Chimera

WASHINGTON, D.C.: APRIL 14, T+60:04

Rupert Hollingshead had always liked the Jefferson Memorial best of Washington’s many landmarks. It was far enough from the Mall that the tourist crowds were always thinner there. In spring it was a wonderful place to enjoy the cherry blossoms. He’d always been a devotee of Jefferson the man, as well, and it was good to sit in the midst of all that neoclassical marble and look up at the man’s wise bronze face and imagine what he would have done in a given situation.

After today, though, he imagined he would feel differently about the place. He would remember it as where he’d been forced to concede defeat.

Tom Banks was waiting for him when he arrived. The CIA director looked pleased with himself, of course. No matter what kind of horror show this had become.

“Your man failed,” Banks said, with barely disguised glee. “He’s dead, dead, dead.”

“He got three of the four,” Hollingshead said, when the two of them were close enough that they could speak without being overheard. “Really, all in all a good show.”

“For a cripple, sure,” Banks said, with a chuckle. “Rupert, old boy, old chum, old pal. You do know how to pick ’em.”

Hollingshead fumed in silence.

“So go ahead. Say the words,” Banks insisted.

“Really? Here, and now? Is that proper protocol?”

“Maybe not. But for my personal satisfaction I’ve got to hear it from your lips,” Banks insisted.

Very well.

“I, Rupert Hollingshead, do affirm that as of this moment the CIA should have full jurisdiction over all secret projects resulting from or evolving from Project Darling Green. The Central Intelligence Agency shall be fully responsible for all further activity, oversight, and secrecy concerning said projects and the Defense Intelligence Agency will have no access to any work product or intelligence product resulting therefrom or associated therewith without the CIA’s prior approval and knowledge. There. Is that enough? Or must I sign something in blood?”

Banks grinned like a feral cat. “I’ve been waiting years for this, Rupert. This project of yours should never have happened in the first place. No sane mind could have approved it, and keeping it going this long was utter stupidity. And now I get to clean up after you.”

“You don’t seem very put out,” Hollingshead observed, “for a man whose workload has just increased.”

“Because it gives me a chance to do something else I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Hang you out to dry. When the president hears about what you did — what you signed off on — he’s going to demote you down to ensign at the very least. He’ll be fucking pissed, to be blunt about it. And you and your stupid bow ties will never darken my doorstep again.”

“All of this. All of this, because you hate me,” Hollingshead said, shaking his head. “Because our two agencies don’t get along. All the deaths, all the misery—”

“Spare me, you old fuck,” Banks said. He turned on his heel and walked away, then. He didn’t even bother with the traditional handshake. Hollingshead watched him go.

Then he turned and with a sigh settled his bulk onto a marble bench where he could look on Jefferson’s face. Maybe for the last time.

He took his cellular phone from his pocket and put it to his ear.

“It’s done,” he said.

Angel’s voice on the other end sounded downcast. Perhaps she’d come to have high hopes for Chapel as well. “He just took over? Just like that?”

“Bought Camp Putnam for a song, yes,” Hollingshead replied. “No questions asked. He seemed anxious to get on with things.” The ghost of a smile touched his lips. “It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for him. He has no idea what he’s just inherited.”

“Director Hollingshead? I’m not sure I understand,” Angel said.

“Give it time.” Hollingshead ended the call.

BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 14, T+64:54

There’s two kinds of people who get to just lie in bed all day, Top said. Babies and cripples. Babies are cute, so they get away with it. Cripples ain’t cute.

“I can’t open my eyes, Top.”

You want to be a cripple, that’s fine. Nobody expects anything from a cripple. They just lie there, being a drain on everybody else’s hard work. But that’s fine. Because you’re a war hero, right? You earned the right to do nothin’ all day but feel sorry for yourself. You made that sacrifice. Don’t matter you got two perfectly good legs. You’re all depressed. You’re traumatized. So you’re crippled in the head.

“I got shot. I got shot three times,” Chapel told him.

He did not know if he was speaking out loud.

Darkness surrounded him. Darkness filled his body, an aching kind of darkness he couldn’t understand. He desperately needed to go to the bathroom.

A man whose body’s crippled, sure, people can look at that and pity him. They can feel sorry for him. A man who’s crippled in the head, people can’t see that. They don’t understand it. Now you and me, we both know about trauma. We both know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night and be back there, back in the mud and the fire and hearing the screams. We understand that. Nobody else ever will. They’ll see you lyin’ in this bed, with two perfectly good legs, and they’ll say, he’s just lazy. He’s just milking it. Our tax dollars are payin’ for him to sleep all day and eat Jell-O.

Chapel was lying in a pool of something wet. Had he soiled himself? The shame of it was too much to bear. He wanted to just curl up and go back to sleep. He wanted to sleep forever. He had a feeling that was an attainable goal.

Open your damn eyes when I talk to you, boy.

“Top,” Chapel said, the start of a protest he didn’t know how to finish. He tried to open his eyes, tried to obey orders. It was so hard, though. His eyelids felt like they had been cemented shut. “Top…”

I’m gonna keep yellin’ at you. I’m not gonna stop. Because I’m no cripple. I got one arm, one leg, and one eye, but I refuse to be a cripple. Cripples don’t work no more. I still got work to do, and you’re it.

“I’m trying, Top.”

I know you are. But my boys don’t accept that just tryin’ is enough. My boys — and don’t you dare forget you are one of my boys now — my boys only accept victory. They only accept one hundred percent success. How’s those eyes comin’ along? They open yet?

It took every ounce of his strength. It was like trying to rip a phone book in half. But Chapel opened his eyes.

He couldn’t see much, just blurry shapes and shadows. The light hurt when it hit the back of his eye sockets. It felt like each individual beam of light was drilling into his skull. But his eyes were open.

