Chimera (35 page)

“Thank you for everything,” he told her. “You've
been more help than I expected.” He thought of something. “You don't know
Franklin Hayes, do you?”

“The federal judge? The one who's supposed to
become our next Supreme Court justice? Just from what I've seen on the
news.”

“What about the names Christina Smollett, Marcia
Kennedy, or Olivia Nguyen?”

Ellie just shook her head.

Chapel nodded. It had been a long shot. “Okay.
Thanks again—and stay safe, please. I hate the fact I'm leaving you here alone
when you're in danger.”

Ellie's face fell. “Captain, I could have done more
for them.”

Chapel shook his head in incomprehension.

“I could have fought harder. I could have helped
Ian and his cabal. I could have . . .” She let the thought trail away.
“I could have made their lives a little easier, in some way. Been kinder to
them.” She was starting to cry.

Was she looking for forgiveness? Chapel would have
given it if he could, but he sensed that nothing he said would matter. He tried
anyway. “They came to you for a reason. You were probably the only human who
ever really cared for them,” he said.

She shook her head in negation. He'd been right—he
couldn't offer her any forgiveness, not now, if she couldn't forgive
herself.

“If they do come here and . . .” She
lowered her head. “If they came here,” she said, “I don't think I would blame
them.”

Chapel had no words for that. He disagreed, but it
didn't matter, not to Ellie. He pushed open the door and stepped out into the
night, Julia following close behind.

“I need to borrow your phone,” he told her.

Julia looked up at him. Her eyes were blank. “My
whole life,” she said, her voice a flat monotone. “My whole life that was going
on and they never told me. My parents were doing that. They were doing all of
that.”

It had finally happened—the endorphins and
adrenaline were gone, and she'd fallen into the abyss of her own thoughts. Just
as she'd said she expected, it had become too much for her to bear. Without
another word she handed over the phone.

Chapel dialed from the piece of paper in his
pocket. “Chief Petty Officer Andrews,” he said, “I'm coming to you right now,
and I have a flight plan to file. The destination is anywhere in the Catskills
Mountains, in New York State.”

LANGLEY,
VIRGINIA: APRIL 13, T+41:46

On the phone, Franklin Hayes was livid. Tom
Banks toyed with the idea of just hanging up on him.

But no. The judge was too important to Banks's
plans for the future. Especially the next few days.

“He's headed where?” Hayes demanded.

“The Catskills. You know what he expects to find
there. Don't make me say it, even on an encrypted line.”

Hayes was silent for a second. “You think he'll
learn anything?”

“It's hard to know. My jurisdiction stops at the
fence. What may still be inside there, if anything, is Hollingshead's business.
It doesn't matter.”

Hayes wasn't about to be diverted from his previous
ire. “Whatever. I need him here, in Denver. I need him here now.”

Banks agreed. Chapel needed to be in Denver as soon
as humanly possible. This jaunt to Camp Putnam was going to slow down a lot of
plans. Not for the first time, Banks wondered how much Chapel had figured out.
Whether he was starting to guess what the real game was here, and what the
stakes were.

It seemed unlikely. Chapel had proved he was
tougher than nails, but he'd also made a lot of dumb mistakes—like dragging the
cute veterinarian around with him. A smart operative would have left her
behind.

He couldn't just assume Chapel was an idiot,
though. And he definitely couldn't just ring him up and tell him what to do. The
one-armed asshole had to be led around like a bull with a ring in his nose. If
you pulled too hard on the ring, he would just plant his feet and refuse to
move. You had to be subtle about it. Make him think he was still in charge of
his own destiny.

“I've got to go,” Banks told Hayes. “I think I can
solve our mutual problem, but it means making a very delicate phone call.”

“To whom?” Hayes demanded.

