Chimera: A Jim Chapel Mission

The door lock clicked open. Chapel grabbed the handle and pulled at the door. Inside the limo it was dark and cool, and Chapel saw two men, Reinhard and Hayes. He leaned inside the door, blinked as his eyes tried to adjust to the darkness inside.

"Well done, Captain," Hayes said. "Get in."

"Your Honor, it isn't safe here," Chapel said, stepping inside the limo. He plopped down on a leather seat and wondered why he hadn't thought about sitting down before. It felt so good, so good to get off his feet. "I, uh-I need to-"

"Relax," Hayes said. Reinhard rapped on the partition between them and the driver. Chapel felt the limo's engine rumble to life and felt them moving. "Relax. It's all over, and you did exceedingly well."

Hayes reached inside his jacket and pulled something out.

It was a pistol.

He shot Chapel twice in the chest.

DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, COLORADO: APRIL 14, T+59:17

"Julia," Angel said.

"I'm here," Julia said. "I'm just . . . still trying to understand what you told me. It's a lot to take in."

"I know," the operator told her. "But something's happened. There's no time to talk about Marcia Kennedy right now. Chapel-"

Julia's body froze. In an instant she felt like a solid block of ice. "Is he-?"

"He's in trouble. He's moving north toward Boulder. I've been tracking him by satellite, watching over him as best I could, but someone up there has been jamming my signal. I'm sure of it now. They're actively jamming me. Or they were."

"What? I don't understand. They stopped jamming you?"

"I have no way of telling. He's in a car moving north. Someone just threw his phone and his hands-free set out of the window."

"Do you think he's . . . still alive?"

Chapel had known. He'd known he was walking into a trap. A setup. He'd expected to die here in Denver. He'd gone anyway. Julia had been doing her best not to think about it. Now she felt like she might throw up.

"Normally I can track his pulse and his blood pressure through sensors in his artificial arm, but right now I'm not getting any readings. They could be jamming my signal still, or-"

"Angel!" Julia interrupted. "Just tell me. Do you think he's dead?" she forced herself to ask.

It was a long time before Angel answered her.

"I don't know," she said, finally.

PART FOUR

WASHINGTON, D.C.: APRIL 14, T+60:04

Rupert Hollingshead had always liked the Jefferson Memorial best of Washington's many landmarks. It was far enough from the Mall that the tourist crowds were always thinner there. In spring it was a wonderful place to enjoy the cherry blossoms. He'd always been a devotee of Jefferson the man, as well, and it was good to sit in the midst of all that neoclassical marble and look up at the man's wise bronze face and imagine what he would have done in a given situation.

After today, though, he imagined he would feel differently about the place. He would remember it as where he'd been forced to concede defeat.

Tom Banks was waiting for him when he arrived. The CIA director looked pleased with himself, of course. No matter what kind of horror show this had become.

"Your man failed," Banks said, with barely disguised glee. "He's dead, dead, dead."

"He got three of the four," Hollingshead said, when the two of them were close enough that they could speak without being overheard. "Really, all in all a good show."

"For a cripple, sure," Banks said, with a chuckle. "Rupert, old boy, old chum, old pal. You do know how to pick 'em."

Hollingshead fumed in silence.

"So go ahead. Say the words," Banks insisted.

"Really? Here, and now? Is that proper protocol?"

"Maybe not. But for my personal satisfaction I've got to hear it from your lips," Banks insisted.

Very well.

"I, Rupert Hollingshead, do affirm that as of this moment the CIA should have full jurisdiction over all secret projects resulting from or evolving from Project Darling Green. The Central Intelligence Agency shall be fully responsible for all further activity, oversight, and secrecy concerning said projects and the Defense Intelligence Agency will have no access to any work product or intelligence product resulting therefrom or associated therewith without the CIA's prior approval and knowledge. There. Is that enough? Or must I sign something in blood?"