Some of the blurry shapes were moving. They moved around him, bent over him. They were people, looking down at him.

“Jesus,” someone said. “He’s awake!”

“How the hell is he still alive?” someone else asked. “He must have lost a gallon of blood already.”

“He can’t last much longer,” the first voice said, though it didn’t sound sure.

“Get Reinhard. If we have to kill him ourselves, Reinhard will know how.”

BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 14, T+65:12

Chapel was lying on a cement floor in a pool of his own blood. It ran down his side, under his legs, and into a drain in the floor. He could hear it dripping away. He could feel it oozing out of his gunshot wound.

His shirt was off. He could look down and see the wound, caked in gore. He had two smaller wounds in his chest, just tiny pinpricks.

His artificial arm had been removed. It lay on a table on the far side of the room. The silicone skin had been completely cut off, revealing the complex assemblage of pistons and actuators underneath.

His good arm was handcuffed to a pipe that ran along the wall behind him. The cuff around his wrist was loose enough that it didn’t cut off the circulation to his good hand, but not so loose he could slip out of it. He wasn’t going anywhere, even if he did feel strong enough to stand up. Which he didn’t.

Those were all facts.

As for anything else, all he had were suppositions and theories.

The judge had shot him twice in the chest — that must have been where the pinpricks came from. The judge must have hit him with a tranquilizer gun. Chapel remembered Jeremy Funt’s story of how Malcolm was recaptured after his escape. William Taggart had taken him down with a tranquilizer gun. Most likely, Chapel thought, the judge had been given such an unusual weapon in case he needed to use it against Quinn. The judge would have known about the unpredictable nature of chimeras and been armed accordingly. The fact he hadn’t been given a high-powered revolver instead meant that the judge had wanted to make sure he kept Quinn alive — at least long enough to serve his intended purpose.

So the judge had known about Quinn’s presence in his security detail. He’d known everything.

The wound in Chapel’s side was serious. It would eventually cause him to bleed out. It was only a flesh wound, though — Quinn’s bullet had cut through his skin and muscle but failed to penetrate his abdominal cavity. If it had hit any major organs, Chapel would already be dead. He’d gotten off pretty easy, actually. If the wound had been properly treated and bandaged, he would be on his feet and ready for action even now.

No one had treated it or bandaged it in any way. He’d been handcuffed in this little room and left to bleed.

There were four men in the little room with him. Security guards in black suits. They wore their sunglasses again — apparently they were done with following Chapel’s orders. When he begged them for help, for a bandage, for water, they didn’t even glance in his direction. Two of them were playing cards. The other one just stared out the room’s sole window.

Chapel had to fight constantly to stay conscious. He did not know if he was always successful — he might have blacked out once or twice by the time Reinhard came into the little room and checked on him.

The head of the judge’s security detail poked and prodded at the wound in Chapel’s side, reopening the crust of blood there. Chapel could feel fresh blood leak from the wound.

“Where’s the judge?” Chapel asked, not expecting any kind of answer.

Reinhard surprised him. “He’s in Boulder, at a press conference. Covered in blood — your blood. But otherwise fine.”

“Press conference?”

“Earlier today, the judge was attacked by a mysterious assassin, didn’t you know that? Hundreds of people on the highway saw it. If it wasn’t for a brave war hero who was guarding him, the judge would have been killed.”

Chapel forced words out of his dry throat. “Awful shame, though, that the war hero who took the bullet for the judge died before they could get him to a hospital.”

Reinhard nodded, looking impressed. “You’ve figured most of this out, haven’t you?”

Chapel took a deep breath before saying anything more. “This was all a false flag operation,” he said.

“Yeah?” Reinhard asked.

“The judge is up against a tough confirmation hearing in the Senate because he’s supposed to be soft on terrorism. An assassination attempt by some domestic terrorist group would give him a great platform to wave the flag around and talk tough, make himself look bloodthirsty. But you and I know better. We know this whole thing was a setup. But you can be trusted not to talk. As for me, the judge doesn’t know what I would do. So he’s going to make sure I don’t ruin this for him. You can’t kill me yourself, though. That would look wrong when they did the autopsy. So you’re going to let me bleed to death, then turn my body over to the local coroner. Nobody will think to look for traces of tranquilizer in my blood, because there won’t be enough blood left to test. The cause of death will be obvious so no uncomfortable questions will be asked.”

Reinhard laughed. “You’re smarter than we thought. When you just walked into this, we kind of thought you were an idiot.”

Chapel tried to shrug. Hard to do with only one shoulder, and that arm handcuffed. “No. Not an idiot. Just predictable. It was my job to track down the chimeras. I would go wherever they did.” He rested for a while before speaking again. “Tell me one thing. Are you working for Banks? Or for Hollingshead? Which of them is the Voice that gives the chimeras their instructions?”

Reinhard sighed. “You know, all this talking is going to drain your strength. Why don’t you just try to sleep, now? Just close your eyes and drift off. You’ve earned it.”

The reverse echo of Top’s remembered voice in his head made Chapel smile. “I’ve slept enough. Let’s talk some more.”

“I’ve got things to do,” Reinhard told him, shaking his head.

Chapel’s only chance was to keep the man engaged. To talk him around. “That’s a pretty sweet posting you’re looking at, huh? Head of security for a Supreme Court justice. It’s too bad you won’t live to see it.”

Reinhard sneered. “Idle threats, now? That’s what you’ve been reduced to?”

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll die first. But I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’ll go with me. Or didn’t they tell you about Laughing Boy?”

“Who?”

Chapel smiled. Reinhard was still listening. That was good. “I don’t know his actual name. Creepy guy, with a scar on the back of his head. Laughs all the time. Have you met him? If you’re working with Banks, I’d bet that Laughing Boy was your go-between. He cleans up after the chimeras.”

