Chimera (3 page)

The agency guy shook his head, slowly. And then he
started to laugh. His whole body shook as he guffawed and chortled and
chuckled.

Chapel swam over to the edge of the pool and
dragged himself out. Water poured off him in torrents as he stormed around the
side of the pool, headed straight for the laughing bastard. If fraternizing with
Sara could cost him his career, punching out a CIA man could get him thrown in
the brig, but at that moment he did not give one good goddamn. Nobody laughed at
Jim Chapel like that.

Before he could land the punch, though, the CIA
bastard lifted the BlackBerry he was holding and held it up at Chapel's eye
level. Chapel saw that it was his own smartphone. The one he'd left at his desk
when he headed for the pool.

The screen said he had twenty-seven new text
messages, and three new voice mails. Chapel grabbed the phone and scrolled
through the phone's logs. Every single message had come from the same number.
There were e-mails, too, from a military address he didn't recognize, but he
knew with a cold certainty they came from the same person who'd sent all those
texts.

“When you didn't answer,” the CIA man said, still
burbling with mirth, “they sent me to come find you. We have to go. Now. The man
who's been trying to contact you is not the kind of person you keep
waiting.”

Chapel stared into his eyes. They were hazel, green
in the middle and gold around the edges, and they were full of laughter,
still.

“Give me that,” Chapel said, and grabbed the
towel.

FORT BELVOIR,
VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+4:03

Chapel read one of the e-mails for the third
time, still not sure what the hell was going on. It went on for pages, but most
of that was just boilerplate confidentiality statements—legalese describing what
exactly would happen to anyone who forwarded or printed out the e-mail. Standard
stuff for military intelligence. The only real content of the e-mail was a
single line of tersely written text:

Report instanter DIA DX Pentagon for new
orders. Reply to acknowledge.

Chapel understood all that just fine. DIA was the
Defense Intelligence Agency, the top level of the military intelligence pyramid.
DX was the Directorate for Defense Counterintelligence and HUMINT—HUMINT being
Human Intelligence, or good old-fashioned spycraft. DX was the group that used
to give him his orders back when he was a theater operative in Afghanistan, but
he hadn't worked for them for a long time—these days his work was handled
directly by INSCOM, and he hadn't so much as spoken to anyone in the DIA in five
years.

Technically, of course, he still had to answer all
the way up that chain, and if somebody at the DIA wanted him to show up at their
office and get new orders, he was required to do so. But what on earth could
they want him for?

“You know anything about this, Laughing Boy?” he
asked the CIA goon.

Laughing Boy shook his head. The very idea seemed
to set him off on another chuckling fit. “I just do as I'm told.”

Chapel stared at the man. His involvement in
this—even if it just came down to fetching Chapel when he wouldn't answer his
phone—added a whole new wrinkle of weirdness. On paper the DIA and the civilian
CIA worked hand in glove, but everyone in the intelligence community knew there
was a permanent divide and lasting hatred between the defense department and the
civilian intelligence organizations. They never shared anything with each other
unless they were legally required to. If the CIA and the DIA were working
together, then that could only mean something really bad had happened and that
rivalry had been put aside long enough to clean it up.

And somehow that meant they needed a one-armed
captain from INSCOM to hold the bucket and the mop.

Chapel rubbed vigorously with the towel at the skin
on the left side of his chest. Laughing Boy raised an eyebrow and Chapel grunted
in frustration. “My skin has to be dry or the electrodes don't work right. Do
you mind? I need to get dressed.”

Laughing Boy kept giggling, but he stepped aside to
let Chapel head for the locker room. Chapel sat down on a wooden bench inside
and picked up the arm. It only weighed nine pounds—lighter than the original.
Its silicone cover looked exactly like a real human arm up until you reached the
shoulder, where it flared out into a pair of molded clamps. Putting it on was
simplicity—he simply drew it over the stump of his shoulder until it fit snugly.
The arm recognized automatically that it was on and the clamps squeezed down
gently on Chapel's flesh until it was locked into place.