Banks grinned like a feral cat. "I've been waiting years for this, Rupert. This project of yours should never have happened in the first place. No sane mind could have approved it, and keeping it going this long was utter stupidity. And now I get to clean up after you."

"You don't seem very put out," Hollingshead observed, "for a man whose workload has just increased."

"Because it gives me a chance to do something else I've wanted to do for a long time. Hang you out to dry. When the president hears about what you did-what you signed off on-he's going to demote you down to ensign at the very least. He'll be fucking pissed, to be blunt about it. And you and your stupid bow ties will never darken my doorstep again."

"All of this. All of this, because you hate me," Hollingshead said, shaking his head. "Because our two agencies don't get along. All the deaths, all the misery-"

"Spare me, you old fuck," Banks said. He turned on his heel and walked away, then. He didn't even bother with the traditional handshake. Hollingshead watched him go.

Then he turned and with a sigh settled his bulk onto a marble bench where he could look on Jefferson's face. Maybe for the last time.

He took his cellular phone from his pocket and put it to his ear.

"It's done," he said.

Angel's voice on the other end sounded downcast. Perhaps she'd come to have high hopes for Chapel as well. "He just took over? Just like that?"

"Bought Camp Putnam for a song, yes," Hollingshead replied. "No questions asked. He seemed anxious to get on with things." The ghost of a smile touched his lips. "It's almost enough to make me feel sorry for him. He has no idea what he's just inherited."

"Director Hollingshead? I'm not sure I understand," Angel said.

"Give it time." Hollingshead ended the call.

BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 14, T+64:54

There's two kinds of people who get to just lie in bed all day, Top said. Babies and cripples. Babies are cute, so they get away with it. Cripples ain't cute.

"I can't open my eyes, Top."

You want to be a cripple, that's fine. Nobody expects anything from a cripple. They just lie there, being a drain on everybody else's hard work. But that's fine. Because you're a war hero, right? You earned the right to do nothin' all day but feel sorry for yourself. You made that sacrifice. Don't matter you got two perfectly good legs. You're all depressed. You're traumatized. So you're crippled in the head.

"I got shot. I got shot three times," Chapel told him.

He did not know if he was speaking out loud.

Darkness surrounded him. Darkness filled his body, an aching kind of darkness he couldn't understand. He desperately needed to go to the bathroom.

A man whose body's crippled, sure, people can look at that and pity him. They can feel sorry for him. A man who's crippled in the head, people can't see that. They don't understand it. Now you and me, we both know about trauma. We both know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night and be back there, back in the mud and the fire and hearing the screams. We understand that. Nobody else ever will. They'll see you lyin' in this bed, with two perfectly good legs, and they'll say, he's just lazy. He's just milking it. Our tax dollars are payin' for him to sleep all day and eat Jell-O.

Chapel was lying in a pool of something wet. Had he soiled himself? The shame of it was too much to bear. He wanted to just curl up and go back to sleep. He wanted to sleep forever. He had a feeling that was an attainable goal.

Open your damn eyes when I talk to you, boy.

"Top," Chapel said, the start of a protest he didn't know how to finish. He tried to open his eyes, tried to obey orders. It was so hard, though. His eyelids felt like they had been cemented shut. "Top . . ."

I'm gonna keep yellin' at you. I'm not gonna stop. Because I'm no cripple. I got one arm, one leg, and one eye, but I refuse to be a cripple. Cripples don't work no more. I still got work to do, and you're it.

"I'm trying, Top."

I know you are. But my boys don't accept that just tryin' is enough. My boys-and don't you dare forget you are one of my boys now-my boys only accept victory. They only accept one hundred percent success. How's those eyes comin' along? They open yet?

It took every ounce of his strength. It was like trying to rip a phone book in half. But Chapel opened his eyes.

He couldn't see much, just blurry shapes and shadows. The light hurt when it hit the back of his eye sockets. It felt like each individual beam of light was drilling into his skull. But his eyes were open.