“What do you mean, ‘cleans up’?”

“You know the chimeras are carrying some kind of germ warfare virus. I mean, come on. They must have told you that much. Laughing Boy finds everybody who’s been in contact with one of them. He kills them and burns the bodies.”

“Bullshit. You’re just trying to scare me. It won’t work.”

“Sure. Believe what you want. Did you have much physical contact with Quinn, though? Did you shake his hand? Maybe pat him down at some point? Laughing Boy doesn’t take any chances.” Chapel looked over at the black-suited men playing cards on the far side of the room. “What about you guys?” he called out, raising his voice as much as he could. “Did any of you touch Quinn? Were any of you in car three when he went berserk? I bet they didn’t tell you about the virus.”

One of the guards looked up and stared at Chapel. “Reinhard,” he said, “what’s he on about? Nobody told us about a virus.”

Reinhard scowled. “Shut up,” he said. “Williamson. Hand me that duct tape.”

Another of the guards tossed a roll of tape to Reinhard.

“Enough bullshit,” Reinhard said. Then he tore off a generous piece of tape and pressed it tight over Chapel’s mouth.

So much for talking his way out of this.

The guards went back to their game. The one who had spoken kept staring at Reinhard and at Chapel, but he didn’t get up from where he sat.

Chapel wondered how much longer it would take to bleed out.

BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 14, T+65:48

There was nothing but darkness outside the room’s little window.

Tools hung from hooks on the walls — saws, hammers, mattocks, and hedge clippers. A toolshed, then. Most likely Chapel had been taken to the judge’s wife’s place in the mountains above Boulder. The judge had said that was the undisclosed location, the safehouse where he would wait for Quinn.

There didn’t seem like a lot of point in figuring out his location, but he couldn’t just lie there and wait to die. He was an intelligence operative, so he spent the last of his time trying to gather information.

There were three guards in the shed, as well as Reinhard. The guards were named Williamson, Reynolds, and Hook. Hook kept winning whatever game they were playing. Apparently Reynolds owed him a fair amount of money. Chapel thought Hook might be cheating.

If he could talk, he could have tried to drive a wedge between Hook and Reynolds. Convince Reynolds he was being taken by a cheat. Get them to fight each other. It would make a great diversion.

Except he couldn’t talk. He couldn’t create the diversion. And even if he had a diversion, what then? He was handcuffed to a pipe. He still had some strength in his body — he hadn’t succumbed to anemia quite yet — but even at his strongest he would never have been able to break the pipe or pull his hand free of the cuffs. They were designed to hold stronger prisoners than him.

If Reinhard would leave the room, Chapel could try to catch Williamson’s attention somehow. Maybe he could convince the guard to remove his duct tape, convince him that Chapel had a cure for the virus, that he could save Williamson from Laughing Boy…

But Reinhard wouldn’t leave the shed. And as long as he remained, Williamson was more afraid of his boss than he was of the virus.

If he could…

If things were just slightly different…

If…

Reinhard’s walkie-talkie crackled with loud static that ramped up to a nasty whine of feedback. Looking annoyed, the chief guard grabbed the unit out of his jacket and switched it to a new channel. He started to put it back in his pocket, but it crackled to life again.

“… say again,” Chapel heard, “say again.”

“Movement… the trees,” a new voice said on the walkie-talkie.

“What the hell is this?” Reinhard asked.

Reynolds looked up from his game and shrugged. “Sounds like Praczek, kind of. Isn’t he out by the road?”

Reinhard grunted in frustration. He put the walkie-talkie to his ear. “Praczek, come in. Praczek, this is Reinhard. Report right now.”

Only static answered him. Reinhard set the walkie-talkie down on the table next to Chapel’s artificial arm.

“Sounded like something, maybe,” Hook said. “Sounded like there was somebody out in the trees. If Praczek saw something—”

“Shut up,” Reinhard said. “We hear something more, I’ll worry about it then. There’s nobody out there. Praczek was probably just jumping at shadows.” He grabbed the walkie-talkie again. “Praczek, report in. Everybody, report in.”

For long tense seconds all the guards stared at the walkie-talkie, but nothing but static came through. Reinhard repeated his request for reports, but still there was nothing.

“So there’s a fault in my set, that’s all,” Reinhard said, while his guards stared at him. “Maybe my battery is dying. Reynolds, give me yours.”

Reynolds took his own walkie-talkie out of his jacket pocket and handed it over. Reinhard played with it for a while, adjusting its various knobs and dials. Every time he switched it on, however, it got nothing but static.

“If there’s somebody out there, maybe they got to Praczek and Foster,” Hook said, rubbing at his chin.

“Maybe this Laughing Boy guy,” Williamson said.

“Shut up!” Reinhard shouted.

In Chapel’s head a little fantasy played out. He saw Army Rangers parachuting into the woods, scrambling to take up positions. He saw them moving in to take out the guards Reinhard had stationed around the house. He saw them breaching the door of the toolshed, bursting in with battering rams and flashbangs and M4 carbines at the ready. He saw them come to rescue him. To take him home.

It was a nice little fantasy. It was also bullshit.

Chapel was a silent warrior. He knew that Hollingshead wouldn’t send Rangers in to rescue him — if Hollingshead even knew he was still alive. If Hollingshead even wanted him to be alive, which Chapel had come to seriously doubt.

This was probably nothing. He hated to admit it, but Reinhard was probably right — it was most likely just a radio malfunction. Praczek’s original message, about movement in the trees, was probably about some animals he’d seen moving around.

“Praczek, damn it, report now,” Reinhard said into his walkie-talkie.

Static.

Suddenly red light flicked across the shed’s window. Just a glimmer. Then a moment later it came back, much stronger, bright red light illuminating the trees as if they’d caught fire.

Everyone in the toolshed jumped at the sight.

