Chimera Page 4

  “He’s a cripple?” Banks demanded.

  “Look for yourself, Banks. He’s fine.”

  “This is the best man you could find me? I guess on short notice—”

  “Captain Chapel has my complete confidence,” Hollingshead shot back. His eyes flashed with anger. “He is exactly the man we need.”

  “What’s he been doing since we scraped him up and brought him home?”

  “Oversight on weapons system acquisitions. It should come as no surprise to anyone here gathered that the private firms we employ see defense contracts as an opportunity to rob America blind. Captain Chapel here is in charge of keeping an eye on them and bringing them to justice when they actually break the law.”

  “So he’s a professional snitch,” Banks said.

  Hollingshead sighed a little. “I prefer the term whistle-blower. The point is, simply, that you are looking at a man with Special Forces training, field experience, and a finely tuned mind for police work. Who, not least of all, knows how to keep a secret. Am I beginning to approach your idea of a satisfactory candidate?”

  “Maybe,” Banks said. “Considering the desperate circumstances, and the sensitivity of the matter—”

  “There’s certainly no time to find anyone else,” Hollingshead said, with those flashing eyes again. Chapel got the sense that for all his genial nature, Hollingshead loathed Banks with a passion. Banks just seemed like he hated everyone.

  Hollingshead took a sip of his water. “Captain Chapel,” he said, “I’m afraid there’s no room for ceremony here. We need you to come work for us and I’m sorry, but you aren’t allowed to say no. As of this moment, you’ve been seconded to this office and I will be your new reporting officer.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” Chapel said.

  “And God help you, I’ve already got a job for you. God help us all.”

  THE PENTAGON: APRIL 12, T+5:19

  Hollingshead went behind the bar and pressed a button hidden among the whiskey bottles. On the far side of the room a shelf of books slid away to reveal a flatscreen monitor. It displayed the DIA seal, a stylized earth orbited by red ellipses and surmounted with a torch.

  “This is going to be a quick briefing,” Hollingshead said. He sounded apologetic. “Since most of what we have is strictly need to know. I can’t stress enough how sensitive this mission is.”

  Chapel wanted to ask why he was privy to it, then. He was hardly the man for a top secret mission, not anymore. But he kept his mouth shut.

  “A little more than five hours ago—that would be ten past six in the morning—a person or persons unknown carried out an attack on a Department of Defense facility in upstate New York. At this time we suspect domestic terrorism.”

  “It doesn’t matter why it happened,” Banks insisted. “Stick to the what.”

  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.

  THE PENTAGON: APRIL 12, T+5:42

  “I know it seems like a hard task we’ve given you,” Hollingshead said, shrugging in apology.

  “I’m just not sure how I’d even begin,” Chapel admitted.