Chimera (29 page)

“ ‘Made' them. I guess that's not a bad way to put it. What are they, specifically?”

“You don't know?” Funt asked.

“I only know what I've seen. I got no briefing at all, just a warning they were tough. The one in New York was definitely that. He also had funny eyelids. I know what the word ‘chimera' means, too. An organism with DNA from two or more sources. Which is more than they're supposed to have.”

Funt nodded. “Okay. I'm going to trust you, just a little bit. I can't hold this gun on you all night, after all. So I'm going to put it away. But first, you're going to give me yours. Then I'll tell you what I know, and then we can discuss getting me out of Atlanta. That's the deal. You okay with it?”

“I'd rather hold on to my weapon.”

Funt smiled. “I'd rather be married to Phoebe Cates. I'd rather be in Philadelphia right now, eating a cheesesteak. The last fifteen years, I've had to deal with how things are, not how I'd rather they were.”

“Fair enough,” Chapel said. Very, very slowly he reached into his jacket and removed his weapon. He handed it to Funt by the grip.

“Good,” Funt said, shoving it in one of his pockets. He lowered his own pistol, but he kept it in his hand. “
Now
we can talk.”

STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+35:39

“I have a lot of questions,” Chapel said. “Starting with what they are. I want to know about the one you called Malcolm, and what your relationship with him is. I want to know when you first encountered them and—”

Funt held up his hands for peace. “Stop. I'll tell you my whole story. That should answer most of your questions. But first I need something from you. I want your promise that when we're done here, we'll go straight to the nearest airport. You'll make sure I get a plane ride to anywhere I want to go.”

“Done,” Chapel said.

“That easy, huh?”

“I've got carte blanche to deal with the chimeras,” Chapel told him. “My boss—at the DIA—just wants to make sure they don't kill anyone else.”

“Oh, I'm certain that's not
all
he wants.” Funt rolled his eyes. “Whatever. If you get me away from Malcolm, that's all I care about. Okay. Let me think about where to start with this.”

“The beginning's always a good place,” Julia said.

Chapel looked across at her. She was standing close enough the three of them might as well be whispering. Clearly she intended to listen in on this. Chapel knew that Hollingshead probably didn't want her to hear it, but he figured this time he wouldn't try to stop her. He was in enough hot water as it was. If Funt started revealing state secrets, that would be another thing, of course.

But as far as Chapel was concerned, the chimeras were fair game.

“It started in 1996. I worked for the bureau back then.” Funt looked at Julia. “That's the FBI.” She just nodded, so he went on. “I wasn't exactly famous; I mean, it's not like I was a household name. But I had cracked some missing persons cases, found some kids who'd been abducted by religious cults or their parents or whatever and I had a reputation as the kind of guy who could find anybody. One day my AD—that's assistant director—calls me into his office and tells me to sign out for the day, then take a train to Virginia and meet with some guy in Langley. It was all very hush-hush and I wasn't supposed to let anybody know where I was going.

“The guy in question was CIA, which wasn't exactly a surprise—somebody says ‘Langley,' that's what you think. His name was Banks. Asshole.
Giant
asshole.”

Chapel fought back a grin.

“Tells me,” Funt went on, “that he's got a missing person he needs found. A kid, about ten years old, named Malcolm. He's been missing for over a week. I always hated hearing something like that. With abducted kids, unless it's a parent who took them, if they've been gone more than forty-eight hours you think to yourself, I'm not looking for a kid. I'm looking for a body. That's how you approach the case—otherwise you go insane when you do find the body. Banks assured me this kid was still alive, though he wouldn't say how he knew that. And he told me it definitely wasn't his parents who took him. Then he asked for my security clearance. He already knew it by heart, but I gave him what he wanted. He said I was going to see some things nobody was ever supposed to know about. At the time I didn't realize that meant I wasn't supposed to know them either, and I was going on his hit list.”

Chapel interrupted. “Why did he bring you in on this in the first place? The CIA couldn't find the kid on their own?”