Reinhard’s eyes were wide. He visibly regained control of himself. Then he pointed at the others. “You three go check that out.”

“You want us to go out there?” Williamson asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Reinhard drew his pistol. He didn’t point it at anybody, but the message was clear. “Go on, now.”

Hook and Reynolds headed for the door. Williamson held out a moment longer, but he must have known better than to anger his boss. Eventually he went, too.

Leaving Chapel alone with Reinhard.

Reinhard didn’t even look at Chapel. He sat down next to the table and started playing with his walkie-talkie again. He looked nervous and jumpy, but not nearly scared enough to do something stupid. As far as Chapel was concerned that was both good and bad. It meant Reinhard wasn’t going to go rushing out himself — leaving Chapel with a chance, no matter how slim, to escape. It also meant he wasn’t likely to shoot Chapel just because he was scared.

Chapel supposed you had to take the good with the bad.

He tried to listen for any sound coming from outside the shed. He could hear nothing, though. The static coming from Reinhard’s walkie-talkie was the only sound inside the shed.

Whatever was going on, it wouldn’t take long to resolve. Hook, Reynolds, and Williamson would go figure out what that light meant. Then they would come back and explain how it was all a false alarm. Maybe one of them would go and check on Foster and Praczek, and find out that sunspots or an electrical storm in the mountains or something else had caused the radio problem. Everything would be explained, and then the situation would return to normalcy, and Chapel would be right back where he’d been: bleeding to death on the toolshed floor, with no hope of escape.

This was the closest he was going to get to a diversion, he knew, and he couldn’t make any use of it.

Except—

On the table behind Reinhard, something was moving. It was Chapel’s artificial arm, and it was moving on its own volition.

BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+66:01

The arm wasn’t supposed to be able to do that. It was supposed to power down automatically when it wasn’t attached. If it didn’t detect skin contact through its electrodes, it shut down to save battery power.

But its fingers were definitely moving.

It couldn’t get the leverage to move very far. But it bent at the elbow, and the index finger whined softly as it extended to its full length. Chapel, who was used to that sound, heard it clearly, but Reinhard didn’t react. Maybe he couldn’t make out the sound above the static coming from his walkie-talkie.

Chapel tried not to stare. He knew who was controlling the arm — the only person in the world, as far as he knew, who could. He remembered when he’d first heard Angel’s voice. She had wanted to convince him she could hack into any system, so she had briefly taken over his arm and made it wave at him. He had been massively disturbed by her ability to do that. He’d been horrified she had the ability.

But now, when what she was doing was infinitely creepier, he was glad for it.

Reinhard was too busy playing with his walkie-talkie to look at the arm. But after a moment, he turned the radio off in disgust and threw it down on the table. And then he must have heard the motors squealing behind him. The mechanical sound of the robotic fingers clenching and unclenching.

His reaction was immediate and violent. He jumped off his chair and squawked like a parrot, spinning around to stare at the arm. “What the hell?” he demanded.

The arm bent slowly at the elbow, looking for all the world like a living thing. Its fingers flexed rapidly, waggling back and forth as the motors made their high-pitched whine. It was impossible to ignore now. Reinhard made a nasty noise in his throat.

What was Angel trying to achieve? Did she want to make it choke Reinhard to death? But no, that was impossible. There was no way she could even see the arm or where it was — there were no cameras in the toolshed for her to hack into. She must just be triggering the various motors at random. But why?

Because, Chapel realized with a start, she thought the arm was still attached to his shoulder. She wasn’t trying to get Reinhard’s attention. She was trying to signal Chapel, to send him a message.

Too bad Reinhard was the one to receive it. He reached for a mallet that hung on the wall. With three vigorous swinging motions he smashed the arm into bits of flying metal.

No, Chapel thought. No! Do you have any idea how expensive that thing is? Do you have any idea what it’s meant to me?

For Chapel, it was like watching someone shoot his pet dog.

Reinhard spun around and stared at Chapel with wide eyes. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. Clearly he thought Chapel had some way to make the arm move remotely. “Answer me, damn it!”

Chapel tried to shrug. Then he stared downward as best he could, toward the gag of duct tape over his mouth.

Reinhard’s reaction was immediate and unthinking. He rushed across the room to grab the gag and tear it off Chapel’s face. His own sweating red features were only a foot or so from Chapel’s mouth.

So Chapel only had to whisper when he said, “That was dumb.”

Reinhard’s features didn’t change. Maybe he didn’t realize what he’d just done. Or maybe he just had no idea what Chapel was capable of.

Chapel swung his legs up fast and wrapped them around Reinhard’s neck. He was weak from blood loss and lying at a bad angle. But he had strength enough left to put pressure on Reinhard’s carotid arteries.

They’d taught him this move in Special Forces training. If you can cut off blood flow to a man’s brain, even for a few seconds, he will see a flash of white light… and then he will fall unconscious and collapse in a heap.

Reinhard obliged nicely, falling across Chapel in a sudden rush of weight.

“Thank you, Top, for making me swim again and build up my leg muscles,” Chapel breathed.

Using his knees, he rolled Reinhard off and onto the floor. The next part took a lot of work, and Chapel had to stop several times to catch his breath. But eventually he managed to move Reinhard around until he could reach into the man’s jacket pocket. Just as he’d expected, there was a handcuff key in there.

He uncuffed himself and got to his feet. His head spun for a while and he saw red spots in his vision, but he managed. Fresh blood started flowing from his wound. He shoved a hand over the hole in his side, but the blood dripped through his fingers.

First things first. He found the roll of duct tape and wrapped a generous swathe of it around his midriff. It was hardly sanitary and would never work as well as real gauze, but it made a passable bandage and kept him from bleeding out there and then. Next he searched Reinhard’s pockets until he found what he was hoping for — his pistol. The P228 that Hollingshead had given him. Reinhard must have picked it up when the judge surprised Chapel in the limo.

