Chimera

CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+0:00

The forest was on fire, and the sky was full of orange smoke. Land mines kept cooking off and exploding in the distance, making Sergeant Lourdes jump every single time — and regret it every single time, since it made the barbed wire imbedded in his leg snag and tear some more.

Sweat poured down his face, chilling instantly in the cool night air. There was blood — blood everywhere — but he couldn’t think about that, couldn’t think about what had happened to him, about his injuries, about what was going to happen to his family without him. He couldn’t think about how he probably wouldn’t make it to see morning.

All he could think about was the sentry post, twenty-five yards away. The cramped little box he’d been stationed in for three years now, the box he’d come to loathe, then tolerate, then start to think of as his home away from home. There was a picture of his baby girl taped to one window. There was a flask of coffee in there and right now he was so thirsty, his mouth felt dry as a bone and—

— and he couldn’t think about that. Because his uniform jacket was in there, too, hanging on the back of his wooden chair. And in the pocket of that jacket was his cell phone, his direct link to his superiors. To the people who had to know what had happened. To the people who could fix this, who could make everything okay, if he could just tell them.

Just tell them the fence was down, the perimeter defenses compromised, and the detainees were free.

Sergeant Brian Lourdes had a pretty good security clearance. Not enough to know why those seven men had been locked away so tight. Not enough to know why they were so dangerous they could never be set free. But enough to know what would happen if they ever did get out. Enough to know it could mean the end of America.

Of course that was never supposed to happen. When Lourdes first came to the facility in upstate New York, he’d been amazed at the level of security on Camp Putnam. The razor-wire fences stood twenty feet high, two layers with a fifty-yard stretch of minefield in between. Twenty men monitored that fence rain or shine, every day of the year. There were more than seven hundred cameras mounted on the fence posts, trained in every direction, watching every corner of that fence that surrounded over a hundred acres of forests and fields.

There was no gate in that fence, no way in or out at all. The detainees never left, and nobody ever went in to check up on them. That was how it stood when Sergeant Lourdes was assigned to this job. That was how it was supposed to be forever.

As of tonight all bets were off.

Lourdes grabbed at a tree root and hauled himself across the rocky ground. The wire in his leg felt like it was on fire, but he gritted his teeth and ignored it. He was trained for this. Trained to keep going, no matter what. Trained to know his duty. He dug his fingers down into the dirt and pulled himself another yard. The sentry box — and his phone — was getting closer.

Three years in that stupid box. Three years working the easiest and most boring job Lourdes had ever had. Every morning he had shown up at oh six hundred and logged himself in, then logged himself back out at eighteen hundred sharp. Twice a day he walked his mile-long section of the fence, checking the chain link, making sure animals hadn’t burrowed underneath it, looking for signs of rust or damage. The rest of the time he just sat watching the trees beyond the inner fence, looking for any sign of movement. If he saw a bird in there, or a fox hunting for eggs, he checked a little box on a form on his computer screen and clicked the trackpad to file it. And that was it. There had never been any sign of the detainees. Wherever they were in there they kept to themselves. He’d never gotten so much as a glimpse of any of them.

Three years when nothing—nothing happened.

And then tonight, not an hour after his day started, before the sun even came up, everything changed. A Predator drone had come in just over the tree line, a sleek little machine that flew so low he didn’t even hear its engine until it was almost on top of him. The laptop computer in the sentry box had lit up with warnings and alarms, but by then Lourdes was already jumping out of his box, running to see what was going on.

The drone was only overhead for a second. He just had time to identify it as an unmanned aircraft. But it’s one of ours, he’d thought. It’s the good guys, just checking up on the camp. He lifted one hand to wave at it, thinking that he would get a call on his radio at any second explaining what the drone was doing there. Instead, the Predator had attacked without warning. Rockets had streaked from pods slung under its fuselage — Hellfire missiles that slammed into the ground like giant hammers beating on the earth.

After that things got very loud and very painful. The fence exploded outward, barbed-wire shrapnel scything through the air, tearing branches off trees, making the dirt boil and jump. The drone was gone before Sergeant Lourdes even knew he’d been hit. Just before the pain started, just before he collapsed to the ground in a blubbering heap, he saw what the chopper had wrought.

A section of both fences maybe a hundred yards wide was just… gone. The minefield was a series of craters, entirely neutralized. On the far side of the fence a stand of trees had been knocked down, and Lourdes could see all the way in to a clearing lit only by starlight.

Lourdes had been told what to do if something like this happened, given instructions by the same LT who had promised him it never could happen. The satellites watching Camp Putnam, the cameras on the fence, would take care of almost everything. Automatic alarms would switch on and soldiers would be summoned; backup defenses would activate without anyone needing to push a button. But there was one thing he had to do. He had to pick up the phone and call a man in Virginia, a man who would need to know the fence was down. A man who could make everything okay, fix everything, but who needed to hear from an actual human being, needed an eyewitness account of what had happened, before he could get to work. Sergeant Lourdes just had to make that call — he just had to pick up the phone.

The phone — the satellite cell phone he was supposed to keep on him at all times — was back in the sentry box, only a few dozen yards away. Lourdes pulled himself another couple of feet. The pain didn’t matter. The blood he’d lost didn’t matter.

He was so close now. He felt like he could almost reach out and touch the wall of the box. Just a few more yards and—

“There,” someone said, from behind him. “Another one.”

“This one’s mine,” a second voice said.

Sergeant Lourdes closed his eyes and said a quick prayer. Then he rolled over on his back and pushed himself up on his elbows. He had to see. Three years of his life making sure these bastards didn’t get out. Three years making sure they didn’t end the world. He had to know what they looked like.

There were six of them, standing in a rough line near where the fence had been just a few minutes before. Big guys, young looking. Muscular, but not exactly Schwarzenegger types. Their hair was long and unkempt, and they had scraggly beards and their eyes—

Something was wrong with their eyes.

Lourdes couldn’t quite make out their faces. They were silhouetted against the burning trees and the orange smoke that masked the stars. But their eyes should be glittering, reflecting some of that light. Shouldn’t they?

“Freeze right where you are!” Lourdes shouted, and he grabbed for his sidearm. He lifted the heavy pistol and pointed at the closest one, the one who was already jogging toward him. He fired three times, forcing himself to aim with each shot.

The detainee ducked sideways each time, as if he were just stepping out of the way of the bullets. That was when Lourdes realized just how fast the asshole was moving. Time had slowed down, and even his racing heartbeat sounded like a dull, thudding bass line.

The detainee was on top of him so suddenly he didn’t have a chance to breathe. The guy stank, but Lourdes didn’t care about that so much after the detainee’s thumbs sank into his windpipe and pressed down, hard.

Lourdes tried to raise the handgun again, but he couldn’t feel his arm. Couldn’t feel much of anything anymore. His vision was going black.

The last thing he saw was the detainee’s eyes, staring down into his. Eyes that weren’t human. They were black, solid black, like an animal’s eyes.

The detainee leaned in harder with his thumbs, but it didn’t matter to Lourdes. Sergeant Brian Lourdes, U.S. Army, was already dead. So he didn’t see what happened next. He didn’t see his killer’s face split down the middle with a cruel smile.

FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+3:17

Three hundred miles away in an office cubicle, Captain Jim Chapel was trying not to fall asleep at his desk. It wasn’t easy. It was too early in the year for air-conditioning, so the air in the office building at Fort Belvoir was still and lifeless, and the only sounds he could hear were the noise of fingers clacking away at keyboards and the low buzz of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

He sensed someone coming up from behind him and sat up straighter in his chair, trying to make it look like he was busy. It wouldn’t do to have some civilian bigwig come in here and see him slouched over his desk. When the newcomer walked into his cubicle and leaned over him, though, it wasn’t who he’d been expecting.

“So are you going to ever tell me what you did in Afghanistan?” Sara asked, her breath hot on Chapel’s neck. She laughed. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

Chapel didn’t move an inch. Sara — Major Sara Volks, INSCOM, to be proper about it — was leaning over his shoulder, theoretically looking at the same computer screen he’d been staring at all morning. It was displaying yet another memo about the technical details of a weapons system under development by a civilian contractor. He doubted very much she was interested in what it had to say.

Still, old habits die hard. In his head he matched up the required clearance to look at this memo with what he knew of her clearance. She was a major in INSCOM, the army’s Intelligence and Security Command. Which meant it was fine, she was more than qualified to see this, and he relaxed a bit.

Then he realized she was leaning over his shoulder, her mouth only about half an inch from his ear, and that she smelled really, really good. After that he didn’t relax at all. “You know I can’t talk about that,” he said. “Ma’am.”

Chapel moved office every few weeks as his job demanded, and every time he found himself a new cubicle he ended up having a new reporting officer — a new boss, for all intents and purposes. Major Volks was hardly the worst of the lot. She was capable and efficient enough that she didn’t need to yell at her people to keep them working. She was also an audacious flirt… at least as far as Chapel was concerned. He hadn’t seen her make eyes at any of the other men in the office, and he was pretty sure he was the only soldier in the fort who got to call her by her first name. The way she spoke to him was ridiculously unprofessional and probably enough to get both of them written up and reassigned, if he’d wanted to make a stink about it.

Not that he minded. It didn’t hurt that her regulation-cut hair was platinum blond, that she had big, soulful eyes and a body sculpted by countless hours in the fort’s excellent fitness center. Or that she had a mischievous grin that made Chapel’s knees go a little weak.

Up to this point she’d kept her comments suggestive rather than brazen. She’d asked him a lot of questions about himself, always prodding for information she had to know he couldn’t give her — like his wartime record, and what exactly his job description was now. It was the kind of flirting people in Military Intelligence did because they spent so much of their time staying secret that even the hint of disclosure was exciting.

She’d also asked him what he liked to do when he went home at night, and whether he enjoyed Italian food. There was a nice Italian restaurant not a mile outside of the fort — the implication was clear.

So far he hadn’t taken the bait.

“We are silent warriors, right?” she said, a hint of a laugh in her voice. “That’s the creed of the MIC.” She leaned in closer, which he hadn’t thought was possible before. Her shoulder touched his back. “All right. Keep your secrets. For now.”

Chapel was no shrinking violet, and he was sorely tempted. And this was definitely the moment. She’d opened a door — it was up to him to walk through. He could ask her out on a date and he knew she would say yes.

Or he could say nothing and keep things casual and flirtatious and harmless between them forever.

Initiating things would put his career at risk — his career, such as it was. A series of boring desk jobs doing oversight on weapons contractors until he retired on a comfortable little pension.

Go for it, he told himself. “I will tell you one secret,” he said. “I love Italian. And, in fact, I was thinking—”

Was it possible she could lean in even closer? She was almost rubbing his back with her shoulder. “Yes?” She reached out one hand to put it on his.

His left hand.

Damn.

He felt her flinch. Felt her whole body tense. “Oh,” she said.

His left arm wasn’t there anymore. He could forget that sometimes, because of the thing they’d given him to replace it. Some days he went whole hours without remembering what was attached to his body.

“It’s… cold,” Sara said.

“Silicone,” he told her, his voice very low. “Looks pretty real, right? They did a great job making it look like the other one. There’s even hair on the knuckles.”

“I didn’t know,” she said. “You didn’t say anything…”

“It’s not a secret. Though I tend not to mention it until it comes up.” He lifted the hand and flexed the fingers for her. “State of the art.” His heart sank in his chest. He could pretend it was normal, pretend that there was nothing weird about his new arm. But he knew how it creeped people out. “Almost as good as the real thing.”

“Afghanistan?” she asked, her eyes knowing and sympathetic. He’d learned to dread that look.

The last thing he wanted was her pity. “Yeah. It’s not a big thing. Listen, as I was saying, I don’t have any plans tonight and—”

“I need to think about it,” she said. She stood up straight. She wasn’t meeting his eyes when she spoke to him, now. “Let me get back to you. Fraternization isn’t exactly permitted, after all, and—”

“I understand,” Chapel told her. And he did. This wasn’t what she’d been expecting. She’d been flirting with a professional soldier, a strong, vigorous man in his early forties with just a touch of gray at his temples. Not an amputee.

She turned to go, and he sighed in disappointment. This wasn’t the first time things had worked out this way. He’d had years to get used to the arm — and how people reacted to it. But damn, he had really hoped that this time—

“I, uh,” she said, and now she did look him in the eye. “I didn’t say no. I said, let me get back to you.”

“Sure,” he said.

She walked away. She looked angry. Like he was the one who had brushed her off.

Well, in a couple of weeks he would be reassigned to a new office, anyway. Probably one where his reporting officer was fat and bald and smelled like cheap cigars. And it wasn’t like it could have gone anywhere with Sara anyway, not with both of them hiding a relationship from their superior officers and hoping they never got caught.

He turned back to his computer and tried to make sense of the memo on his screen. He got about three sentences in before he realized he couldn’t remember which weapons system this memo related to, or why any of it mattered in the slightest degree.

Grunting in frustration he pushed himself up out of his chair and logged off from the computer. There was no way he was going to get any work done, not until he got his head clear, and that meant he needed to go swim some laps.

Just as he stepped out of the cubicle he heard the chime as his BlackBerry received a new text message.

“I cannot deal with you right now,” he told his phone, and walked away.

FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+4:02

When they flew him home from Afghanistan, one of the first thoughts through Chapel’s mind had been that he would never swim again.

He’d grown up in Florida, swimming in the canals with turtles and manatees. He’d gotten his SCUBA certification at the age of twelve and his MSD — the highest level of nonprofessional certification — by eighteen. He’d spent more of his youth in the water than on dry land, at least according to his mother. He’d seriously considered going into the navy instead of the army, maybe even becoming a frogman. In the end, he had only decided to be a grunt because he didn’t want to spend half his life swabbing decks. He had learned quickly enough that the army liked soldiers who could swim, too — it had been a big part of his being chosen for Special Forces training — and he had made a point of doing twenty laps a day in the nearest pool to keep in shape. It had become his refuge, his private time to just think and move and be free and weightless. He’d never felt as at peace anywhere else as he did while swimming.

Now that was over.

A man with one arm can only swim in circles, he’d thought. He had been lying in a specially made stretcher on board a troop transport flying into National Airport. He had spent most of the flight staring out the window, feeling sorry for himself.

His life was over. His career was over — he would never go back into the theater of operations, never do anything real or valuable again. No one would ever take him seriously for the rest of his life — he would just be a cripple, someone they should feel sorry for. He pitied himself more than anyone else ever could.

That had ended when he got to Walter Reed and started his rehabilitation. He’d been a little shocked when he met the man they sent to teach him how to live with one arm. The physical therapist had come into the room in a wheelchair because he was missing his right leg. He was also missing his right arm, and his right eye. He’d been a master gunnery sergeant with the Marines in Iraq and had thrown himself on an IED to protect what he called his boys. Not a single one of them had been injured that day. Just him. “Call me Top,” he’d said, and he held out his left hand for Chapel to shake.

Chapel had reached automatically to take that hand. It had taken him a second to remember his own left hand wasn’t there anymore. Eventually he’d awkwardly reached over and shook Top’s hand with his right.

“See?” Top had said. “You’re already getting the hang of it. You make do with what you’ve got. Hell, I should know it’s not easy, but then, I never expected life to be easy. I know you army boys think life is one long vacation. In the Marines we have this thing called a work ethic.”

“In the army we’ve got this thing called brains; we use that instead,” Chapel had fired back. When they both stopped laughing, there were tears in Chapel’s eyes. The tears took a lot longer to stop than the laughter. Top let that go. He didn’t mind if his boys — and Chapel was one of his boys now, like it or not — cried a little, or screamed in pain when they felt like it. “A soldier who can still bitch is a happy soldier,” Top had told him. “When they shut up, when they stop griping, that’s when I know one of my boys is in trouble.”

There had been plenty of tears. And plenty of screaming. The artificial arm they gave Chapel was a miracle. It would mean living an almost entirely normal life. It functioned exactly like a real arm, and it responded to his nerve impulses so he just had to think about moving his arm and it did what he wanted. It was light-years beyond any prosthetic ever built before. But being fitted for it meant undergoing endless grueling surgeries as the nerves that should have been serving his missing arm were moved to new places, as electrodes were implanted in his chest and shoulder.

If it hadn’t been for Top, Chapel was pretty sure he wouldn’t have made it. He would have eaten his own sidearm, frankly. But Top had shown him that life — even a life limited by circumstance — could still mean something. “Hell, I’m one of the lucky ones,” Top had told him one day while they were doing strength-training exercises.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Chapel said.

“Hell, no. Everything that he took away, God made sure I had a spare handy. There’s only three body parts you only get one of — your nose, your heart, and one other one, and I got to keep all those. Now, my little buttercup, shall we get back to work?”

It had taken a long time for Chapel to confess to Top what he missed the most. “I wish I could still swim,” he said. “I used to love swimming. I can’t get my magic arm wet, though.”

“So take it off when you go swimming,” Top suggested.

Chapel shook his head. “Won’t work. I mean, I guess I could kick my way around a pool if I had to. If my life depended on it I could tread water just fine if I fell off a boat or something. But without two arms, I’m not going to break any speed records. I’ll never swim laps again. That was the main way I got exercise before.”

“I always hated swimming, myself,” Top said. “Never liked going in over my head and getting water in my nose. But okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, starting tomorrow, you’re going to teach me how to swim with one arm and one leg.”

“I can’t do that,” Chapel said. “I don’t think it can be done. And anyway, I’m not a teacher.”

“So you got two things to learn with that big army brain of yours,” Top said. “As usual, the marine is going to have to do the hard part. And probably drown, too. Nothing new about that, either.”

Chapel had known exactly what Top was trying to do. He had wanted to shake his head and say that kind of psych-out wasn’t going to work on him. But he trusted Top by then, trusted him more than he’d trusted anyone before in his life. So the next morning they had gone down to the hospital’s swimming pool with a couple burly orderlies (who still had all their limbs), and Chapel had taught Top how to swim.

Top did drown, twice. Each time he was resuscitated, and each time he got back in the pool. He had to be dragged out of the water by the orderlies so many times they refused to help anymore and quit on the spot. Top put in a requisition for more orderlies, and they kept going. The results weren’t ever perfect. Top swimming with one arm and one leg looked kind of like a drunk dolphin flopping back and forth in the water. He had a lot of trouble swimming in a straight line, and even one lap of the pool left him so exhausted he had to rest for an hour before he started again.

In the end, though, Top could swim. “I ever fall off an ocean liner on one of those celebrity cruises, I guess I’ll be okay,” Top had said when he decided they were done. When he’d successfully swum ten laps, in less than eight hours. “Now, Captain Chapel. Sir. You want to tell me why we went to all this trouble? Sir, you want to tell me why I forced you to do this demeaning task, sir?”

“Because,” Chapel had said, “if I can show an enlisted man like you how to swim, sorry sack of guts that you are, I can surely figure out how to do it with my own glorious and beautiful officer’s body.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Top had said. “Now get in that goddamned pool or I will throw you in.”

Now — years later — Chapel was up to twenty laps at a time, in less than an hour. He would never do the butterfly crawl again, but he’d mastered a kind of half stroke that used his arm mostly for steering and let his legs do all the work. Fort Belvoir had a wonderful pool in its fitness center, and he availed himself of it daily.

There was no feeling like it.

The blood-warm water streamed past him, buoying him up like gentle hands. He didn’t have to think about anything else while he swam — he just focused on his body, on his movements. His muscles moved in perfect concert, his arm and his legs snapping into an old familiar rhythm. His head turned from side to side as he drew in each breath and let it out again in a long, slow exhale. There was no better feeling in the world.

Thanks, Top, he thought, as he kicked off for the start of lap seventeen.

The last time he’d seen Top had been at the master gunnery sergeant’s wedding, less than a year previous. Top had walked down the aisle with two legs and two arms — the only way anyone could tell he wasn’t whole was that he was wearing an eye patch. Chapel had gotten to know Top’s bride a little bit and she had turned out to be the toughest, most sarcastic woman he’d ever met. She needed to be if she was going to keep up with Top.

Lap eighteen. Chapel would have stayed in the pool all day if he could have. He needed to get back to work, though. The frustration and boredom of his morning and of Major Volks’s rejection were gone, or at least he’d worked off enough of that negativity to actually start drafting some memos of his own.

Still. Maybe he’d shoot for twenty-five laps today.

Across the pool. Back. He kicked off for lap nineteen.

And then stopped himself in the water before he’d gone five yards out.

“Hello?” he said.

A man in a pin-striped suit was standing at the edge of the pool, looking down at him. He had a thick white towel in his hands and something else. A BlackBerry, maybe.

“Can I help you with something? Make it quick, though,” Chapel said. “I’m pretty good on the straightaways, but treading water isn’t exactly my forte.”

Anyone wearing that kind of suit in Fort Belvoir was a civilian, and Chapel had a bad moment where he thought the guy might be some kind of CEO from one of the corporations he was watchdogging. The buzz-cut hair said otherwise, though, as did the sheer bulk of muscle crammed into the jacket.

Chapel was trained in Military Intelligence. He’d studied all the different ways to put clues together, to draw conclusions from scant evidence. From just the look of this guy he knew right away that he had to be CIA.

The agency had tentacles everywhere, and there were plenty of them wrapped around INSCOM and Fort Belvoir. They tended to stay in other parts of the fort though, where Chapel couldn’t see them, and he’d always been happy about that. Military Intelligence and civilian spies never got along.

“Listen, if you just came to watch the freak go for a swim, that’s fine,” Chapel said, because the guy still hadn’t told him what he wanted. “But then I’ll just get back to it.”

The agency guy shook his head, slowly. And then he started to laugh. His whole body shook as he guffawed and chortled and chuckled.

Chapel swam over to the edge of the pool and dragged himself out. Water poured off him in torrents as he stormed around the side of the pool, headed straight for the laughing bastard. If fraternizing with Sara could cost him his career, punching out a CIA man could get him thrown in the brig, but at that moment he did not give one good goddamn. Nobody laughed at Jim Chapel like that.