The judge had no need to know, but for once Banks
relented. “Rupert Hollingshead. I've got to light a fire under his ass.” Chapel
trusted his boss. Time to exploit that particular mistake.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL
14, T+43:07

They landed in the Catskills with no fuss.
The airport there was little more than a short runway between two forested
hills, a place for hobbyist pilots to park their Cessnas. It was just big enough
to accommodate the jet.

“There are some pretty rich people up here, in the
middle of nowhere,” Chief Petty Officer Andrews told Chapel. “This isn't the
first G4 to land on this strip. What do you want me to do now?”

“Hmm?”

“Me, the pilot, this plane. Do you want us to wait
here for you?”

Chapel thought about that for a second. “What are
your orders from up top?”

Andrews studied his face for a moment before
answering. Perhaps she was trying to decide what his security clearance was.
“I've received no new orders since I picked you up in Atlanta. Though—there was
one thing. I was told to watch you closely and provide an update on your
psychological state.” She was being careful, he saw, choosing her words
precisely. She hadn't told him
who
was supposed to
get that update.

“Okay. Don't get in trouble on my account,” he told
her, knowing perfectly well she wouldn't. If orders came in to leave him
stranded in the Catskills, she would take her plane up and away on a moment's
notice. “If you don't get any other orders, stay put. Refuel if they have the
right facilities here. We might need to leave in a hurry.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” she said, and saluted him. Her way
of saying she would follow her orders—wherever they came from. Reminding him,
perhaps, of the chain of command.

He returned the salute anyway, then went to wake
Julia. She'd just managed to fall asleep and she was surly getting up, pushing
his hands away and pulling her hair down over her eyes as if she wanted to block
out the light. She didn't say anything, though, as he led her down the stairs to
the ground.

It was cold out, though not as frigid as Chicago.
What Chapel hadn't been expecting, though, was how dark it was. There were a few
lights on the airstrip's sole building, a hangar about five hundred yards away.
The jet behind them showed its own lights that blinked on its wingtips.
Otherwise the world was wrapped in a thick blanket of dark cloud that only a few
stars could penetrate. The moon was down, and Chapel couldn't see more than a
dozen yards in any direction.

No one was waiting for them on the tarmac. Not a
soul.

That was a good thing, of course. It meant Chapel
wasn't about to be arrested—or worse. It meant Hollingshead wasn't ready to reel
him in, not quite yet. Maybe the admiral wanted to give him a chance to come in
on his own. Or maybe he wanted to see just how far Chapel would push.

The darkness was also a bad thing, though, because
they had a ways to go yet in the middle of the night. “Angel,” he said, “what
are the chances of getting some transport out here?”

“Sorry, Captain,” the operator said in his ear. She
sounded like she had better things to do. “You can turn around and get back on
that plane. Follow your orders. Otherwise, you're on your own.”

“Understood,” Chapel said.

Crap. He'd gotten used to Angel's help. He'd gotten
used to having cars waiting for him everywhere he went, and helicopters when the
cars weren't fast enough.

Well, he still had his training. Army Rangers
didn't have angels sitting on their shoulders when they were dropped behind
enemy lines. They were taught to improvise as necessary.

A little parking lot sat on the far side of the
hangar. Three vehicles were parked there—two compact cars and a pickup truck.
Chapel glanced through a window on the side of the hangar. There was an old man
sitting in there, applying daubs of paint to a canvas the size of a barn door.
Chapel saw no sign of anyone else—most likely the man in the hangar was simply a
night attendant, there to make sure nobody ran off with the row of private
planes parked inside the cavernous hangar. Loud music came through the window,
something wild and classical. The attendant probably hadn't even heard the G4
land on his runway.

So far so good.

The compacts were most likely stored there for the
use of people flying in for the weekend—people who lived somewhere else but
wanted to be able to drive around when they got up here. The pickup probably
belonged to the painter, but it was the best choice for where Chapel was headed.
It would also be the easiest vehicle to acquire. The doors weren't locked. He
stuck Julia in the passenger seat—she did as she was told without complaint or
acknowledgment. Then he bent down under the dashboard and pulled some wires away
from the fuse box. “You can't do this on modern cars,” he told Julia, who didn't
even look at him. He was talking to fill up the silence. “The computers in them
know better. But the older models were designed to be fixed by their owners, so
everything's out in the open.” He found the two wires he wanted. With his
fingernails and teeth he stripped a little insulation off them, then rubbed them
together until the pickup coughed to life.