He looked down at the arm where it lay on the table. It was a total loss, sadly. Reinhard had smashed it to pieces. It moved spasmodically, its few remaining intact actuators whining and moving pointlessly.

The hand had been damaged almost beyond recognition. It felt weird, but all the same Chapel picked it up with his good, living hand and gave it one last squeeze. It could be tough, saying good-bye to an old friend.

But it was time to get out of there.

BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+66:06

Chapel felt woozy and nauseated even before he opened the door of the toolshed. Cold night air swept in and nearly knocked him off his feet. It made the waxy sweat on his face and chest feel like ice. But he managed not to fall down.

He didn’t know how long Reinhard would remain unconscious. He didn’t know what he would find outside of the shed. He desperately wanted to sit down and rest for a while. But a lot of things had come together to give him this one chance. He could not afford to waste it — he definitely would not get another one.

He stumbled outside, trying to keep low. It was hard to bend from the waist without blacking out. The pain from his wound was excruciating, and his duct tape bandage constricted his chest and made it hard to breathe. So he squatted down and duckwalked around the side of the shed to try to get his bearings.

What he saw was more confusing than revelatory. The shed stood about twenty yards away from a big house, a pile of fake log cabin construction with lots of windows. Most of them were dark. Between the house and the shed was a wide patch of gravel where four cars sat, unattended. Surrounding the gravel and the buildings were tall dark trees, mostly pines. A single break in the forest led down to a road about two hundred yards away. That had to be east, since the rough shapes of mountains loomed over the trees on the other side, which must be west.

The entire scene was lit by a flickering red light, as if the forest were on fire. Chapel soon saw that wasn’t accurate, however, as a new red light burst into life high over the trees to the south, a light that sank slowly toward the forest. A flare, fired from a flare gun. It was impossible to say where the flare had come from.

The moment the flare appeared, Chapel heard gunfire open up — automatic fire from at least three light machine guns, maybe Uzis or Mac-10s judging by the sound. The muzzle flashes came from over by the house, and he heard men shouting over there as well. That must be Reinhard’s men, shooting indiscriminately into the trees. But who were they shooting at? They were acting like they were under invasion by a full-scale assault, but Chapel heard no return fire, saw no movement at all to the south. Just the flare, slowly settling to earth.

Whatever — it didn’t matter. He had to get away.

Chapel ran east as fast as he could, ducking into the trees, headed straight for the road that lay beyond. He heard shouting behind him, but he didn’t stop, didn’t look back.

Just up ahead the trees gave way. The road appeared, a single lane of blacktop painted a dim red by the distant flare. Chapel broke through onto the road surface and smelled fireworks, the distinct sulfurous tang of spent gunpowder.

Then a soft shoulder rammed into his armpit, and he smelled Julia, felt her body press up against his. She was moving, running, and she supported him as he hobbled along. They headed down the road toward an SUV parked fifty yards away, showing no lights. As they got closer he saw Chief Petty Officer Andrews standing next to the open driver’s-side door. She had a smoking flare gun in her hand.

The rear hatch of the SUV swung open, and Julia shoved him inside, into the rear compartment. Chapel realized he could barely keep his eyes open, that he was so weak he was likely to pass out at any second.

The hatch swung down to close him up inside the vehicle. He heard feminine voices talking in a low whisper. Heard the engine of the SUV turn over.

Enough. He let go of consciousness and sank into darkness.

BOULDER, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+68:14

Reinhard stared down at the puddle of blood on the floor of the toolshed. He rubbed his throat where the bastard had choked him. His hand came away stained with red, and he shook drops of semicoagulated blood from his fingers. “This is where I woke up. Just before you arrived. My men were still out in the woods, shooting at flares.”

He shook his head. “They weren’t trained to handle that kind of Special Forces shit. They were trained to work as bodyguards for celebrities and CEOs. Not to guard against an attack by Army Rangers.”

He bent down and looked at the set of handcuffs lying on the floor, one cuff open with the key still in the lock.

“I’ll admit it, I wasn’t ready for this either. Maybe I should have known better. I saw what Chapel was like on the road, when he took down Quinn. But I also saw how much blood he lost. There was no way a man in that kind of condition could do what he did, not without help. You’re telling me there was nobody here. Just a stewardess and a veterinarian out in the woods.” He shook his head again. “No way. I’m telling you, there had to be a whole company of Rangers involved. Otherwise…”

He didn’t want to turn around. He didn’t want to look at the man who had come to debrief him. He didn’t want to admit he’d failed. “We did our best. We followed the script, did exactly what we were told. I’ve worked for the judge a long time. I knew I had to give this my all, and I did. I honestly don’t see how we could have done any better.”

“Ha,” his debriefer said. It was almost like a little laugh. Not that there was anything funny here.

“Are you going to tell me I’m fired?” Reinhard asked. “Shit. I know you are. You’re here to tell me I screwed up and I’m off the payroll. Gonna lose my pension, too. I had fifteen years in that. Well, I don’t know who could have done better.”

“Heh. Hee ha hee,” the man behind him said. “Nobody’s saying otherwise.”

Reinhard felt his heart skip a beat. Was it possible he was going to walk out of this with a job? He knew what a mess this was. He knew how many kinds of hell the blowback would be. Was it possible?

He started to turn around to look at the man. “So am I—”

“Fired? Ha ha ha,” the man laughed. “No.”

Which would have been good to hear, except the debriefer was holding a silenced pistol in his hand. And the barrel was pointed at Reinhard’s side.

“One — ha — problem, though. The plan was, Chapel would — hee hee — die while protecting the judge. Ha hee. We were going to present his body to the coroner and — heh — say that Quinn killed him.”