Before he could land the punch, though, the CIA bastard lifted the BlackBerry he was holding and held it up at Chapel’s eye level. Chapel saw that it was his own smartphone. The one he’d left at his desk when he headed for the pool.

The screen said he had twenty-seven new text messages, and three new voice mails. Chapel grabbed the phone and scrolled through the phone’s logs. Every single message had come from the same number. There were e-mails, too, from a military address he didn’t recognize, but he knew with a cold certainty they came from the same person who’d sent all those texts.

“When you didn’t answer,” the CIA man said, still burbling with mirth, “they sent me to come find you. We have to go. Now. The man who’s been trying to contact you is not the kind of person you keep waiting.”

Chapel stared into his eyes. They were hazel, green in the middle and gold around the edges, and they were full of laughter, still.

“Give me that,” Chapel said, and grabbed the towel.

FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+4:03

Chapel read one of the e-mails for the third time, still not sure what the hell was going on. It went on for pages, but most of that was just boilerplate confidentiality statements — legalese describing what exactly would happen to anyone who forwarded or printed out the e-mail. Standard stuff for military intelligence. The only real content of the e-mail was a single line of tersely written text:

Chapel understood all that just fine. DIA was the Defense Intelligence Agency, the top level of the military intelligence pyramid. DX was the Directorate for Defense Counterintelligence and HUMINT — HUMINT being Human Intelligence, or good old-fashioned spycraft. DX was the group that used to give him his orders back when he was a theater operative in Afghanistan, but he hadn’t worked for them for a long time — these days his work was handled directly by INSCOM, and he hadn’t so much as spoken to anyone in the DIA in five years.

Technically, of course, he still had to answer all the way up that chain, and if somebody at the DIA wanted him to show up at their office and get new orders, he was required to do so. But what on earth could they want him for?

“You know anything about this, Laughing Boy?” he asked the CIA goon.

Laughing Boy shook his head. The very idea seemed to set him off on another chuckling fit. “I just do as I’m told.”

Chapel stared at the man. His involvement in this — even if it just came down to fetching Chapel when he wouldn’t answer his phone — added a whole new wrinkle of weirdness. On paper the DIA and the civilian CIA worked hand in glove, but everyone in the intelligence community knew there was a permanent divide and lasting hatred between the defense department and the civilian intelligence organizations. They never shared anything with each other unless they were legally required to. If the CIA and the DIA were working together, then that could only mean something really bad had happened and that rivalry had been put aside long enough to clean it up.

And somehow that meant they needed a one-armed captain from INSCOM to hold the bucket and the mop.

Chapel rubbed vigorously with the towel at the skin on the left side of his chest. Laughing Boy raised an eyebrow and Chapel grunted in frustration. “My skin has to be dry or the electrodes don’t work right. Do you mind? I need to get dressed.”

Laughing Boy kept giggling, but he stepped aside to let Chapel head for the locker room. Chapel sat down on a wooden bench inside and picked up the arm. It only weighed nine pounds — lighter than the original. Its silicone cover looked exactly like a real human arm up until you reached the shoulder, where it flared out into a pair of molded clamps. Putting it on was simplicity — he simply drew it over the stump of his shoulder until it fit snugly. The arm recognized automatically that it was on and the clamps squeezed down gently on Chapel’s flesh until it was locked into place.

As he did every time he put it on, he ran it through a quick check to make sure everything was working all right. He lifted the arm and then swung it backward, made a fist, and then straightened his hand out like he was about to deliver a karate chop. Finally, to check the fingers he touched each of them in turn with the thumb.

Living nerves in his shoulder and chest had been rewired to replace the ones he’d lost. Sensors in his new hand sent messages to those nerves through subcutaneous electrodes. The neurosurgery had gone so smoothly that now when Chapel touched his artificial thumb to his artificial index finger, he actually felt them rubbing against each other. He could pick up a playing card with those fingers and feel the smooth coating of its lamination, or touch sandpaper and feel how rough it was.

He thought about what Top would say. “There’s guys out there with two hooks instead of hands that learn how to make omelets in the morning without getting egg all over their shirts. You, my boy, are living in science fiction tomorrowland. Is it not a glorious thing to be living in George Jetson world?”

“Sure is, Top,” Chapel said, out loud.

Jerks could laugh at him all they wanted for being a freak. Jim Chapel was whole. Top had taught him that. He was whole and vital and he could do anything he set his mind to. Whatever the DIA wanted him for, he was ready.

He dressed himself hurriedly and then tapped a message on the BlackBerry acknowledging that he was on his way. To the Pentagon.

Coming out of the locker room he found Laughing Boy waiting for him. “All right, you delivered your message,” Chapel said. “You can go now, I’m being a good boy.”

Laughing Boy shook his head and chortled a little. “Nope. I’m supposed to drive you there myself. Make sure you show up.”

“I know how to follow orders,” Chapel insisted. Laughing Boy didn’t even shrug. “Fine. We’ll go in just a second. I need to let my reporting officer know where I’m going—”

Laughing Boy shook his head.

So it was one of those kinds of briefings, then. The kind where you just disappeared off the face of the earth and nobody knew where you went. This was getting weirder by the minute.

Chapel sighed. “Fine. Let’s go.”

POUGHKEEPSIE, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+4:04

Two hundred and fifty miles away, Lieutenant Barry Charles slapped the helmet of the greenest private in his squad. “We ran through this in the simulator just last month, remember? The train extraction — that’s exactly how we’re going to do this. Get all the nice civilians out of the car first, then we take down the target. Don’t let any of the nice civilians get hurt. Don’t let the target get hurt, at least not too much. We’ve got orders to bring him in alive. You children understand what I’m saying?”

The four men Charles commanded all saluted. In their body armor and protective masks they looked like a mean bunch of sons of bitches, Charles had to admit that. They were the best men the 308th counterintelligence battalion had ever trained, and they were ripped and ready.

“Then let’s take this train. By the book, soldiers!”

The men shouted a wordless response and swarmed toward the train. Command had signaled ahead and forced the train to stop ten miles north of Poughkeepsie, out in the sticks where collateral damage would be light. The train’s conductor had confirmed the presence of the target and told them which car he was in. Charles had been given only the quickest of briefings on this mission — a picture of the target and a warning that the man he wanted was potentially armed and definitely dangerous, an escapee from a DoD detention facility upstate — but he had no doubt this was going to be a cakewalk.

“Unlock the doors now,” he called — he was patched in directly with the train’s own radio system and the conductor was ready to do as he said.

Looking up at the train now he saw the anxious faces of commuters and tourists staring down at him. He gave them a cheery wave to put them at ease and then turned to signal to his men. There were two doors on the train car, one at either end. He had four men — one to take the door, one to provide cover. Simplicity itself. He dropped his hand and the men hit the doors running, the pneumatic locks hissing open for them. The metal side of the train pinged in the morning sun. Through the windows Charles watched his men take up stations inside the train, covering one another just like they’d been trained.

There were a couple of screams and some angry shouts, but nothing Charles wasn’t expecting. Civilians started pouring out of the train car in a nearly orderly fashion. About as orderly as you could expect from citizens with no military discipline or training. Charles shouted for them to head as quickly as possible to the safety of a big box hardware store a hundred yards behind him, and they did as they were told.

“Lieutenant, sir, we have him,” one of his squad called. The voice in his ear sounded pumped up and excited. “He’s just sitting there, looks like he might be asleep.”

Talk about your lucky breaks. “Well, whatever you do,” Charles said, “don’t be rude and wake him up. Are the civilians clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” another of the squad called.

“I’m coming up. Just keep your eyes open.”

Charles got one foot up on the door platform and grabbed a safety rail. He let his carbine swing across the front of his chest as he hauled himself up into the airlocklike compartment between train cars. The door that lead into the car proper was activated by a slap plate. He reached down to activate it.

Hell broke out before the door even had a chance to slide open.

“Sir, he’s moving—” someone shouted.

“—does not appear to be armed, repeat, I see no weapons—”

“What the hell? What the hell did he just—”

The door in front of Charles slid open and he looked into a scene of utter chaos. A man with a scraggly beard had picked up one of Charles’s men, and as Charles watched, the target threw the soldier into one of his squad mates, sending them both sprawling over the rows of seats. A third squad member came at the target with his carbine up and ready to fire.

The target reached forward, grabbed the soldier’s arm, and twisted it around like he was trying to break a green branch off a tree.

Charles heard a series of pops like muffled gunfire, but he knew what they actually were — the sounds of the soldier’s bones snapping, one by one. A second later the soldier started screaming. He dropped to the floor, down for the count.

Charles started to rush forward, to come to the defense of his men, but he nearly tripped over what he thought was luggage that had fallen into the aisle.

It wasn’t luggage. It was his fourth squad member. Looking down, Charles saw the man was still alive but broken like a porcelain doll. His mask was gone, and his face was obscured by blood.

Lieutenant Charles looked up at the man who had neutralized his entire squad and for a moment — a split second — he stopped and stared, because he couldn’t do anything else. The man’s eyes. There was something wrong with the man’s eyes. They were solid black, from side to side. Charles thought for a moment he was looking into empty eye sockets. But no — no — he could see them shining—

He didn’t waste any more time. He brought his carbine up and started firing in tight, controlled three-shot bursts. Just like he’d been trained. Charles had spent enough time on the firing range — and in real life, live fire operations — to know how to shoot, and how to hit what he aimed at.

Human targets, though, couldn’t move as fast as the thing in front of him. It got one foot up on the armrest of a train seat, then the other was on the headrest. Charles tried to track the thing but he couldn’t — it moved too fast as it crammed itself into the overhead luggage rack and wriggled toward him like a worm.

Suddenly it was above him, at head height, and its hands were reaching down for him. Charles tried to bring his weapon up, putting every ounce of speed he had into reacquiring his target.

The thing was faster. Its hands tore away Charles’s mask, and then its thumbs went for his eyes.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+4:41

Laughing Boy had a car waiting right outside the fitness center, a black Crown Victoria with Virginia plates. Chapel got in without a word, and the two of them headed straight for the Pentagon.

Chapel didn’t ask for the man’s name. CIA told you what you needed to know and they didn’t like it if you asked them questions. He resolved to keep calling the guy Laughing Boy, if only in his head.

They had a long drive together during which neither of them said more than ten words. Mostly they were about whether there would be much traffic on I-95. Fort Belvoir was just south of Mount Vernon, only a few miles from the Pentagon — it wasn’t a long ride — but you always hit a snarl of traffic when you approached the Beltway that surrounded the District of Columbia. Half the country seemed to be trying to get into D.C. to do some business or just see the sights. The Pentagon was still in Virginia, technically, but that didn’t make things any easier. As the car slowed down to a crawl outside of Arlington, Chapel got impatient and started drumming on his side of the dashboard with his artificial fingers.

Laughing Boy seemed to find that very funny.

There wasn’t a lot, it seemed, that didn’t amuse Laughing Boy. He never stopped laughing the whole time they were in the car together, though as he focused on his driving it dropped to a kind of dry giggling that grated on Chapel’s nerves. When they got to the Pentagon’s parking entrance, he pulled the car into a reserved spot but before he got out he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a bottle of pills.

“Gotta show due respect, right?” Laughing Boy asked, with a hearty guffaw. He popped three pills in his mouth and dry swallowed them. The effect was almost immediate. He grimaced and rubbed at his chest and sweat broke out on his head, slicking his crew cut. Eventually he recovered and looked over at Chapel with a grim smile. “Can’t take those when I’m driving.”

Chapel got a quick look at the pill bottle before Laughing Boy put it away. The pills were something called clozapine — Chapel had no idea what they were for, but he did notice that Laughing Boy stopped laughing after taking them.

Thank heaven for small favors, he thought.

The two of them headed inside through the security checkpoint, where Chapel had the usual hassles that came with having part of your body replaced by metal. The soldiers who did his pat-down and search were at least respectful — he doubted he was the only amputee they’d seen that day. Chapel and the CIA man were given laminates, and a helpful guard gave them directions on how to get to the office Laughing Boy named.

Chapel was not surprised when, five minutes later, Laughing Boy ignored the directions altogether and took him deep into C Ring and to an office on the wrong side of the building. They passed quickly through, ignored by all the clerks in their cubicles, and back to an elevator in an otherwise empty hallway. When the elevator doors opened, Chapel saw two soldiers inside carrying M4 carbines. The soldiers demanded to see their laminates and then let them in. One of the soldiers punched a button marked H and they started to descend.

Chapel was a little surprised by that. The Pentagon was built in five concentric rings of office space, rings A through E. There were two sublevels underground called F and G that he knew of. He’d never heard of an H level at all.

When the elevator doors opened again, he looked out into a long hallway with unadorned concrete walls. The floor and ceiling were painted a glossy battleship gray. Unmarked green doors stood every dozen yards or so down the corridor, which seemed to stretch on forever. There were no office numbers, nor any signs distinguishing one door from another. “How do you even know which office you want?” Chapel asked Laughing Boy as they headed down the echoing hall.

“If you’re down here and you don’t know which one is which, you’re already in trouble,” Laughing Boy told him.

“This isn’t where DIA DX has its offices,” Chapel pointed out. “I’ve seen those before. This isn’t—”

He stopped because Laughing Boy was staring at him. Waiting for him to ask a question. Chapel was certain there would be no answers.

“Never mind,” Chapel said.

“Good dog.”

The CIA man took the lead, setting off at a good clip, and Chapel followed. He did a double take when, for the first time, he saw the back of Laughing Boy’s head. There was a bad scar there — more of a dent — where the flesh had turned white and no hair grew.

“Come on,” Laughing Boy said. “We’re already late.” He stood next to a door exactly like all the others, his hand on the knob.

Chapel hurried to catch up with him. Laughing Boy turned the knob and revealed the room beyond — which was nothing like what Chapel had expected.

THE PENTAGON: APRIL 12, T+4:59

Classical music filled the air, soft and almost lost under the sound of falling water coming from a splashing fountain in the center of the space. The room beyond the unmarked door was lined with wooden shelves full of leather-bound books, and the floor was covered by a rich blue carpet. There were, of course, no windows — they had to be a couple hundred feet underground — but the fountain kept the room from feeling claustrophobic.

Armchairs upholstered in red leather were gathered around the room in small conversation areas, while to one side stood a fully stocked wet bar with comfortable-looking stools. On the other side of the room stood a massive globe in a brass stand and a giant map cabinet with dozens of drawers.

It didn’t look like an underground bunker. It didn’t look like an office, either. It looked like a private club, the kind of place where old diplomats would sit and discuss foreign affairs over snifters of brandy.

“Fallout shelter,” someone said from behind Chapel’s shoulder.

He turned and saw a man of about sixty dressed in a three-piece suit and a bow tie. The suit was tweed — elegant but not exactly stylish — and the man in it looked like a throwback to the nineteenth century, with long sideburns and a pair of tiny wire-rimmed glasses. He smiled warmly as Chapel stared at him.

“You’re wondering where you are, of course,” the man said. He held out a hand and Chapel shook it. “This whole level was supposed to be a private fallout shelter for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I doubt it will surprise you to know they demanded it have a pleasant little tavern. The other rooms on this level aren’t like this, sadly. Mostly they’re full of metal cots and preserved food from the 1960s. This room is my favorite.”

“It’s… nice,” Chapel offered. Maybe a little stuffy for his taste, but it definitely beat his cubicle back at Fort Belvoir.

“Rupert Hollingshead,” the man said, and let go of Chapel’s hand. “I’m the one who sent you all those pesky text messages. I am also, despite appearances, a member of the DIA directorate, though not of DX, I’m afraid.”

“Captain James Chapel, sir, reporting,” Chapel said, and gave Hollingshead a salute. If Hollingshead was DIA, then he had to be military, either a full bird colonel or a brigadier general. The fact that he was out of uniform didn’t matter one whit.

Hollingshead returned the salute. “Oh, do be at ease, Captain. As I was saying… fallout shelter, yes. Never used for that purpose, of course, and abandoned for years. When I needed a quiet little place to set up shop, I figured it would do. The walls are concrete six feet thick and it’s swept for listening devices every day. Can’t be too careful. I do apologize, Captain, but will you allow me to show you a seat? Time is rather… ah. Short.”

“Damn straight,” someone else said.

Chapel hadn’t noticed the bar’s only other occupant until he stood up from his chair. This one was much more what Chapel thought of when he imagined a high-ranking intelligence official. He wore the customary black suit, power tie, and flag pin. He had heavy jowls that made him look a little like Richard Nixon, and he stood a little hunched forward as if his posture had been wrecked by years of whispering into important ears.

The two of them, Hollingshead and this man, couldn’t have been less alike. But Chapel could tell right away they had the same job. Spymasters — the kind of men who were always behind the scenes pulling strings and counting coup. The kind of men who could start wars with carefully worded position papers. The kind of men who briefed the president daily, but who never let their faces show up on the evening news.

Chapel had been in intelligence long enough to know that you never, ever questioned or messed with men like that. You saluted and you said sir, yes, sir and you did what they said and you never asked why.

You couldn’t keep yourself from wondering, though.

“That’s Thomas Banks,” Hollingshead said. “CIA, though — shh! Don’t tell anyone I told you that.”

He gave that warm smile again and Chapel couldn’t help but return it. He found himself liking Hollingshead already.

Banks, on the other hand, was going to be a hard man to love — that was evident from his whole manner. “We need to get this started,” he growled. “We’ve already lost five hours. Five hours we’ll never get back.”

“Of course,” Hollingshead said. “As for your friend here, will he be staying?”

Chapel and both officials turned to look at Laughing Boy, who had taken up a position just to one side of the door. Laughing Boy didn’t so much as squirm under the scrutiny.

“He’s been cleared. Your man is, too, I assume,” Banks said. “What are his qualifications? Doesn’t look like much.”

“Captain Chapel’s a war hero, actually,” Hollingshead said. He went over to the bar and poured himself a glass of water. He raised one eyebrow at Chapel, but Chapel shook his head to say he didn’t need anything. “If you were to ask him about his past, I’m sure he would be unable to tell you a thing, and quite right. His entire service record and most of what he’s done since he came home is oh, quite classified. So I’ll have to sing his praises myself. He was one of the first to put, ah, boots on the ground as they say, in Afghanistan, as part of Operation Anticyclone.”

“What, that mess with the Taliban?” Banks asked.

Chapel had kept quiet about Afghanistan so long even hearing other people talk about it made him feel weird. He kept his peace, though — a captain didn’t speak to men at this level until he was spoken to.

“Hmm, yes. He was dropped into Khost Province with a number of Army Rangers. The idea was they would make contact with some highly placed mujahideen and arrange with them to support our incursion there. This was right after September eleventh, of course, when we still thought we had friends in the Khyber Pass. Chapel and his men grew beards to honor the local customs, and, more important, they carried briefcases filled with cash. The men he was supposed to meet with were, after all, the same men the United States had once armed and paid to fight the Soviets. That all happened on your side of the aisle, Banks, I’m sure you remember—”

“That was before my time,” Banks grunted.

“Of course. Of course,” Hollingshead said, waving away the protest. “The point is, Captain Chapel did his job and made contact. Sadly, the men he was meeting with had already chosen their path and decided the future lay with al-Qaeda. When the negotiations, ah, collapsed, the captain found himself on the wrong end of a rocket-propelled grenade. This unfortunately killed all the Rangers with him and left Captain Chapel badly wounded. His captors refused to give him medical attention until he told them every single thing he knew about U.S. troop movements in Afghanistan. He refused. By the time our boys rescued him, his arm had gone septic and had to be removed.”

“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.

“There, at least, we can help you.” Hollingshead drew a folded-up sheet of paper from his pocket. As he unfolded it and smoothed it out he said, “Now, you can’t ask us how we came by this, son, or what these people have in common. But we are — let’s say eighty percent — sure that our detainees will attempt to make contact with the people named on this list.”

He handed the paper to Chapel. There were eight names on it, each matched with a last known address. He didn’t bother reading the names yet, instead looking up at the two men facing him. “Permission to guess something, sir?”

Hollingshead chuckled. “That, I think, we can allow.”

“If I were an escapee from a… from a DoD facility, the first thing I’d want to do was to make contact with my family. Friends, professional contacts… anyone I could trust. I’m assuming that’s where these names come from.”

“Look, Banks. Look — he’s already on the case,” Hollingshead said, with a warm and generous smile. “I told you he was our man.”

“He’s already making mistakes is what he’s doing,” Banks countered.

Hollingshead’s smile faded. “I’m afraid that’s true, son.” He looked Chapel straight in the eye. “Those aren’t family members or friends,” he said. “The word for them is — ah, there’s no good word for it, let’s say — let’s call them—”

“Intended victims,” Banks said.

Chapel frowned. He glanced down at the list again.

“It’s a kill list,” Banks went on.

Chapel nearly dropped the piece of paper.

Hollingshead waved his hands in the air as if he wanted to calm everyone down. “That sounds so very dramatic! It’s not wholly inaccurate, though. The one thing we are certain of is that our detainees are going to go after these names and do everything they can to murder them. Keeping these people alive—”

“—is secondary,” Banks butted in. “Taking out the targets is the only thing you need to worry about. But with this list at least you know where they’re headed.”

Chapel scanned the list quickly, not bothering to memorize the names. He was more interested in the addresses for the moment. In his head he put together a map of the locations. New York City, Atlanta, Vancouver in Canada — that was going to be a jurisdictional nightmare — Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Alaska. That was an awful lot of ground to cover. But it was better than just going door-to-door throughout the entire continental United States, asking if anyone had seen a shaggy-haired man with a murderous disposition.

When he had the map in his head, he glanced over the names. A couple of them were doctors, by the look of it — or Ph.D.s, at least. He only recognized one of the names. “Hayes. Franklin Hayes — he’s a federal judge. He’s been in the news recently.”

“The president chose him to be the next justice on the Supreme Court,” Hollingshead said. “He’s just waiting for the Senate to confirm his appointment.”

Chapel wondered if that made his job harder or easier. Harder because if someone was gunning for a high-ranking judge it would be tough to keep it out of the papers. Easier because a man like that would already have some security.

“He’ll be the first one you make contact with, of course,” Banks said. “He’s the highest-value target.”