As Chapel threw the truck in gear and rolled
through the open gate of the airfield, there was no sign the painter was even
aware he'd just been robbed.

PHOENICIA, NEW
YORK: APRIL 13, T+44:19

The night was impenetrably dark. The skeletal
branches of trees loomed over the road on either side, blocking out even
starlight. The truck's headlights could illuminate no more than a few gray weeds
sticking up through the gravel of the road. Chapel had to take it slow,
consulting the GPS in his phone every time the road branched or turned.

Occasionally they passed by an open field and the
silver light of the overcast was just enough to see by. Old wooden buildings
crouched on that open land, barns and farmhouses. Few of them showed any lights
of their own.

Suddenly Julia sat up straight in her seat and
peered through the truck's window, her hand on the glass.

“I know this place,” she said, as he slowed the
truck down to a crawl. “I remember this.”

Chapel couldn't see anything but darkness and more
trees. “You sure?” he asked.

“We're on the road to Phoenicia,” she said. “I grew
up there.”

Chapel had forgotten that much of Julia's youth had
been spent on these back roads. Her parents had lived here, working by day at
Camp Putnam where they were raising a small army of genetic misfits, coming home
at night to check her homework and take out the trash. He shook his head. “What
was it like?” he asked.

She shrugged and made herself small in her seat
again, withdrawing once more. For a second he thought she wouldn't answer, that
that would go beyond the bounds of their new professional relationship. Then she
made a small noncommittal noise and said, “It was all right, I guess. I went
skiing a lot in the winter, and in summer my friends and I would steal some beer
and go tubing.”

“Tubing?” Chapel asked.

Julia actually smiled a little. “It's the local
sport, I guess. You get an old inner tube from a tractor tire and you throw it
in the river, then you sit with your butt in the hole and your legs dangling in
the water. The current takes you downriver while you lie back with the sun in
your face and the water splashing you to keep you cool. The river keeps the beer
cold for a long time.”

“Sounds pretty idyllic,” he said, to keep her
talking.

“Now, yeah. When I was a teenager, I thought it was
boring as hell. I used to dream about when I grew up and I could move to New
York City. I was going to be a reporter, for a while, until I realized that
newspapers couldn't compete with the Internet. Then I was going to be a famous
blogger.” She laughed, a welcome sound in the dark cab of the pickup. “There are
some things really I miss about this place. In Phoenicia there's a restaurant
called Sweet Sue's. They make the best pancakes in the world.”

“I've had some pretty good pancakes,” Chapel told
her. “Down in Florida we used to get
panqueques
from
street vendors. They served them with fruit and honey on top.”

“No comparison,” Julia said. He could almost hear
her roll her eyes. “At Sweet Sue's the pancakes are like half an inch thick, and
lighter than air. Except they fill you up fast. I could never eat more than one
of them at a sitting, but my dad would order
four
of
them, which is the equivalent of saying you want to eat an entire birthday cake
all at once. He never managed to finish and Mom would scold him for wasting
perfectly good carbohydrates. Then she would pull out a pen and work out how
many grams of fat he'd just eaten and how many calories he would burn if he
walked all the way home.”

“You really were raised by scientists,” Chapel
said. When she didn't respond, he nodded at the road. “You know this road? You
know where it heads?”

“Yeah—out to nowhere. There are some farms on the
far side of the mountain, but from here it's fifty miles of just trees and
little creeks and crazy people.”

Well, he couldn't disagree. They were only a few
miles from Camp Putnam.

CAMP PUTNAM, NEW
YORK: APRIL 14, T+44:37