The gunshot was louder than Reinhard expected. Silencers always were. You expected a flat little cough, like when somebody fired a silenced pistol on TV. Real silencers just muffled the sound of the gunshot a little. He looked down and saw a stain of red spreading across his side. Exactly in the same place where Quinn shot Chapel.

“See — ha — we still need a body, to make it look right,” the debriefer said. “Heh ha ho. Gotta stick to the — ha — script. That left arm’s going to have to come off, too.”

SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+69:33

It was a lot easier opening his eyes, this time. Chapel felt warm and comfortable, like he was waking up after a good nap in a soft bed. He felt a dozen times stronger than before. Something was jabbing him in the arm, but it was easy to ignore. He looked up and saw a stucco ceiling above him, and a light fixture that was a little too bright for comfort. So he closed his eyes again and fell back asleep.

The pinpoint irritation in his arm woke him again, a little later. It was exactly in the crook of his right arm and it felt like a mosquito bite, maybe. He reached over with his left arm to swat it away.

His left hand passed right through his right arm, meeting no resistance. That made him open his eyes again. He looked over to his left and saw that his arm was gone.

Oh, yeah, he thought.

He did not find the fact particularly distressing. He had woken up so many times before, expecting to find himself whole and intact. The first few months it had been a horrible sensation to have to wake up and remember he was an amputee. Eventually he’d gotten used to it, or at least it had stopped waking him up with the cold sweats.

Leisurely, knowing there was no rush, he turned his head to the right.

Chief Petty Officer Andrews was lying in the bed next to him. She looked pale and slightly disheveled, but she was smiling.

Damn, Chapel thought. Julia’s not going to like this. And I don’t even remember getting into bed with the CPO. Or anything we might have done.

“You’re awake,” Andrews said.

Julia’s face appeared over Andrews’s shoulder.

Oh, wow, Chapel thought. What exactly did I miss?

But Julia wasn’t in the bed. She was standing next to it, leaning over Andrews. Julia wasn’t smiling. “Try not to move your arm,” she said. “If that needle comes out, it’s going to make a hell of a mess.”

Keeping his shoulder immobile, Chapel tilted his head to look down at his arm. A needle was buried in the flesh there, a needle attached to a plastic tube full of blood. The tube ran to an IV bag, and another tube ran to a needle in Andrews’s arm.

Andrews laid her head back on her pillow. “Type O negative,” she said. “I’m a universal donor.”

“You lost a lot of blood,” Julia told him. “I had to give you a transfusion or you probably would have died.” She checked the blood bag and the tubes. “The CPO is going to be tired for a while, but otherwise she should be fine. You, on the other hand—”

“Where are we?” Chapel asked. His voice sounded hoarse and reedy, but he felt good. He felt better. He wanted, suddenly, to get up and get back to work.

“A motel room outside of Boulder,” Andrews told him. “It was the closest place that Angel felt was safe. Actually, she advised us to keep going, to get out of Colorado altogether, but Julia decided you needed to be treated immediately if you were going to make it. She started barking orders and Angel had no choice but to listen. Julia would make a great combat medic, you know.”

“She’s fantastic,” Chapel agreed. “But Angel—”

He stopped. He’d been about to say they couldn’t trust Angel. But he shouldn’t be able to trust Andrews, for the same reason. They both worked for Hollingshead. The man who’d sent Chapel to Denver so he could die just to make the judge look good.

He didn’t want to speak his suspicions out loud, however. Not when it was clear that Andrews had just saved his life.

“Angel was the brains behind this whole rescue,” Julia said. “She tracked you by satellite to that house. She guided us there.”

Angel had made his arm scare Reinhard as well, and that had certainly helped. What did it mean? Angel had to have been in on the setup. She had steered him toward Denver just as strongly as Hollingshead and Banks.

“What about the flares?” he asked, trying to piece things together.

“That was her idea, too,” Andrews said. “I keep a sidearm on board the jet, in case I need to act as an impromptu sky marshal. But one pistol-packing CPO wouldn’t have a chance against a small army of security guards. So she told me to take the flare gun from the emergency kit on the plane and told me how to use it — where exactly to shoot the flares so it would look like a bunch of Special Forces types were storming the compound.”

“Most of the medical equipment I’m using came from that same emergency kit,” Julia told him. “Angel told me to bring it along. There was a full suture kit in there, as well as some antibiotics and painkillers. You owe her, big time.”

It made no sense.

Angel had led him right to the trap and told him to walk in. Banks and Hollingshead had come up with this scheme to make the judge look good by staging an assassination. Angel must have known something of the details.

So why, now, was she helping him? Part of the plan had been for him to die at Quinn’s hands. Hayes had presumably announced to the world that Chapel was dead. If he showed up in public now, alive and with a story to tell, it would ruin the entire plan. Angel should have been helping to kill him, not helping to save him.

He looked over at Andrews. She was beholden to Hollingshead, certainly, but he doubted she’d known any details about the plan. The fewer people who know a secret, the easier it is to keep. That was the entire rationale behind need-to-know information. So it was highly unlikely she was his enemy.

He would just have to trust her. “Angel betrayed me,” he said aloud. “She was told to get me to Denver no matter what it took. Because I was supposed to go there and get myself killed while fighting Quinn.”

Neither Andrews nor Julia looked particularly shocked.

“It was a setup, do you understand? She was in on the scheme to kill me.”

Chapel nearly jumped when Angel answered him directly.

Her voice came from the motel room’s telephone, which must have been set to speaker so Julia and Andrews could consult with her. She must have been listening the whole time.

“That’s partly true,” Angel admitted. “Chapel, Hollingshead and Banks did collude in sending you to Denver. And, yes, I knew you were walking into danger and I didn’t tell you everything I knew.”

