Chimera (48 page)

“You're talking about Hollingshead's office.”

“Yeah,” Angel said. “Director Hollingshead was there. He was nice to me. He was the first person who'd been nice to me since I was arrested. He said I shouldn't worry, that they knew I was just fooling around. I was so relieved! I asked if I could go, and he got really sad and told me, no, it wasn't that easy. What he could do for me was give me a job. They would find a job that would use my particular skills. He said it would give me a sense of purpose. It would give my life some meaning.

“And he was right. I love my job, Chapel. I love being able to make things happen and help agents in the field. I love the fact that I get to do good things.

“But there's one problem. Sometimes, I find out that the government isn't always . . . good. Sometimes I learn things I wish I never had to know. And that makes me wonder where my loyalties really should be.”

She fell silent. Chapel took a deep breath.

“Okay,” he said. “Well, we've seen plenty of evidence of that lately, haven't we? So what are you telling me, Angel?”

“I'm trying to say I'm on your side. That I'm all yours, Chapel, from now on. No more secret agendas. No more withholding information.”

“I'm supposed to trust this sudden change of heart?” he asked.

“Yes,” Angel told him. She sounded like she expected him to say that in that case all was forgiven and they could go back to being best friends forever.

“Really? And what, exactly, made you switch allegiances?”

Angel was silent for a long moment. “I spoke to Marcia Kennedy,” she said.

SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+70:03

“I wasn't supposed to talk to her, of course,” Angel said. “Director Hollingshead was quite clear about that. You weren't supposed to continue your investigation. I wasn't supposed to help you dig up any more secrets. But I had already called her and left a message on her voice mail, asking her if she could help. Asking if she could shed any light on why her name was on the kill list. She called me back, shortly after you were picked up at Denver International Airport. I tried to tell her that I'd made a mistake and that I didn't have any questions for her, but she wanted to talk about it. She'd been wanting a sympathetic ear to listen to her story for more than twenty years. I couldn't stop her once she got going, and then, I couldn't bear to stop her. I had no right to stop her.” Angel's voice was thick with emotion. “I recorded the call. I record all of my calls. Do you want to hear it?”

Chapel looked around the room. Julia and CPO Andrews were both staring at him, watching his face. He couldn't quite read their expressions. He couldn't tell if they were judging him or just waiting to hear his reply.

“I'm starting to think maybe I don't,” he said, and Julia started to turn away. “Angel. Go ahead and play it anyway.”

Angel said nothing more. She just let the recording play.

“This is about the—the experiment. I know it is. What? No. No, I want to tell you. I need to. It started in 1984.”

Marcia Kennedy's voice was thin and whispery. It sounded like her mouth was dry when she spoke, like getting the words out took real effort. Even distorted by the speaker of the motel room phone, the urgency in the voice was plain.

“Please, just—please. Please let me talk, I have to get through this in one go or I'll start—

“1984, like I said. I was in a hospital then, a hospital in Oregon. I was in one of my depressive phases at the time. It was a bad one. I . . . I tried to hurt myself.

“They took me to this hospital. They pumped me full of lithium, which is the best drug they have to treat my disease. It works, I guess. It makes me feel normal again. It also makes me so thirsty I feel like I'm going to die, and it makes me gain all this weight, and . . . I don't like it. I don't like the way it makes me feel. I complained about it. They took me to see a doctor I'd never met before. I thought he was going to admonish me for complaining so much, but instead he was very kind. He said he understood that the side effects of lithium were bad, but that I had to take something. He said there was something else they could try. Some new kind of drug that the army had developed.

“I jumped at the chance. I mean, why wouldn't I? He said it was experimental, that they weren't sure what the side effects would be like, but I was so thirsty. I was so thirsty. I had to beg my father to sign the papers, the, the consent forms or whatever, but he did it. He looked so hopeful. He thought they were going to cure me. I just wanted to get out of that hospital so I could go home.