Some of the blurry shapes were moving. They moved around him, bent over him. They were people, looking down at him.

"Jesus," someone said. "He's awake!"

"How the hell is he still alive?" someone else asked. "He must have lost a gallon of blood already."

"He can't last much longer," the first voice said, though it didn't sound sure.

"Get Reinhard. If we have to kill him ourselves, Reinhard will know how."

BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 14, T+65:12

Chapel was lying on a cement floor in a pool of his own blood. It ran down his side, under his legs, and into a drain in the floor. He could hear it dripping away. He could feel it oozing out of his gunshot wound.

His shirt was off. He could look down and see the wound, caked in gore. He had two smaller wounds in his chest, just tiny pinpricks.

His artificial arm had been removed. It lay on a table on the far side of the room. The silicone skin had been completely cut off, revealing the complex assemblage of pistons and actuators underneath.

His good arm was handcuffed to a pipe that ran along the wall behind him. The cuff around his wrist was loose enough that it didn't cut off the circulation to his good hand, but not so loose he could slip out of it. He wasn't going anywhere, even if he did feel strong enough to stand up. Which he didn't.

Those were all facts.

As for anything else, all he had were suppositions and theories.

The judge had shot him twice in the chest-that must have been where the pinpricks came from. The judge must have hit him with a tranquilizer gun. Chapel remembered Jeremy Funt's story of how Malcolm was recaptured after his escape. William Taggart had taken him down with a tranquilizer gun. Most likely, Chapel thought, the judge had been given such an unusual weapon in case he needed to use it against Quinn. The judge would have known about the unpredictable nature of chimeras and been armed accordingly. The fact he hadn't been given a high-powered revolver instead meant that the judge had wanted to make sure he kept Quinn alive-at least long enough to serve his intended purpose.

So the judge had known about Quinn's presence in his security detail. He'd known everything.

The wound in Chapel's side was serious. It would eventually cause him to bleed out. It was only a flesh wound, though-Quinn's bullet had cut through his skin and muscle but failed to penetrate his abdominal cavity. If it had hit any major organs, Chapel would already be dead. He'd gotten off pretty easy, actually. If the wound had been properly treated and bandaged, he would be on his feet and ready for action even now.

No one had treated it or bandaged it in any way. He'd been handcuffed in this little room and left to bleed.

There were four men in the little room with him. Security guards in black suits. They wore their sunglasses again-apparently they were done with following Chapel's orders. When he begged them for help, for a bandage, for water, they didn't even glance in his direction. Two of them were playing cards. The other one just stared out the room's sole window.

Chapel had to fight constantly to stay conscious. He did not know if he was always successful-he might have blacked out once or twice by the time Reinhard came into the little room and checked on him.

The head of the judge's security detail poked and prodded at the wound in Chapel's side, reopening the crust of blood there. Chapel could feel fresh blood leak from the wound.

"Where's the judge?" Chapel asked, not expecting any kind of answer.

Reinhard surprised him. "He's in Boulder, at a press conference. Covered in blood-your blood. But otherwise fine."

"Press conference?"

"Earlier today, the judge was attacked by a mysterious assassin, didn't you know that? Hundreds of people on the highway saw it. If it wasn't for a brave war hero who was guarding him, the judge would have been killed."

Chapel forced words out of his dry throat. "Awful shame, though, that the war hero who took the bullet for the judge died before they could get him to a hospital."

Reinhard nodded, looking impressed. "You've figured most of this out, haven't you?"

Chapel took a deep breath before saying anything more. "This was all a false flag operation," he said.

"Yeah?" Reinhard asked.