Chapel shook his head. “With all due respect, sir, he won’t.” He tapped the list with his artificial index finger. “Judge Hayes is on — what? The Tenth Circuit Court? The address for him here is in Denver. If the detainees are limited to traveling by train or by bus—” He glanced up for confirmation.

“So far that’s what we’ve seen, yes,” Hollingshead confirmed. “They don’t have driver’s licenses or passports. They won’t be able to board an airplane. And they don’t know how to drive a car. That’s a small bit of luck, eh?”

“—then it will still take two days for one of them to arrive in Colorado.”

“That sounds right,” Hollingshead confirmed.

Chapel nodded. “Meanwhile we’ve got two names here in New York City. An hour and a half from the Catskills by train. A detainee could already be there. Two people are already at risk. It has to be my first stop.”

“Whatever!” Banks said, throwing his hands in the air. “Just do it. Hollingshead, I want constant reporting on this. Total accountability from your office.”

“Of course,” Hollingshead said. He was staring Chapel right in the eye while he spoke. “I’ll make sure to keep you in the loop.”

“As for you,” Banks said, jabbing a finger in Chapel’s direction, “you do what you’re told, you keep your mouth shut, and you end this problem as fast you goddamned well can. You need something from CIA, we’ll provide it, as long as you keep our name out of things. You have a sidearm? You’re going to need one. And I want you in civvies while you’re working on this. I don’t want the public to see an army asshole running around in full dress uniform, shooting at our targets.”

“I would need to go home and change.”

“There’s a rack of civilian clothing in the room back there,” Hollingshead said, gesturing at a door at the back of the bar. “You can take your pick. As for a sidearm, I’ve already thought of that.” He reached behind the bar and produced a black pistol with the squared-off lines of a SIG Sauer P228—a weapon Chapel had handled more than once, since it was common issue among the armed forces. The army, which had to have its own name for everything, called it the M11.

“Nice weapon,” Chapel said. At least here he could impress his superiors with his knowledge. “9x19 mm ammunition — the favorite cartridge of police and military units everywhere. Good stopping power, but without the kick of heavier ammo so you don’t have to refocus after each shot. A short slide and barrel so it’s easily concealed. Normally it takes a thirteen-round magazine but you’ve put the fifteen-round magazine from a P226 in there — you can tell by the way the magazine sticks a little way out of the grip. Not the fanciest gun in the world but one of the most dependable.”

Hollingshead glanced at Banks, looking impressed. Banks just shrugged.

Hollingshead set the pistol down on the bar and came over to shake Chapel’s hand. When Chapel held out his right hand, Hollingshead grasped it — then grabbed Chapel’s artificial left hand as well. He didn’t flinch at all when he touched the silicone. “All right, son. Go get changed while I finish up here with our civilian friend.”

“Sir,” Chapel said. He headed through the indicated door and found a little room beyond, a cloakroom by the look of it. Two Z-racks of men’s suits stood there, each suit wrapped in plastic like they’d just come back from the dry cleaner’s. Along one wall was a dresser full of crisp white shirts still wrapped in cellophane.

He took off his cap and started to unbutton his jacket when he heard voices from the bar room beyond. He closed the door to the cloakroom but not all the way. He wanted to hear what they had to say.

“—goddamned cripple, at least tell me that robot arm of his isn’t his shooting arm,” Banks grumbled.

“I assure you, I didn’t just pick Chapel’s name out of a hat,” Hollingshead replied. “He’s the man we want — the man we need for this. Given some of your preconditions and your damnable sensitivity issues.”

“You’d better be right. For all of our sakes.” Banks grumbled something else Chapel couldn’t make out. Then he raised his voice and spoke more clearly. “You’ve got just as much to lose here as I do, Rupert.”

“A point I am firmly aware of. Now why don’t you and your crop-headed monster get out of my office, so I can get back to controlling this situation?”

Chapel had to grin at that. Crop-headed monster. He could think of worse names for Laughing Boy — plenty of them — but that one fit just fine.

When he’d finished dressing, he stepped back out of the cloakroom to find Banks and Laughing Boy gone. They hadn’t even bothered to wish him good luck. Not that he minded much.

“Look at you!” Hollingshead said. “I wouldn’t recognize you. Which I suppose is the point.”

Chapel ran a hand down the front of his new suit. “I haven’t worn one of these in a while. I’ve got my dress uniforms for formal occasions, and when I’m off duty, I’m more of a polo shirt and jeans man.”

“How’s the fit? In the, ah, shoulders?”

Chapel had ended up taking the slacks from one suit and the jacket from a bigger one. He needed extra room in the shoulders for two reasons. One was to give the clamps that held his arm on more room. The other was to give him space to conceal his sidearm.

They taught you all kinds of fun stuff in spy school, including how to dress yourself. “It’s good.”

He pulled down on the cuffs of the suit jacket and stared at the dark fabric. It was the wrong color. It wasn’t green or blue. It wasn’t a uniform. “Sir,” he said, in a small voice — because if the army had taught him one thing above all others, it was how to show respect to a superior officer. “Sir. Please. I hate to even say this out loud. But… I am a cripple. I am too old for this job, and too long out of active duty. If this mission is as important as you say—”

“Son, I’m going to mark this little moment of doubt down to pressure. The stress of a new and daunting assignment.” Hollingshead stood up straight and Chapel couldn’t resist coming to attention. “We’re going to pretend you never said that. And if you ever call yourself that horrible name again — cripple — I’m going to start believing it, and I can’t afford that. You are the right man for this job. The only man for this job. Now. I’d ask if you’re ready, if you need more time,” Hollingshead said, “but we don’t have that luxury. I’ll take you to the helipad now, and you can get started.”

THE PENTAGON: APRIL 12, T+6:21

As Hollingshead led Chapel up through various layers and corridors of the Pentagon, every soldier they passed stood to attention and saluted. Clearly they knew the man — and respected him. Chapel found himself grinning, despite the screwed-up situation he’d landed in. This was a whole other world from the cubicle farm at Fort Belvoir. This was the game — the Great Game, they used to call it.

As they made their way through the lobby toward the helipad deck, a squad of soldiers at the security checkpoint stopped in the middle of searching visitors and lined up by the door like they were competing for who got to hold it open. They watched Hollingshead like he was about to perform some kind of magic trick. Hollingshead might look like a stuffy old professor from Yale or Harvard, but these men knew better.

“I have a question, sir,” Chapel said.

“You’re free to ask, of course.” Hollingshead’s mouth curled in a funny kind of smile. “I’ll tell you anything I can.”

“I just wanted to know — how should I be addressing you? If I’m working for you now, I’d like to know whether I should call you Colonel… or General.”

“Are those my only options? They used to call me Commodore. Then it was Rear Admiral.”

“Sir,” Chapel said, his spine stiffening. “Beg your pardon. I didn’t realize you were in the navy.”

“Try not to hold it against me,” Hollingshead said. He waved the guards away and pushed the doors open himself, letting a gust of fresh air come blasting into the security lobby.

A helicopter — a Bell 407, painted in civilian colors and with no DoD markings at all — was waiting on the Pentagon’s helipad. Its rotor was already spun up by the time Chapel and Hollingshead arrived.

The noise of the chopper was enough to make it difficult for Chapel to hear what Hollingshead was saying. He’d been rambling on about what kind of support Chapel would have in his mission — an unlimited budget, the ability to requisition police and National Guard units as required — but Chapel hadn’t been listening with more than half an ear. He was too busy trying to remember what he knew about New York City, a place he’d only been a handful of times in his life.

“Captain,” Hollingshead said, nearly shouting over the roar of the helicopter’s engine.

“Hmm?”

“Captain! I’m about to commit an act of treason! I’d appreciate it if I could have some of your attention.”

That made Chapel focus, and quickly. “Admiral,” he said.

“You have a number of questions, I’m sure, which haven’t been answered yet. I can’t tell you everything, but I can give you a little more than you’ve heard so far.”

Chapel could barely hear Hollingshead’s voice over the roar of the rotor blades, but he leaned close to catch every word. He understood how serious this was.

“What happened this morning, at the camp, was a disaster. It was supposed to be impossible. It was also, in a way, the luckiest break we’re likely to get.”

“Admiral?”

“The CIA — Banks, specifically — was supposed to be in charge of any escapes from that camp. He had someone in our ranks there — a mole — who was supposed to call him if such a thing happened. For reasons no one knows, the mole failed to make that telephone call. Because it is a top secret DoD facility, it was put on my desk instead. My office was given oversight on this. I mobilized the capture teams immediately. You’ve guessed by now what happened to them. I was quite prepared to send more men, as many as it took — this is that big a threat. But by that time, Banks had finally heard what was going on. He went straight to the president and demanded he be given this operation.

“Because time was of the essence and I was already working on this, the commander in chief decided I should remain in charge. But Banks was given veto power over every move I made. He has not been shy about using that power. It was his decision to send a single man rather than multiple teams. He is far more concerned about maintaining secrecy in this matter than in actually capturing the fugitives.”

“But if they’re that dangerous—”

“He feels that allowing the public to know what’s going on would be an even greater threat to national security,” Hollingshead said. He shook his head sadly. “He’s a smart man, but I can’t say I approve of his priorities. He insisted that it had to be one man for this job. He wanted to send that goon of his, but I insisted I choose the man. Any number of twenty-five-year-old Navy SEALs came to mind, but no. I wanted someone who could be discreet, somebody with some experience — no cowboys. This isn’t a job for a hit man; this is far more surgical. I picked you.”

“I appreciate your faith in me, sir,” Chapel said. Even though he couldn’t claim to understand it.

“You’re going to curse my name before this over, I don’t doubt it. But I need you in this role. You are the last chance to keep this thing in Military Intelligence hands. If you fail, I fail as well. Banks will gain total control over this operation. He’ll send his goon in and I think you can guess what would happen then. The cretin will kill every shaggy-haired man in a five-hundred-mile radius. The collateral damage will be astonishing, and terrible. You and I both swore an oath to protect the American people. It’s you who’s going to have to uphold that oath, because there can be no one else, now.”

“I’ll — I won’t let you down,” Chapel promised.

“I know what we’ve handed you, Captain. I know how I would feel about being given a mission like this and then being told I couldn’t know any of the details. We’re playing a rotten joke on you, frankly, and I’m sorry. It was Banks who insisted we send you out into this with an incomplete briefing, as well.”

“I understand the need for secrecy, sir,” Chapel said.

“I daresay you do. What neither you nor I understand — at least not completely, not yet — is just how much is going on behind the scenes. Banks is playing a very deep strategy here. He’s keeping me from telling you everything I know. But he can’t keep you from finding things out on your own.”

“Sir?”

“Keep your eyes open, out there. Put the clues together. If you’re going to actually pull this off, that’s the only way. Figure out what we’re not telling you — and why we can’t tell you. Banks won’t like you peeling back the lid of his box of secrets, but he can’t stop you, not if you’re smart about it.”

Chapel nodded in understanding.

“Whatever you do,” Hollingshead said, “keep yourself alive. It’s imperative to me that you don’t get killed out there.”

“I — sir, that’s—”

“Because, Captain, I don’t have time to find a replacement. Now get going! I’ve got a little surprise for you en route. You’ll get to meet your new partner.”

He shook Chapel’s hand and headed back into the Pentagon.

Leaving Chapel all alone — with a job to do.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+6:29

In Brooklyn an old woman was just being roused from sleep. The bedside light came on with a click, and Dr. Helen Bryant’s eyes flickered open. She had been in the middle of her midday nap and felt somewhat annoyed at being awoken. Then she looked up and saw a face looming over hers and fear caught flame inside her chest.

“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.”

“Want their shoe sizes? I can get those,” Angel joked.

“I somehow doubt that,” Chapel told her.

“Seriously? Do you know how many people buy their shoes online these days? People are lazy. They’ll do anything they can online because then they don’t have to get off the couch. Look at me — I’m saving the world and I can do it from my bathtub, if I feel like it.”

Chapel fought down the urge to ask if she was in the bath right at that moment. He had work to do. Focus, he thought. “Okay. Okay. The real thing I want to know is why they’re on that list. You have any idea about that, Angel?”

“I didn’t get any details you haven’t already heard,” she told him. “Looking at this list, I don’t see any immediate connections. Maybe something’ll come up as I get more facts on them. Let’s start with the first name on your list — the one in Brighton Beach. Name, Bryant, Dr. Helen. Lives on Neptune Avenue. Sounds like a fun place. Occupation: Genetic Counselor.”

“What’s a genetic counselor?” Chapel asked.

“Let me Google her… ooh, she’s got a website! I love it when they have websites. Nice-looking lady, if your taste runs to older women. Looks like she’s an ob-gyn. She sees pregnant women and helps them find out if their babies are healthy, and what they can do if it turns out the babies have genetic problems. Oh my God, that must be the saddest job in the world sometimes. Can you imagine?”

“I’ve never had kids. Never got the chance,” Chapel said.

“A man of your age should have a wife, Chapel. A wife and lots of happy little healthy babies. I’m finding all kinds of stuff about Dr. Bryant here. Looks like she’s pretty famous in certain circles — she’s won all kinds of awards, gotten commendations from numerous institutes, worked for the National Institutes of Health for a long time… did fieldwork in Africa during the early part of the AIDS crisis. Weird, looks like there’s a police bulletin about her too. Let me just take a peek…”

Chapel imagined Angel crouched forward looking at her computer screen, scanning through dozens of web pages at once. When she didn’t come back on the line after a few seconds, he began to wonder what she’d found. “Angel? Is everything okay?”

“No, sweetie. It’s not. At least, not for Dr. Bryant.”

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+8:02

“Goddamn it, no!” Chapel shouted, and he punched the instrument panel of the helicopter with his good fist. The pilot started to protest, but the look on Chapel’s face must have warned him off. “She can’t be dead. I can’t be too late.”

“The police are already on the scene,” Angel told him.

“Damn it,” Chapel said, but more muted this time. He’d known how tight the time frame was, known that people had already died at the hands of the detainees. But this was the first civilian — the others had been military personnel. That didn’t make their deaths much easier to bear. But they’d known what they were getting into, or at least known they were dealing with dangerous people. Nobody had even told Dr. Bryant she was in danger.

“Do you still want to go to Brooklyn?” Angel asked. “I can change your flight plan and take you to the next address instead.”

“No,” Chapel said. “No. I need to see the crime scene. There might be some evidence there that can help me track this bastard. And we know he was in the area recently — maybe I can catch him now before he moves on to the next target.”

“All right, Chapel. You’ll be on the ground in a few minutes.”

The chopper curved in over New York Harbor and then made a straight line across Brooklyn, an endless sea of two- and three-story buildings, rows of brownstones and warehouses and churches punctuated in only a few places by taller structures. The pilot shed altitude as they came in over a rectangular slice of greenery by the ocean. It looked like a salt marsh. On the far side Chapel saw the heliport, a commercial pad with a few civilian choppers sitting dormant. Chapel slapped the pilot’s shoulder in thanks, and the kid gave him a thumbs-up. Before the skids had even touched asphalt, Chapel jumped out of the side hatch. It felt good to have his feet on solid ground again, though he knew it would take a while before his head stopped thrumming with the sound of the rotor blades.

The chopper lifted off again as soon as he was clear. It would head for the nearest air base where it could refuel, in case he needed it again in a hurry. In a few seconds it was gone from view and Chapel could hear nothing but ocean waves and distant car traffic. The silence was a dramatic change.

“Did you get me that car?” Chapel asked, and when Angel didn’t answer, it took him a second to realize he’d left his headphones in the chopper. He reached for his BlackBerry, wondering how he would make contact with her — she hadn’t exactly given him her phone number.

Before he had a chance to call the DIA and ask to be connected to the sexiest-sounding woman working there, someone called his name and he looked up.

A courier in a FedEx uniform came jogging up and handed Chapel a package. He signed for it, and the courier left before Chapel could figure out who was sending him a parcel at a heliport he’d never heard of an hour ago.

He tore open the package and found a cell phone inside, still in its box. There was a plastic blister package in the parcel as well, holding a tiny in-ear attachment for the phone.

He managed to get all the packaging undone without too much trouble. The new phone was a touch-screen model that was all screen and no buttons. He’d always wanted one of those, frankly — the tiny keys on his BlackBerry were hard to use with his less sensitive artificial fingers. He put the earpiece in his ear and powered on the phone. It looked like its batteries had a decent charge.

“Let me guess,” he said, as the screen lit up. “Is that you, Angel?”

“Hi, sweetie,” she said. “I figured it was time for an upgrade.”

“You know, it’s DoD policy that we only use BlackBerrys,” he told her. “This brand is a no-no.”

“It’s got sixteen times the memory and twice the screen resolution. I’m a high-definition kind of girl. It works with the 4G network and Wi-Fi and the best hands-free transceiver on the market. Namely the one in your ear right now. Keep it there — and keep the phone in your pocket — and we never have to be apart. Sound good?”

“I’m receiving you loud and clear.”

“Good. And, sweetie, you don’t have to shout. Just talk normally and I’ll hear you. In fact, I’ll hear everything you do, so I can give you advice on the fly. Your car is waiting at the entrance to the heliport. We’ll get you to Dr. Bryant’s place right away. In the meantime, I’ll walk you through the process of migrating all your data from your old phone. I can do most of that for you from here.”

What was it Top had told him about living in George Jetson land?

“Okay,” Chapel said, as he jogged out of the chain-link gate of the heliport. A black car — a Crown Victoria, just like the one Laughing Boy drove — was waiting for him. He had an appointment with a dead woman.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:12

Neptune Avenue was lined with modest houses and convenience stores, pizza parlors and medical clinics. The air smelled of the ocean and pasta sauce and was filled with the noise of cars and thumping radios. Dr. Bryant’s house was a simple two-story structure with bars over its windows and a steel-core reinforced door.

“Looks like she was worried about security,” Chapel said. “Not that it helped.”

“That’s pretty standard for New York,” Angel told him. “Police records say she’s had a couple break-ins before, as well. People who saw her name on the door — saw she was a doctor — and broke in looking for drugs.”

“Does she keep an office here?” Chapel asked.

“No, this was just her home. Her office and her lab are a few blocks away. This is kind of a run-down area for somebody like her. I guess she wanted to live near her patients. By the looks of things, they were mostly Russian immigrants.”

“You have access to her medical records?”

“Nothing privileged, though I could probably get that without too much trouble if you need it,” Angel told him. “I don’t see anything that stands out, right now. I don’t see anything that would have made her any enemies.”

“One was enough,” Chapel said. He gritted his teeth and walked up to the door. A single strand of yellow police tape crossed the opening, and a uniformed police officer was standing just inside. She stared at his ID with a skeptical eye, but she let him through. Angel had already talked to the local cops and let them know he was coming.

The house was dark inside, and it took a while for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he saw the place was full of police photographers and detectives drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. He would have preferred to visit the scene alone, but that wasn’t an option.

He heard someone crying loudly in the back of the house — probably a kitchen back there; he could see the side of a refrigerator through an open door. The last thing he wanted at that moment was to be questioned by a grieving relative, so he headed up the stairs instead — that was where Angel told him Dr. Bryant had been discovered.

“I’m getting some preliminary reports now; they were just filed by the detectives on the scene,” Angel said in his ear. “Chapel, this isn’t going to be pretty. It sounds like she was beaten to death in her bedroom.”

“I’ve seen dead people before,” he told her.

A detective in a cheap suit, wearing a police laminate on a lanyard around his neck, looked up and stared at Chapel. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

Chapel flashed his ID again, but the detective shook his head.

“How about you just tell me, instead of making me read the fine print on that thing? I figure you have a right to be here or we would have turned you away at the door. But you’re no cop. I’m guessing… military?”

Chapel bit his lip, but said nothing.

The detective scratched at the stubble on his chin. He looked like a tough old bastard. He looked like a drill instructor Chapel had known in basic training, frankly. He looked like the kind of guy who was used to being lied to and didn’t like it at all.

“I can’t answer your questions,” Chapel said. “I can’t tell you anything. This murder is of interest to—”

“DHS,” Angel whispered in his ear.

“The Department of Homeland Security,” Chapel said. It was a lie, but it wasn’t a ridiculous one.

The detective’s eyes went wide. “Yeah, okay. I know that score.” He stepped aside and let Chapel past.

“That was too easy,” Chapel said under his breath.

“This is New York, sweetie. This is where 9/11 happened. They understand terrorism here — and nobody will bother a DHS agent.”

“Good thinking, Angel.” Chapel stepped through another doorway and walked into the crime scene proper.

He may have seen dead bodies before. He had seen the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan. This was different, though, and his breath caught in his throat.

Dr. Helen Bryant was lying on the floor, twisted into an unnatural shape. She’d been thrown into a mirror and pieces of broken glass were everywhere, a shoal of them covering part of her face. That was a small mercy. She was an elderly woman. A little old lady. No little old lady should ever have this happen to them. It was just so… wrong.

One of the detainees had done this. Chapel suddenly wanted very much to kill the son of a bitch. He wanted to make the guy suffer.

Chapel forced himself to squat down and take a closer look, much as he wanted to just turn away and shake his head. He made himself look at the wounds on Dr. Bryant’s body, the broken bones, the lacerations. There were no gunshot wounds, and no sign that she’d been cut with a knife.

The bastard had done this with his hands.

“Do you need us to move her?” someone asked from behind him. It wasn’t the detective who had questioned him. This was a paramedic, or maybe somebody from the coroner’s department. “We’re almost done taking fiber and hair samples. If you need something, just ask.”

Chapel looked up at the paramedic. She was black, in her midthirties, and she looked like she was in awe of the DHS agent who had graced her crime scene with his presence.

Damn, Chapel thought. Angel’s ruse had gotten him this far, but now it might cause problems. If the cops thought this case was somehow connected to terrorist activity, they might start asking questions. Well, he decided, that was for Angel or Hollingshead to take care of. He had tougher problems to solve.

He put his hands on his knees and started to straighten up. Turning his face away from the body, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. “What’s that?” he asked.

