it couldn't make the connection. He tried again.

Three beeps.

Chapel could only think one thing. A second chimera
was in New York—and it had decided to pick up where the first one left off. It
was going to kill Julia.

“Change of plans,” he told the pilot. “Take us to
Brooklyn—as fast as you can!”

The pilot shook his head and looked over at Chapel.
“Sir, that's not allowed. I've already put in my own flight plan, and the local
authorities are very strict about civilian aircraft deviating from course over
Manhattan.”

“A woman's going to die if you don't turn around
right now,” Chapel told the man. When the pilot didn't respond instantly, Chapel
grabbed the chin strap of his helmet and dragged his head to the side to make
eye contact. “Turn around,” he said.

The pilot was military. He knew what a direct order
sounded like.

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+12:31

The pilot set them down on the ball field of
a public park not too far from Julia's clinic. It was as close as he could
get.

Chapel jumped to the ground. He took a second to
get his bearings and headed for the closest exit from the park. The streets
beyond were lit brightly enough, and the clinic was only two blocks away. He
prayed he wasn't too late.

He'd never forgive himself if he failed to save
Julia, not after he'd already failed her mother.

When he reached the clinic, he found it shut up
tight for the night. An iron shutter had been pulled down over its front door
and curtains obscured its windows. He was about to hammer on the door, demanding
to be let in, when he heard a sudden sharp noise come from inside. A noise like
a muffled gunshot.