“They started me on the drug right away. They said it might make me gain weight, and I might have some problems with memory. They weren't kidding. The trial for the drug ran nine months. I don't remember more than a handful of days in that time. I remember sitting in a day room at the hospital, playing chess with somebody. She was schizophrenic and she cheated. She cheated at chess; she would just, just make up new rules, and say I had to play by them, but they didn't make sense. I got really frustrated and I could barely breathe. I remember looking down and there was my stomach. It was huge. I felt like I'd swallowed a bowling ball. I started to cry because I'd gotten so fat. Weight gain was one of the side effects of lithium, too. I guess I thought they must be related kinds of drugs.

“Except this one didn't make me thirsty. It made me nauseated. I don't remember much of those months. But I remember always wanting to throw up. I remember my hair thinning, and my sweat smelled funny. I have little glimpses, sometimes. Little recollections. I remember the pattern of light on a wall, or I see myself in a mirror, and my skin was so clear. It had never been that clear in my life.

“At the end of the nine months I woke up in this bed, there was blood on the sheets and I had no idea what I was doing there. The doctor, the kindly doctor was there and he held my hand. He held my hand for hours because I was crying, except I didn't know why I was crying. I felt like something had ended. Like something had been taken away from me but I didn't know what. He told me I wasn't thinking straight, that the drug had unexpected side effects. One of them was that it made me hallucinate some things, except I couldn't remember any hallucinations. He told me it had also interacted badly with my digestive system, which explained the nausea. He said that because of the drug my appendix had become inflamed and that they had to remove it. I had a scar on my stomach, this huge scar right at the bottom of my stomach, right at my bikini line. He said that was where they took out my appendix.

“They stopped giving me the new drug, which was fine, I didn't want it anymore. I figured lithium was better. Anything would be better. I got to go home. The weight came off pretty fast and I guess—I guess I just went on with my life. I didn't think about it too much. I didn't want to. It was like I went to sleep and had a nightmare, and when I woke up, it was nine months later.

“I had dreams sometimes but they were just . . . dreams. For years I had them and I told myself they meant nothing. When you're bipolar, you learn to make a lot of excuses. That's what my therapist tells me. You make excuses for your behavior. When you're manic and people tell you you're acting crazy, you just tell yourself they're jealous because you're having more fun than they are, or that they just can't keep up with you. When you're depressed, on the other end of the cycle, you make up excuses why you need to spend the day in bed, or why the rent is late . . .

“So every time I thought about that drug trial, every time I would remember something, I would just tell myself none of it was real. That the things I was thinking were just disordered thoughts, or misinterpreted memories, or whatever. Nothing really happened to me in that hospital except I went a little loopy, and wow, how fortunate was it that I couldn't remember what I did all that clearly. I didn't want to remember. I wanted to put it behind me.

“Sometimes people would ask me about my scar. You know . . . boyfriends, mostly. I've had a few, and they always ask where it came from. I tell them I had my appendix out a long time ago. In 1985. Usually nobody asks twice. But there was one guy, once. He asked and he said his mom had a scar like that. I said she'd probably had her appendix out, too, but he said no. He said she'd had a cesarean section when he was born. He was upside down in her womb and they had to cut him out.

“I don't . . . I don't want to say what I think. It sounds crazy. It just sounds crazy. But you know, don't you? You're a woman. You know what I think.

“You know what I think they took from me.”

SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+70:31

CPO Andrews wiped a tear from her cheek. She had turned her face away from Chapel's, so he couldn't tell what she was thinking, though he could guess.

Julia got up without a word and left the room.

“Angel,” Chapel said, “I didn't know.”

“No, Chapel, of course you didn't. None of us did. We never stopped to ask where the chimeras came from.”

Chapel had imagined they must have been grown in vats somewhere, fetuses floating in glass tubes in some dark laboratory. When he thought about it now, that seemed ridiculous. That kind of technology didn't even exist. Whereas even in 1984 it would have been child's play for a scientist like William Taggart to implant embryos in unsuspecting women all over the country.