The paramedic came over to stand next to him, taking care not to step on any evidence as she did so. Together they looked at the bedside table. A book of crossword puzzles and a pen lay on the floor next to the bed, and just above them, on the wall, someone had scrawled a single word.

Chapel moved closer. The letters were shaky and hard to make out, as if they’d been written by someone with a broken arm, someone in a panic, somebody who knew she was about to die. He had no doubt that Dr. Bryant had written the word.

She must have been trying to leave some kind of clue, maybe even to identify her killer. She could have been more clear about it, Chapel thought, and then scolded himself for thinking uncharitable thoughts about the dead. Still, he had no idea what the message meant:

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:20

“Angel,” Chapel said, “you ever heard of something called Chimera?”

“Sounds familiar. Give me a second.” He heard the faint sound of clacking keys and knew she must be looking it up on the Internet. “Right… for one thing, you’re saying it wrong, sweetie. It’s not ‘chim-ur-uh,’ it’s ‘kai-mare-uh.’ It’s a monster from Greek mythology — a lion with a goat head coming out of its back and a snake for a tail.”

“I’m guessing Dr. Bryant wasn’t killed by some kind of weird lion creature,” Chapel told her. “It’s got to be something else. Was there a Project Chimera? Maybe something the CIA was involved in? Maybe that was the name of the place where the detainees were held.”

“No, nothing like that is showing up. And I’ve got access to some pretty weird databases, so I’d expect at least a footnote somewhere.”

He glanced over his shoulder to see if the paramedic was listening, but she had stepped out of the room, maybe to tell the detective about the scrawled message on the wall. Chapel stood up straight, ignoring his protesting knees.

“Maybe it’s a person’s name,” Angel suggested. “Or at least an alias.”

“Maybe,” Chapel said. At the very least it was a clue. Dr. Bryant had died to give him this information. It had to mean something.

But it was going to have to wait. Dr. Bryant was dead — there was nothing more he could do for her. There was one other name on the kill list that was located in New York City. He needed to get moving.

At the door the detective was waiting for him. “Anything you can share?” he asked.

Chapel shook his head and started to push past the man.

“Maybe you should talk to the daughter,” the detective told him.

“Daughter?”

The detective nodded. “You probably heard her on your way in — she’s in the kitchen, grieving pretty hard for her mom. She’s the one who found the body. They were supposed to have lunch together today.”

Chapel’s heart went out to Dr. Bryant’s daughter, but it wasn’t his job to console anyone. His job was to make sure nobody else’s kids had to mourn their parents today. “Did she give you anything you can use? Did she see anybody running away from the house, or tell you about any enemies Dr. Bryant might have had? Otherwise—”

The detective shrugged and pulled a notepad out of his jacket pocket. “Julia Taggart, thirty-two, lives in Bushwick. No, nothing like that. We liked her for this at first — the skinny is she and her mom had some fights, just screaming matches. But I’ve seen what people look like after they kill their moms and she ain’t the type, she—”

“Taggart,” Chapel said, his eyes going wide.

“Yeah,” the detective said, “that’s her name, does that mean something to you?”

Angel’s voice sounded in his ear. “It definitely means something to me,” she said.

“Taggart — not Bryant,” Chapel said.

The detective nodded. “Sure. The deceased and her husband split up back in the late nineties, nothing weird about it, just a divorce. Dr. Bryant went back to using her maiden name, but the daughter kept her dad’s.”

“Number seven on the kill list is Dr. William Taggart,” Angel said. “He lives in Alaska.”

Chapel had already made that connection. “Yeah. I definitely want to talk to her,” he told the detective.

He was led down the stairs and back into the kitchen. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through lace curtains and gave the room a yellow glow. There were cops everywhere, most of them just standing around in black uniforms or suit jackets. In the middle of this tableau, sitting at the kitchen table, was a woman in her early thirties wearing a white lab coat. Her eyes were smeared with half-melted makeup, and a teardrop had gathered on the point of her chin. She had fiery red hair that fell to her shoulders, and under the lab coat she was wearing jeans and a black sweater, with a single strand of pearls around her neck.

A cop with a notepad was trying to talk to her, but Julia Taggart just kept shaking her head. The cop wanted to clarify some details of her story, but Julia could only mutter short responses. She was clearly devastated by her mother’s death.

This isn’t going to be easy, Chapel thought. But he had to ask her some questions before he moved on. “Miss Taggart?” he said. The cops parted to let him through. “Julia? My name is Chapel. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

She looked up at him with hopeful eyes. Like maybe he was going to come tell her that her mom wasn’t really dead, that it had all been a terrible mistake.

Chapel had seen that look before. When he’d got back from Afghanistan, he had visited the family of every one of the Rangers who died the day he lost his arm. He had thought he could bring them some comfort, at least let them know their sons or brothers or husbands had died for a good cause.

Every time he’d been completely stalled — flummoxed — by that same look. That look of final, unthinking hope in the face of utter desolation.

Chapel wanted to run away. He wanted to do anything in the world except talk to this woman, now. What could he possibly tell her? I’m so sorry, but your mother is dead and you can never know who did it, or why they did it, and even if I do catch them, I can’t even tell you that. All because the CIA didn’t want its secrets getting out.

He bit his lip, hard, and sat down next to her.

“We’ll get this guy,” he told her. It was all he was allowed to say — the only shred of comfort he was legally allowed to give. He hated his job sometimes. “Maybe you can help me get him. I just need to know a few things.”

She looked away, her eyes darting from his face. He hadn’t told her what she wanted to hear. “I’ve already answered all your questions,” she said.

Chapel didn’t doubt the police had asked her a million things already, all the usual questions you asked in an investigation like this. He had a few he was pretty sure she hadn’t heard before. He glanced at the cop with the notepad, though. He definitely didn’t want what he was going to say written down.

“Maybe I can take you somewhere and buy you a cup of coffee,” he told her. “Maybe getting away from this house will help jog your memory.”

“I just… want to go home, now,” she said, looking right into his eyes. “Can I go home? Please?”

Chapel turned to look for the detective — the man he assumed was in charge here.

“Sure,” the detective said. “You want me to call a patrol unit to take her there?”

Angel spoke in his ear. “I’ll have a cab out front by the time you get out the door.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Chapel told the detective. “I’ll make sure she gets home okay. Do you need to sign her out or anything?”

The detective shrugged. “We’ve got her information.”

Chapel got up from the table and offered Julia a hand getting up. She shook him off and rose on her own, though she looked a little wobbly. She followed Chapel out of the house and down to the sidewalk where, as promised, a cab was waiting for them.

Julia stared at the cab as if she’d never seen one before. She was in shock, of course, but she pulled herself together visibly and said, “I live on—”

“Woodbine Street. Don’t worry,” Chapel said. Angel had already given him the address. “I’ve got this taken care of.”

He opened her door for her and offered his arm as she started to climb in. Too late he realized he’d given her his left arm. Her hand brushed his silicone fingers and stopped there. Without getting into the cab, she stopped and lifted his artificial hand and peered at it like she was looking at a specimen through a microscope.

“Oh,” she said. “This is really lifelike. I didn’t even notice until just now. What is this, a DEKA Luke arm? I’ve read about these.”

Chapel frowned. “It’s the most recent version. Technically it’s still just a prototype, but—”

“Typically they only give these to soldiers who have lost limbs in combat,” she said. She’d had one leg inside the cab. Now she removed it and put her foot down firmly on the sidewalk. “Mr. Chapel,” she said, “you’re clearly not a policeman. I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me exactly what’s going on here.”

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:31

“This one’s sharp. Watch out, honey,” Angel said.

Chapel set his jaw. “Miss Taggart—”

“It’s Dr. Taggart. I’m a vet,” the woman told him.

Chapel’s eyes went wide. “Really?” That surprised him — she hadn’t seemed the type. “Which branch of service?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Were you in the army, the navy, the air force?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m a veterinarian. Okay, I think we’re done. I’ll get my own cab, thanks.” She turned and started to walk away.

“Dr. Taggart,” he said, putting a little iron in his voice. The tone they’d taught him to use in officer training.

She stopped, but she didn’t turn around.

“Your mother’s dead, and her killer is still at large. Your father is William Taggart, right? He’s in danger, too. A lot of people are in danger, and I’m trying to save them.”

“My father is on the other side of the continent,” she said, whirling around to glare at him. “This was just some random act of violence. Get your story straight.”

“Your mother wasn’t killed by some crazy drug addict looking for a fix,” he told her. Even saying that much was risking his mission, but he needed to convince her of the urgency of things. “She was targeted. Singled out.”

She didn’t reply. She didn’t walk away, either.

“If I’m going to stop what happened to your mother from happening again, I need some answers, and I need them now.”

She walked toward him, coming close enough to get right up in his face. “My whole life people have kept secrets from me. I don’t enjoy it. Are you going to tell me the truth, Mr. Chapel?”

“It’s Captain Chapel. That’s one true thing,” he replied.

Her eyes took very careful measure of his face. He felt like he was being dissected in a laboratory. She shook her head — but then she got into the cab.

He climbed in beside her. The cabdriver turned and looked back at them. “You know you’ve been on the meter this whole time, right?”

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:37

As the cab crawled through Brooklyn traffic, Chapel watched the city go by. It seemed to take forever to pass each house, each little corner store. Time was ticking away and there was no way to get the minutes back. Chapel thought about what Angel had told him — in New York City, the subway was apparently the only way to get anywhere in a timely fashion. He should have listened to her.

“I really am sorry for your loss,” he told the woman sitting beside him. “That was true, too. It’s got to be… tough.” He reached for more words of sympathy but they were hard to find. “I didn’t know Dr. Bryant, but by all accounts she was a good person.”

“Thanks. I guess,” she said. “Yeah. She was a real saint. As long as you weren’t her daughter.”

“The two of you didn’t get along?” The detective had said so, but he wanted to hear it from her own lips.

“We fought. I was a disappointment to her, and she never let me forget it. She wanted me to go into the family business and I didn’t.”

“She wanted you to become a genetic counselor?”

Julia shrugged. “Not specifically, not necessarily. But she and Dad were both scientists, real scientists, as she would say. They were geneticists. They met in grad school, at Oxford. He was working on a second doctorate while she got her first.” She rubbed at her eyes and then stared at her hands when they came away covered in melted eye shadow. “Ugh. Do you want to know how he convinced her to marry him? He drew a Punnett square. That’s a chart you make, it matches up the genes two organisms have and shows how likely their offspring are to have a certain trait. He showed Mom that if they had kids, there was a statistically significant probability they would have red hair.”

“I guess it worked,” Chapel said.

She grabbed a strand of her hair and pulled it around toward her eyes as if she were checking what color it was. Letting it go, she said, “Too bad he couldn’t predict how they would actually get along. He left us when I was a teenager. Most of what I remember of them is the two of them shouting at each other.”

“Why did they split up?”

“Like I said, people keep secrets from me. Mom would never explain — she just said it was a disagreement over ethics. Which could mean he slept around, or it could mean they differed on their views of stem cell research. Either way I’d believe it. She made him sound like the worst man on earth.”

“What about you? Do you get along with him?”

“I haven’t spoken to him in years,” she said. “And then it was just on the phone.”

Chapel tapped on the window with his real fingers. This wasn’t going anywhere. He needed to get back on track. “Did your mother have an interest in mythology?” he asked.

“What on earth does that have to do with anything?” She had taken a tissue from her purse and was angrily wiping the makeup from around her eyes. When he didn’t reply, she threw herself back in the cab seat and sighed. “No. I don’t remember her ever talking about mythology.”

Chapel nodded. “Did she know any Greek people? Maybe someone who would wish her harm?”

“Maybe the guy who runs the diner where she got breakfast.”

“Cute, but not helpful, Dr. Taggart.”

She sneered at him. “I have no reason to be either, so far. When are you going to start telling me what’s going on?”

He could see in her eyes she was done answering questions until he gave her something. He tried to think of the best way to be evasive without sounding evasive. “The man who killed your mother had her name and address. He also had your father’s.”

She stared at him as if he’d told her he was an alien and he’d just come from the moon. “My mother was assassinated?” she asked.

“I know that’s going to come as a shock—”

“But it’s been twenty years. Why now?”

It was Chapel’s turn to be surprised. “I’m not sure I follow. What happened twenty years ago that would make your mother a target for assassination?”

“I don’t know,” she told him. “She never told me any details. I just know that she and my father both used to work for the CIA, back when we lived up in the Catskills.”

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:48

The Catskills. That was where the DoD facility was located, the one where the detainees had been held. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Chapel felt like he was looking at the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and two of them had just fit together for the first time.

“You have no idea what they did for the CIA?”

“None,” Julia said. “They were both pretty good at keeping their secrets. By the time I was old enough to ask — to even wonder about what my parents did for a living — we had already moved to New York City and they had moved on to other jobs. I may have asked about their time as spies once in a while, but they would just tell me to mind my own business and I guess eventually I got the point.”

Spies — well, that was unlikely. Dr. Bryant hardly fit the profile. But the CIA wasn’t just spies; it employed thousands of civilians in all kinds of roles. All of whom were required by law never to talk about what they did. Even mentioning they had worked for the CIA, even to their own daughter, would be forbidden. “They actually said, ‘we used to work for the CIA,’ just like that?”

“No, of course not. Nothing like that. I only knew about it because once a year a guy from the CIA would come to our house for dinner. After we ate, they would send me to my room and tell me to play my music loud so he could debrief them.”

That was standard practice for the CIA, Chapel knew. Defectors from foreign countries and anyone who worked on projects involving national security were debriefed on a yearly basis to make sure no foreign spies had contacted them and they hadn’t accidentally revealed sensitive information.

“Did you ever overhear anything you weren’t supposed to?” Chapel asked.

“No, never. I was still trying to be a good kid back then. I thought it would make them like me more. Mom and Dad were both cold fish, and I was always trying to find some way to get their approval. I used to look forward to the CIA guy’s visits. It made me feel like my life was a little more exciting than other kids’. He was always nice to me, too. Nicer than my parents.”

“Angel,” Chapel said, under his breath.

“Already working on it, sugar,” the voice in his ear said. “Give me a sec.”

Julia stared at him. More specifically, she stared at his ear. “Oh, God,” she said. “You’ve got a Bluetooth. What a nonsurprise.”

He reached toward the hands-free set nestled in his ear, but he didn’t touch it. “I need to stay connected,” he told her.

“The only people in New York who wear those things are bankers and finance types,” she said. “People who are rich enough that nobody dares tell them they look like douche bags. We all got pretty tired after a while of them walking around talking to invisible people all the time. It used to be you could tell if somebody was a crazy bum because he did that. Suddenly you had to take that kind of behavior seriously.”

Chapel could only shrug. “Excuse me for one second,” he told her.

“Whatever,” she said, and turned to look out her window.

Angel eventually came back on the line. “This one took some digging. There are a lot of sealed records here… Helen Taggart née Bryant, William Taggart — they were both on somebody’s payroll, definitely, up until the mid-nineties. Tax records only show they worked for an unspecified government agency. That’s unusual — the IRS doesn’t mess around. The CIA should have been generating pay stubs and W-2 forms like anybody else.”

“Sounds like they were being paid out of a black budget.”

“Which is pretty much a brick wall when you’re trying to follow a money trail,” Angel agreed. “I did find one thing, though, that’s going to make you so proud of me. William Taggart is still working as a research scientist, and that means he depends on grant money that has to be accounted for scrupulously. In 2003, he got a grant from an anonymous donor, but the check was paid by a bank in Langley, Virginia.”

Which was where the CIA had its headquarters.

“That was some inspired detective work, absolutely,” Chapel said. Not for the first time he uttered silent thanks that Angel was on his side. What she’d uncovered wasn’t cast-iron proof that William Taggart had worked for the CIA, but it was pretty damning — and it was enough to confirm what his daughter had said.

“One other thing,” Angel said, “I can definitely confirm that a William Taggart, a Helen Taggart, and a Julia Taggart all lived in Phoenicia, New York, until 1995. The elder Taggarts paid mortgage payments and property taxes there, and the woman you’re sitting next to was a student at the local elementary school.”

“Now you’re just showing off,” Chapel said, with a chuckle. “I don’t suppose there are any military bases in that area? Maybe a detention facility?”

“No likely suspects yet,” Angel said, “but I’m still looking and—”

“Hey — that’s my house,” Julia said, rapping on the Plexiglas partition between them and the cab’s driver. “Slow down. You can let me off at the corner.”

“Hold on, Angel,” Chapel said. Julia was reaching into her purse, but he put out a hand to stop her. “This is on me,” he told her.

“Fine.” She closed her purse and reached for the door handle.

“I still have some more questions,” Chapel said, before she could get out of the cab. “If you’ll just give me a little more of your time—”

“I don’t think so,” she told him. “You’re definitely not coming inside, and I have to start planning my mother’s funeral.” Her face fell. Maybe she had been able to put aside her grief while she was talking to him, but he could see it had only been delayed. “It’s bad enough she’s dead. I didn’t need any of this. I really didn’t—”

She stopped in midsentence. She was staring through the window of the cab, looking up at her house — a modest two-story building not unlike the one where her mother had lived.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Beyond the obvious?”

“Captain Chapel,” she said. “I didn’t leave the lights on when I left this morning.”

He leaned across her to look up at the house. There were definitely lights on in the second-floor windows. As he watched, someone walked past the window, someone big and definitely male.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:59

“Dr. Taggart,” Chapel said, “give me your house keys, and stay in this cab no matter what happens.”

Her eyes searched his face. She wasn’t stupid. She knew this couldn’t be a coincidence. Still, she clearly had her doubts.

“I am not kidding,” he told her.

She nodded once and reached in her purse to fish out her keys. She slapped them into his outstretched right hand.

He tapped on the partition between them and the cabbie. “Wait here. Keep the meter running — it’ll be worth your while.”

The bearded cabdriver just shrugged.

Chapel stepped out onto the sidewalk. With his artificial left hand he brushed the front of his jacket, just to remind himself his sidearm was still there.

Approaching the house he saw right away that he wouldn’t need the keys after all. The front door had been forced open. It was a heavy steel-core door with a Medeco lock, a lock that was supposed to be impossible to pick. Whoever had opened the door hadn’t bothered to try. He’d simply smashed the lock mechanism, maybe with a sledgehammer. Chapel looked up and down the street but saw nobody watching him. Breaking that door must have made a lot of noise but nobody had come to investigate.

He shook his head and pushed past the swaying door. There was a second door inside, a security door with an electric buzzer. That door, too, had been smashed open and the buzzer was whining a plaintive cry.

“Up the stairs. It’s the apartment on the left,” Angel told him.

The building had been a single house once, from the look of it, but had been subdivided at some later point to make four apartments. Chapel headed up the stairs and found himself in a narrow corridor between two identical doors. These were simple wooden doors, child’s play to kick in. It looked like both of them had been bashed open by force. Maybe the intruder didn’t have an Angel to tell him which door he wanted.

Chapel drew his weapon. He reached for a safety switch before remembering there wasn’t one on the P228. The handgun had an internal safety — the first pull on the trigger was a double action, cocking the hammer a moment before the handgun fired. That meant his first shot would be slightly slower than expected.

It had been a long time since he’d fired a pistol at anything but a paper target. Chapel set his jaw and pushed open Julia’s apartment door with his foot.

From behind the door he heard shattering glass. Had the intruder jumped out a window? No — he could see blue glass fragments all over the floor.

The apartment might have been nice, tastefully decorated and cozy, once. He saw framed pictures of dogs on the walls and a bricked-in fireplace. Other than that the place was a shambles. The furniture had been broken into sticks of wood. Books had been torn from their shelves and thrown across the floor. Foam stuffing from ripped-up pillows and cushions floated on the air.

The place hadn’t just been ransacked. It had been demolished.

A loud clattering, rattling noise broke his concentration. Stainless steel cooking implements — salad tongs, spatulas, slotted spoons — bounced and danced across the floor. The intruder must have pulled out one of Julia’s kitchen drawers and just thrown it through the opening to the kitchen.

Careful not to trip on anything, Chapel advanced into the room. He was still blocking the main exit, but he stayed far enough from the kitchen entrance to not be surprised if the intruder came running out.

He cleared his throat. Summoned up his best command voice. “Stop where you are! You’re under arrest!”

Silence filled the apartment. To one side of Chapel, a broken lamp rolled off a table and landed in a snowdrift of old tax forms. He managed not to jump, even as keyed up as he was.

“Step out of the kitchen. Lie down on the floor in here with your fingers locked behind your head,” Chapel demanded.

The intruder took a step toward him. Chapel could hear the stamping footsteps on the wooden kitchen floor. He could hear the intruder breathing heavily, now, too. Chapel felt like his senses were coming alive, growing stronger. He remembered this focus, this clarity, from the days when he’d worked in the field.

“Step out of the kitchen,” he repeated. “Lie down on the—”

The intruder didn’t just emerge from the kitchen. It was like he exploded out of it, like he was a bullet fired from a gun. Chapel had never seen a human being move that fast — before this moment, he would have sworn it was impossible.

He jerked the trigger of the P228. His instincts were good, his reflexes just as sharp as they’d ever been. He was certain he’d hit his target, that the 9 mm round had caught his target in his shoulder.

The intruder didn’t slow down at all. He collided with Chapel, knocking him over, sending them both rolling into the remains of a couch. Chapel saw a massive fist lift in the air, the arm behind it curling as the intruder readied a devastating blow aimed right at Chapel’s head.

He managed to yank his head to one side. The fist came down with a thunderous crack. Chapel felt splinters dig into his ear and the side of his face. He glanced to the side and saw the intruder’s fist buried in the shattered floorboards.

Impossible, Chapel thought. This is impossible—

And then strong arms grabbed him and hauled him into the air. He kicked and struggled, because he knew how hard it was to lift a human being who refused to let his center of gravity stay in one place. The hand gripping his leg squeezed. Hard. Chapel felt the muscle there, honed by years of swimming, crush and start to tear.

Then the intruder tossed Chapel into a corner of the room and made a break for the apartment door.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:03

Chapel picked himself up off the floor and shook some dust off his jacket. His head swam for a minute, but he fought the wooziness off.

