Chimera Page 11

  As he stood there, wondering what to do, his fare and the woman came out of the closed-down store. He was leaning on her shoulder like he could barely walk under his own power. What was the meaning of this? “Hey! Hey, you!” he called to them. “Who’s going to pay for this mess?”

  The woman stared at him like he was crazy. Like he was crazy. “This man is hurt,” she said. “He needs help.” They were walking away.

  “What about me? I’m wounded, too!” Arash shouted after them. They didn’t so much as turn around and apologize. He would have chased them if he didn’t need to stay with the cab.

  He fumed for a while. He nearly swore again. But Arash Borhan had nothing if he did not have a sense of practicality. He got in his cab and worked hard at getting it free of the wooden barrier. Metal shrieked and groaned, and the front fender did, in fact, fall off. But eventually he got loose from the pile of broken wood. It felt like the cab could still drive. Well, maybe this was not the end of the world, after all.

  Then someone rapped on the glass of his window, and he sighed. In New York, people saw nothing. They wouldn’t care if his cab was half destroyed—they still had places to be. They would want to know if he was available for a new fare. Crazy! They were all crazy. He rolled down the window, prepared to tell some angry businessman that no, he was off duty, that he needed to get back to the garage for repairs.

  The nose of a pistol came through the window and tapped Arash on his cheek.

  Wonderful. This day was going to get even worse.

  “I have no money,” he said. “No money!”

  The man holding the pistol seemed to think this was very funny, because he laughed heartily at the thought.

  Arash looked at him in horror. This laughing man was wearing a black suit and had the crew cut of a soldier. But much, much worse was the dead look in his eyes. Arash knew that look. It was the look he’d fled when he left Iran. The look of a man who had no conscience. No soul.

  “You’ve got a new fare,” the man said, laughing so hard he could barely get the words out. “We’re going to Bed-Stuy.”

  “Whatever you say,” Arash told him, because you did not argue with such a man. Not when he was holding a gun.

  Still it got worse, though.

  It could always get worse.

  “Oh no, no,” Arash moaned as the laughing man loaded a dead body into the trunk of the cab. Arash recognized the dead man—it was the maniac who attacked him and forced him to drive his cab here. “No, please, no,” he said, when the laughing man told him to get in the cab and drive.

  It was a long way to Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of the worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The laughing man kept laughing the whole way. When they reached the address he indicated, Arash saw it was an abandoned warehouse. The roof was falling away, and the interior was full of rat nests and the cardboard shelters of the homeless. This was not a good place, not at all. Arash maneuvered his cab around piles of rubble to reach the very dark heart of it.

  “Good. Now get out and open the trunk,” the laughing man said, giggling softly to himself.

  “God protect me,” Arash whispered. But he did as he was told. What choice did he have? He looked down at the body curled up in the trunk. Much of the maniac’s head was missing. What did this all mean? What could it mean?

  The laughing man pointed at a red plastic gas can in the trunk. The dead man’s hand was resting on it.

  “Take that,” the laughing man said, “and pour it all over him. Don’t be stingy.”

  There was no doubt in Arash’s mind what was going to happen here. The laughing man was going to make him burn up his own cab. His livelihood, the only possession Arash had that was worth anything. This was terrible.

  There was nothing he could do. He opened the gas can and poured it all over the dead man. The fumes of gasoline stung his eyes, but that was not the reason he started crying.

  “You’re hurt,” the laughing man said, tapping Arash’s bloody temple with his gun. This he seemed to find only slightly amusing. “This guy? He hurt you?”

  Arash nodded. He could find no words.

  “Well, that’s a damned shame,” the laughing man said.

  Arash looked at him through a haze of tears. Was he going to find sympathy here, in the unlikeliest of places? Arash knew such men as this—soulless men—could act unpredictably at times. They could even be charitable if it suited their whim.

  “Get in there with him,” the laughing man said.

  “I . . . what?” Arash asked.

  “Get in the trunk with him. Come on. I’m in a hurry.”

  “This I will not do,” Arash said.

  “Yeah, you will. One way or another.”

  Arash was a practical man. He knew what danger he was in, and that he had no options left. He tried to run.

  The laughing man shot him in both legs. Then he dragged him back to the cab and threw him in the trunk. The blood and gasoline from the dead man soaked into his clothes, filling his nose and mouth and making it hard to breathe. The pain in his legs was unbearable, and his brain contained nothing but clouds of pure agony.

  He could barely see, could feel nothing but pain. But still he heard the laughter.

  “I can put a round in your head, so you don’t have to burn alive,” the man said, chuckling to himself. “You want that?”

  Arash Borhan was a practical man.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and nodded in agreement.

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+10:52

  “Hop up there,” Julia said.

