Chimera (39 page)

He turned around and looked at the door of the
church. Its frame glowed with the same pink light. He staggered outside,
tripping on debris, and saw a haze of light over the tops of the skeletal
trees.

He'd been so wrapped up in Samuel's story that he
hadn't noticed the sun coming up. It was dawn light streaming in, dawn light
he'd seen.

Which meant he had a major problem on his
hands.

CAMP PUTNAM, NEW
YORK: APRIL 14, T+48:20

“Samuel!” Julia called. “Samuel! Come
back!”

Chapel reached for her arm. “Julia, you have to let
him go.”

“He needs help,” she told him. “Medical help. Or
are you going to tell me he's a chimera and he doesn't deserve it? Because one
of them killed my mother?”

“I'm going to tell you we're screwed. The sun is
up.”

“It tends to do that this time in the morning,” she
told him. She looked angry, but he was pretty sure she wasn't angry with him. He
guessed she was angry at her parents, who had created Camp Putnam and populated
it with sad monsters. So angry she couldn't help but express it, and he happened
to be standing nearby.

“Listen, we'll come back for him, I promise. But
there are people out there who need to be saved right now.” Like Franklin Hayes.
Chapel still didn't know why Hayes was on the kill list. But it sounded like
he'd been singled out for special consideration. Banks and Hollingshead had both
told Chapel that Hayes was the most important target on the list; he'd assumed
they just thought that because he was politically connected. It looked like the
Voice—and the chimeras—had their own reasons to hate him.

Chapel glanced at the sky again. “We need to get
out of here now. Once the sun is up, sneaking past that guard will become
impossible. We barely made it in the pitch dark. And if he catches us—”

“I see your point,” she said.

Together they raced for the trees. Finding their
way back wasn't going to be easy—they had wandered quite a ways in the dark,
just following the forest paths, because they hadn't known what they were
looking for. They'd had a working flashlight, too. Even with dawn coming up, the
trees screened out most of the light and it was still almost midnight dark under
their groping branches.

Chapel headed southeast, his best guess at where
the gap in the fence lay. He knew there was almost no chance of reaching the
exit before the sun was fully up, but he had to try. Any amount of cover could
make a difference. Every beam of light that hit the gap would make it harder to
escape unnoticed.

The path wound and snaked about, and he cursed
every time they had to double back because the trees were just too thick to
pass. Growing up he'd spent some time in Florida's swamps and he knew all about
undergrowth and how it could tangle you up. He knew forests like this and he
knew they were death traps—even if this one didn't have any alligators in it, or
sucking bogs so deep you could fall in and never be found. This forest had its
own dangers.

He tried not to think about that. He tried to keep
one eye on his feet, watching for exposed tree roots or piles of leaf litter
that could hide all kinds of obstacles. But the forest just wasn't built for
running.

“There,” Julia said, finally. She was out of
breath, but she grabbed his arm with one hand and pointed with the other. “That
shack. I remember it.”

Chapel could see why. It was a collapsed hovel like
all the others they'd seen, maybe one of the places the chimeras had retreated
to when Ian told them to split up. Only one wall remained intact, the roof
having collapsed and taken the other walls with it. But the intact wall was
decorated with hundreds of tiny skulls. They looked like fox skulls to
Chapel.

“My God, it's even creepier in daylight,” she
said.

Chapel grunted in frustration. He looked up and saw
the sun had fully risen. It was too late to try to just sneak out.

Even though they were so close to the gap in the
fence. “That was the first shack we saw when we came in, wasn't it?” he
asked.

“Yeah,” Julia said. “The fence is just a little
ways over there.” She pointed at a stand of woods that looked like every other
group of trees.

“It is?” Chapel asked. “How can you know that?”

“We came north by northwest when we entered. We'd
gone less than a quarter mile when we saw this place.”

Chapel could only stare at her.

“What?” she asked.

“How could you know that?”

She just stood there for a while catching her
breath. “Girl Scouts,” she told him. “Orienteering award.”

“You,” he said, “keep surprising me with just how
incredible you are.”

“Sweet,” she told him. “Now. How do we do this
without getting shot?”

Somewhere nearby someone stepped on a pile of pine
needles.

Somebody who wasn't one of them.

Chapel whirled around—and saw motion between two
trees. It still wasn't light enough for him to see what it was. Maybe an animal.
Maybe Samuel.

He put out one hand to signal to Julia that she
should stay very still and not speak. She seemed to get the point. Chapel closed
his eyes and just listened for a moment. He heard more footsteps, coming closer.
Very slowly.

“Damn,” he said, very softly. Mostly to himself.
Then, much louder, “I am a federal agent. I am armed, but my weapon will remain
in its holster. My companion is a civilian, and she is not armed.”

Julia stared at him like he'd gone crazy—at least,
until a few seconds later, when soldiers poured out of the trees and surrounded
them.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL
14, T+49:06

They took away Chapel's phone, his hands-free
set, the scuffed-up phone Samuel had called the Voice, and of course, his
pistol. They left him his arm, even after one of the soldiers pulled the glove
off his left hand and found what lay beneath. They handcuffed him with his hands
behind his back, then forced him at gunpoint through the gap in the fence and
into the back of an old M35 truck—a “deuce and a half,” a two-and-a-half-ton
truck of the kind the military used all over the world.

What happened to Julia he didn't get to see. None
of the soldiers hit him or mistreated him in any way, so he could only hope
they'd extended her the same courtesy.

He did not ask any questions or speak at all except
when they demanded he identify himself. He gave them his name, his rank, and his
serial number. They didn't ask for anything else.

He got a good look at their uniforms and saw they
were navy—most likely they'd been drawn from the Naval Support Unit at Saratoga
Springs. Sailors, then, seamen rather than soldiers. They weren't SEALs, he
could tell that much, but they were well trained and efficient. They carried M4
carbines—but not M4-A1s, which meant they probably weren't Special Forces.

