Chimera (49 page)

“I don't want to think about this. I don't want to know these things,” Angel said. “Chapel—what's your next move?”

“I don't know yet,” he told her. “Let me think about it.”

SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+72:14

Eventually Julia decided that the transfusion had gone on long enough. Chapel was still short on blood, but CPO Andrews could only donate so much before her own health was at risk. Julia came back into the motel room and removed the needles from their arms. CPO Andrews got up slowly from the bed and then excused herself to go in the bathroom and wash her face.

Julia checked Chapel's pulse and looked into his eyes, checking the response of his pupils. She rubbed his arm down with an antibacterial solution and then put a small adhesive bandage over the puncture. “How do you feel?” she asked.

“Better. A lot better, thanks to you.”

Julia nodded and looked away. He reached over and took her hand.

“You saved my life. Again.”

“I had a lot of help.” She started to pull away.

“Julia,” he said, “just talk to me for a second. Okay?”

She made an irritated noise and pulled her hand away. But she didn't move away from him. “What is there to talk about?” she asked.

“I need to know if you're okay,” he told her.

“No one shot me and left me to bleed out. I'm fine.”

“Physically, sure. But you've learned a lot of things recently that I'm sure you didn't want to know.” He leaned over and put his arm around her. She didn't push him away. “I know about emotional trauma. A lot of the guys I served with in Afghanistan came back suffering from PTSD. They couldn't just return to their normal lives, not with what they'd become over there. They couldn't sleep. They couldn't talk to their wives or children without getting angry, without blowing up. Some of them just shut down, stopped talking or stopped getting out of bed.”

“I'm not—I'm handling this as best I can,” Julia said. “Chapel, this was my family doing all these things. My mom and my dad forcibly impregnated all those women. They raised the chimeras like their own children, and then they locked them up and threw away the key.”

Chapel pulled her closer. She laid her head on his shoulder.

“When I was a teenager, sitting in my room listening to Nirvana on my headphones and wondering which boys at school liked me, they were . . . they were out at that camp. They were there looking after their other kids, their
two hundred
sons. Training a whole generation of psychotic killers. I don't . . .”

She stopped because tears had crowded up in her eyes and she couldn't seem to speak until they'd all squirted down her cheeks.

“It's like my entire life was a lie. A cover story. I was their cover story. Their alibi. That was the whole reason I existed.” She rubbed at her eyes with the balls of her thumbs. “I don't understand it! I don't understand any of it! I don't know who I am anymore. Last week I was a veterinarian in New York City, with a crummy little apartment and an OkCupid profile I checked every once in a while and a standing date to have lunch with my mother every week. Who am I now?”

“You're the same person,” Chapel said.

“I shot a man's foot half off! I killed one of my brothers. My mom is gone, and my dad is probably going to die, and honestly—honestly, Chapel, and it bothers me, absolutely disgusts me to say this, but I think maybe he deserves it. I kind of want him to die to pay for what he did. How can I feel that way about my father? This isn't Julia Taggart, DVM! This isn't me!”

Chapel held her for a long time without saying a word. She was done with tears, but she rocked back and forth slowly, clutching her hands together in front of her. Clearly she'd needed this, needed to vent like this, for a long time. He'd been too busy chasing his mad quest to give her the chance.

Eventually she slowed her rocking and she just leaned into him, crowded up against him until they fell back on the bed and just lay there together. He stroked her hair, and she just breathed, breathed and did nothing else.

“I know how you feel,” he told her.

“Come on,” she whispered.

“Every soldier knows how you feel.”

“I'm no soldier,” she moaned.

“No. But listen. When you enlist in the military, you're just some kid. You grew up, went to high school, maybe you got in some trouble or maybe you just didn't know what else to do with your life, maybe you wanted to serve your country but frankly, a lot of soldiers I know just were looking for something to do. So they go to boot camp and everything about you is broken down. Everything you think you know about yourself is challenged and tested and evaluated. Then you get shipped overseas right into a war zone. People are trying to kill you all the time. Sometimes you have to try to kill other people. Everything you ever learned in church or in school or from your friends has to be put aside, put on hold, just so you can survive through another day. You give up every shred of who you were, who you thought you were, so you can be something else. Something that can fight, and will fight. Something that will survive no matter what.”

“Jesus,” Julia said. “Why would anyone choose that?”

“It's hard to explain, but . . . you're surrounded by other people just like you. People going through the same thing. They watch your back and keep you alive. You do the same for them because there's nobody else who can. You get through every day because if you fail, if you lower your guard even for a moment, your friends might die. Friends isn't even the right word. They're more than that. There's no good term at all for what your buddies become. But that's the compensation. It's the consolation for all the horror you face. You get these people in your life, these people who mean everything to you, and you know they feel exactly the same way about you. You'd never say it. They would tease the hell out of you if you did. But you love them.”

“You . . . do?” Julia asked. Maybe because she understood what he was trying to say to her.

“Believe it,” he told her. “Believe it. When you're a soldier, you're not alone. You are never alone.”

She pressed her face against his chest, and he just held her, held her close, because he knew that was exactly what she needed.

SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+73:21

After she'd rested for a bit, CPO Andrews went out and got some food and other supplies—some antibiotic cream for Chapel's various wounds, new clothes for both Chapel and Julia, some toiletries for all of them and three disposable cell phones so that they could all stay in touch with Angel. Andrews and Julia both had their own phones, but they were afraid to use them. None of them were sure what was going to happen to them, whether CIA agents were hunting them down even then.

“Laughing Boy could be coming here, right now,” Julia pointed out.

“I'm actually more worried about Hollingshead,” Chapel told her.

CPO Andrews found the idea shocking—that was her boss he was talking about—but she'd worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency long enough to know it wasn't impossible.