“This was the mid-nineties. There wasn't even an Internet to speak of back then,” Funt pointed out, “much less the kind of satellites we have now. Back then when you needed somebody found, you went to the FBI. I was simply the best man for the job.

“The CIA flew me up to some place in New York State, I never did find out exactly where. They introduced me to William Taggart—your father who, forgive me, miss, was an asshole as well, though not as big an asshole as Banks.”

“I'm not exactly offended,” Julia said.

Funt nodded in thanks. “He treated me like I was a kid. You could tell when he talked he was translating in his head, from big multisyllabic science words down to the kind of slangy English somebody like me might understand. He said the kid I was looking for was named Malcolm, and he was very, very special.

“They showed me some of the chimeras. Had them come out and speak to me, say, hello, Mr. Detective, isn't the weather nice today. Then one of them took off his shirt. There were a bunch of cinder blocks set up in the room. This kid—his name was Ian, I remember—goes over to them and breaks them, one at a time, by punching them. When he's done, he's breathing a little heavy and his eyes go weird. You know what I mean. An extra black eyelid slides down over his eyes and blinks at me a couple of times.

“When I stopped wanting to scream for my mother, I said, thanks, that was very impressive, but what in God's name did I just see? Dr. Taggart explained they were called chimeras, and they're the next step in human evolution. Ninety-nine percent human, he said, just like you and me. The other one percent was cobbled together from DNA sequences he stole from chimpanzees and rattlesnakes and something called a water bear, which I'd never heard of. They were survivors, he said. They could live through anything, they could survive gunshot wounds, blood loss, hypothermia. They were faster than people, stronger, and, he thought, probably smarter, though they had a hard time testing for that.

“I asked a whole bunch of questions, like how one percent difference could account for everything he'd told me, and why on earth he'd chosen to do this, and whether he thought the devil had a special place for him in hell or if he was just going to get the usual treatment. He got pretty pissed off then and walked out on me. It was another scientist, a woman with red hair like yours but going gray, who showed me the rest.”

“That . . . would have been my mother,” Julia said.

“Are you going to get mad if I tell you she was kind of an asshole, too?”

“She's dead,” Julia said.

“Oh. Crap. I . . . didn't know—”

“She's dead, which is the only thing that keeps me from agreeing with you,” Julia told him.

“ . . . Right. Well, this woman, who didn't even tell me her name, she showed me the place they had the chimeras living. Camp Putnam, they called it. They were all living in a sort of dormitory there. It looked pretty much like a summer camp, except all the kids were exactly the same age and size, and they all kind of looked alike. And instead of hot little counselors in tight T-shirts and short shorts, they had soldiers carrying M4 carbines. The kids didn't seem to think it was weird. They'd never known anything else, your mom told me. They'd been there their whole lives.”

“Hold on,” Chapel said. “Julia—your parents moved away from the Catskills in, when, 1995?”

“We moved to our house, yeah. For the first couple of years Dad only came to see us on the weekends, and Mom would commute to and from work. She had to get up really early so I had to get myself ready for school in the morning.”

“But if the camp was operational then, why wouldn't they want to live closer to it?” Chapel asked. “If that was where they worked—”

“Did you want to hear the rest of my story?” Funt asked.

“Yes. Sorry,” Chapel told him. “Just trying to keep the facts straight.”

Funt snorted in derision and went on. “Good luck with that. This was the weirdest case I ever saw, and I only got little glimpses of it. Your mom took me to see the fence around the camp. At the time it was just a normal cyclone fence, twelve feet high. They were already building a new one when I was there. Much bigger, and with barbed wire on top. Your mom told me the fence was electrified. They didn't think the chimeras would dare climb it. In this one case, they were wrong. Malcolm had gone right over it. The guards caught him when he landed on the other side.”

“They caught him?” Julia asked. “But—”

“They caught him. They couldn't hold him, though. Three soldiers, heavily armed. He killed all three of them, snapped their necks, and ran off into the woods. He was ten years old at the time.”

STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+35:48

“He was . . . ten?” Julia asked, her face pale even in the darkness that had settled over the top of Stone Mountain. “In 1996, he was ten . . . they were all . . . ten?”

