Chimera (5 page)

Hollingshead took another sip of water. “Very well.
The purpose of the facility is classified, but I can tell you it housed seven
individuals who were not allowed to leave.”

“Permission to ask for a clarification, sir?”
Chapel said.

“Absolutely granted,” Hollingshead told him.

“These men were prisoners?” Chapel asked.

“Need to know,” Banks said. In other words, Chapel
wasn't cleared to even know that the prisoners were in fact prisoners.

“The DoD refers to them as detainees,” Hollingshead
said.

Ah,
Chapel thought.
Prisoners, yes. But not criminals incarcerated in a prison. Individuals held,
most likely without trial, for unspecified reasons. That suggested they were
terrorists, or at least that they possessed information regarding terrorism, and
had been held under extraordinary rendition.

Chapel bit his lip. He was already jumping to
conclusions and the briefing had just started. The first thing he'd learned
during his military intelligence training was to never assume anything.

“Six of the individuals escaped from the facility.
The seventh is presumed dead. Why we presume this is—”

“Need to know,” Banks jumped in.

Hollingshead nodded. “The six who left the facility
were tracked to the best of our ability, of course, and we are very good at that
sort of thing. Two of them were picked up en route and . . .
neutralized. The remaining four were followed by satellite reconnaissance as far
as a train station in Rhinecliff, New York, where we picked them up on a
closed-circuit camera.” He pressed another button and the television screen
flickered to life, showing grainy black-and-white footage of a train
platform.

Chapel leaned forward to get a better look.

Four men were on the platform. They paced back and
forth, acting agitated. It was hard to tell them apart—they all had shaggy hair
and beards and their clothes were little more than rags. A train pulled up to
the platform and one of them got on. The other three didn't even so much as wave
good-bye.

“The four you see here each took a different train,
headed to a different destination. About the same time I started texting you, I
dispatched counterintelligence units to pick them up before they got off the
trains. Sadly none of these units was successful.”

“The detainees never showed up at the destinations?
They left the trains en route?” Chapel asked.

“Ah. No. The units were—well. They are units no
more.”

“The detainees killed your people?” Chapel asked,
amazed. The DIA didn't mess around with terrorists (assuming, of course, these
were terrorists, he reminded himself). If they sent squads of soldiers to pick
up the detainees, they would have gone in heavily armed and ready for
anything.

“The detainees are dangerous people,” Hollingshead
said. “They're stronger and faster than—”

“Need to know,” Banks said, nearly jumping out of
his chair.

Damn it,
Chapel
thought. He had a bad feeling about where this was going. They were going to ask
him to lead an investigation to track these men down, but they weren't going to
give him enough information to do it properly. Government bureaucracy at its
very worst, and he was the one who would have to take the fall.

He said nothing, of course. These men were his
superiors. He didn't have to like Banks or approve of the man's obsessive need
for secrecy—but he did have to treat him with respect. That was part of what
being a soldier meant.

“We have to find these men, and soon,” Hollingshead
said. He switched off the flatscreen. “You see, they are carrying—”

“Need to know!” Banks said, nearly shouting.

Hollingshead stared at his opposite number. He
didn't turn red in the face or bare his teeth or ball his fists. It was clear to
Chapel, though, who had been trained to read people, that Hollingshead was about
to blow his top.

“I appreciate the sensitivity of this situation,”
Hollingshead said. Chapel could tell he was picking his words carefully. “But
you're putting my man in danger by keeping him in the dark like this.”

“You know what's at stake,” Banks said.

“And I'm telling you,” Hollingshead replied, “that
if you don't clear this particular piece of information right now, I'm pulling
out of this operation.”

“You wouldn't dare,” Banks said, with a snort. “You
know this needs to get done. You know what we stand to lose.”

“Indeed. Oh, yes, indeed I do. Which is why, after
ejecting you and your agent from my office, I'll take this right to the Joint
Chiefs. And write it up for the president's daily briefing, where I'll suggest
that we mobilize every soldier we can get our hands on until this is taken care
of. Of course, the press will want to know why we're doing that.”

Banks looked like he'd been hit in the face with a
shovel.

“This is bigger than you or me or our little
fiefdoms,” Hollingshead went on. “It
should
be
handled out in the open, frankly. I'm of half a mind to do this even if you
relent. But I'll give you one chance to reconsider.”

Banks set his mouth in a hard line. He grasped the
arms of his chair hard enough that the leather creaked. Chapel expected him to
jump up and walk out of the room. But he didn't.

“They're carrying a virus,” Banks said, finally. “A
human-engineered virus.”

THE PENTAGON:
APRIL 12, T+5:31

Chapel had no idea what to do with that
news.

It made him want to take a shower. It made him want
to shower in bleach.

He couldn't help but ask the first question that
came to his mind, whether or not he was a good soldier. “A virus . . .
are we talking Ebola or the common cold, here?”

“Neither, and that's the one bit of luck we've
had,” Hollingshead told him. “It's bloodborne, not airborne. They can only
infect others by direct contact, and then only if they break the skin.”

“That sounds manageable. What's the chance of them
bleeding on someone? It's got to be pretty slim,” Chapel said. His relief made
his heart skip a beat.

Then he saw the look on Hollingshead's face—and the
identical expression on Banks's features.

“Why is nobody agreeing with me?” Chapel asked.

“I mentioned the detainees were violent,”
Hollingshead said. “I was understating the case, honestly. They're
. . .” He glanced at Banks and then at Laughing Boy, who was still
standing by the door. “Mentally deranged is the nicest term I can think of. I
can assure you, the chances of them breaking someone's skin—or, to be frank
about it, biting them—is quite high. In fact it seems to be their chief joy in
life.”