No damn time to be hurt, he told himself. Except it sounded like Top’s voice inside his head. “That’s right, Top,” he said out loud. And then he dashed for the apartment door and down the stairs.

Chapel had gone through Special Forces training with the Army Rangers. The Rangers were famous for always being the first boots on the ground — wherever the army went, the Rangers were the first group sent in. They had a reputation for moving fast and keeping their wits about them. It had been a while since he’d used it, but conditioning like that doesn’t break. He took the stairs two at a time and put his good shoulder into the door, knocking it wide open and spilling him into the street.

Just in time to see the back door of the cab slam shut, and the vehicle take off down the road at high speed. He saw two people in the backseat. One was Julia.

He was certain the other one was the intruder.

“Hell, no,” he said, and lifted his weapon, aiming with both hands. The cab was already a hundred feet away and gaining speed, weaving to avoid other cars. He couldn’t risk firing into its cabin in case he hit Julia by accident, so he snapped a shot at its rear right tire. The bullet dug a narrow trench through the asphalt, barely missing by a foot.

Chapel wanted to swear. He wanted to shout in frustration.

Instead he took off at a run. There was no way he could catch up with the speeding cab — his legs were strong but he was only human. He had no intention of just giving up, though.

Even if there was no hope at all.

“Chapel,” Angel said. “Chapel! Tan Lexus, just ahead on your left!”

Chapel didn’t waste time asking questions. He ran over to the indicated car and grabbed the driver’s-side door handle. It resisted him — but then he heard a chunk as the door lock opened.

He had no idea what Angel was planning. He knew how to hot-wire a car, but it would take too long. This was pointless, it was just a token gesture, but—

As he slid into the driver’s seat, the car rumbled to life.

“Keyless ignition,” Angel said, “tied in to one of those always-on satellite services, so if you lose your keys you can just ask the nice man in India to start the car for you. Or, you know, your favorite hacker.”

Chapel pulled on his seat belt and stepped on the gas.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:04

Chapel jerked the wheel to the side to get around a slow-moving bicyclist and nearly collided with a line of cars coming the other way. He swerved back into his lane and accelerated. He could just see the cab ahead, a block away. There was a red light between them, but he took it at full speed, ignoring the horns that blared at him and the shouts of pedestrians.

He had to be careful, had to avoid accidents — it was far too easy, in the heat of the moment like this, to trade speed for safety. If he caught the intruder but ran over six pedestrians in the process, why exactly was he doing this?

The cabdriver didn’t seem to have any such qualms. He sideswiped a city bus and then rocketed across his lane and half up onto the sidewalk to get around another car. The intruder must have been threatening him to make him drive like that, Chapel thought. He must be afraid for his life.

From what Chapel had seen, he had good reason to be.

“Is New York traffic always like this?” Chapel asked.

“Day in, day out,” Angel told him. “There’s another traffic light up ahead — I’m going to keep it green for you, but you need to watch out. Jaywalking is the official pastime in this city.”

“Noted,” Chapel said, palming the wheel as he gunned around a double-parked delivery van. Up ahead in the crosswalk people were standing in the street, inches from the cars that blasted past them going both ways. “You can’t get these people to actually wait on the sidewalks, can you?”

“There are some things even I can’t hack,” Angel told him. “Sorry, sweetie.”

Too much traffic. Too many people. On an open country highway Chapel could have given chase for miles. Here he was going to kill somebody if he didn’t end this, and soon. The bright yellow cab was inching closer, but the cabbie was taking ever more serious risks. He blasted right through a fruit cart, sending its umbrella twirling and spattering the road and passersby with bright orange mango pulp. A woman in a business suit screamed and threw her briefcase at the cab as it nearly took her toes off.

“I need to get close and drive him off the road,” Chapel said.

“Hold on,” Angel told him. “Up ahead — perfect! One lane of the road up ahead is closed for construction. There’s a blue wooden barrier and some orange netting making a temporary sidewalk. Do you see it?”

Chapel squinted at the road ahead. Yeah, the cab was just entering a new block where the road had been dug up. Big construction vehicles were leaning on the sidewalk and out into the street, protected from sideswipes by a blue wooden wall. Three more feet of the road had been cordoned off with traffic barrels and netting so people on foot could get around the construction.

“The intersection ahead is clear… now!” Angel said.

Chapel stepped on the gas and the Lexus shot through the open space, just as the traffic light overhead turned from yellow to red. The Lexus bounced and jumped on its suspension as he hit a trench dug through the asphalt, but suddenly the yellow cab was dead ahead.

Chapel pulled around the cab, trying to get level with it. He could see Julia and the intruder in the backseat. He had her in some kind of choke hold, and he was shouting at the cabbie through the partition.

There was blood on the partition. Who the hell was this guy?

He didn’t look like the detainees Chapel had seen in the grainy surveillance footage Hollingshead had shown him. This guy’s hair was cut short and his face was clean-shaven. Of course, that transformation would have taken only a few minutes in a train station bathroom. Chapel was certain this had to be one of the men he was looking for. It was just too unlikely that this was some random criminal who had broken into Julia’s apartment the same day her mother was beaten to death.

Besides, Chapel had seen the way the man moved, the strength in his arms. That was exactly what Hollingshead and Banks had tried to warn him about. The detainees were stronger and faster than anyone Chapel had ever seen.

“Angel,” Chapel said, “the owner of this Lexus — how’s his insurance?”

“She’s got a five-hundred-dollar deductible,” Angel told him.

“Send her a check,” he said, and he yanked the steering wheel over to the side, slamming the nose of the Lexus right into the left rear wheel of the cab.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:10

Metal screeched and safety glass shattered. The steering wheel jumped in Chapel’s hands like a wild horse trying to break free of a rider, and the car under him skidded and floated over the asphalt, all control lost. The cab spun around and broke through the blue wooden barrier, sending broken scraps of wood flying in the air. Orange netting wrapped around the windshield of the Lexus, obscuring Chapel’s view. A moment later the air bag exploded in his face and he couldn’t see anything.

“The cab has stopped moving,” Angel told him.

The air bag deflated almost instantly, and Chapel already had his seat belt off. He shoved the door of the Lexus open and ducked out, keeping his head low. He didn’t think the detainee had a weapon but he wasn’t about to find out the hard way.

Dashing around the front of car, he came at the cab with his handgun in a two-handed grip. He saw the cab was up on two wheels, its front end propped up by broken wood and a pile of gravel on the far side of the barrier. It wasn’t going anywhere.

Someone tumbled out of the passenger door. He raised his weapon but lowered it again when he saw it was Julia. She looked banged up, a little, but he didn’t see any blood on her. “Dr. Taggart,” he called. “Are you all right?”

“He went through there,” she shouted back, pointing at a building on the far side of the broken barrier.

He had to hand it to this woman. She was a civilian and she’d been through more than her share of shocks and horrors for one day, but still she kept her wits about her. She knew what was important — catching this man. She could look after herself.

Chapel clambered over the shattered barrier and ducked around the side of the gravel pile, a giant backhoe giving him cover on his other side. Dead ahead was the building she’d indicated. Its ground floor was lined in sheet glass windows, but they’d been covered over with brown craft paper held on with duct tape so he couldn’t see inside. The door of the building might have been locked up tight, but now it was hanging open on one hinge. He recognized the detainee’s handiwork.

“Angel,” he said, “what does this building look like inside?”

“It’s been gutted. Used to be a department store, but it went out of business two years ago. The current owners tore out all the copper wiring and anything else of value and have left it empty ever since.”

“So you’re telling me there’s no power in there. No lights.”

“I’m afraid so. Be safe, Chapel.”

Not much chance of that.

Chapel shoved his back up against the window just to the right side of the door. The door hung open wide enough for him to get a glimpse inside. He saw a bare concrete floor, with pillars here and there holding the ceiling up. Piles of construction debris, an old wheelbarrow, and a stack of two-by-fours sat inside. The light streaming in through the broken door only illuminated a small patch of the floor.

He saw no sign of movement. For all he knew the detainee had just run through this building and out a back door. If he had, the chase was over.

Every instinct in Chapel’s body told him that wasn’t true. That he was standing right outside of a death trap.

He shoved the door out of its frame with one foot. The remaining hinge gave way, and it fell outward, smashing onto the sidewalk. Chapel ducked inside before the noise had stopped and got his back up against the nearest pillar.

He could hear nothing. The place stank of mildew and dust. Nothing alive but rats had been in there for a long time.

Chapel held his breath.

He waited.

Finally he heard what he’d hoped for. A footfall, the sound of someone big, human sized, crunching the dust underfoot.

“This building is surrounded,” he shouted. “Your only chance is to turn yourself in. I promise we won’t hurt you.”

“I’ve been hurt before,” the detainee said.

His voice came from much closer than Chapel had expected. He couldn’t be more than ten feet away.

“Thanks to you, I know what it feels like to be shot.”

“Yeah? How was that?”

“It woke me up pretty good. Made me not want to get shot again.”

A sense of humor. Not what Chapel had expected. The detainee’s voice was deep, but not gruff. It had no accent as far as Chapel could tell — which meant the detainee probably wasn’t of Middle Eastern descent, nor Russian. He had considered the idea that the detainees might have been foreign combatants, al-Qaeda or Taliban who had been brought to the States for questioning, but the voice sounded altogether wrong for that.

“How are we going to play this?” Chapel asked.

“Why don’t you step out where I can see you. Then we’ll figure it out together.”

The voice was calm. There was no fear in it. No rage, either. Chapel had seen what this man did to Julia’s apartment — and to Dr. Bryant’s body. That had taken real anger, blinding fury. But this man sounded about as angry as if he was trying to solve a difficult Sudoku puzzle.

“You sound like a reasonable man,” Chapel said.

The voice laughed, with genuine mirth.

“You don’t know anything about me,” the detainee said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t make that mistake.”

“I know you killed Helen Bryant, and that she was just the first name on your list. I know you went to Julia Taggart’s apartment, probably to kill her, too — even though she isn’t on your list at all. Care to tell me why you did that?”

“Bryant had to see. She had to understand what she did to us,” the detainee told him. There was an undercurrent of anger in the words, now, and Chapel knew he’d struck a chord. “As for the daughter, well. Her child — the person she made to love. To really love. I wanted to show her, show her how that hurt!”

So much for reasonable. It sounded like every word the detainee spoke now was making him angrier.

“Look, calm down; I’m actually here to help you,” Chapel said.

“They have to die! They all have to die for what they did!”

Damn. Chapel had really set the guy off. He was screaming now, his words slurring with rage. Who went from calm and collected to homicidally angry that fast? “Just talk to me — explain it to me,” Chapel called out. “Please! I want to understand!”

“Understand? You can’t fucking understand this!”

“I want to—”

Chapel didn’t get to finish the thought. The detainee hit the pillar Chapel hid behind, then, hard enough to shatter it into chips of concrete and twisted rebar. Hard enough to send Chapel sprawling forward, right into the pool of light coming in through the door.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:14

Chapel nearly dropped his pistol as he fell forward. He barely managed to get his hands under him as broken concrete pelted his back and smacked into his head. He felt blood slicking down one side of his face, and his ears were ringing. Slowly he turned around to look behind him.

The detainee came at him roaring like an animal, arms outstretched, big fingers reaching for Chapel’s flesh.

Chapel rolled out of the way, scrabbling to get his feet underneath him. He dashed into the darkness beyond the pool of light. Instantly he was blind, and he stumbled as his foot caught on a pile of two-by-fours. He went sprawling again, but this time caught himself a little better. He rolled onto his good shoulder, then onto his back. Blinking rapidly he fought to gain some kind of night vision so he could see through the murk. The daylight coming in through the broken door dazzled his eyes and kept him from seeing anything.

He heard concrete shattering again, vaguely saw pieces of acoustic ceiling tile come cascading down from above.

“I see you there,” the detainee said, his voice thick with rage.

Damn — Chapel couldn’t see his attacker at all. He pushed himself backward with his feet, trying at least to get a wall behind him so the detainee would have to come at him from the front. He lifted his handgun, pointed it into the darkness.

For a second the detainee was visible in the pool of light, moving so fast he was a blur. He was headed right for Chapel. Could the bastard see in the dark?

Chapel got to his feet and jumped to the side just in time. The detainee hit the wall where Chapel had been, and metal clanged as a stack of rebar went falling and clattering across the floor.

Chapel desperately tried to make out anything in the dark. There were shadows — vague shapes. He took a wild guess at where the detainee would be. He raised his weapon, aimed as carefully as he could since he didn’t know what he was shooting at. It could have been a wheelbarrow or a pile of buckets.

But this shadow moved.

Chapel took the shot. The muzzle flash ruined any night vision he’d gained.

But the detainee screamed.

“Stop doing that!” the detainee bellowed. “Just give up and die already!”

Not a chance, Chapel thought. He backed away from the detainee, his artificial hand held out behind him so he wouldn’t stumble over anything too big. His eyes stung with dust and darkness, so he clamped them shut.

He felt air moving over his face and his good hand. He heard broken concrete settling, heard rebar creaking as it took the weight of the building above.

The detainee was stumbling in the dark now, too. Either his night vision wasn’t as good as Chapel had thought or he had lost enough blood to slow him down. Thank heaven for small favors. Chapel’s artificial hand felt a pillar behind him. He pressed his back up against it. He listened.

He could hear footsteps. Coming closer.

He considered rushing for the light. In the dark like this he was clearly at a disadvantage. The light was coming from the street, though. He had to keep the detainee in the building where he controlled the situation. If the guy got out onto the sidewalk again, he might run for it, and Chapel knew he couldn’t run him down on foot.

“You’re tough, for a human,” the detainee said.

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

Chapel had no time to think about it. A piece of concrete as big as his fist struck the pillar, just inches above Chapel’s head. If it had connected, it might have fractured his skull. Chapel ducked and lifted his weapon, just as another chunk of concrete smacked into his leg.

He fired blind into the darkness, one shot, two. He had no hope of hitting the detainee.

But in the muzzle flash he saw the detainee coming toward him, saw little snapshots frozen in time as the bastard leaped into the air, arms wheeling to smash into Chapel and crush him.

Chapel jumped to the side and ran toward the windows at the front of the building. He kept well clear of the door to keep the detainee from getting any ideas.

His leg hurt. Every step was a new flash of agony. Either he’d been wounded by the chunk of concrete that hit him, or he was just now feeling the effects of when the detainee had grabbed him back in Julia’s apartment.

He made it to the windows, but he could already hear the detainee running at him again, charging. Chapel reached behind him and grabbed a handful of the brown paper that covered the window. Just before the detainee reached him, he tore it free, turning his head to the side.

Bright light burst through the uncovered glass, a beam of it like a laser shining right in the detainee’s face. Chapel had hoped to blind the man — if his eyes were adjusted to the darkness, the sudden light should be enough to dazzle him, at least for a moment, and let Chapel get a shot off.

The detainee laughed. He squinted his eyes shut, then opened them again.

Except — they were different now. Chapel was flummoxed by what he saw. The detainee’s eyes had turned black, solid black, from side to side. No white was visible at all.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:17

“What the hell are you?” Chapel demanded.

The detainee didn’t answer. As Chapel watched, the detainee’s eyes changed again. The blackness slid away from his eyes, like an eyelid drawing back. Like an extra eyelid.

Chapel thought of lizards and snakes — didn’t they have an extra eyelid like that? Some kind of membrane to protect their eyes from the sun?

This made no sense. It made no sense at all.

Chapel was so surprised he failed to take the obvious shot.

The detainee grabbed up a piece of rebar from the floor. He wasn’t surprised, and he was more than ready to end this. The length of ribbed steel bar swung through the air, slamming into the window right by the side of Chapel’s good arm. Chapel managed to duck as it came around for a second strike.

Damn, the guy was fast. Weird eyes notwithstanding, his speed and strength were beyond any limit of human strength. This just kept getting harder and harder to understand.

Chapel had to jump to the side to avoid a third swing. The detainee switched his grip on the bar and jabbed at Chapel, hard enough to star the tempered glass of the window behind him.

Before Chapel could even move, another jab came, and another. One clipped the side of his head and bright lights burst behind Chapel’s eyes. He lurched wildly, suddenly unable to stand up straight — which was all that saved him from being impaled as the bar came right at his chest.

If this kept up much longer, Chapel knew he would be beaten to death, his bones crushed by that length of steel. He brought up his weapon and fired — they were close enough together now he barely needed to aim.

A bright spot of blood appeared on the detainee’s chest, just a little to the right of where his heart should be. It was the kind of shot that might kill a human being or might just incapacitate him — either way it would leave him down on the floor, bleeding out.

It knocked the detainee back maybe half a step. His arms went wide, the rebar whistling through the air, still clutched in one big hand.

Chapel had bought himself a split second. His head was swimming and he really wanted to lie down, but his work wasn’t finished.

He raised the pistol again, this time aiming at the maniac’s eye. He might have too many eyelids, but Chapel doubted they could stop a 9 mm slug.

Before he could take the shot, though, the rebar connected with Chapel’s hand and sent the handgun flying. Pain lanced up Chapel’s arm as far as his shoulder, like a vein of magma had opened under his flesh. He cried out — he couldn’t help it — and brought his hand up close to his chest. It didn’t feel broken but it was starting to go numb, which was never a good sign.

Not that it mattered, particularly.

He was face-to-face with a superstrong madman. He was unarmed. The lunatic had a length of steel bar hard enough and heavy enough to stove in a human rib cage.

Anyone else would have known that was the moment of his death.

Anyone without Chapel’s training might have been forgiven for breaking down then and begging for his life.

But Chapel had trained with the Army Rangers. Some of the most elite warfighters on earth. And that training had included an intense course in hand-to-hand combatives.

“Bye, bye,” the detainee said, and he brought the rebar around in a swinging arc.

Chapel shot out his good hand and grabbed the rebar in midair, not trying to stop it or even slow it down. Just getting a grip, letting his arm be carried along by its momentum. His artificial hand shot out and grabbed hold of the detainee’s elbow.

The Rangers had taught Chapel that when he had a pistol in his hand, that was his best weapon. But when he didn’t have a pistol, his best weapon was his enemy’s own weight. Swinging the rebar forced the detainee to commit to the bar’s inertia, shifting his own center of balance away from his feet. Chapel yanked him forward, adding all his own strength to the moving bar.

The detainee went somersaulting forward, carried along by his own follow-through, and went down face-first into the floor. Chapel heard the peculiar wet snap of cartilage breaking and knew the detainee’s nose had shattered on impact.

The detainee moaned like an injured cow.

Maybe I got lucky and cracked his skull, too, Chapel thought. Maybe I got really lucky and dazed him for a second.

Chapel had never been that lucky. “Are you ready to talk?” he asked the detainee, just in case. He moved around behind the fallen maniac, his eyes scanning the floor.

“I’m ready to kill you,” the detainee said, his voice distorted by his broken nose. “I’m ready to tear you a new asshole, you little—”

“Yeah. I kind of thought you’d say that,” Chapel said. He found his pistol on the floor. He picked it up, took careful aim, and put two bullets in the back of the lunatic’s head.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:19

Chapel’s legs felt like they were made of Jell-O. He really wanted to sit down.

He wanted to close his eyes and go to sleep.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “I think I might have a concussion.”

He was suddenly on the floor, looking up at the dark ceiling. He couldn’t remember how he got there. His head was ringing like a bell. The detainee had smacked him in the head with the rebar, he remembered. He’d taken a blow to the head.

That didn’t fill him with confidence.

“Chapel!” Angel shouted in his ear. “Chapel! You have to stay awake, honey. You have to! If you go to sleep now, you won’t wake up!”

“I’ll be okay,” Chapel told her, not because he believed it but because he wanted to reassure her. “Don’t you worry about me, sexy ghost voice.”

“You’re losing it,” Angel said. “Your pulse is all over the place, and your blood pressure is falling. I’m calling the paramedics.”

“No!” Chapel said. “This is a secret mission. No para… no doctors, no hospitals. They’ll have too many questions. I just need to walk this off.”

“Captain Chapel?” someone asked. Someone new.

This voice wasn’t in his head.

“Captain Chapel? Can you open your eyes?” A soft hand was on his cheek. Fingers pried his eyes open. He looked up into a beautiful face, the face of… well, not an angel. He didn’t know what Angel looked like. He knew this face, though. It was surrounded by red hair.

Voices were clamoring near his ear, but he could barely hear them. The earpiece had fallen partially out of his ear, he realized. He tried to reach to put it back in, but his arms felt like they were made of lead.

“Captain Chapel, you need medical attention,” Julia Taggart said.

“You should see the other guy.”

“The man who killed my mother? He’s dead. Definitely dead. Not much left of his cerebrum, it looks like. I suppose it’s funny to say this, but thank you. I appreciate it.”

“Sure thing,” Chapel told her. “Will you help me up? I’m having trouble standing, and I need to get out of here.”

“You need to go to a hospital.”

“I can’t do that. Just get me into a cab or something.”

He saw Julia bite her lip. “Maybe I can do better than that,” she said.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:31

Arash Borhan did not need this shit. No, not at all.

Earlier that day he’d gotten a call from some sexy-sounding woman who said his cab was needed for a special fare, and that he stood to make a lot of money if he went to some address in Brighton Beach. Normally he didn’t work that far south in Brooklyn, but the money the woman promised him would more than make it worth his while. So he drove down there, he picked up a man and a woman who were arguing on the sidewalk, and he drove them to Bushwick. That had all been fine. The man got out to go into a house there, while the woman stayed in his cab and the meter kept ticking away.

Then everything had gone to hell.

Some crazy mother had come rushing out of the house and jumped in the back of the cab, and when Arash demanded to know what was going on, the maniac had nearly ripped his ear off. The maniac told him to drive, to break so many laws. And then this other maniac, the man who was his original fare, had driven him right off the road.

Now his cab was wedged into a wooden construction barrier. The paint was scratched to hell, and he was missing a wing mirror. He would be lucky if the front fender could be saved at all.

He touched the side of his head. He was still bleeding, too.

“Motherf—” Arash shook his head. He would not say the swear out loud. He was a decent man. But this was just too much.

