Chimera Read online

  “Please,” she said, clutching the sheets in her fists. “Don’t hurt me. I don’t keep any drugs here. They’re at my clinic.”

  The face hovering over her was broad and cruel. Male, perhaps twenty-five years old. His hair and beard were hacked short, as if he’d cut them himself, and his eyes were hidden by large sunglasses. If she’d been a little more awake, she might have known what that meant.

  “Relax,” he told her, his voice a low growl that held a purr of violence ticking over like an idling engine. She tried to sit up, but a thick hand pressed down between her breasts and pushed her back. She couldn’t fight that hand—it was like struggling against an industrial press. She could feel the bones of her rib cage flex as he pushed down harder. “I said relax. My name is Brody. You know what I am.”

  “You’re not here for drugs,” she said, because she was beginning to understand who Brody was. What he was.

  “I said you know what I am,” Brody said. “Don’t mess with me.” He leaned down over her, close enough she could smell the dirt on his skin. “I came a long way to find you. I had to know.”

  He reached up and took off his sunglasses. She had known already what she would see underneath, but still she gasped. His eyes were black from side to side. There were no irises, no whites, just featureless shiny black. Looking into them she felt like she was looking into a darkened room—anything at all could be in there. There would be no predicting Brody’s behavior, she knew. He seemed calm enough now, but he could erupt in violence at the slightest provocation. He was strong enough that if that happened, one little old lady was not going to survive his wrath.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “How did you get out?”

  “I’ll ask the fucking questions!” Brody shouted. He grabbed the metal bed frame underneath her and yanked hard, throwing the mattress, the box spring, and Dr. Bryant to the floor. She struggled with the sheets wrapped around her neck and arms and tried to scuttle away as he reached down with inhuman speed and grabbed her by the shoulder.

  “No,” she screamed, as his fingers closed around her clavicle and crushed it into powder. Pain ran screaming up and down her body as her arm twitched wildly against the floorboards. “Please—please just—tell me what you want to know! I’ll tell you anything!”

  Brody let her go. “That’s better.” He walked over to the door and shut it carefully. For a while he didn’t look at her. He stared down at his hands, at the floor. “That’s . . . better. Just everybody relax.” Was he talking to himself, as much as to her?

  He sat down in the chair by her dressing table. He dropped into it hard enough to make it creak, as if he wasn’t used to fragile furniture. She supposed he wouldn’t be. “You left us there. You just left us.”

  Dr. Bryant was in horrible pain, but she knew she had to do something. The telephone on the bedside table was useless. There was no way help could reach her in time. There was a pen, there, however, perched on top of the crossword puzzle she’d been working on before she fell asleep. She grasped it with her weak left hand and fumbled the cap off.

  “You—you didn’t want us anymore,” Brody said, his anger back to a low simmer. Dr. Bryant knew that the comparative calm wouldn’t last. He rubbed at his hair and face with both hands. “I guess we didn’t work out, huh?” A nasty grin crossed his face. “I guess we just weren’t good enough.”

  Dr. Bryant dropped the pen. She’d managed to scrawl a message on the wall next to the bed frame. Nothing complex, but enough that the right people would understand what it meant. Assuming the right people ever saw it.

  “Brody,” she said, “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t—”

  “You said you were our mother! You stood up on the platform, and you shouted it through a loudspeaker. You were our mother, and you were going to take care of us! Make sure we were okay!”

  “We did what we could,” she pleaded. “It wasn’t safe to—to get any closer. We sent you food, and clothes. Toys—”

  “You’re pretty stupid for a doctor, huh?” Brody asked. He dropped to his knees next to her and smashed her across the face with a hand like a lion’s paw. “Stupid! Stupid! I know how to read, you stupid bitch! You gave us books. You gave us books so we could read. Did you think we wouldn’t figure out what a mother was supposed to be?” He struck her again and again. “In the books, the mothers hugged their children. They loved them! You never loved us,” he said, and his voice was a roar.

  “It wasn’t safe,” she begged, in between blows. “It wasn’t safe—we couldn’t—we couldn’t—please stop! Please!”

  Brody stopped hitting her across the face. For a moment he glared at her, his nostrils flaring. “This isn’t going right.”

  She could only stare up at him. Blood ran down her face in streams.

  “This isn’t what I expected. I thought I was going to come and talk to you, just talk. That I could learn something here. But I just keep getting frustrated.” He shook his head from side to side.

  “Brody,” she managed to squeak out, “Brody, I’m hurt. I’ll . . . I’ll tell you anything. I’ll . . . I’ll be your mother if you want, just—”

  “You know what I am. You know we don’t do well with frustration,” he said. Then he grabbed her by her hurt arm and threw her across the room to smash against the vanity table on the far wall. She just had time to see her own screaming face in the mirror before she crashed into the glass with a shattering, tooth-rattling noise.