“All right—that's enough,” Banks said. He went over
to the bar and poured himself a highball. “That is the absolute limit of need to
know. Tell him what he has to do, Rupert, so he can actually get to it.”

Hollingshead took off his glasses and wiped them
with a handkerchief. “Easy enough to say, of course. Much easier than it will be
to do. But we need you, Captain Chapel, to go into the field and recover these
men.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Chapel said, standing up. “You
want me to lead an investigation to locate them, so we can send in appropriate
squads to pick them up. I'll need to rendezvous with local police and National
Guard units in New York State to—”

“No.” Hollingshead held up his glasses so he could
look through them, presumably so he could find any remaining smudges. Or maybe
so he just didn't have to look Chapel in the eye. “No. Nothing that simple.
We're asking you to go into the field and deal with these men personally.”

“You mean I'm to track them down . . . on
my own,” Chapel said, because he was certain that was what Hollingshead had just
said. Even if it made no sense whatsoever. “Four men who each took
out—single-handedly—a rapid response team.”

“We're saying that we need you to find them and
remove them from play,” Hollingshead said.

“Remove them from play?”

“If you get a clear shot on them,” Banks confirmed,
“you take it. Bringing them in alive is not required. They're much more valuable
to us dead than they are on the loose.”

“You want me to kill them,” Chapel said.

“It's the damned sensitivity of the thing,”
Hollingshead said.

For once Banks had more to say. “The public can
never find out what's happened. It can't learn where they came from, and it
can't learn what they're carrying. We can't risk any more high-profile
incidents. It's been hard enough covering up what happened to the original
teams.” The CIA director swallowed his liquor with a grimace. “It has to be just
one man, to keep our involvement quiet. Secrecy is imperative here.”

Jim Chapel was no stranger to the need for secrecy.
He'd spent his professional life keeping secrets and not asking questions. He
knew how this sort of thing worked, and he knew what Banks wasn't saying. That
the blowback from a leak in this operation would be devastating. Which meant
that these detainees weren't just terrorists, and the human-engineered virus
they were carrying wasn't the product of some black laboratory in a rogue
state.

It was something the government had made. The
government of the United States. The detainees—the psychopathic, violent,
homicidal detainees weren't just dangerous criminals. They were guinea pigs.
Specimens that the CIA or the DoD or maybe both had experimented on. And letting
that fact out of this room was unthinkable to Banks.

He noticed one other thing, too, from what Banks
had said.

When Banks talked about the public—meaning the
American people, the citizens of the United States—he referred to them as an
“it.”

He was beginning to see why Hollingshead hated this
man.

THE PENTAGON:
APRIL 12, T+5:35

“You'll need to leave immediately,” Banks
told him. “You're going to have to work damned fast if you're going to catch
them. We'll do everything in our power to help you—everything that doesn't
damage national security.”

“I know we're asking a very great deal of you,
son,” Hollingshead said. “I wish I could give you opportunity to volunteer for
this mission. I wish I could let you turn it down. Tell me, Captain, what are
your thoughts right now?”

“Permission to speak candidly, sir?”

Hollingshead came over and put a hand on his
shoulder. “Permission to swear a blue streak if you like. Permission to call us
every foul name you can think of. Just be honest and tell me what you're
thinking.”

“I think you called in the wrong man,” Chapel told
them.

Banks and Hollingshead both stared at Chapel in
shock.

From behind him, he heard Laughing Boy let out a
little chuckle, which was cut off quite abruptly as if he were trying to
suppress it.

Chapel could hardly believe he'd said it himself.
For ten years he'd been slowly dying in a desk job he hated. Doing basic police
work when he'd been trained to be out in the field, making a real difference.
How many times had he dreamed of a moment like this, of being called back to
active duty? Because it would have meant he was whole again. Not just
three-quarters of a human being, but a vital man of action.

But part of what made him want that, part of why he
could even hope for it, was his desire to do the
right
thing. The thing that made sense not just for him but for the
country he served. And there must have been a serious miscalculation somewhere
here.

He shook his head. “This isn't a matter for
Military Intelligence. You have four men out there, loose in America, who sound
as much like serial killers as anything else. That's the jurisdiction of the
FBI, the last time I checked. If they were detainees under extraordinary
rendition—even then—at most you should be working with the U.S. Marshals
Service. They're the ones who track down escaped fugitives.”

“I don't have time for this shit,” Banks said.

“Sir, with all due respect—I'm the one running out
of time,” Chapel told him. “There's one other thing I have to say, though. One
thing I need to make clear. You have the wrong man because
I am not a hit man
. I don't kill people for money.”

“You know how to use a gun, don't you?” Banks
demanded.

“The army taught me that, yes,” Chapel agreed. “But
I know you're a civilian, sir, and you may be operating under a common
misconception about soldiers. We aren't in the business of killing random
people. The mission of the armed forces is to extend U.S. policy through force
only when necessary, and to use other means whenever it is humanly
possible.”

Hollingshead nodded slowly. He was a military man,
Chapel was sure of it, so he already knew this.

“So when I find these men, I'm going to do
everything in my power to bring them in alive. Or at least capture them in the
safest way possible.”

“Then you're a fool,” Banks told him.

Hollingshead clapped his hands together in obvious
excitement. “Then you will do it? You'll get them back for us?”

“Sir,” Chapel said, standing at attention, “I do
not remember being asked for my acceptance of this mission, sir. I remember
being asked for my opinion.”

“What the fuck ever,” Banks said, rising from his
chair and frowning in anger. “I asked for a killer and you brought me a
goddamned Eagle Scout.”

It was, in its way, the nicest thing Banks had said
about Chapel yet. He knew he wasn't going to get anything better.