As he did every time he put it on, he ran it
through a quick check to make sure everything was working all right. He lifted
the arm and then swung it backward, made a fist, and then straightened his hand
out like he was about to deliver a karate chop. Finally, to check the fingers he
touched each of them in turn with the thumb.

Living nerves in his shoulder and chest had been
rewired to replace the ones he'd lost. Sensors in his new hand sent messages to
those nerves through subcutaneous electrodes. The neurosurgery had gone so
smoothly that now when Chapel touched his artificial thumb to his artificial
index finger, he actually felt them rubbing against each other. He could pick up
a playing card with those fingers and feel the smooth coating of its lamination,
or touch sandpaper and feel how rough it was.

He thought about what Top would say.
“There's guys out there with two hooks instead of hands that
learn how to make omelets in the morning without getting egg all over their
shirts. You, my boy, are living in science fiction tomorrowland. Is it not a
glorious thing to be living in George Jetson world?”

“Sure is, Top,” Chapel said, out loud.

Jerks could laugh at him all they wanted for being
a freak. Jim Chapel was whole. Top had taught him that. He was whole and vital
and he could do anything he set his mind to. Whatever the DIA wanted him for, he
was ready.

He dressed himself hurriedly and then tapped a
message on the BlackBerry acknowledging that he was on his way. To the
Pentagon.

Coming out of the locker room he found Laughing Boy
waiting for him. “All right, you delivered your message,” Chapel said. “You can
go now, I'm being a good boy.”

Laughing Boy shook his head and chortled a little.
“Nope. I'm supposed to drive you there myself. Make sure you show up.”

“I know how to follow orders,” Chapel insisted.
Laughing Boy didn't even shrug. “Fine. We'll go in just a second. I need to let
my reporting officer know where I'm going—”

Laughing Boy shook his head.

So it was one of those kinds of briefings, then.
The kind where you just disappeared off the face of the earth and nobody knew
where you went. This was getting weirder by the minute.

Chapel sighed. “Fine. Let's go.”

POUGHKEEPSIE, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+4:04

Two hundred and fifty miles away, Lieutenant
Barry Charles slapped the helmet of the greenest private in his squad. “We ran
through this in the simulator just last month, remember? The train
extraction—that's exactly how we're going to do this. Get all the nice civilians
out of the car first, then we take down the target. Don't let any of the nice
civilians get hurt. Don't let the target get hurt, at least not too much. We've
got orders to bring him in alive. You children understand what I'm saying?”

The four men Charles commanded all saluted. In
their body armor and protective masks they looked like a mean bunch of sons of
bitches, Charles had to admit that. They were the best men the 308th
counterintelligence battalion had ever trained, and they were ripped and
ready.

“Then let's take this train. By the book,
soldiers!”

The men shouted a wordless response and swarmed
toward the train. Command had signaled ahead and forced the train to stop ten
miles north of Poughkeepsie, out in the sticks where collateral damage would be
light. The train's conductor had confirmed the presence of the target and told
them which car he was in. Charles had been given only the quickest of briefings
on this mission—a picture of the target and a warning that the man he wanted was
potentially armed and definitely dangerous, an escapee from a DoD detention
facility upstate—but he had no doubt this was going to be a cakewalk.

“Unlock the doors now,” he called—he was patched in
directly with the train's own radio system and the conductor was ready to do as
he said.

Looking up at the train now he saw the anxious
faces of commuters and tourists staring down at him. He gave them a cheery wave
to put them at ease and then turned to signal to his men. There were two doors
on the train car, one at either end. He had four men—one to take the door, one
to provide cover. Simplicity itself. He dropped his hand and the men hit the
doors running, the pneumatic locks hissing open for them. The metal side of the
train pinged in the morning sun. Through the windows Charles watched his men
take up stations inside the train, covering one another just like they'd been
trained.