  Brody hurt her more after that but thankfully she felt very little of it. She was dead long before he was finished.

  IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+6:46

  Partner?

  Chapel thought maybe Hollingshead had meant the helicopter pilot. When he climbed on board, though, he saw that the pilot was an air force kid who couldn’t be more than twenty-five—and who had no idea who Chapel was, where he was going, or what his mission was.

  Chapel pulled on a crash helmet and moved the integrated microphone around so the pilot could hear him. “New York City—as fast as we can get there.”

  The pilot confirmed, and in a moment they were airborne. The chopper cut a wide arc around the Pentagon then slewed northeast, headed straight over Washington.

  Chapel sat back in his seat and let his gaze wander over the landscape. He considered taking a nap. It was going to be a long flight and there wasn’t much he could do until they arrived. He was too keyed up, though. Too excited—and scared—and worried—to even think about closing his eyes.

  Instead he could only let his mind race, thinking over everything he needed to accomplish, everything he could reasonably do to catch the detainees before they killed again. And about how it might already be too late for the first name on the kill list.

  He was lost in his own thoughts when a voice spoke in his ear.

  “Good morning, Captain,” a woman said.

  It was the smokiest, most sultry voice Chapel had ever heard. It was like someone was stroking his ear with a velvet glove.

  He glanced over at the pilot, then back at the empty seats behind him. Whoever this woman was, she wasn’t onboard.

  “No,” she said, with a chiding laugh. “I’m not there with you.”

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and think of me as your guardian angel?” she suggested.

  “What do you mean, guardian angel?” Chapel asked.

  The pilot of the helicopter glanced over at him briefly
, then shrugged and went back to flying the chopper. Apparently the pilot wasn’t hearing the voice in his ear.

  That was probably for the best.

  “Director Hollingshead asked me to keep an eye on you, cutie,” the voice said. “I work directly for him, normally, but for the next few days I’m all yours.”

  “He mentioned something about a partner. What’s your name?”

  “Well, my initials are NTK.”

  He smiled despite himself. In other words, her very name was Need to Know. “So you’re the secretive type. I can handle that,” he told her. “Let’s just run down the list, shall we? What is your current location? What’s your rank? What’s your official job description?”

  “All those things are classified, and you know it. You’re playing with me,” she said.

  “Just establishing some ground rules. All right. Let’s try another one. Are you going to be waiting for me when I land in New York?” Chapel asked. “Surely you can answer that, since I’ll find out one way or another in an hour.”

  “Captain, I’ll always be with you. But this is as physical as I get. The sweet little voice in your ear, making helpful comments and keeping you company. I’ve already been briefed on your operation, and I’m looking for ways right now to help.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  The voice sighed, just a little. “Let’s put it this way. While you’re in the field you’re not going to have a lot of time to check your voice mail or look things up on Wikipedia. I’ll do all that for you. If you need a map to your next target, I’ll send it straight to your phone. I guess, if you really wanted to get on my bad side, you could call me your secretary. I’ll keep you up to date, I’ll file your reports with the DIA, and I’ll make any phone calls you don’t have time to make. But I can be so much more to you. I can coordinate with law enforcement and the National Guard. I can make sure people know you’re coming and stay out of your way. I can get into any computer system and make it purr for you.”

  “Any computer? You’re a hacker?”

  “What an ugly little word that is. But yes. Any computer, any microchip that’s hooked up to the Internet. For instance, I can do this.”

  She went silent for a moment and Chapel wondered what it was she thought she was doing—breaking into his bank account? Changing his e-mail password?

  Then he saw his own hand come up in front of his face. His left hand. The hand rotated to face him and then the fingers wiggled. His hand was waving at him.

  Sweat broke out on his forehead. He hadn’t told the arm to do that—he couldn’t even feel what it was doing. He grabbed the wrist of his artificial arm and forced it down into his lap. It tried to fight him, to break out of his grip, but he held on as hard as he could.

  Apparently this guardian angel could take control of his arm. Any time she wanted. It had a wireless Internet connection built in, he knew that—the microcomputer built into its circuitry had to get firmware updates from time to time—but he had never considered for a moment before that that might be a security flaw.

  If she could do it—anybody could.

  Adrenaline surged through his body, and he fought down an urge to tear the arm off his shoulder and throw it out the helicopter’s window.

  Slowly he fought to regain control of himself. He glanced over at the pilot. The kid was looking at him out of the corner of his eye. He was frowning. He must have seen the whole thing.

  The embarrassment helped Chapel slow his heart rate and start breathing again.

  “Angel,” he said, because she still hadn’t told him her name.

  “Ooh, I like that,” she said. “From now on, that’s what you’ll call me.”