  Chapel looked around the room. It was a small examination room in the back of Julia’s veterinary office. A stainless steel table dominated the space, which was otherwise filled with cabinets full of medical supplies, jars of cotton swabs, dispensers for hand sanitizer, and, of course, pictures of dogs. A flatscreen monitor on one wall displayed a rotating screen saver of pictures of Portuguese water dogs.

  “Do you have dogs yourself?” Chapel asked.

  “I used to. Now my ex has them,” she told him. “Go on. Up there,” she said, pointing again at the stainless steel table. “It’s clean.”

  “You’re divorced?” he asked, still not complying.

  “No. Ex-boyfriend. We were together since grad school. It got to the point where I wanted to get married and have children. He disagreed. Now he lives on a farm upstate. With my dogs.” She looked at the flatscreen, which was showing at that moment a dog running across a field, its ears flapping behind it. She rubbed the corner of the screen as if she were petting the animal. “They’re better off up there, of course. They need space to run, and the city air is no good for dogs. Are you going to get on that table, or should I consider this a symptom of mental deterioration?”

  Chapel smiled. He did what he was told. The table had clearly been meant to hold the weight of a big dog at most. It creaked under him but it held.

  “There are two kinds of head injuries,” she told him, rummaging in a drawer to take out a small flashlight. “The kind that go away on their own, usually pretty quickly, and the kind that kill you. It can be hard to tell them apart. Open your eyes very wide and look straight ahead, not at me.”

  Chapel complied. She shone the light into his eyes, dazzling him. He tried to remember the ride over here. He recalled her dragging him out of the gutted department store where he’d left the body of the detainee. He remembered being put in a cab, and then not much more until they’d reac
hed this place. There had been a receptionist out front, but the office was mostly deserted—Julia had canceled all her appointments for the day after finding her mother’s body.

  “I’m missing some time,” he said. “I don’t remember the ride here, really.”

  “Blackouts like that are common with concussion. Do you feel nauseated?”

  “No,” he told her. She brought out a tongue depressor and he obediently opened his mouth.

  “Good. Now swallow for me.”

  He gulped down some air. “I appreciate this, Doc,” he said.

  She shrugged. “Just call me Julia. You may have saved my life, so that seems fair.” She smiled. Her face was only inches away from his. She put a thumb on his left eyelid and pushed it back, staring deep into his eye. When she let go, he had to blink.

  She was very close. He couldn’t help but smell her faint but sweet perfume and feel the warmth of her body so near his.

  “When that maniac jumped in the cab and told the cabbie to drive, I thought for sure he was going to kill me.”

  Chapel pulled himself back from what he’d been thinking. He put out of his mind how good she smelled, and instead he studied the woman’s face. She was a lot tougher than most civilians he’d met, mentally and emotionally. She could handle this. “That was his plan. He killed your mother to make her . . . I don’t know. Feel guilt for something she’d done. He thought killing you might make her see the light. The fact that she was already dead, that his plan made no sense, doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.”

  Julia nodded. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her stained lab coat. “I gathered as much from what he said to me.”

  “He spoke to you? In the cab? This could be important,” Chapel insisted.

  “Don’t get too excited. He just kept saying he was going to make my mom pay. That she owed him, and that I was how he was going to fulfill that debt. That was all he said—well, that and he kept threatening the cabbie if he didn’t go faster. At one point he reached through the opening in the partition and grabbed the cabbie’s ear. He nearly tore it off. I’m going to assume—because I know you won’t tell me even if I’m wrong—that he was on drugs of some kind. Speed, or perhaps PCP. That’s the only explanation I have for why he was so strong.”

  Chapel knew there was a question hidden in that statement. She was asking if he knew of another reason. He didn’t, so it was easy to stay quiet. Even if he’d had an explanation, he couldn’t have given it to her. I am a silent warrior, he thought to himself, repeating the creed of the army Military Intelligence Corps.

  She reached up and touched his face again, more gently this time. Her hand was very warm.

  Without warning, she leaned in and kissed him. Her lips were soft and warm, and when they pressed against his, her arms went around his neck. For a moment he couldn’t think straight.

  Then she let go of him and walked across the room to put her flashlight back in its drawer, as if nothing at all had happened.

  “Not that I’m complaining,” he said, “but what was that for?”

  “Because you saved my life, and because, I guess, you avenged my mother,” she said, her back turned toward him. “And maybe because I wanted to. Don’t worry. I wasn’t trying to start something. When you walk out my door, you’re never coming back. I know that.”

  “Listen, Julia, I—”

  “We need to make sure your brain wasn’t damaged,” she said, clearly intending to change the subject.

  “I feel a little light-headed . . . now,” he said, smiling at her.