Chapel glared over at the phone. If she was admitting that much—

“I thought I was doing my duty. My job. I thought keeping secrets from you, and operating on a secret agenda, was important. It was a matter of national security, and even if I wanted to be honest with you, I couldn’t be. I’m sure you understand that. But then things changed,” Angel said.

“Changed how?” Chapel demanded.

Andrews and Julia both looked away. This was between Chapel and Angel, and they didn’t want to be part of it.

“First, I need to tell you something.”

Chapel grimaced. “What? You’re going to apologize?”

“In a way. Chapel, I want to tell you something about myself. Something I’m not supposed to reveal to anyone. I was a hacker, once. Back when I was a teenager, I was pretty good with computers and I had nothing better to do than to try to hack into the Pentagon’s servers. I thought it would be funny.”

“Why are you telling—”

“Just listen. I was a high school kid. I didn’t know any better. It was easy, almost too easy to get in. I never saw anything important, really. I didn’t understand any of the data I found. I think it was all just payroll records. So I logged out and forgot about it. Until the next morning when a bunch of soldiers broke down my bedroom door and arrested me.

“Long story short, I was looking at a lot of jail time because I’d been bored and fooled around where I shouldn’t. I got passed around to a lot of people, psychologists and intelligence analysts and military lawyers, all of them wanting to know how I did what I did. I tried to explain, but none of them understood. They were convinced I was a domestic terrorist, and they were talking about espionage charges. I could have gone to jail for life, Chapel. But then they took me to this one office, in the subbasement of the Pentagon. You know that office. It used to be a fallout shelter for the Joint Chiefs.”

“You’re talking about Hollingshead’s office.”

“Yeah,” Angel said. “Director Hollingshead was there. He was nice to me. He was the first person who’d been nice to me since I was arrested. He said I shouldn’t worry, that they knew I was just fooling around. I was so relieved! I asked if I could go, and he got really sad and told me, no, it wasn’t that easy. What he could do for me was give me a job. They would find a job that would use my particular skills. He said it would give me a sense of purpose. It would give my life some meaning.

“And he was right. I love my job, Chapel. I love being able to make things happen and help agents in the field. I love the fact that I get to do good things.

“But there’s one problem. Sometimes, I find out that the government isn’t always… good. Sometimes I learn things I wish I never had to know. And that makes me wonder where my loyalties really should be.”

She fell silent. Chapel took a deep breath.

“Okay,” he said. “Well, we’ve seen plenty of evidence of that lately, haven’t we? So what are you telling me, Angel?”

“I’m trying to say I’m on your side. That I’m all yours, Chapel, from now on. No more secret agendas. No more withholding information.”

“I’m supposed to trust this sudden change of heart?” he asked.

“Yes,” Angel told him. She sounded like she expected him to say that in that case all was forgiven and they could go back to being best friends forever.

“Really? And what, exactly, made you switch allegiances?”

Angel was silent for a long moment. “I spoke to Marcia Kennedy,” she said.

SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+70:03

“I wasn’t supposed to talk to her, of course,” Angel said. “Director Hollingshead was quite clear about that. You weren’t supposed to continue your investigation. I wasn’t supposed to help you dig up any more secrets. But I had already called her and left a message on her voice mail, asking her if she could help. Asking if she could shed any light on why her name was on the kill list. She called me back, shortly after you were picked up at Denver International Airport. I tried to tell her that I’d made a mistake and that I didn’t have any questions for her, but she wanted to talk about it. She’d been wanting a sympathetic ear to listen to her story for more than twenty years. I couldn’t stop her once she got going, and then, I couldn’t bear to stop her. I had no right to stop her.” Angel’s voice was thick with emotion. “I recorded the call. I record all of my calls. Do you want to hear it?”

Chapel looked around the room. Julia and CPO Andrews were both staring at him, watching his face. He couldn’t quite read their expressions. He couldn’t tell if they were judging him or just waiting to hear his reply.

“I’m starting to think maybe I don’t,” he said, and Julia started to turn away. “Angel. Go ahead and play it anyway.”

Angel said nothing more. She just let the recording play.

“This is about the — the experiment. I know it is. What? No. No, I want to tell you. I need to. It started in 1984.”

Marcia Kennedy’s voice was thin and whispery. It sounded like her mouth was dry when she spoke, like getting the words out took real effort. Even distorted by the speaker of the motel room phone, the urgency in the voice was plain.

“Please, just — please. Please let me talk, I have to get through this in one go or I’ll start—

“1984, like I said. I was in a hospital then, a hospital in Oregon. I was in one of my depressive phases at the time. It was a bad one. I… I tried to hurt myself.

“They took me to this hospital. They pumped me full of lithium, which is the best drug they have to treat my disease. It works, I guess. It makes me feel normal again. It also makes me so thirsty I feel like I’m going to die, and it makes me gain all this weight, and… I don’t like it. I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I complained about it. They took me to see a doctor I’d never met before. I thought he was going to admonish me for complaining so much, but instead he was very kind. He said he understood that the side effects of lithium were bad, but that I had to take something. He said there was something else they could try. Some new kind of drug that the army had developed.

“I jumped at the chance. I mean, why wouldn’t I? He said it was experimental, that they weren’t sure what the side effects would be like, but I was so thirsty. I was so thirsty. I had to beg my father to sign the papers, the, the consent forms or whatever, but he did it. He looked so hopeful. He thought they were going to cure me. I just wanted to get out of that hospital so I could go home.

“They started me on the drug right away. They said it might make me gain weight, and I might have some problems with memory. They weren’t kidding. The trial for the drug ran nine months. I don’t remember more than a handful of days in that time. I remember sitting in a day room at the hospital, playing chess with somebody. She was schizophrenic and she cheated. She cheated at chess; she would just, just make up new rules, and say I had to play by them, but they didn’t make sense. I got really frustrated and I could barely breathe. I remember looking down and there was my stomach. It was huge. I felt like I’d swallowed a bowling ball. I started to cry because I’d gotten so fat. Weight gain was one of the side effects of lithium, too. I guess I thought they must be related kinds of drugs.