"The judge is up against a tough confirmation hearing in the Senate because he's supposed to be soft on terrorism. An assassination attempt by some domestic terrorist group would give him a great platform to wave the flag around and talk tough, make himself look bloodthirsty. But you and I know better. We know this whole thing was a setup. But you can be trusted not to talk. As for me, the judge doesn't know what I would do. So he's going to make sure I don't ruin this for him. You can't kill me yourself, though. That would look wrong when they did the autopsy. So you're going to let me bleed to death, then turn my body over to the local coroner. Nobody will think to look for traces of tranquilizer in my blood, because there won't be enough blood left to test. The cause of death will be obvious so no uncomfortable questions will be asked."

Reinhard laughed. "You're smarter than we thought. When you just walked into this, we kind of thought you were an idiot."

Chapel tried to shrug. Hard to do with only one shoulder, and that arm handcuffed. "No. Not an idiot. Just predictable. It was my job to track down the chimeras. I would go wherever they did." He rested for a while before speaking again. "Tell me one thing. Are you working for Banks? Or for Hollingshead? Which of them is the Voice that gives the chimeras their instructions?"

Reinhard sighed. "You know, all this talking is going to drain your strength. Why don't you just try to sleep, now? Just close your eyes and drift off. You've earned it."

The reverse echo of Top's remembered voice in his head made Chapel smile. "I've slept enough. Let's talk some more."

"I've got things to do," Reinhard told him, shaking his head.

Chapel's only chance was to keep the man engaged. To talk him around. "That's a pretty sweet posting you're looking at, huh? Head of security for a Supreme Court justice. It's too bad you won't live to see it."

Reinhard sneered. "Idle threats, now? That's what you've been reduced to?"

"Oh, I'm sure I'll die first. But I'll have the satisfaction of knowing you'll go with me. Or didn't they tell you about Laughing Boy?"

"Who?"

Chapel smiled. Reinhard was still listening. That was good. "I don't know his actual name. Creepy guy, with a scar on the back of his head. Laughs all the time. Have you met him? If you're working with Banks, I'd bet that Laughing Boy was your go-between. He cleans up after the chimeras."

"What do you mean, 'cleans up'?"

"You know the chimeras are carrying some kind of germ warfare virus. I mean, come on. They must have told you that much. Laughing Boy finds everybody who's been in contact with one of them. He kills them and burns the bodies."

"Bullshit. You're just trying to scare me. It won't work."

"Sure. Believe what you want. Did you have much physical contact with Quinn, though? Did you shake his hand? Maybe pat him down at some point? Laughing Boy doesn't take any chances." Chapel looked over at the black-suited men playing cards on the far side of the room. "What about you guys?" he called out, raising his voice as much as he could. "Did any of you touch Quinn? Were any of you in car three when he went berserk? I bet they didn't tell you about the virus."

One of the guards looked up and stared at Chapel. "Reinhard," he said, "what's he on about? Nobody told us about a virus."

Reinhard scowled. "Shut up," he said. "Williamson. Hand me that duct tape."

Another of the guards tossed a roll of tape to Reinhard.

"Enough bullshit," Reinhard said. Then he tore off a generous piece of tape and pressed it tight over Chapel's mouth.

So much for talking his way out of this.

The guards went back to their game. The one who had spoken kept staring at Reinhard and at Chapel, but he didn't get up from where he sat.

Chapel wondered how much longer it would take to bleed out.

BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 14, T+65:48

There was nothing but darkness outside the room's little window.

Tools hung from hooks on the walls-saws, hammers, mattocks, and hedge clippers. A toolshed, then. Most likely Chapel had been taken to the judge's wife's place in the mountains above Boulder. The judge had said that was the undisclosed location, the safehouse where he would wait for Quinn.

There didn't seem like a lot of point in figuring out his location, but he couldn't just lie there and wait to die. He was an intelligence operative, so he spent the last of his time trying to gather information.

There were three guards in the shed, as well as Reinhard. The guards were named Williamson, Reynolds, and Hook. Hook kept winning whatever game they were playing. Apparently Reynolds owed him a fair amount of money. Chapel thought Hook might be cheating.