Arash had come to America in 1979 to escape the Iranian Revolution. He’d thought he was getting away from violence, that he could be safe in the States. He’d worked hard to get this cab, to become a naturalized citizen. He loved America and everything it stood for.

Except — everybody here had guns. And he had seen more violence in New York City than he’d ever witnessed in Tehran. Twice he had been robbed at gunpoint, just because he was a cabdriver and had some cash on him. This was the first time he’d actually been hurt. He found he did not like it at all.

As he stood there, wondering what to do, his fare and the woman came out of the closed-down store. He was leaning on her shoulder like he could barely walk under his own power. What was the meaning of this? “Hey! Hey, you!” he called to them. “Who’s going to pay for this mess?”

The woman stared at him like he was crazy. Like he was crazy. “This man is hurt,” she said. “He needs help.” They were walking away.

“What about me? I’m wounded, too!” Arash shouted after them. They didn’t so much as turn around and apologize. He would have chased them if he didn’t need to stay with the cab.

He fumed for a while. He nearly swore again. But Arash Borhan had nothing if he did not have a sense of practicality. He got in his cab and worked hard at getting it free of the wooden barrier. Metal shrieked and groaned, and the front fender did, in fact, fall off. But eventually he got loose from the pile of broken wood. It felt like the cab could still drive. Well, maybe this was not the end of the world, after all.

Then someone rapped on the glass of his window, and he sighed. In New York, people saw nothing. They wouldn’t care if his cab was half destroyed — they still had places to be. They would want to know if he was available for a new fare. Crazy! They were all crazy. He rolled down the window, prepared to tell some angry businessman that no, he was off duty, that he needed to get back to the garage for repairs.

The nose of a pistol came through the window and tapped Arash on his cheek.

Wonderful. This day was going to get even worse.

“I have no money,” he said. “No money!”

The man holding the pistol seemed to think this was very funny, because he laughed heartily at the thought.

Arash looked at him in horror. This laughing man was wearing a black suit and had the crew cut of a soldier. But much, much worse was the dead look in his eyes. Arash knew that look. It was the look he’d fled when he left Iran. The look of a man who had no conscience. No soul.

“You’ve got a new fare,” the man said, laughing so hard he could barely get the words out. “We’re going to Bed-Stuy.”

“Whatever you say,” Arash told him, because you did not argue with such a man. Not when he was holding a gun.

Still it got worse, though.

It could always get worse.

“Oh no, no,” Arash moaned as the laughing man loaded a dead body into the trunk of the cab. Arash recognized the dead man — it was the maniac who attacked him and forced him to drive his cab here. “No, please, no,” he said, when the laughing man told him to get in the cab and drive.

It was a long way to Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of the worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The laughing man kept laughing the whole way. When they reached the address he indicated, Arash saw it was an abandoned warehouse. The roof was falling away, and the interior was full of rat nests and the cardboard shelters of the homeless. This was not a good place, not at all. Arash maneuvered his cab around piles of rubble to reach the very dark heart of it.

“Good. Now get out and open the trunk,” the laughing man said, giggling softly to himself.

“God protect me,” Arash whispered. But he did as he was told. What choice did he have? He looked down at the body curled up in the trunk. Much of the maniac’s head was missing. What did this all mean? What could it mean?

The laughing man pointed at a red plastic gas can in the trunk. The dead man’s hand was resting on it.

“Take that,” the laughing man said, “and pour it all over him. Don’t be stingy.”

There was no doubt in Arash’s mind what was going to happen here. The laughing man was going to make him burn up his own cab. His livelihood, the only possession Arash had that was worth anything. This was terrible.

There was nothing he could do. He opened the gas can and poured it all over the dead man. The fumes of gasoline stung his eyes, but that was not the reason he started crying.

“You’re hurt,” the laughing man said, tapping Arash’s bloody temple with his gun. This he seemed to find only slightly amusing. “This guy? He hurt you?”

Arash nodded. He could find no words.

“Well, that’s a damned shame,” the laughing man said.

Arash looked at him through a haze of tears. Was he going to find sympathy here, in the unlikeliest of places? Arash knew such men as this — soulless men — could act unpredictably at times. They could even be charitable if it suited their whim.

“Get in there with him,” the laughing man said.

“I… what?” Arash asked.

“Get in the trunk with him. Come on. I’m in a hurry.”

“This I will not do,” Arash said.

“Yeah, you will. One way or another.”

Arash was a practical man. He knew what danger he was in, and that he had no options left. He tried to run.

The laughing man shot him in both legs. Then he dragged him back to the cab and threw him in the trunk. The blood and gasoline from the dead man soaked into his clothes, filling his nose and mouth and making it hard to breathe. The pain in his legs was unbearable, and his brain contained nothing but clouds of pure agony.

He could barely see, could feel nothing but pain. But still he heard the laughter.

“I can put a round in your head, so you don’t have to burn alive,” the man said, chuckling to himself. “You want that?”

Arash Borhan was a practical man.

He squeezed his eyes shut and nodded in agreement.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+10:52

“Hop up there,” Julia said.

Chapel looked around the room. It was a small examination room in the back of Julia’s veterinary office. A stainless steel table dominated the space, which was otherwise filled with cabinets full of medical supplies, jars of cotton swabs, dispensers for hand sanitizer, and, of course, pictures of dogs. A flatscreen monitor on one wall displayed a rotating screen saver of pictures of Portuguese water dogs.

“Do you have dogs yourself?” Chapel asked.

“I used to. Now my ex has them,” she told him. “Go on. Up there,” she said, pointing again at the stainless steel table. “It’s clean.”

“You’re divorced?” he asked, still not complying.

“No. Ex-boyfriend. We were together since grad school. It got to the point where I wanted to get married and have children. He disagreed. Now he lives on a farm upstate. With my dogs.” She looked at the flatscreen, which was showing at that moment a dog running across a field, its ears flapping behind it. She rubbed the corner of the screen as if she were petting the animal. “They’re better off up there, of course. They need space to run, and the city air is no good for dogs. Are you going to get on that table, or should I consider this a symptom of mental deterioration?”

Chapel smiled. He did what he was told. The table had clearly been meant to hold the weight of a big dog at most. It creaked under him but it held.

“There are two kinds of head injuries,” she told him, rummaging in a drawer to take out a small flashlight. “The kind that go away on their own, usually pretty quickly, and the kind that kill you. It can be hard to tell them apart. Open your eyes very wide and look straight ahead, not at me.”

Chapel complied. She shone the light into his eyes, dazzling him. He tried to remember the ride over here. He recalled her dragging him out of the gutted department store where he’d left the body of the detainee. He remembered being put in a cab, and then not much more until they’d reached this place. There had been a receptionist out front, but the office was mostly deserted — Julia had canceled all her appointments for the day after finding her mother’s body.

“I’m missing some time,” he said. “I don’t remember the ride here, really.”

“Blackouts like that are common with concussion. Do you feel nauseated?”

“No,” he told her. She brought out a tongue depressor and he obediently opened his mouth.

“Good. Now swallow for me.”

He gulped down some air. “I appreciate this, Doc,” he said.

She shrugged. “Just call me Julia. You may have saved my life, so that seems fair.” She smiled. Her face was only inches away from his. She put a thumb on his left eyelid and pushed it back, staring deep into his eye. When she let go, he had to blink.

She was very close. He couldn’t help but smell her faint but sweet perfume and feel the warmth of her body so near his.

“When that maniac jumped in the cab and told the cabbie to drive, I thought for sure he was going to kill me.”

Chapel pulled himself back from what he’d been thinking. He put out of his mind how good she smelled, and instead he studied the woman’s face. She was a lot tougher than most civilians he’d met, mentally and emotionally. She could handle this. “That was his plan. He killed your mother to make her… I don’t know. Feel guilt for something she’d done. He thought killing you might make her see the light. The fact that she was already dead, that his plan made no sense, doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.”

Julia nodded. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her stained lab coat. “I gathered as much from what he said to me.”

“He spoke to you? In the cab? This could be important,” Chapel insisted.

“Don’t get too excited. He just kept saying he was going to make my mom pay. That she owed him, and that I was how he was going to fulfill that debt. That was all he said — well, that and he kept threatening the cabbie if he didn’t go faster. At one point he reached through the opening in the partition and grabbed the cabbie’s ear. He nearly tore it off. I’m going to assume — because I know you won’t tell me even if I’m wrong — that he was on drugs of some kind. Speed, or perhaps PCP. That’s the only explanation I have for why he was so strong.”

Chapel knew there was a question hidden in that statement. She was asking if he knew of another reason. He didn’t, so it was easy to stay quiet. Even if he’d had an explanation, he couldn’t have given it to her. I am a silent warrior, he thought to himself, repeating the creed of the army Military Intelligence Corps.

She reached up and touched his face again, more gently this time. Her hand was very warm.

Without warning, she leaned in and kissed him. Her lips were soft and warm, and when they pressed against his, her arms went around his neck. For a moment he couldn’t think straight.

Then she let go of him and walked across the room to put her flashlight back in its drawer, as if nothing at all had happened.

“Not that I’m complaining,” he said, “but what was that for?”

“Because you saved my life, and because, I guess, you avenged my mother,” she said, her back turned toward him. “And maybe because I wanted to. Don’t worry. I wasn’t trying to start something. When you walk out my door, you’re never coming back. I know that.”

“Listen, Julia, I—”

“We need to make sure your brain wasn’t damaged,” she said, clearly intending to change the subject.

“I feel a little light-headed… now,” he said, smiling at her.

But she was done with whatever had passed between them. She was back to her professional mien. She folded her arms and leaned against the counter behind her. “Your pupils are normal, which is very encouraging, but I’m going to ask you some questions. What city are you in?”

Chapel frowned. Seriously? She was just going to kiss him and then immediately pretend like nothing had happened? He shrugged in confusion. “New York,” he told her.

“Good. What’s today’s date?”

“April twelfth.”

She nodded. “Very good. What agency do you work for?”

Chapel reared back. He shook his head.

Julia sighed and folded her arms. “I’ve met enough spies in my life to recognize the type, Captain Chapel. I know you’re in the intelligence community. You’re tracking down assassins sent to kill former CIA employees. This has something to do with work my parents did twenty years ago, and—”

“Stop,” he said. “You don’t want to continue in that line.”

“Oh?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Is that a threat?”

“It’s an apology, though I guess I didn’t phrase it very well. I’d love to tell you what’s going on,” Chapel said. “Really. I think you deserve to know. The problem is, I don’t really understand it myself. I was given a very minimal briefing and sent after these men. Anything I do know about them, I can’t share with you.”

She stared at him for a while, perhaps giving him a chance to relent. If so, he didn’t take it. Eventually she just nodded and turned away.

And that… was that. Whatever had happened, whatever had made her kiss him — whatever might have happened was over. She was done with him.

He had a strong urge to run away. Like he’d done something wrong. There was one thing he had to ask her, though.

“I blacked out on the way here,” he said. “Sometimes people say things when they’re blacked out that they don’t mean to. Did I say anything that I wouldn’t remember?” he asked.

“You kept calling out for somebody named Angel,” she told him. “And you said one word a couple of times. ‘Chimera.’ ”

Chapel nodded. “You don’t know what that word means, do you?”

“I do have a postgraduate degree, Captain,” she said, a nasty sneer in her voice. “A chimera is a creature with the body of a lion, a goat head on its back, and—”

“—the tail of a snake, sure,” Chapel said. Enough. He should just go. There was another target in New York City he had to check on, and three more detainees out there he had to take down. There was no time for tiptoeing around this woman’s feelings. “Thanks, anyway.”

“Except,” she said, “to a geneticist it means something completely different.”

“A geneticist? Like your mother?”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+11:03

“In genetics a chimera is an organism that has more than one kind of DNA in the same body,” Julia told him.

“What, like a mutant?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No, a mutant is an organism that has the normal DNA for its species except a couple of genes are randomly changed from what they should be. A chimera is much weirder. Part of its normal DNA has been replaced by DNA from another source. Sometimes that happens naturally, when two eggs are fertilized in the same womb but one absorbs the other. That’s one way you get people with two different color eyes, for instance — that’s called chimerism. It can mean something else, though, as well. It can refer to transgenic organisms.”

“Transgenic?”

“A transgenic creature is a kind of chimera where the two or more different kinds of DNA come from completely different species. I don’t mean mules or ligers or that sort of thing, where you have two animals so closely related they can interbreed. Transgenics is when a human being intentionally adds unrelated DNA to an organism’s genetic makeup. Say, adding firefly genes to a tobacco plant so it glows in the dark. Or growing a human ear on the back of a mouse.”

Chapel’s head reeled, and not from the concussion. “They can do that? And it doesn’t just kill the mouse?”

“Not if it’s done right. Only a small number of genes are switched, normally. And yes, we can do that now. It has been done, successfully.”

“But why?” Chapel demanded. “Is this some kind of sick mad scientist thing? Like, crossing a monkey and a shark to get a monkey with big teeth?”

“It’s done for slightly more noble reasons, usually. Like with spidergoats.”

A vision of eight-legged goats spinning webs across mountaintops filled Chapel’s head. “Now I know you’re full of it.”

“No, really. It’s been done. They introduced some spider DNA to a goat ovum, and the result was a spidergoat. It looks just like a normal goat, but its milk contains threads of spider silk. Spider silk is much, much stronger than steel, but because of the size of spiders it’s tough to harvest. Spidergoat silk is a lot bigger and longer than the stuff a spider makes. They use spidergoat silk to make body armor for soldiers. At least, they’re starting to.”

Chapel had good reason to appreciate body armor. Still— “That sounds ludicrous.”

“It’s a field that’s just starting out. But the implications are incredible. They want to breed a kind of tomato chimera that contains vaccines. You could inoculate children by feeding them their vegetables. They want to make chimera animals, pigs probably, that have human organs which can be harvested for transplants.”

“I am starting to feel a little nauseated, now,” Chapel said. “This is messed-up stuff.”

“I agree,” Julia said. “But I’m willing to accept that if it means saving lives.”

“Okay, okay, enough with the ethics debate.”

“Why are you asking me about this?” Julia asked.

He shot a glance at her eyes and saw she was desperate to know. And for once he could answer — she would find out soon enough anyway, from the police. “Your mother wrote the word ‘chimera’ on her wall. Probably while she was being killed.”

“Oh my God,” Julia gasped.

He was sorry to have to shock her like this. But it was important. “Do you know what she was trying to tell us?”

“I have no idea,” Julia said. “She never used the word ‘chimera’ in my presence, not that I remember. But then, she never talked about her work to me. Ever.”

Chapel rubbed at his eyes with the balls of his thumbs. Chimera had to mean something. Helen Bryant had died to get the word to him. She must have thought he — or someone — would understand. But what could it possibly mean?

In his head he saw black eyes. The eyes of the detainee when blinding light shone on them. They had turned black because an extra eyelid had slid across the maniac’s eyes.

Even at the time, Chapel had thought they looked like the eyes of a snake or something. Lots of animals had an extra eyelid, didn’t they? He seemed to remember that cats and birds did, too.

No. What he was thinking was crazy. But—

“If you could do that to a goat. If you could have a pig that grows human organs — you could — you could have a human being with animal organs as well, you could make them stronger, tougher, even—”

He couldn’t finish the thought out loud.

But he had another one. “Julia. What kind of research does your father do?”

She bit her lip. “He’s one of the world’s leading experts on gene therapy,” she said. “He works with human DNA.”

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+11:16

It was impossible. It simply couldn’t be.

And yet Chapel had seen the evidence with his own eyes. The detainee in the gutted department store had been far stronger and faster than any human being had a right to be. And he’d had an extra eyelid, one that shut down automatically when he was exposed to bright light, protecting his eyes. Making them as black as eight balls in his head. He had seemed inhuman. A monster. Chapel had refused to accept that, and so he had thought of the detainee as human, completely human. He’d been of the same opinion as Julia — that the guy had to have been full of drugs to make him so inhumanly strong and resistant to damage.

But if in fact the detainee had been a chimera — a combination of human and animal genes — it made a kind of crazy sense. Chapel had seen a documentary on chimpanzees, once, that had startled him. He’d always thought chimps were just smart apes that could be trained to do circus tricks or maybe learn some basic sign language. Instead, the chimps in that documentary — wild chimps — had been incredibly strong and very dangerous. They were capable of tearing a human being to pieces, and if their territory or their dominance was threatened, they had no qualms at all about doing it.

If the detainee had possessed chimpanzee genes, or genes from some other species stronger than a human being—

“You’re tough, for a human,” the detainee had said to him. Because the maniac wasn’t human. At least not entirely.

His phone was buzzing in his pocket. He pulled it out and saw the call was coming from the number (000) 000-0000. That had to mean it was an encrypted call, from Angel most likely. He hit the end button, and the phone stopped vibrating.

Before he could even put it in his pocket, it started ringing out loud. He checked and saw that he’d turned the ringer off, but apparently Angel could override that.

Probably she was just checking in to make sure he was all right. It might be something else, though. Something important.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Julia said, staring at him and his phone. “Either take that call or yank the battery out of that thing.”

Before he could do either, the flatscreen on the wall flickered and the image there changed. It showed a line drawing of a human head with one ear highlighted. The screen animated and showed an earpiece like the one in Chapel’s pocket being inserted.

Not exactly subtle.

“What the hell?” Julia asked.

“That screen must be attached to the Internet,” Chapel said to her while he fished in his pocket. He took out the earpiece and stared at it. “I have a friend who’s… good with computers.”

He put the earpiece in and was not surprised to hear Angel calling his name. “Are you alone, sugar?” she asked.

“Not quite. I—”

He turned to look at Julia, but she was already storming out of the examining room. “I’ve got work to do,” she said, and slammed the door behind her.

“I’m alone now,” he told Angel.

“That’s good. I like having you all to myself,” she told him. “Tell me you’re okay. Your vitals look all right, though you seem tired.”

“It’s been a long day. Wait a minute — you can tell I’m tired from the earpiece?”

“It’s got a few sneaky features. It can collect biometric data. Among other things.”

“And those other things—”

“Sweetie, if you ask me about classified things, you know I have to lie. And I don’t ever want to lie to you.”

“Fair enough. All right, Angel. What’s so important you needed to cut in on me like that?”

“I’m going to put Director Hollingshead on the line, and he can tell you all about it. Director?”

“I’m here,” the admiral said. “Chapel — it sounded like you took a pretty good blow to the head, there. Are you recovered?”

“I was dazed for a minute,” Chapel told him. “But I’ll be all right. Dr. Taggart took care of me. She also told me a few interesting things about chim—”

“Ahem,” Hollingshead broke in. “No need to tell an old dog anything about digging up bones, son.”

“Ah.” So Hollingshead already knew about chimeras. And what Chapel was facing. It would have been nice to have some warning, but Chapel supposed some things were meant to stay secret. Apparently so secret it couldn’t even be discussed over an encrypted line. “Okay, then, sir, I’ll tell you all about it some other time. Maybe in person.”

“You’re on the trail, son, and that’s all that matters. What’s the status of your, ah, investigation? What’s your next step?”

“There’s one more name on the list with a New York address. She shouldn’t be in danger now — the other three are probably hundreds of miles from here by now. Still, it won’t hurt to pay her a visit and make sure she’s safe. After that, it’s either Chicago or Atlanta. Any thought on where I should head first?”

“Angel’s looking for clues. Maybe she’ll turn something up. I know you’ll make the right choice, Captain Chapel. I have utter faith in you. Director Banks on the other hand…”

“Oh?”

“You’ve got some competition, let us say. Oh, nothing you can’t handle — and no one you haven’t met before. Someone you’ve seen around the Pentagon, perhaps.”

Laughing Boy. Hollingshead must be talking about Laughing Boy. “He’s been activated? Maybe that’s good news — two of us running down leads can cover a lot more ground than one,” Chapel pointed out.

“Unfortunately he’s not as proactive as you’ve shown yourself to be,” Hollingshead said, sounding contrite. “In fact, I fear he’s simply bird-dogging you. After your recent success, I sent a team to pick up what was left of the… fellow in question. Your new shadow got there first. What he did with the remains is currently unknown.”

Chapel thought about that. If Laughing Boy had taken the body of the dead detainee, it could simply mean the CIA didn’t want the local authorities claiming the remains of a man who was carrying a dangerous virus. But why not let Hollingshead’s people take care of it? Banks must have had his reasons. Maybe there was something about the body he didn’t want anyone else to see.

Yet another mystery to add to the already enormous pile of mysteries in this operation. Chapel shrugged it off. “At least the… specimen is under wraps. Do you think I need to worry about our civilian friends?”

Hollingshead didn’t sound sure when he answered. “No one has declared war just yet. Chalk this one up to a shot across our bows, maybe. For now we’re all pulling in the same direction,” he said. “Just keep your eyes open.”

“Will do, sir.”

“All right, then. I’ll put Angel back on, and she can help you coordinate your next move.”

Chapel talked to Angel briefly, arranging to have a cab waiting when he left the veterinary clinic. Then he opened the door of the examination room and headed out to the front of the office, where Julia and her receptionist were talking quietly. Julia had a balled-up tissue in her hand, and the receptionist was rubbing her back in slow circles. Apparently Julia had finally gotten a chance to start grieving for her mother.

“I’ll be going now,” Chapel told her. “If there’s anything I can do—”

“You already have,” Julia told him.

“I might have some more questions,” he suggested. “But I’ll give you some time, first. I’m… I’m so sorry.”

She nodded. She wasn’t even looking at him anymore. “You should get a CT scan at some point. Make sure your brain wasn’t injured in that concussion.”

“If I get a chance, I will,” he told her.

“You’ll want a doctor who specializes in human patients for that.” She got up to unlock the front door. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I say I never want our paths to cross again.”

He couldn’t blame her for that. “Thanks for all your help.”

She shrugged. He started to walk out the door, but she stopped him by putting one hand on his artificial shoulder. He flinched, even if she didn’t. He’d never gotten used to people touching him there.

“Captain,” she said, “be careful. But find the rest of them, and make sure nobody else has to go through this. Grief, I mean. It sucks.”