“He sent me to Denver,” Chapel explained, “and I'm sure he knew what was waiting there for me. I pushed him too hard when I investigated Camp Putnam. I wasn't supposed to see that place. Now I'm a liability. Angel,” he said, because she was always listening via the speakerphone, “I don't know how you left things with him—”

“I told him you're dead,” she answered.

“Oh,” Chapel said.

“Judge Hayes had announced as much in his press conference. He claimed he had your body and was going to turn it over to the Denver county coroner. Director Hollingshead sounded pretty upset when I confirmed it.”

“I'll just bet he did,” Chapel said, frowning. Hollingshead was an excellent spymaster, and that meant he had to be an excellent actor, sometimes.

CPO Andrews shook her head. “I don't get it. Why would he want you dead? He chose you to track down the chimeras. There's still one at large. Why would he want you dead now?”

“Because while I was so busy digging up CIA secrets—which suited him just fine, since he's at war with Director Banks over there—I accidentally turned up one of his.” Chapel sat down on the bed and reached for a plastic container full of roasted chicken. He was starving. Blood loss could do that to you, he knew. “Rupert Hollingshead was in on the chimera project from the beginning. I'm pretty sure he ran the whole thing.”

No one spoke. The two women in the motel room stared at him. He was sure Angel was listening intently, too.

Chapel took a bite, chewed, swallowed. Wiped his hands on a napkin. “In 1990, Ellie Pechowski was recruited to teach the chimeras. She was recruited by a captain in the navy. It's funny how ranks work—I'm a captain in the army, but that's not the same rank. In the navy—”

“Captain is O-6, one rank below O-7, a one-star rear admiral,” CPO Andrews said. “You're talking about my branch, now.”

Chapel nodded. “
Captain
Hollingshead was the one who recruited Pechowski. When we talked about her, he called her Ellie Pechowski, not Eleanor. Only people who know her call her Ellie.” He took another bite. “I can't prove it. But I think he probably recruited William Taggart and Helen Bryant as well. I think he was the commanding officer at Camp Putnam. I think the chimera project wasn't a CIA project at all. I think it was a Department of Defense project all along.”

“That's—that's—” CPO Andrews couldn't seem to accept it.

“It makes sense. It makes a lot of sense,” Angel said. “It explains why Camp Putnam is a DoD facility, and why Hollingshead was the one who captured you when you went there, not Banks.”

Chapel nodded. He didn't like this much. He wished it weren't true. But the evidence kept mounting. “I think he's been lying to me—to us—all along. For one thing, I don't think there even is a virus.”

“What?” Julia asked, laughing as if the idea was ludicrous.

“Think about it,” Chapel said. “Ellie Pechowski and your parents had constant exposure to the chimeras for years. But nobody ever treated them like Typhoid Mary. They were never quarantined, and until now nobody tried to kill them.”

“No virus,” Julia said, staring at her hands. “But . . . Laughing Boy . . .”

“They claim he's tracking down anyone who might be exposed. That's a great cover story. It lets him kill anyone who might be a witness—there won't be any serious oversight if Banks can claim that Laughing Boy is just controlling the outbreak of a weaponized virus. Even the president would sign off on that. But it also means Laughing Boy can kill anyone who even saw a chimera. Hollingshead and the DoD started this thing. Banks is trying to erase it from history. That's what this has all been about. I understand the kill list now. I know why those people were chosen to die. They're the only ones who know what happened. The only people who could bear witness to what Hollingshead did.”

“Which means,” Angel pointed out, “that everyone in this room is on that list—and I am, too.”

“They want to kill us,” Julia said.

“Yes,” Chapel told her.

“Okay. How do we stop them?”

SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+74:22

Chapel gave her a warm smile. “I have an idea about that. It means getting your father—alive—to someone who'll listen. Congress, maybe. Or the media if that's not an option. We make this thing part of the public record. Expose the secret. Tell the world what they did to those two hundred women.”

Julia and CPO Andrews both seemed to like the idea. Chapel wasn't as crazy about it, himself. It was treason. It was breaking every rule he'd ever learned as a spy. But it was the only way out of this.

“We have one advantage,” Chapel said. He reached for the new shirt Andrews had bought him and started pulling it on. “They think I'm dead. Angel, what did you tell Hollingshead about Julia?”

“He thinks she's on a train headed back to New York City. I considered telling him that CPO Andrews was taking her back on the jet, but it would be too easy for him to track that. She has to file a flight plan every time she moves to a new location.”

“If you're headed for Alaska, I'll take you, of course,” Andrews said. “But by that same reasoning he'll know right away that you're alive, as soon as he checks the flight records. There would be no other reason for me to take the plane to Alaska.”

“We'll just have to risk it. Hope that he's preoccupied and doesn't check those records, at least not until we've got Taggart. It puts even more time pressure on us, but I don't see any other way to get there in a hurry. How soon can you have the jet ready?”

“Hold on,” Julia said.

Chapel stopped buttoning his shirt to face her.

“You lost nearly half your entire blood volume,” she said.

“And got it back, from the transfusion. I feel fine,” he insisted.

“I'm sure you feel great. People always do after getting new blood. You're still weak, regardless of how you feel. You were shot, Chapel. You have a gunshot wound. You shouldn't be going anywhere except a hospital.”

“We don't have time,” he told her.

“Believe me, I get it. All our lives are at stake. And I hear what you're saying, that we have to move quickly before they come for us. But if your wound reopens in the middle of a firefight, or you just collapse from anemia . . . I don't know how I'll feel about that. I can't just let you kill yourself, Chapel.”

“ ‘First do no harm,' right? That's the oath they made you swear?”

“I'm not a people doctor. My oath said something about only using my skills for the benefit of society. Whatever. I'm not saying this as your veterinarian. I'm saying it as your . . . buddy.”