“Yeah,” Funt said. “That significant, somehow?”

“Just . . . to me. No. I mean, no—it's not significant. Please, go on.”

Chapel shot her a glance, but her face wasn't giving anything away. Maybe she had some secrets of her own.

Funt shrugged and went on. He took off his ranger hat and rubbed his arms. “I had my case, anyway. This weird mutant kid had escaped from the camp and I had to track him down. I tried not to think too much about what he'd done to those soldiers, or what the other one, Ian, had done to those cinder blocks. I worked it like any other missing persons. I asked a lot of people a lot of questions, made a lot of phone calls, wore out some shoe leather. I'm guessing the details aren't too important, not now. I spent three weeks looking, and every day Agent Banks from the CIA would call me and bitch me out for not finding Malcolm. Eventually I tracked the kid down to a house outside of Philadelphia. Nice place, just on the edge of farmland. No fence, just a real big lawn he could play on. It was owned by a family called the Gabors. They'd found him walking along the side of a country road outside of Utica, New York, while they were on vacation. Figured he was a runaway so they took him in, raised him like their own. Hippie types—Mr. Gabor worked for a nonprofit feeding homeless people. The Mrs. was a lawyer, but the bumper sticker on her car said No Blood for Oil, so she wasn't exactly the rich kind of lawyer. I'm guessing they were nice people.”

“You're guessing? You didn't talk to them?” Chapel asked.

“Nope. What I know about them I got from their daughter. She was a student at Villanova. She came home for Thanksgiving and found them in their bed. Her mom had been strangled. Looked like her dad tried to put up a fight. He was in pieces.”

“Oh, God,” Julia said. “Don't—please don't explain what you mean.”

“I'd prefer not to, myself,” Funt said. “I don't even like thinking about what I saw in that bedroom. It was a classic rage killing, from the look of it. What you'd expect if a six-foot-four linebacker came home and found his wife in bed with the mailman. A little more brutal than that, maybe. The daughter was in hysterics, of course, but she gave me the info I needed to find Malcolm. He was in his favorite place, the place he always went to, she said, when he was angry or confused, which happened a lot. He was in this tree fort in their backyard. He was still there when I got to the house. Just sitting up there, staring down at me. He'd been crying. I asked him why he'd done that to his foster parents. Why he'd killed them. He told me. Seems he had been given a cat for a pet, and the cat disappeared. He didn't tell me where it went and I didn't ask. I wasn't in Missing Pets. His foster mom and dad got pretty upset about the whole thing, though, so they must have known what happened to it. He asked if he could have another one, and they said no. Absolutely not.”

“What does that have to do with the parents' murder?” Julia asked.

“You're not listening. That was the whole reason. They wouldn't let him have another cat. So he killed them.”

“What? That's insane,” Chapel said.

“Yeah. Exactly. The chimeras—they're ninety-nine percent human. But that one percent makes a serious difference,” Funt told him. “They don't think like us. They look like us, but they don't
feel
like us. To them everything is serious. Deadly serious. When they get frustrated, or upset . . . even just confused, it makes them angry—and when they're angry, nobody is safe. They're not human. They're monsters.”

Chapel felt a chill run down his spine. “What did you do?” he asked.

“I asked him to come down from his tree house. I told him I would find him some new parents to live with, that everything was going to be okay. Working in Missing Persons you learn how to talk to kids who are so scared they can't see straight. You learn how to calm them down. You also learn how to get them to climb into a stranger's car. I got Malcolm buckled in and I drove him straight to the local police station. He started freaking out then, but I thought I could handle him. Then Dr. Taggart—your dad—showed up, and Malcolm went ballistic.

“One of the cops at that station ended up on an early pension. Maybe he learned to walk again. I didn't have a chance to follow up. As for me, I was in the hospital for a long time with a broken pelvis and two broken legs. I came real close to putting a bullet in Malcolm's head. Instead, your dad put five tranquilizer darts in him and eventually he fell down and went to sleep. It was the last I ever saw of him.”