“I’ll do my best,” he promised her.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+11:29

Back to work. The next name on the list was Christina Smollett. She was in New York City, too. Hopefully she was still alive.

A new cab was waiting for him in front of Julia’s clinic. He climbed in, and the car rolled smoothly away before he’d even had a chance to tell the driver what address he wanted.

“All taken care of,” Angel told him.

“I appreciate it.” He tapped on his knee with the fingers of his artificial hand. When he’d been talking with Julia, he’d almost forgotten the time-sensitive nature of his operation. Now that he was away from her, the ticking of the clock started to bother him again. “We’ll have to make this next visit quick. What can you tell me about Christina Smollett?”

Angel hummed a little tune while she worked. “Interesting,” she said, after a minute.

“Anything you’d like to share?” Chapel asked.

Angel laughed. “If I understood it, I’d give you some analysis. What I’m looking at is just facts. Christina Smollett has a social security number, a date of birth — August 23, 1959—and a mailing address we already knew, 462 First Avenue, New York, where you’re headed now. Beyond that? Not much. As far as I can tell she’s never filed a tax form, for one thing.”

“That’s odd for a woman in her fifties,” Chapel mused.

“Never been married, no children. No family left, either — her parents died a while back, both from natural causes and at advanced ages. No brothers or sisters. She doesn’t have a bank account. She doesn’t have any academic records past high school, which… let me check… she did graduate from, though not with particularly impressive grades. From there the list gets pretty monotonous. No driver’s license. No history of service in the armed forces. No arrests, warrants for arrest, or so much as a parking ticket. Never been fingerprinted, and I can’t find a single photograph of her taken after 1971. It’s like she hasn’t so much as touched the world in forty years.”

“Sounds like she’s been living off the grid,” Chapel said.

“And you sound like you’ve got a theory, sweetie.”

“More like a hunch,” Chapel said. “I’m betting Christina Smollett works for the CIA. Probably in the National Clandestine Service. She’s undercover, or at least off the books.”

“They certainly don’t list her on their payroll,” Angel confirmed.

“Helen Bryant and William Taggart were both CIA employees. I’m pretty sure every single name on that list is or was as well. We’re tracking down the people who worked on some operation in the eighties. Probably something the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology got up to.”

“Aren’t they the ones who make the exploding pens and cyanide-filled false teeth?” Angel asked. “The gadget shop?”

“They do more than that. They were the ones who ran MK-ULTRA, for instance. That’s exactly the shop that Drs. Bryant and Taggart would work for. And unless I’m way off, I’m willing to bet Christina Smollett worked in the directorate as well.”

“Let me do some more checking, see what I turn up,” Angel said.

As the cab rolled into Manhattan the traffic picked up a little, but it wasn’t long before they were on First Avenue. The cabdriver rapped on the partition and glanced over his shoulder. “You want the emergency room or the main entrance?” he asked.

“What? Emergency room?” Chapel said. “No, I’m going to a private residence. A house or an apartment building.”

“Oh, sorry. With that bruise on your head I figured you were checking yourself in. You sure you have the right address?”

“Definitely. 462 First Avenue,” Chapel confirmed.

“Buddy,” the cabbie told him, “maybe you should have them take a look at your head. That’s the address for Bellevue Hospital. You know — the place where they send all the crazies.”

MANHATTAN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+11:55

Chapel reached for his wallet to pay the cabdriver, but the man waved his hand to say no. “All prepaid, and I’m not going to take advantage of a guy like you,” the cabbie said, smiling broadly.

“A guy like me?” Chapel asked.

“No offense, friend, no offense meant. I have a mother in Ohio, she’s like you, okay? So I understand how hard it can be.”

Chapel started to reach up to touch his artificial arm, then stopped himself.

“When you have trouble keeping track of things, right? When maybe you have memory problems. My mom’s got the Alzheimer’s, she’s doing all right, though.”

“That’s… good,” Chapel said. “I’m glad to hear it. Thanks.”

Clearly the man thought he had brain damage or something. Humiliated and still a little confused by what he was doing there, Chapel climbed out of the cab and looked up at the façade of Bellevue Hospital, which looked like any other glass-fronted building in New York except it had the name “Bellevue” written up one side. Having only seen the hospital in movies before, he would have expected some huge brick monolith with tiny barred windows from which the occasional scream could be heard.

Maybe he should check himself in. He was definitely feeling disoriented and confused. Julia had said he was recovering nicely from his concussion, though. “Angel, do you have any thoughts about what’s going on, here?”

“Just one, sugar. I’m starting to understand why Christina Smollett is so far off the radar. She’s been a resident here since 1979. She’s a patient in the psychiatric hospital.”

Chapel frowned. “How old was she when she checked in? Wait — I can do this one in my head. She was born in 1959 so she would have been nineteen or twenty. I don’t see how she could possibly have done any work for the CIA before that. And I seriously doubt the CIA has any undercover operatives in there.”

“You still want to go in and talk to her?” Angel asked. “I can make the arrangements.”

“Yeah, I should at least see if she can give me any new leads.” Though Chapel wondered what a woman who’d been living in a psychiatric hospital for over thirty years could possibly know about genetic freaks with extra eyelids or the inner workings of secret government facilities. Still, he was here. “I won’t take long. Can you have a helicopter ready to pick me up when I’m done?”

“There’s a helipad on the roof. It’s not open to civil aviation, but I can get you in and out before anyone knows you’re there. In the meantime… okay, you’re good. You’ve been added to the list of approved visitors for Christina Smollett. I’ve listed you as being in law enforcement.”

“Thanks,” Chapel said, and he hurried for the entrance. There was a metal detector inside and a couple of bored-looking uniformed security guards, one of whom was reading a newspaper. The other wrote down Chapel’s name on a clipboard and then waved him through to a bank of elevators.

On the way up Angel gave him directions to the correct ward. The Psychiatric Hospital was behind a series of locked doors that security guards had to open for him. The place was clean and brightly lit, but it looked old and tired all the same, the walls painted in drab institutional colors and the endless doors all the same. Following Angel’s directions, he finally reached a nurses’ station where a man in purple surgical scrubs waved him over. “You’re here to see Kristin, right?”

“Christina Smollett,” Chapel said, glad as always that he had Angel to smooth the way for him. Without her it might have taken hours to get this far.

“Christina? We have a Kristin Smollett,” the nurse told him. “Huh. Ruth? Ruth!”

An older woman in a starched white uniform came to the window of the nurses’ station and peered out with sharp eyes.

“Ruth,” the male nurse asked, “Christina Smollett. Is that the same as Kristin?”

“Yes,” Ruth told him, handing him a manila folder. “She’ll be in her room this time of day. Dinner’s in an hour; be sure to be done with your visit by then, sir.”

“It shouldn’t take that long,” Chapel assured her.

The male nurse led him down a long corridor. He leafed through the folder while they walked. It looked like it was Christina Smollett’s medical record.

“Funny,” the nurse said. “I’ve been working here six years. I always thought her name was Kristin.”

“She never corrected you?” Chapel asked.

“You haven’t visited her before, have you?” the nurse inquired. He caught Chapel trying to read over his shoulder, and he snapped the manila folder closed.

“No,” Chapel admitted.

The nurse gave him a shrewd look, but then he shrugged. “Somebody like Kristin, somebody who’s been taking antipsychotic medication for a long time, it kind of… eats away at them. It keeps them from acting out, and it makes the disturbed thoughts go away. But it doesn’t leave a whole lot else in there.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Looking at her medication history, it’s like reading a book on the history of nasty pills. The stuff we give here now is okay, it’s all new wonder drugs. But back in the eighties she was mainlining Thorazine, and that stuff turns you into a zombie. I’d be pretty surprised if she can even remember her name.”

MANHATTAN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+12:07

The nurse unlocked a door and gestured for Chapel to head into the room beyond. “I’ll be out here when you’re done, so I can check you back out.”

Chapel thanked him and stepped inside.

The room was small but not cramped, pleasant without exactly being comfortable. There was a bed and a dresser inside, and one window that looked like it couldn’t be opened. Christina Smollett was sitting on the bed. She might have been fifty or seventy. Her hair was long and gray, and it looked like it had been carefully brushed on one side and left tangled and knotted on the other. She wore a sweat suit, and she was staring at the one piece of ornamentation in the entire room, a picture taped to the wall. The picture was of Tom Selleck, a twinkle in his eye and a cocky grin half hidden behind his famous mustache.

She didn’t move at all when Chapel came in. She didn’t seem aware of his presence. He walked over in front of her, not wanting to block her view of the picture but needing to get her attention. “Ms. Smollett?” he asked. “Christina?”

She blinked when he said her name, but didn’t move her head. Her lips were curled in a simple smile. “He always looks so nice, in his shows,” she said. “Like he would be friendly if you met him.”

She sighed happily.

Chapel took a deep breath. “Christina, my name is Chapel. I need to ask you some questions. I need to know if you’ve ever met a Dr. Helen Bryant or a Dr. William Taggart.”

She stuck out her lower lip and shook her head in the negative. “I know lots of doctors, though, and they don’t always tell me their names. I’ve known a whole bunch of doctors. Doctors like me. They say I’m a perfect patient.”

“I’m sure you are,” Chapel told her. “How about Franklin Hayes? He’s a judge. Have you ever met a judge?”

“Oh, no. There would have been a judge at my commitment hearing. But they didn’t take me to that. Mommy said they didn’t want to upset me. I used to be very easy to upset.” She looked back at the picture on the wall. “Do you think he would be nice, if you met him in person?”

“Tom Selleck?”

“Is that his name? I… I have trouble with names sometimes. I’m sorry. I’m being a terrible hostess. Can I offer you a cup of coffee? If you’re hungry, I could probably make something.”

Chapel glanced around the room by reflex, but of course there was no coffeemaker in the room, much less any kind of kitchen facilities.

This was going nowhere. Christina Smollett’s mind was mush, to be callous about it. She wasn’t there. He took the kill list from his pocket and ran down the rest of the names, but she just shook her head at the sound of each one.

What on earth did this woman have to do with chimeras and kill lists and CIA secret projects? He couldn’t see any connection at all. More to the point, why would the detainees — the chimeras, as he was coming to think of them — want to kill this woman in the first place? She was no danger to them or anybody else.

If she had ever known a secret, a secret that could damage national security, it was long gone.

“You’re very handsome,” she said, and looked down at her hands. A blush spread across her cheeks. “I don’t see a lot of white people in here. Most of the nurses are Spanish or Negroes.”

“… okay,” Chapel said. “Christina, it was nice meeting you, but I think I should go now. Be… well.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say, and for once Angel was no help. “Be safe.”

“You look nice. Nice and handsome. That’s a very good combination in a gentleman caller. I don’t get as many gentleman callers as I did when I was younger,” she told him. “Will you come again, Mr. Selleck? Please tell me you’ll come and see me again sometime. I’d like that very much.”

Chapel stood up and walked over to the door. “Perhaps, Christina. I’m, uh, very busy with work right now, and—”

“You know what they say, a young lady with no social connections is at high risk of recidivism.” It sounded like something a doctor might have said to her once. “I could backslide. I could lose all the wonderful progress I’ve made if I don’t get to see people sometimes. If I don’t get to talk to people, get social stimulation, if I—”

She stopped talking then.

Her face went white and her eyes very wide.

Chapel looked down and saw she had grabbed his arm. His left arm. Her fingers squeezed at the silicone that was wrapped around the motors there.

She grabbed the fingers of his artificial hand and brought them up to her face to look at them more closely. And then she started to scream. Piercing, hysterical cries of utter terror.

“You’re not real! You’re a robot! You’re a robot!”

Chapel pressed up against the wall to one side of the door as Christina ran around the room, grabbing the blankets off her bed, tearing the picture of Tom Selleck off the wall. She held them close to her like armor, like they could protect her.

“He’s a robot,” she shrieked as the nurse came into the room. “He’s not real! Don’t let him touch me. Don’t let him put that thing inside me! Don’t let him touch me!”

The nurse stared at Chapel as he took Christina’s shoulders and tried to calm her down.

“I have an artificial arm,” Chapel tried to explain. “A prosthetic. She grabbed it and — and—”

“Just go. Get out — Ruth can check you out,” the nurse said. He turned to Christina and tried to shush her, his hands stroking her arms.

“You’re not real! You’re a machine man!” she shouted.

Chapel hurried out into the hall and down toward the nurses’ station, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Christina wasn’t running after him. At the station the nurse named Ruth leaned out through her window. She looked at him, then down the hall toward Christina’s room.

“I, uh,” Chapel said. “I seem to have—”

“This is a psychiatric hospital, sir,” Ruth told him. “It happens. It’s best if you just leave now.”

“Not a problem,” Chapel said. He signed the form she put in front of him and headed for the locked doors that led off the ward.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+12:16

Julia’s receptionist was taking advantage of this very weird day to catch up on her filing. Portia Artiz loved her job, but she didn’t know what to make of any of the things that had happened so far. The morning had been perfectly normal, a parade of dogs and cats coming through the front room, phone calls and forms to be filled out. Then Julia had said she was going to her mom’s place for lunch and everything had just gone weird.

First Julia had called to tell Portia to cancel all her appointments, but she wouldn’t explain why. She’d been crying on the phone and Portia begged her to say why, but Julia had a way of not letting anybody in. Portia blamed that on her mother, who everybody said was such a saint but the couple of times Portia met her she’d been a real frosty bitch.

Oh, man, she shouldn’t even think things like that. Julia’s mom was dead, attacked by some weirdo looking for drugs. The very thought made Portia’s skin crawl. They got junkies in the office all the time, looking to score from the supply of animal tranquilizers they kept in a closet at the back of the office. Most of them were scrawny little guys, no threat to anybody but themselves. They were more annoying than dangerous — they came up with the craziest stories about why their pets needed the drugs really bad, right away, and they just didn’t give up. Half of Portia’s job was getting rid of them, threatening to call the police if they didn’t leave. What if one of those guys was as jacked up and dangerous as the one who got Julia’s mom, though? Portia shivered as she bent over the filing cabinet.

Someone rapped on the glass door behind her, and Portia jumped right into the air. She gave out a little squeak and turned to see a man standing at the door, a big guy with a smile on his face. Probably another junkie, she thought, until he held up a police badge and pressed it against the glass.

He started laughing and Portia realized she must look hilarious, jumping straight in the air like that. He chuckled wildly and she couldn’t help herself, she had to join in. She giggled behind her hand and shook her head as she opened the door. “You scared me half to death,” she said, still laughing. “What can I do for you? If this is about that guy who came back here earlier, the one with the concussion—” she started.

“Nope,” the man said, and then he grabbed her by the throat and squeezed, hard. Portia’s vision started to dim as she struggled for breath. “Not him. I’m here for your boss.”

MANHATTAN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+12:17

While Chapel waited on the roof of Bellevue for his helicopter he spoke to Angel, trying to figure out why someone like Christina Smollett would be a target for the chimeras.

“She’s definitely not CIA,” Angel said.

“Definitely. But then why is she on the list?” He crumpled the list in his hand. “Maybe this is all a snipe hunt. Maybe the list is meant to send me down the wrong path. Maybe I’m wasting my time chasing phantoms just so the CIA can have a good laugh at my expense, and—”

“No. The list is real. The names are all there for a reason,” Angel said, and any trace of flirtation or sultriness was gone from her voice. “Every one of those people is marked for death, including Christina Smollett.”

Chapel looked up at the sky as if he would see Angel floating there.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

“You know things you aren’t telling me,” he said.

“Now, sugar,” she said, her voice softening again. “You already knew that. Don’t be silly, there are all kinds of secrets that I can’t—”

“In fact, you knew all about Christina Smollett before I came here on this fool’s errand,” he said, very carefully.

“How could I know that?”

“Because you called here, back when I asked you to let the targets know they were in danger. You knew she was a patient in Bellevue, you must have — because you talked to somebody here. Her doctors, the security guards — somebody.”

“I… spoke to them. Yes.”

“You didn’t mention that before I got here. You let it be a little surprise for me. We’re not exactly on the same team, are we, Angel?” he asked. “I’m trying to save lives here. I’m trying to stop a bunch of killers. And you’re not on board for that. Not fully. You have another agenda you’re working here, and it’s not about keeping these people alive.”

He waited for her reply. For her to try to smooth things over, to explain things away. But she didn’t say anything.

Eventually the helicopter came to pick him up.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+12:22

Seen from the roof of Bellevue the sky over New York City was a deep blue-black. Up this high Chapel could even see a few stars, though most of them were lost in the haze of light that seemed to rise from the city like mist. On the western horizon a last streak of pink marked where the sun had gone down.

Out there, Chapel thought, out past that sunset there are three more of the bastards already moving toward their targets. Implacable killers moving fast, like sharks that had caught the scent of blood. And he had just thrown away the best weapon he had to find and fight them.

“Angel,” he said, “please come in. Angel?”

There was no response.

“Angel,” he said, “I’m sorry if I was rude.”

She didn’t reply.

“Sir?” the pilot asked, leaning across the crew seats of the chopper and shouting over the noise of the engine. “We need to get airborne.”

Chapel nodded and climbed into his seat. A helmet waited for him there — he picked it up and started to pull it on when he realized he would have to take the hands-free unit out of his ear for it to fit.

His main connection to Angel. Well, she could reach him through the helicopter’s radio if she felt like talking. He put the hands-free unit in his pocket and pulled the helmet on. Adjusting the microphone, he asked the pilot, “What are your orders?”

“Sir, I’m to take you to Newark Airport; that’s just the other side of the Hudson River. There you will find a civilian jet waiting for you to take you wherever you want to go. I’m supposed to ask you where that is, sir. They need to file a flight plan before you arrive or you won’t be able to take off.”

Where indeed? The next names on the list, in geographical order, were in Atlanta and Chicago. He had to pick one and hope that he wasn’t haring off after another distraction. If he chose the wrong one, if he wasted time on another red herring, he could be sentencing an innocent person to death. He pulled the crumpled list from his pocket.

He tapped his artificial fingers on his knee. The target in Chicago was named Eleanor Pechowski; the one in Atlanta was a Jeremy Funt.

Angel might have been able to help him. She might have told him which of them was a higher-value target for the chimeras. But Angel wasn’t talking to him.

He remembered something he’d heard Teddy Roosevelt had said. In a crisis, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The second best was the wrong thing. The worst thing you could do was nothing.

He had to make a decision. He had to just pick one.

“Atlanta,” he told the pilot. “I’m going to Atlanta next.”

So he could start this whole crazy chase over from scratch.

“Might as well settle in, sir. This’ll take a little while,” the pilot told him.

Chapel nodded and looked out his window. They were already lifting off the hospital roof. The helicopter made a wide arc around a skyscraper and headed west, toward the sunset. At least he was making some progress.

It had been a long day and he felt like closing his eyes, maybe even getting a little sleep. The very first thing they taught him in the army was how to sleep wherever he might be, whenever he got the chance. He closed his eyes and tried to calm down his racing mind. Tried not to think about dead doctors and monsters that were part human and part something else.

Before he could nod off, though, he felt his phone jump in his pocket. He let it vibrate for a second, wondering who could be calling him. Maybe it was Angel, he thought. Or Hollingshead calling him to bitch him out for the way he’d treated Angel.

It was neither of them. The phone listed the number as having a 718 area code. He vaguely remembered that was the code for Brooklyn.

He only knew one person in Brooklyn. “Julia?” he said, answering the call. “Did you think of something that I needed to—”

“Chapel!” Julia said. She was shouting, but he could barely hear her over the noise of the helicopter. Only a few words got through. “Chapel, you — to come — man here — police — says he’s police — don’t know who else to — think he’s — kill me!”

The phone beeped three times and the words CALL FAILED appeared on the screen. Chapel wasn’t used to this phone — it worked differently from his old BlackBerry — but he managed to call up the recent call menu and tried to call her back. The phone beeped three times, telling him it couldn’t make the connection. He tried again.

Three beeps.

Chapel could only think one thing. A second chimera was in New York — and it had decided to pick up where the first one left off. It was going to kill Julia.

“Change of plans,” he told the pilot. “Take us to Brooklyn — as fast as you can!”

The pilot shook his head and looked over at Chapel. “Sir, that’s not allowed. I’ve already put in my own flight plan, and the local authorities are very strict about civilian aircraft deviating from course over Manhattan.”

“A woman’s going to die if you don’t turn around right now,” Chapel told the man. When the pilot didn’t respond instantly, Chapel grabbed the chin strap of his helmet and dragged his head to the side to make eye contact. “Turn around,” he said.

The pilot was military. He knew what a direct order sounded like.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+12:31

The pilot set them down on the ball field of a public park not too far from Julia’s clinic. It was as close as he could get.

Chapel jumped to the ground. He took a second to get his bearings and headed for the closest exit from the park. The streets beyond were lit brightly enough, and the clinic was only two blocks away. He prayed he wasn’t too late.

He’d never forgive himself if he failed to save Julia, not after he’d already failed her mother.

When he reached the clinic, he found it shut up tight for the night. An iron shutter had been pulled down over its front door and curtains obscured its windows. He was about to hammer on the door, demanding to be let in, when he heard a sudden sharp noise come from inside. A noise like a muffled gunshot.

Or one fired from a silencer.

No. Jesus no. This chimera had a gun.

Chapel looked up and saw there were no bars on the windows of the second story of the building. There was a light fixture just above the doorway that looked sturdy enough to hold his weight. He jumped up and grabbed it with his good hand, then slowly pulled himself up until he could hook one leg around it.

As a kid in Florida Chapel had climbed plenty of trees. Then in the army he’d learned to climb walls and fences. He could do this. He got a nasty twinge from his hurt leg when he put all his weight on that foot, but he managed to launch himself upward and grab the ledge of the second-story window. Desperation gave him strength as he pulled himself up so he could stand on the ledge. It was only a few inches wide, but it was enough.

He tried the window and found it opened freely. Chapel jumped through feetfirst and landed in a dark bedroom full of minimalist furniture. Thankfully there was nobody asleep in the bed. He hurried to the room’s door and started to reach for the knob — then remembered his training and pressed his ear up against the door instead.