The thought made him gag a little.

“I suppose we can assume Olivia Nguyen and Christina Smollett underwent the same . . . procedure,” Chapel said. He stopped talking then. He wanted to ask more questions, but with CPO Andrews lying next to him it felt like it would be in bad taste to continue his line of thought. “Maybe we should talk about this later,” he said.

CPO Andrews turned to face him again. Her mouth was set in a hard line. “No,” she said. “No. This is inexcusable. You're a man, and I don't expect you to understand the level of violation we're talking about.”

“I guess you're right about that,” Chapel admitted.

“But even worse,” Andrews said, and she pressed her lips tightly closed for a moment as if she couldn't bear to speak, but then went on, “even worse than what the government did—would be to just keep it secret. To not do something.”

Chapel nodded slowly. “This isn't about hunting down the chimeras anymore. Not for me. It's about finding out what was done back in 1984 and 1985, and finding out who's responsible.”

“Good. You find them. And you make them pay,” Andrews told him. “Go on. Talk to Angel. Work this case. I insist.”

He watched her eyes for a second. Then he said, “Angel, there were two hundred chimeras born in 1985. Why do we only have three names on our list?”

“I've been wondering that myself,” Angel said, over the speakerphone. “I don't have a concrete answer. My best guess is that only these three women represented a threat to the project's secrecy.”

“I don't follow,” Chapel said.

“It's ugly to think about, but it makes sense why the CIA chose these women to be the mothers of the chimeras. The project was always top secret, but they needed two hundred women of the appropriate age and relative health. That's a huge security risk. They picked women with emotional problems because they were less likely to understand what was happening to them, or to talk about it afterward—and even if they did, nobody would believe them. Christina Smollett, for instance, or maybe her father figured out some of it and sued the CIA. The case was thrown out because the judge assumed she was just . . . crazy. That she'd hallucinated the whole thing, or whatever. The secret was safe, but still, it meant she was enough of a threat to get on the list. Marcia Kennedy is a relatively lucid woman. She guessed what was done to her, and maybe I wasn't the first person she talked to about it. So that gets her on the list, too. As for Olivia Nguyen, I looked up her records and she suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. She has long stretches where she appears to be perfectly healthy—that's common with her diagnosis—but she has a habit of keeping knives under her mattress, and sometimes she thinks the songs she hears on the radio are a government plot to drive her crazy.”

“A government plot—”

“Yeah,” Angel said. “I don't think she's aware of what was done to her, or who did it. But she writes a lot of letters to the editor of the local newspaper talking about the government. A few of them even get printed. They're quite well written, and it takes a while before you realize they're the product of a disordered mind. They never contain anything specific enough to endanger the secrecy of the chimera project but maybe the CIA doesn't want to take the chance that someday she'll get more focused, more coherent.”

“So they want her dead just in case,” Chapel said. “Even though she's never done anything to hurt them. So she's on the list.”

“Chapel, there's one thing I don't understand. Why the chimeras?”

“You mean, why were they created, or—”

“No,” Angel said. “I mean, why send the chimeras to kill their own mothers?”

Chapel hadn't even considered that before. “Because they know the chimeras will do it,” he said, at last. “The people who are running this plot, they don't care about who gave birth to who. They just know how to manipulate the chimeras. They know the chimeras hate the people who created them, and then abandoned them. It wouldn't take much to convince a chimera to kill his biological mother. Even if she never knew he existed. They can't think through their emotions.”

“But why even take that chance? Why not just send Laughing Boy to kill these women?”

Chapel frowned. “Plausible deniability,” he said. “There's always the risk somebody will see Laughing Boy shoot the people on the kill list. Some chance someone will put two and two together and realize the government is assassinating its own citizens. But if it's just some big, obviously crazy guy who kills these people, well, the world knows that happens sometimes. No one will investigate too deeply.”