Observing little details like that helped him keep
his cool. Just like Julia had dealt with the horrors of Camp Putnam by falling
back on her medical training.

Besides, he had little else to do while he waited
to find out what was going to happen to him.

The back of the truck was cold and drafty—it lacked
a hard top, instead just having a canvas cover. It smelled like grease and old
boots. That was a comforting smell to Chapel—it reminded him of his early days
in the army. It also made him think he wasn't being detained by the CIA.

That was something, anyway. He consoled himself
while the truck bounced and rolled over gravel roads, carrying him away from
Camp Putnam.

In time the truck stopped and the engine was
switched off. Chapel closed his eyes and listened to every sound he could hear.
He heard the sailors moving around the truck, heard them click their heels as
they saluted someone. He heard other vehicles moving around. And yes—there—the
sound of a helicopter's rotor powering down.

He heard boots crunching on gravel outside the
truck. Heard sailors come closer, and he knew they were coming to get him. He
had no idea what to expect.

He was unable to keep his jaw from dropping when
Rupert Hollingshead jumped up into the back of the truck and stared at him with
a cold and angry eye.

NAVAL SUPPORT
UNIT SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+50:21

“Admiral,” Chapel said. “Please forgive me
for not saluting.”

Hollingshead just glared at him for a while. The
DIA director was wearing an immaculate suit with a perfectly folded handkerchief
in his breast pocket. His bow tie had a pattern of anchors on it, but otherwise
he looked very much the civilian, just as he had the last time Chapel saw him,
back at the Pentagon.

He was carrying a stool, a folding three-legged
stool that he assembled and set down next to him. Eventually he sat down on it
and crossed his legs, his hands gripping one knee. He said nothing, but he kept
looking at Chapel, utter disappointment on his face.

The silence between them took on its own life. It
made Chapel want to squirm. It made him want to explain himself. He did not do
these things.

Eventually it was Hollingshead who broke the
silence. “The life of an officer is quite lonely, at times. You see, son, an
officer can't afford to have friends.”

Chapel stayed at attention. He had not been put at
ease.

“An officer always has a superior to whom he must
report. No friends there, I assure you. Then he has men and women under his
command. A good officer will have good people—if they aren't good people when
they are assigned to him, he turns them into good people. That's what I was
taught by my commanders, anyway. He learns to respect them, their hard work,
their sacrifice; these things make them special in his eyes. They make him
proud, and he comes to, ah, love them, in his very special way, I suppose. But
he can't ever forget he's responsible for them. That their actions, in a very
real, very concrete way, are his actions, and so—when it becomes necessary—when
he must—he has to punish them. In accord with their offenses. When they break
the rules, you see.”

When Chapel was sixteen he'd been caught, once,
sneaking out of a girl's bedroom window. The man who'd caught him was the girl's
father, who didn't approve of her seeing Chapel. The girl's father had been
carrying a pistol at the time.

At that particular moment, listening to
Hollingshead describe the burdens of leadership, Chapel remembered that long ago
summer's night with exquisite fondness. As scared as he'd been, as ashamed, it
wasn't a patch on this.

“I'd like you to answer some questions, Captain,
just so I can sleep better tonight. So I can be content in knowing I did the
right thing, here.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Chapel said.

“When Angel relayed to you my direct order that you
were not to come to the Catskills, but to instead proceed directly to Denver,
was your equipment functional? Your telephone and your—your—hands-free unit, I
believe it is called?”

“Sir, yes—”

“Just yes or no, please.”

Chapel bit his lip. “Yes,” he said.

“So you did hear her correctly? The order was
received without transmission errors? You understood the order and acknowledged
it?”

“Yes.”

Hollingshead nodded. “All right. Let's try another
question. Were you at any time under the impression that Julia Taggart had a
security clearance that would allow her to know—oh, anything—about your current
mission?”

“No, sir, but—”

“Just yes or no, Captain.”

“No.”

Hollingshead sighed. “So when you interrogated
Jeremy Funt, say, or when you spoke with Ellie Pechowski—oh, I heard everything
she told you, I'll be having words with her as well. Oh, my, yes. And let us not
forget, when you infiltrated a Department of Defense secure facility with Julia
at your side, were you in any way operating under the delusion that Julia had a
need to know what you found?”

Chapel supposed he deserved that. What he didn't
deserve was to be spoken to like a child. But he held his tongue. “No,” he
said.

“No. No, I don't suppose you would have been that
foolish. You were recommended to me as a man who actually understood secrecy and
the importance of national security. I might ask you many more questions, son. I
might sit here all day asking them. I might also have you brought up on charges
of espionage and treason, which—while perhaps not the best descriptions for the
very, very foolish things you've done—are the best words I have to describe
them. You—”

“Sir. Permission to speak candidly,” Chapel said.
Interrupting Hollingshead was insubordination, but compared to espionage and
treason it wasn't much of a crime.

“Oh, but of course, son, I'd never dream of
anything else. I so very much want to hear your explanation for what you've
done.”

Chapel inhaled sharply. “She had no need to know,
as we define that term in the intelligence community. But if anyone on earth had
a
right
to know, it was her.”

Hollingshead waited, a patient expression on his
face, as if he expected Chapel to say more. Chapel chose not to do so.

“Let's put her aside for a moment,” the admiral
eventually said. “We'll also put aside the utter naiveté and silliness of your
last statement.”

Chapel bit his lip to keep from responding. The
shame he felt had kept his anger under wraps until then. It had kept him from
even feeling it. But there was a time to just accept that you were being chewed
out, that you deserved to be called a fool. And there was a time when that
stopped.