If he could talk, he could have tried to drive a wedge between Hook and Reynolds. Convince Reynolds he was being taken by a cheat. Get them to fight each other. It would make a great diversion.

Except he couldn't talk. He couldn't create the diversion. And even if he had a diversion, what then? He was handcuffed to a pipe. He still had some strength in his body-he hadn't succumbed to anemia quite yet-but even at his strongest he would never have been able to break the pipe or pull his hand free of the cuffs. They were designed to hold stronger prisoners than him.

If Reinhard would leave the room, Chapel could try to catch Williamson's attention somehow. Maybe he could convince the guard to remove his duct tape, convince him that Chapel had a cure for the virus, that he could save Williamson from Laughing Boy . . .

But Reinhard wouldn't leave the shed. And as long as he remained, Williamson was more afraid of his boss than he was of the virus.

If he could . . .

If things were just slightly different . . .

If . . .

Reinhard's walkie-talkie crackled with loud static that ramped up to a nasty whine of feedback. Looking annoyed, the chief guard grabbed the unit out of his jacket and switched it to a new channel. He started to put it back in his pocket, but it crackled to life again.

" . . . say again," Chapel heard, "say again."

"Movement . . . the trees," a new voice said on the walkie-talkie.

"What the hell is this?" Reinhard asked.

Reynolds looked up from his game and shrugged. "Sounds like Praczek, kind of. Isn't he out by the road?"

Reinhard grunted in frustration. He put the walkie-talkie to his ear. "Praczek, come in. Praczek, this is Reinhard. Report right now."

Only static answered him. Reinhard set the walkie-talkie down on the table next to Chapel's artificial arm.

"Sounded like something, maybe," Hook said. "Sounded like there was somebody out in the trees. If Praczek saw something-"

"Shut up," Reinhard said. "We hear something more, I'll worry about it then. There's nobody out there. Praczek was probably just jumping at shadows." He grabbed the walkie-talkie again. "Praczek, report in. Everybody, report in."

For long tense seconds all the guards stared at the walkie-talkie, but nothing but static came through. Reinhard repeated his request for reports, but still there was nothing.

"So there's a fault in my set, that's all," Reinhard said, while his guards stared at him. "Maybe my battery is dying. Reynolds, give me yours."

Reynolds took his own walkie-talkie out of his jacket pocket and handed it over. Reinhard played with it for a while, adjusting its various knobs and dials. Every time he switched it on, however, it got nothing but static.

"If there's somebody out there, maybe they got to Praczek and Foster," Hook said, rubbing at his chin.

"Maybe this Laughing Boy guy," Williamson said.

"Shut up!" Reinhard shouted.

In Chapel's head a little fantasy played out. He saw Army Rangers parachuting into the woods, scrambling to take up positions. He saw them moving in to take out the guards Reinhard had stationed around the house. He saw them breaching the door of the toolshed, bursting in with battering rams and flashbangs and M4 carbines at the ready. He saw them come to rescue him. To take him home.

It was a nice little fantasy. It was also bullshit.

Chapel was a silent warrior. He knew that Hollingshead wouldn't send Rangers in to rescue him-if Hollingshead even knew he was still alive. If Hollingshead even wanted him to be alive, which Chapel had come to seriously doubt.

This was probably nothing. He hated to admit it, but Reinhard was probably right-it was most likely just a radio malfunction. Praczek's original message, about movement in the trees, was probably about some animals he'd seen moving around.

"Praczek, damn it, report now," Reinhard said into his walkie-talkie.

Static.

Suddenly red light flicked across the shed's window. Just a glimmer. Then a moment later it came back, much stronger, bright red light illuminating the trees as if they'd caught fire.

Everyone in the toolshed jumped at the sight.

Reinhard's eyes were wide. He visibly regained control of himself. Then he pointed at the others. "You three go check that out."

"You want us to go out there?" Williamson asked.