  But she was done with whatever had passed between them. She was back to her professional mien. She folded her arms and leaned against the counter behind her. “Your pupils are normal, which is very encouraging, but I’m going to ask you some questions. What city are you in?”

  Chapel frowned. Seriously? She was just going to kiss him and then immediately pretend like nothing had happened? He shrugged in confusion. “New York,” he told her.

  “Good. What’s today’s date?”

  “April twelfth.”

  She nodded. “Very good. What agency do you work for?”

  Chapel reared back. He shook his head.

  Julia sighed and folded her arms. “I’ve met enough spies in my life to recognize the type, Captain Chapel. I know you’re in the intelligence community. You’re tracking down assassins sent to kill former CIA employees. This has something to do with work my parents did twenty years ago, and—”

  “Stop,” he said. “You don’t want to continue in that line.”

  “Oh?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s an apology, though I guess I didn’t phrase it very well. I’d love to tell you what’s going on,” Chapel said. “Really. I think you deserve to know. The problem is, I don’t really understand it myself. I was given a very minimal briefing and sent after these men. Anything I do know about them, I can’t share with you.”

  She stared at him for a while, perhaps giving him a chance to relent. If so, he didn’t take it. Eventually she just nodded and turned away.

  And that . . . was that. Whatever had happened, whatever had made her kiss him—whatever might have happened was over. She was done with him.

  He had a strong urge to run away. Like he’d done something wrong. There was one thing he had to ask her, though.

  “I blacked out on the way here,” he said. “Sometimes people say things when they’re blacked out that they don’t mean to. Did I say anything that I wouldn’t remember?” he asked.

  “You kept calling out for somebody named Angel,” she told him. “And you said one word a couple of times. ‘Chimera.’ ”

  Chapel nodded. “You don’t know what that word means, do you?”

  “I do have a postgraduate degree, Captain,” she said, a nasty sneer in her voice. “A chimera is a creature with the body of a lion, a goat head on its back, and—”

  “—the tail of a snake, sure,” Chapel said. Enough. He should just go. There was another target in New York City he had to check on, and three more detainees out there he had to take down. There was no time for tiptoeing around this woman’s feelings. “Thanks, anyway.”

  “Except,” she said, “to a geneticist it means something completely different.”

  “A geneticist? Like your mother?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+11:03

  “In genetics a chimera is an organism that has more than one kind of DNA in the same body,” Julia told him.

  “What, like a mutant?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No, a mutant is an organism that has the normal DNA for its species except a couple of genes are randomly changed from what they should be. A chimera is much weirder. Part of its normal DNA has been replaced by DNA from another source. Sometimes that happens naturally, when two eggs are fertilized in the same womb but one absorbs the other. That’s one way you get people with two different color eyes, for instance—that’s called chimerism. It can mean something else, though, as well. It can refer to transgenic organisms.”

  “Transgenic?”

  “A transgenic creature is a kind of chimera where the two or more different kinds of DNA come from completely different species. I don’t mean mules or ligers or that sort of thing, where you have two animals so closely related they can interbreed. Transgenics is when a human being intentionally adds unrelated DNA to an
organism’s genetic makeup. Say, adding firefly genes to a tobacco plant so it glows in the dark. Or growing a human ear on the back of a mouse.”

  Chapel’s head reeled, and not from the concussion. “They can do that? And it doesn’t just kill the mouse?”

  “Not if it’s done right. Only a small number of genes are switched, normally. And yes, we can do that now. It has been done, successfully.”

  “But why?” Chapel demanded. “Is this some kind of sick mad scientist thing? Like, crossing a monkey and a shark to get a monkey with big teeth?”

  “It’s done for slightly more noble reasons, usually. Like with spidergoats.”

  A vision of eight-legged goats spinning webs across mountaintops filled Chapel’s head. “Now I know you’re full of it.”

  “No, really. It’s been done. They introduced some spider DNA to a goat ovum, and the result was a spidergoat. It looks just like a normal goat, but its milk contains threads of spider silk. Spider silk is much, much stronger than steel, but because of the size of spiders it’s tough to harvest. Spidergoat silk is a lot bigger and longer than the stuff a spider makes. They use spidergoat silk to make body armor for soldiers. At least, they’re starting to.”

  Chapel had good reason to appreciate body armor. Still— “That sounds ludicrous.”

  “It’s a field that’s just starting out. But the implications are incredible. They want to breed a kind of tomato chimera that contains vaccines. You could inoculate children by feeding them their vegetables. They want to make chimera animals, pigs probably, that have human organs which can be harvested for transplants.”

  “I am starting to feel a little nauseated, now,” Chapel said. “This is messed-up stuff.”

  “I agree,” Julia said. “But I’m willing to accept that if it means saving lives.”

  “Okay, okay, enough with the ethics debate.”

  “Why are you asking me about this?” Julia asked.