Chimera Read online

  “They stopped giving me the new drug, which was fine, I didn’t want it anymore. I figured lithium was better. Anything would be better. I got to go home. The weight came off pretty fast and I guess—I guess I just went on with my life. I didn’t think about it too much. I didn’t want to. It was like I went to sleep and had a nightmare, and when I woke up, it was nine months later.

  “I had dreams sometimes but they were just . . . dreams. For years I had them and I told myself they meant nothing. When you’re bipolar, you learn to make a lot of excuses. That’s what my therapist tells me. You make excuses for your behavior. When you’re manic and people tell you you’re acting crazy, you just tell yourself they’re jealous because you’re having more fun than they are, or that they just can’t keep up with you. When you’re depressed, on the other end of the cycle, you make up excuses why you need to spend the day in bed, or why the rent is late . . .

  “So every time I thought about that drug trial, every time I would remember something, I would just tell myself none of it was real. That the things I was thinking were just disordered thoughts, or misinterpreted memories, or whatever. Nothing really happened to me in that hospital except I went a little loopy, and wow, how fortunate was it that I couldn’t remember what I did all that clearly. I didn’t want to remember. I wanted to put it behind me.

  “Sometimes people would ask me about my scar. You know . . . boyfriends, mostly. I’ve had a few, and they always ask where it came from. I tell them I had my appendix out a long time ago. In 1985. Usually nobody asks twice. But there was one guy, once. He asked and he said his mom had a scar like that. I said she’d probably had her appendix out, too, but he said no. He said she’d had a cesarean section when he was born. He was upside down in her womb and they had to cut him out.

  “I don’t . . . I don’t want to say what I think. It sounds crazy. It just sounds crazy. But you know, don’t you? You’re a woman. You know what I think.

  “You know what I think they took from me.”

  SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+70:31

  CPO Andrews wiped a tear from her cheek. She had turned her face away from Chapel’s, so he couldn’t tell what she was thinking, though he could guess.

  Julia got up without a word and left the room.

  “Angel,” Chapel said, “I didn’t know.”

  “No, Chapel, of course you didn’t. None of us did. We never stopped to ask where the chimeras came from.”

  Chapel had imagined they must have been grown in vats somewhere, fetuses floating in glass tubes in some dark laboratory. When he thought about it now, that seemed ridiculous. That kind of technology didn’t even exist. Whereas even in 1984 it would have been child’s play for a scientist like William Taggart to implant embryos in unsuspecting women all over the country.

  The thought made him gag a little.

  “I suppose we can assume Olivia Nguyen and Christina Smollett underwent the same . . . procedure,” Chapel said. He stopped talking then. He wanted to ask more questions, but with CPO Andrews lying next to him it felt like it would be in bad taste to continue his line of thought. “Maybe we should talk about this later,” he said.

  CPO Andrews turned to face him again. Her mouth was set in a hard line. “No,” she said. “No. This is inexcusable. You’re a man, and I don’t expect you to understand the level of violation we’re talking about.”

  “I guess you’re right about that,” Chapel admitted.

  “But even worse,” Andrews said, and she pressed her lips tightly closed for a moment as if she couldn’t bear to speak, but then went on, “even worse than what the government did—would be to just keep it secret. To not do something.”

  Chapel nodded slowly. “This isn’t about hunting down the chimeras anymore. Not for me. It’s about finding out what was done back in 1984 and 1985, and finding out who’s responsible.”

  “Good. You find them. And you make them pay,” Andrews told him. “Go on. Talk to Angel. Work this case. I insist.”

  He watched her eyes for a second. Then he said, “Angel, there were two hundred chimeras born in 1985. Why do we only have three names on our list?”

  “I’ve been wondering that myself,” Angel said, over the speakerphone. “I don’t have a concrete answer. My best guess is that only these three women represented a threat to the project’s secrecy.”

  “I don’t follow,” Chapel said.

  “It’s ugly to think about, but it makes sense why the CIA chose these women to be the mothers of the chimeras. The project was always top secret, but they needed two hundred women of the appropriate age and relative health. That’s a huge security risk. They picked women with emotional problems because they were less likely to understand what was happening to them, or to talk about it afterward—and even if they did, nobody would believe them. Christina Smollett, for instance, or maybe her father figured out some of it and sued the CIA. The case was thrown out because the judge assumed she was just . . . crazy. That she’d hallucinated the whole thing, or whatever. The secret was safe, but still, it meant she was enough of a threat to get on the list. Marcia Kennedy is a relatively lucid woman. She guessed what was done to her, and maybe I wasn’t the first person she talked to about it. So that gets her on the list, too. As for Olivia Nguyen, I looked up her records and she suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. She has long stretches where she appears to be perfectly healthy—that’s common with her diagnosis—but she has a habit of keeping knives under her mattress, and sometimes she thinks the songs she hears on the radio are a government plot to drive her crazy.”

  “A government plot—”

  “Yeah,” Angel said. “I don’t think she’s aware of what was done to her, or who did it. But she writes a lot of letters to the editor of the local newspaper talking about the government. A few of them even get printed. They’re quite well written, and it takes a while before you realize they’re the product of a disordered mind. They never contain anything specific enough to endanger the secrecy of the chimera project but maybe the CIA doesn’t want to take the chance that someday she’ll get more focused, more coherent.”

  “So they want her dead just in case,” Chapel said. “Even though she’s never done anything to hurt them. So she’s on the list.”

  “Chapel, there’s one thing I don’t understand. Why the chimeras?”

  “You mean, why were they created, or—”

  “No,” Angel said. “I mean, why send the chimeras to kill their own mothers?”

  Chapel hadn’t even considered that before. “Because they know the chimeras will do it,” he said, at last. “The people who are running this plot, they don’t care about who gave birth to who. They just know how to manipulate the chimeras. They know the chimeras hate the people who created them, and then abandoned them. It wouldn’t take much to convince a chimera to kill his biological mother. Even if she never knew he existed. They can’t think through their emotions.”

  “But why even take that chance? Why not just send Laughing Boy to kill these women?”

  Chapel frowned. “Plausible deniability,” he said. “There’s always the risk somebody will see Laughing Boy shoot the people on the kill list. Some chance someone will put two and two together and realize the government is assassinating its own citizens. But if it’s just some big, obviously crazy guy who kills these people, well, the world knows that happens sometimes. No one will investigate too deeply.”

  “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 n
eedles 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.”