There were a couple of screams and some angry
shouts, but nothing Charles wasn't expecting. Civilians started pouring out of
the train car in a nearly orderly fashion. About as orderly as you could expect
from citizens with no military discipline or training. Charles shouted for them
to head as quickly as possible to the safety of a big box hardware store a
hundred yards behind him, and they did as they were told.

“Lieutenant, sir, we have him,” one of his squad
called. The voice in his ear sounded pumped up and excited. “He's just sitting
there, looks like he might be asleep.”

Talk about your lucky breaks. “Well, whatever you
do,” Charles said, “don't be rude and wake him up. Are the civilians clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” another of the squad called.

“I'm coming up. Just keep your eyes open.”

Charles got one foot up on the door platform and
grabbed a safety rail. He let his carbine swing across the front of his chest as
he hauled himself up into the airlocklike compartment between train cars. The
door that lead into the car proper was activated by a slap plate. He reached
down to activate it.

Hell broke out before the door even had a chance to
slide open.

“Sir, he's moving—” someone shouted.

“—does not appear to be armed, repeat, I see no
weapons—”

“What the hell? What the hell did he just—”

The door in front of Charles slid open and he
looked into a scene of utter chaos. A man with a scraggly beard had picked up
one of Charles's men, and as Charles watched, the target threw the soldier into
one of his squad mates, sending them both sprawling over the rows of seats. A
third squad member came at the target with his carbine up and ready to fire.

The target reached forward, grabbed the soldier's
arm, and twisted it around like he was trying to break a green branch off a
tree.

Charles heard a series of pops like muffled
gunfire, but he knew what they actually were—the sounds of the soldier's bones
snapping, one by one. A second later the soldier started screaming. He dropped
to the floor, down for the count.

Charles started to rush forward, to come to the
defense of his men, but he nearly tripped over what he thought was luggage that
had fallen into the aisle.

It wasn't luggage. It was his fourth squad member.
Looking down, Charles saw the man was still alive but broken like a porcelain
doll. His mask was gone, and his face was obscured by blood.

Lieutenant Charles looked up at the man who had
neutralized his entire squad and for a moment—a split second—he stopped and
stared, because he couldn't do anything else. The man's eyes. There was
something wrong with the man's eyes. They were solid black, from side to side.
Charles thought for a moment he was looking into empty eye sockets. But no—no—he
could see them shining—

He didn't waste any more time. He brought his
carbine up and started firing in tight, controlled three-shot bursts. Just like
he'd been trained. Charles had spent enough time on the firing range—and in real
life, live fire operations—to know how to shoot, and how to hit what he aimed
at.

Human targets, though, couldn't move as fast as the
thing in front of him. It got one foot up on the armrest of a train seat, then
the other was on the headrest. Charles tried to track the thing but he
couldn't—it moved too fast as it crammed itself into the overhead luggage rack
and wriggled toward him like a worm.

Suddenly it was above him, at head height, and its
hands were reaching down for him. Charles tried to bring his weapon up, putting
every ounce of speed he had into reacquiring his target.

The
thing
was faster.
Its hands tore away Charles's mask, and then its thumbs went for his eyes.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL
12, T+4:41

Laughing Boy had a car waiting right outside
the fitness center, a black Crown Victoria with Virginia plates. Chapel got in
without a word, and the two of them headed straight for the Pentagon.

Chapel didn't ask for the man's name. CIA told you
what you needed to know and they didn't like it if you asked them questions. He
resolved to keep calling the guy Laughing Boy, if only in his head.

They had a long drive together during which neither
of them said more than ten words. Mostly they were about whether there would be
much traffic on I-95. Fort Belvoir was just south of Mount Vernon, only a few
miles from the Pentagon—it wasn't a long ride—but you always hit a snarl of
traffic when you approached the Beltway that surrounded the District of
Columbia. Half the country seemed to be trying to get into D.C. to do some
business or just see the sights. The Pentagon was still in Virginia,
technically, but that didn't make things any easier. As the car slowed down to a
crawl outside of Arlington, Chapel got impatient and started drumming on his
side of the dashboard with his artificial fingers.