  “Angel,” he said, almost growling, “don’t ever do that again. Seriously.”

  “I know that was a little naughty of me—”

  “Angel!” he interrupted. “I’m an amputee. I lost a part of myself once, do you understand? Can you understand why I would be a little sensitive about losing it again?”

  She said nothing. Hopefully she was feeling terribly guilty and was too embarrassed to say anything.

  “Let me show you what that was like,” he told her, because he was very close to getting furious. Nobody messed with his arm. “I’m not supposed to know anything about you. But I know you aren’t military. You’re a civilian.”

  “That’s—that’s strictly NTK,” she gasped. “Who told you that?”

  “You did.”

  She didn’t sound so playful anymore. “Damn it, Captain. If I have a breach, I need to know about it right now. This is national security tech I’m working with here—if it’s been compromised—”

  “Relax,” he told her. “Nobody’s hacked your system. I just used my amazing powers of deduction. You referred to our mutual boss as Director Hollingshead. That’s probably his official job title. But anyone who’d ever served in the armed forces would know better—they would call him Admiral Hollingshead.”

  That long, uneasy silence again. Maybe she was thinking that if he could figure that out he was dangerous to her. Maybe she was about to tell his arm to strangle him.

  When she came back on the line, though, her voice was as sweet and sexy as it had ever been. “I think I’m going to like you,” she said. “You’re going to keep me on my toes. Well, we have just tons of work to do, don’t we? Where do you want to get started?”

  Chapel shook his head. This was not exactly what he’d expected when Hollingshead told him he was going to get a partner.

  IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+7:32

  “First things first. I’ll be in New York soon. The address I’m headed for is in southern Brooklyn. Is there a helipad nearby?”

  “Very near by. The address you’re thinking of,” Angel said, “is in Brighton Beach, and there’s a heliport less than a mile away, just the other side of Marine Park.” Chapel’s BlackBerry turned itself on and vibrated in his pocket. He took it out and looked at the map shown on the screen. Angel highlighted both the address he wanted and the location of the heliport. “You caught a break there—it’s about to turn into rush hour in New York. If you had to touch down in Manhattan, you could have been looking at an hour ride on the subway.”

  “Considering my mission I don’t think the subway would have been appropriate,” Chapel pointed out.

  “Sweetie, in New York, during a workday? The subway is the only way to get around. But seeing how close you’ll be, I’ll have a car waiting for you when you arrive. See how useful I can be? I’ll get you a visual reference on the address as well, so you know when you get there and don’t have to go hunting for house numbers.”

  “Good,” Chapel said. “How long until I land?” He glanced out the window and saw urban sprawl beneath him, but that meant nothing—most of the land between D.C. and New York was built up to one degree or another.

  “Not for another half an hour yet.”

  “Okay. You have my list of addresses.” He didn’t want to call it a kill list, not when the pilot might be listening. “Can you get phone numbers for each of those names? I want to call them all now and make sure they know they’re in trouble.”

  “That’s just a piece of cake, sugar. But are you sure you want to do that?”

  “Why not?” Chapel asked.

  “Not to be a pill, but part of your job is making sure this doesn’t get any public attention. If you tell these people that crazed lunatics are coming for them, what’s to
stop them from going to the media?”

  Chapel frowned. “If I talk to them the right way, make sure they know that’s not in their best interests, I think we can minimize that. The last thing these people want to do is advertise their locations. I just want to make sure they get somewhere safe, like a police station or an army base. Somewhere we can protect them.”

  “Director Banks isn’t going to like that,” Angel chided.

  “We don’t work for him. I’ll handle any blowback. But I won’t have these people made into sitting ducks. I’ll do anything in my power to keep them alive.”

  Angel clucked her tongue. The sound was annoyingly loud in Chapel’s headphones. “I should really run this past Director—Admiral—Hollingshead.”

  “Do what you have to do, Angel, but get me those phone numbers. These are human beings. They’re American citizens. They have a right to protect themselves. That’s not something the intelligence community gets to take away when it’s convenient.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Jim—”

  “Call me Chapel. Everybody does.”

  “Okay. Chapel. I’ll get those numbers. And I’ll make the calls for you, that’s part of my job. I’m sorry I questioned you. I don’t ever get to meet the people whose lives I touch. Sometimes I forget that sort of thing.”

  “It’s an occupational hazard. We’re in the business of protecting people, but to do that, sometimes we can’t tell them the whole truth. Sometimes we have to lie to them, frankly. If you do that long enough, you forget that it’s not a good thing. People like Banks forget that’s a regrettable necessity, not the whole of their job. I won’t make that mistake, not if I can help it.”

  “Thanks, cutie. Okay, I’ll take care of that. Anything else?”

  “I need as much information on those people as you can dig up. I need to know what they do for a living, where they hang out after work, what kind of family they have.”