For a moment he heard nothing. Then a soft creak, as if someone had stepped on a loose stair riser. The chimera must have heard him come through the window and was coming upstairs to investigate.

The sound wasn’t repeated. Chapel had no idea where the chimera was in the building. One wrong move now and he was likely to get shot. He drew his weapon and held it low, down by his thigh.

Every shred of his training told him he was in a lousy situation. There was an armed madman out there beyond the door, and Chapel had no idea of his location or if he was even alone. Opening the door would expose him to enemy fire. He glanced down at the bottom of the door and saw only darkness there — there would be no lights in the hall outside. He would be running blind, running right into what could be an ambush or a trap or who knew what. Julia could already be dead, and he might be throwing away his life for nothing — worse than that, he was jeopardizing his mission by acting like this.

He reached down and turned the doorknob.

To hell with caution, he told himself. And then he shoved the door open and threw himself into the hallway beyond, keeping low and swinging his arm up to point his pistol first one way, then the other, up and down the hall.

He saw no movement, no sign of any threat. He started to move again—

— when he heard the same creaking sound as before.

Chapel froze in place and gave his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness. A little light came in through the windows of the bedroom behind him, enough to see that there were two other doors on the hall, and that to his left it ended in a stairwell leading down. The doors were all closed. He was certain the creaking had come from the stairs.

He strained his eyes to see anything. A silhouette. A shadow. Just a few steps from the top of the stairs, something big moved in the darkness, and he heard the creaking again.

The shape held something long and narrow — like a silenced pistol.

Chapel did what you were never supposed to do in such a situation. He improvised. Launching himself forward, he ran toward the top of the stairs and then threw himself down them, aiming right for the center of the shadow’s mass.

A shot rang out, a dull roar muffled by the silencer. The muzzle flash was only a dim flicker of light, but it was enough for Chapel to see that his target was a man in a suit. In midair Chapel threw out his arms to grab the man and pull them both rolling to the floor of the stair landing. He took the fall with his shoulder and spun around, weapon up and raised and ready to fire.

The long barrel of the silencer was already pointed right at his face. He’d taken his target down, but the chimera had jumped back to his feet before Chapel could even get his bearings.

“Ah, how sweet,” the chimera said. “You came back for her.” The chimera seemed to find this uproariously funny. He couldn’t seem to stop laughing.

That was when Chapel realized he wasn’t facing a chimera at all.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+12:39

“I’m just — heh — I’m going to turn on the — ha — lights,” Laughing Boy said. “Okay? Nobody needs to move, I just want to. To. Heh heh heh. Get a look at you.”

“Try anything and I will shoot,” Chapel told him.

“Yeah, yeah. Ha ha ha.”

Laughing Boy reached up and flicked a light switch. Chapel was ready for it, but still the sudden light dazzled him. He put his artificial hand up to shield his eyes. Laughing Boy had plenty of time to shoot him in the second or so it took his eyes to adjust, but the CIA freak didn’t take the opportunity.

Once Chapel could see, he understood the situation a little better. The two of them were crammed into the narrow landing of the stairs, Chapel in a tight firing crouch, Laughing Boy hunched over just a little. Laughing Boy’s silenced pistol was still pointed right at Chapel’s face.

Chapel’s sidearm was pointed straight at Laughing Boy’s heart.

Laughing Boy couldn’t stop giggling, perhaps at the absurdity of this situation. His whole body shook with mirth — except the arm that held his gun. The barrel of his pistol didn’t so much as bob up and down.

“Where’s Julia?” Chapel demanded. “Is she alive?”

Laughing Boy shrugged.

“Answer me!”

The CIA man smiled. He’d been laughing the whole time, but this was the first thing that made him smile. “Nobody gets to give orders around here. Not when we’ve both drawn down on each other.”

Chapel gritted his teeth. He thought of something that had occurred to him before. “Do me a favor, then. Blink your eyes a couple of times.”

Laughing Boy’s smile turned into a mischievous grin. “Oh, clever. But no. I’m not one of them. I’m just like you.”

“Bullshit,” Chapel said. “We’ve got nothing in common.”

“You’ll find out.”

“Enough of this. Put your weapon away or I’ll shoot,” Chapel demanded.

“I’m ready to die for my country,” Laughing Boy said. He chuckled at the thought. “I do what I have to do.”

“You’re going to tell me that’s why you’re here? In the interest of national security?” Chapel could hardly believe it.

Laughing Boy nodded. “She was exposed to the virus. I just need to bring her in for a couple tests.”

“Sure,” Chapel said. “That makes sense. That’s why you came with a silencer on your weapon. And why she called me to tell me you were trying to kill her.”

“Oh, all right — you’re cleverer than I gave you credit for, aren’t you? I was going to put a bullet in her and then burn her body. But, you know, it’s all details.” Laughing Boy chortled so hard his concentration broke for a second.

Long enough.

Chapel shot out one leg and swept it across Laughing Boy’s ankles. As he’d expected, the CIA man was fast and managed to jump back, avoiding the sweep, but that distracted him further and gave Chapel plenty of time to grab the flash suppressor on the end of the silenced pistol and shove it upward, toward the ceiling. The pistol discharged once, twice, and the stink of gunpowder filled Chapel’s nose and made him want to sneeze, but he fought it back and wrestled the weapon out of Laughing Boy’s hand. In a second he had his own pistol jammed up under the CIA man’s chin and the silenced pistol went arcing backward, over his shoulder, to clatter on the stairs below.

“Now,” Chapel said, “we start talking about who gets to give the orders.”

“Told you,” Laughing Boy said, his chest shaking with a case of the giggles, “I’m ready to die.”

He flung himself forward before Chapel had a chance to react, pushing them both down the stairs, flying head over feet. Chapel’s head spun as it struck the banister, then a riser on the way down. At the bottom he struggled to regain his feet, to spin around and find the other man. He was so disoriented it took him a second to realize he’d dropped his pistol.

Laughing Boy stood up from where he’d bent over to retrieve his own weapon. Chapel braced himself, ready to take the shots. Ready to die.

But Laughing Boy… laughed. Long and hard and fully, from the bottom of his chest. “Hear that?” he said. “They’re never supposed to be around when you need them, right? Am I right?”

Chapel strained his ears and heard it — the sound of police sirens, coming toward them. Someone must have seen him break into the building.

“I’m going to go now,” Laughing Boy said, holstering his weapon. “I hate cops, you know? So many questions, and they never believe your answers.”

“It helps if you tell them the truth.”

Chapel had never in his life told a joke that got such a big and heartfelt laugh.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+12:46

Laughing Boy disappeared into the darkness of the building. Chapel didn’t bother chasing him — he knew the man would shoot him if he tried. He grabbed his own handgun off the floor and holstered it, then searched for a door leading into the clinic. By the time he found it, red and blue lights were already stabbing through the thin curtains that covered the front windows. He heard police radios squawking, and he knew in any second they would start demanding he come out with his hands visible.

Before then, he had to know what had happened here. He had to know if Julia was still alive.

The clinic was dark, and the flashing lights made it hard to see anything. He hurried forward into the reception area and nearly slipped and fell. The floor was slick with something dark. He knew what that meant instantly.

“Oh, no,” he said aloud. He crept forward until he found the receptionist’s desk. Blood had splattered all the files lying there, and a woman’s body lay slumped, motionless, in the chair.

Biting his lip, he used his artificial hand — it didn’t have any fingerprints — to gently lift her head.

It wasn’t Julia. It was the receptionist, the one he’d seen comforting Julia in her grief. There were two dark holes in her face, one in her temple, one in her cheekbone just below her eye. Blood oozed from both of them as he moved her. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You had nothing to do with this, you didn’t deserve…”

“Chapel?” he heard someone shout, from behind him.

It was muffled, distorted, but it was definitely Julia’s voice.

He made his way deeper into the clinic, past the examination rooms, past a shelf loaded down with prescription dog food. “Julia?” he called. “Where are you?”

“All the way at the back,” she called out. “Is he still there?”

“He’s gone,” Chapel called. In the dark he stumbled forward until he found a door at the back of the clinic. A heavy, reinforced steel door with a massive lock. Bending down he saw that the paint on the lock plate had been scuffed. There were three long oval spots where the paint had been blasted away.

Laughing Boy must have tried to shoot out the lock. That almost never worked — Chapel had been taught that much when he was trained by the Rangers — but it looked like Laughing Boy had failed to find any other way to get the door open.

“I’m coming out,” Julia said. The lock mechanism clicked, and the door swung open. Chapel got a look inside and realized why a veterinary clinic needed such a heavy door — the closet beyond was lined with shelves stocked with pill bottles of every type and size and description.

He only had time for a quick glance before Julia rushed out at him, a scalpel in one hand. “Tell me you don’t work with him! Tell me you didn’t set all this up!” she demanded.

“I swear it,” he said, holding up both hands.

She stared at his left hand, and he realized it must be covered with blood.

“He killed Portia,” Julia said.

“I know. But he’s gone now. The police frightened him off.”

Julia shook her head. Then she dropped the scalpel to clatter on the floor and rushed at him, wrapping her arms around him. “Make this stop,” she pleaded. “Make it stop!”

But Chapel knew that was one thing he couldn’t promise.

Laughing Boy was hunting down everyone who had come into contact with the chimeras. He was killing them and burning their bodies, just in case they’d been exposed to the virus. Just because he’d been thwarted once didn’t mean he wouldn’t try again. He would come back for Julia, track her down wherever she went, no matter how much police protection Chapel might arrange for her.

There was only one thing he could do.

“I have a plan to keep you safe,” he told her. She pressed her face against his shoulder and sobbed noisily. “I can protect you from him, and from the chimeras. But I need you to trust me.”

“Seriously? That’s not going to happen, Chapel!” she wailed, pounding on his good shoulder with her fist. “After everything that happened today, you think I’m just going to put my utter faith in you?”

“I need you to—”

“I’ll give you a chance,” she said. “Don’t blow it.”

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+14:55

Dealing with the police took way too long. For a while they had Chapel in handcuffs and were ready to take Julia into protective custody. Eventually, though, a detective had come running over, waving his cell phone in the air. He huddled up with the cops for a while. Chapel had no idea what they said to one another, but when they were done they took the cuffs off and let him go.

As soon as he was free, his own phone chimed to tell him he had a new text message. It came from the number (000) 000-0000 and contained only two words:

yr welcome

Once the cops left, Chapel and Julia headed back to the public park, where the helicopter picked them up. It took them to the private section of Newark Airport, where all the corporate executives stored their G5 private jets. The plane waiting for Chapel and Julia looked the same as all the others — sleek and expensive.

“Does it secretly turn into a robot?” Julia asked. “Or maybe it has hidden missile systems that flip up when your enemies least expect it.”

Chapel grinned at her. She’d been through so much trauma that day but she was bouncing back, delaying her grief and anger and fear because there was still work to be done, still places to be.

There was something about this woman. Something in the way she kept surprising him. She had been smart enough to lock herself in the drug closet when Laughing Boy came for her. She had seen through his necessary lies.

It didn’t hurt that her delicate features were perfectly framed by her mane of fiery red hair. He followed her up the stairs of the private jet and tried not to be too obvious about enjoying the view.

“It’s just a way of getting from point A to point B,” he said. “Normally I would take military transports. There’s always a transport going from one base to another. My boss decided I needed to get to Atlanta in a hurry, though, so he swung — this—”

He stopped because as he climbed aboard he got his first look at the interior of the jet. Instantly he knew it had to be Hollingshead’s personal plane.

Most of the cabin except for the cockpit had been turned into one spacious sitting area. Four leather-covered seats faced one another in the middle of the space. They were huge and looked extraordinarily comfortable. Chapel, who was running on fumes at that point, saw at once that they could convert with a button press into reclining beds.

Clearly no expense had been spared in making the plane cozy — and elegant.

The walls of the fuselage were lined in rich, red wood, polished to a nearly mirror finish. The overhead lights were designed to look like tiny chandeliers. At the back of the cabin was a massive oak desk with built-in bookshelves. Chapel took a closer look and saw the books were real. Black elastic straps held them in so they wouldn’t fall out if the plane hit any turbulence.

Hidden speakers in the ceiling played classical music at a low volume. The plane smelled not like recirculated air but like leather and sandalwood.

“This is nicer than my apartment,” Julia said. “Bigger, too.”

A narrow door beside the desk opened and a woman in a navy uniform came out, bearing a tray with two cocktail glasses on it. “Good evening, sir, ma’am,” she nodded, and brought the tray over to a mahogany coffee table that sat in the middle of the four seats. “I’m Chief Petty Officer Andrews, and I’ll be looking after you tonight. Please, have a seat and buckle yourselves in. Our flight time to Atlanta will be a little over two hours, once we’re in the air. Can I get you anything while you wait for takeoff? Magazines, blankets, food?”

Chapel hadn’t eaten all day, not since breakfast. It was the first chance he’d had to think of it. “I could use a sandwich,” he said.

“Certainly, Captain. I have a nice roast beef with cheddar in the back. I’ll just put that together for you. Ma’am?”

Julia looked up at Chapel like she wanted approval to ask for something. He shrugged.

“I guess… I could use a salad or something,” she said, eventually.

Chief Petty Officer Andrews smiled. “I have a romaine salad with goat cheese and mandarin oranges. For dressing, I have a balsamic vinaigrette, a gorgonzola, or just oil and vinegar if you prefer your dressing on the side. Do you take croutons?”

“Um… yes,” Julia said. Her eyes were wide, as if this were the most bizarre thing she’d seen all day.

Petty Officer Andrews smiled and disappeared through her little door again.

“I made such a mistake when I went to vet school,” Julia said, when she was gone. “I should have joined the navy. Is it always like this?”

Chapel smiled. “Always,” he said. “In the army we ate dirt half the time, and we used rocks for pillows. In the navy they got goat cheese and mandarin oranges.”

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+15:37

The salad seemed to perk Julia up, though he could see in her eyes just how tired she was. While she ate she actually smiled at Chapel and met his eye once or twice and then turned her head away with a little laugh. “It’s funny how comforting having a good meal can be,” she said.

“I imagine you could use a little comfort right now,” Chapel told her.

She snorted in exuberant agreement. “I need to feel normal, basically. I need to feel like I’m not about to be shot. And frankly, I need a shower and a change of clothes. And a good nap in a real bed. And a drink! Definitely a drink.”

“When we get to Atlanta, sure,” Chapel said. “Maybe we both need that.” It had been a very long day, and it wasn’t over yet. “My instinct is to keep moving, to keep working. But if I don’t get a little downtime, I’m going to start getting fuzzy. Then I’ll start making mistakes.”

Julia met his eye directly and gave him a very warm smile. “I know you’re on a tight time frame. But I want you to promise me something. The first time we get a chance, you have to let me show you how much I appreciate your saving my life.”

For a moment — just a moment — Chapel thought he knew exactly what she meant by that, and the thought made him feel very hot and bothered. “You don’t mean—”

Her eyes opened wide, and she put a hand over her mouth. “Jeez! No. I meant you would let me buy you dinner. Or something.” She laughed and reached over and patted his wrist, defusing the sudden tension. “Wow, Chapel. You’re blushing.”

He turned away, because he could feel the heat in his cheeks.

“Oh, don’t be embarrassed. It’s cute,” Julia said.

Nobody had called Chapel cute since he was seven years old. It felt very strange to hear it now.

“There’s something about you, Chapel. You’re a tough guy, I see that in the way you move, the lines in your face. But there’s an innocence underneath it. Interesting. It’s like I can see that you really believe in what you do. In who you are. You’re not cynical about your job at all.”

“I took an oath to protect my country,” he said. “I take it pretty seriously.”

Julia shook her head. “I’ve met spies before. They seemed to feel like having secrets made them better than everybody else.”

“The opposite is usually true,” Chapel said, furrowing his brow. He was distinctly uncomfortable with where this conversation was going.

Luckily Julia didn’t push it any further. Though she did say, almost under her breath, “I wish I could see you in your uniform. I bet you look just adorable.”

Now that was one thing no one had ever said about him. He pretended he hadn’t heard her and went back to his sandwich.

After they finished their meal, Julia curled up in her leather seat, covered in a thick wool blanket that looked very warm, and was out like a light. Chief Petty Officer Andrews came out and touched a button on the arm of Julia’s chair. It reclined smoothly and without noise, so gently Julia didn’t even wake up. The chief petty officer expertly slipped a pillow under Julia’s head. She smiled at Chapel, then disappeared as silently as she’d come.

Chapel watched Julia’s body rise and fall with her breathing for a while. He thought about how she’d held him when he rescued her from Laughing Boy. About how good it had felt to have her body pressed up against his. He’d felt like a hero, then.

He watched her brow wrinkle and knew she must be dreaming.

She was beautiful. Beyond that, there was something more to her. Real substance. She was strong and smart and kind. He hadn’t met anyone like her in a long time. He’d brought her with him to keep her safe. That was all. She had kissed him, but she’d said she wasn’t trying to start anything. Whatever he was feeling now she probably didn’t return it. How could she? He was a man with one arm. That was enough to put anybody off. Maybe she’d just kissed him out of pity. She’d called him cute and adorable, but those were words women used to describe babies and kittens, not men they wanted to get to know better in a romantic way. Weren’t they?

Damn. He needed to stop thinking like that. He needed to stop thinking about Julia as anything but an asset that needed to be protected.

He turned his seat to face the window and watched lights blinking on the tarmac. He had to get his mind off Julia. He grabbed his phone and his hands-free set out of his pocket. He put the hands-free set in his ear and forced himself to close his eyes. “Angel,” he said, “I don’t know if you’re listening. I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“Magic words,” Angel told him. “Do you have any more of them?”

“I was letting this case get to me,” he told her, “when I accused you of having your own agenda. That was wrong of me. You’ve done nothing but help me. You’ve been an utter godsend. I’m starting to see that I could never do this without you.”

“That’s a start,” she said.

“This case — this operation — is like nothing I’ve ever had to do before,” Chapel told her. “I’m starting to get worried. There are three more chimeras out there. There’s no way I can catch them all before they kill someone.”

“It’s looking pretty grim, I’ll admit,” Angel told him.

“And now I have Laughing Boy to worry about. He’s killing people, Angel. He’s killing anyone who comes in contact with a chimera, just in case they’re infected. He was going to kill Julia.”

“I know.”

“I couldn’t let that happen,” he said.

“I know. Director Hollingshead wasn’t very happy when he heard you’d brought a civilian along for the ride, of course. But I explained everything to him and made him see it was necessary to prevent another death.”

“You did that for me? Even after what I said?”

“I care, Chapel. I care about people, just like you do.”

Chapel nodded to himself. He was very glad to hear it. “So he’s… okay with this?” He glanced over his shoulder and saw Julia’s sleeping face half covered by her blanket. She was beautiful like that, in repose. When she wasn’t angry or grief-stricken. He wondered what it would have been like to meet her before all this. In just ordinary circumstances. But then again, how could that have ever happened? A veterinarian in New York and a defense intelligence analyst in Virginia would have very little to talk about. Almost nothing in common. “He won’t demand I turn her over to the CDC?”

Angel was silent for a moment. After recent events, Chapel worried she might not come back on the line. “She could be infected, Chapel.”

“I know,” Chapel sighed. He’d known it from the moment he’d found Laughing Boy inside her clinic. She had, in fact, been exposed to the chimera, and if it so much as scratched her while they were in the back of the hijacked cab together, she could have the virus already. “If Hollingshead orders it, I’ll bring her in. Turn her over to his doctors so they can screen her for the virus. Treat her if necessary. But I can’t just send her off to face Laughing Boy on her own.”

“He won’t order that. Even if she does have the virus, she’s probably better off with you where you can watch her and make sure she doesn’t spread it. Still — it’s just going to make your job harder if you have to babysit her at the same time.”

“I’m not so sure about that. She’s proved herself to be pretty resourceful, and she might have information I need. Answers to questions I haven’t even figured out how to ask, yet.”

“Fair enough. Hollingshead says it’s okay, she can travel with you. Just make sure she doesn’t learn anything too sensitive, and it should be all right.”

“That’s good,” Chapel said. “About Laughing Boy — what can we do about him? If he’s running around killing people, then he must have gone rogue, right? Please tell me that Banks didn’t order him to kill Julia. Please tell me we can have him arrested and remove him from the field.”

“I wish I could,” Angel said.

Chapel tapped at the armrest of his seat with his good fingers. “The CIA doesn’t just kill American citizens. I mean, it has, and I suppose things happen that I don’t get to hear about. But—”

“Chapel, he was authorized to do this. And the authorization came from higher up than Banks.”

Chapel grabbed the armrest hard enough to make the leather creak. “So he’s got a license to kill? That’s something from the movies. Only the president can authorize the execution of American citizens without a trial.”

“Higher up, I said,” Angel told him.

Chapel shivered at the thought. “Is the threat of this virus really that high? That they would just kill people on suspicion they might have it?”

“I don’t have a lot of information on it. But clearly someone thinks so,” Angel told him. “This is way beyond top secret stuff. What we do know, and this from confidential sources, is that the disease caused by the virus is incurable and almost impossible to detect until it’s way too late to do anything.”

“Jesus.” Chapel glanced at Julia again. She could be a ticking time bomb right now. She could be incubating the virus while she slept. And there was no way to know for sure. “That doesn’t excuse his behavior. We need to find a way to stop Laughing Boy now. Before he can kill anyone else.”

“Chapel,” Angel said, “I want to tell you something. You were right.”

“What?” It had been a while since somebody had said that to him.

“I do have my own agenda,” she told him. “Or rather, my agenda is the same as Director Hollingshead’s, and it may not match up with yours. We’re not like Director Banks and his operative. We don’t want to just kill people to keep this thing under control. But we do intend to control it, regardless of what that takes. Director Hollingshead can’t stop Laughing Boy. He doesn’t intend to try. He may not like Laughing Boy’s methods — but he agrees with Banks, at least in principle, about what needs to be done. If Julia does have the virus, we won’t kill her. But we will lock her up for the rest of her life in a facility like the one the chimeras escaped from. Because we have no other choice.”