“Except this one didn’t make me thirsty. It made me nauseated. I don’t remember much of those months. But I remember always wanting to throw up. I remember my hair thinning, and my sweat smelled funny. I have little glimpses, sometimes. Little recollections. I remember the pattern of light on a wall, or I see myself in a mirror, and my skin was so clear. It had never been that clear in my life.

“At the end of the nine months I woke up in this bed, there was blood on the sheets and I had no idea what I was doing there. The doctor, the kindly doctor was there and he held my hand. He held my hand for hours because I was crying, except I didn’t know why I was crying. I felt like something had ended. Like something had been taken away from me but I didn’t know what. He told me I wasn’t thinking straight, that the drug had unexpected side effects. One of them was that it made me hallucinate some things, except I couldn’t remember any hallucinations. He told me it had also interacted badly with my digestive system, which explained the nausea. He said that because of the drug my appendix had become inflamed and that they had to remove it. I had a scar on my stomach, this huge scar right at the bottom of my stomach, right at my bikini line. He said that was where they took out my appendix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia got up without a word and left the room.

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

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

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

The thought made him gag a little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t follow,” Chapel said.

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

“A government plot—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t want to think about this. I don’t want to know these things,” Angel said. “Chapel — what’s your next move?”

“I don’t know yet,” he told her. “Let me think about it.”

SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+72:14

Eventually Julia decided that the transfusion had gone on long enough. Chapel was still short on blood, but CPO Andrews could only donate so much before her own health was at risk. Julia came back into the motel room and removed the needles from their arms. CPO Andrews got up slowly from the bed and then excused herself to go in the bathroom and wash her face.

Julia checked Chapel’s pulse and looked into his eyes, checking the response of his pupils. She rubbed his arm down with an antibacterial solution and then put a small adhesive bandage over the puncture. “How do you feel?” she asked.

“Better. A lot better, thanks to you.”

Julia nodded and looked away. He reached over and took her hand.

“You saved my life. Again.”

“I had a lot of help.” She started to pull away.

“Julia,” he said, “just talk to me for a second. Okay?”

She made an irritated noise and pulled her hand away. But she didn’t move away from him. “What is there to talk about?” she asked.

“I need to know if you’re okay,” he told her.

“No one shot me and left me to bleed out. I’m fine.”

“Physically, sure. But you’ve learned a lot of things recently that I’m sure you didn’t want to know.” He leaned over and put his arm around her. She didn’t push him away. “I know about emotional trauma. A lot of the guys I served with in Afghanistan came back suffering from PTSD. They couldn’t just return to their normal lives, not with what they’d become over there. They couldn’t sleep. They couldn’t talk to their wives or children without getting angry, without blowing up. Some of them just shut down, stopped talking or stopped getting out of bed.”

“I’m not — I’m handling this as best I can,” Julia said. “Chapel, this was my family doing all these things. My mom and my dad forcibly impregnated all those women. They raised the chimeras like their own children, and then they locked them up and threw away the key.”

Chapel pulled her closer. She laid her head on his shoulder.

“When I was a teenager, sitting in my room listening to Nirvana on my headphones and wondering which boys at school liked me, they were… they were out at that camp. They were there looking after their other kids, their two hundred sons. Training a whole generation of psychotic killers. I don’t…”

She stopped because tears had crowded up in her eyes and she couldn’t seem to speak until they’d all squirted down her cheeks.

“It’s like my entire life was a lie. A cover story. I was their cover story. Their alibi. That was the whole reason I existed.” She rubbed at her eyes with the balls of her thumbs. “I don’t understand it! I don’t understand any of it! I don’t know who I am anymore. Last week I was a veterinarian in New York City, with a crummy little apartment and an OkCupid profile I checked every once in a while and a standing date to have lunch with my mother every week. Who am I now?”

“You’re the same person,” Chapel said.

“I shot a man’s foot half off! I killed one of my brothers. My mom is gone, and my dad is probably going to die, and honestly — honestly, Chapel, and it bothers me, absolutely disgusts me to say this, but I think maybe he deserves it. I kind of want him to die to pay for what he did. How can I feel that way about my father? This isn’t Julia Taggart, DVM! This isn’t me!”

Chapel held her for a long time without saying a word. She was done with tears, but she rocked back and forth slowly, clutching her hands together in front of her. Clearly she’d needed this, needed to vent like this, for a long time. He’d been too busy chasing his mad quest to give her the chance.

Eventually she slowed her rocking and she just leaned into him, crowded up against him until they fell back on the bed and just lay there together. He stroked her hair, and she just breathed, breathed and did nothing else.

“I know how you feel,” he told her.

“Come on,” she whispered.

“Every soldier knows how you feel.”

“I’m no soldier,” she moaned.

“No. But listen. When you enlist in the military, you’re just some kid. You grew up, went to high school, maybe you got in some trouble or maybe you just didn’t know what else to do with your life, maybe you wanted to serve your country but frankly, a lot of soldiers I know just were looking for something to do. So they go to boot camp and everything about you is broken down. Everything you think you know about yourself is challenged and tested and evaluated. Then you get shipped overseas right into a war zone. People are trying to kill you all the time. Sometimes you have to try to kill other people. Everything you ever learned in church or in school or from your friends has to be put aside, put on hold, just so you can survive through another day. You give up every shred of who you were, who you thought you were, so you can be something else. Something that can fight, and will fight. Something that will survive no matter what.”

“Jesus,” Julia said. “Why would anyone choose that?”

“It’s hard to explain, but… you’re surrounded by other people just like you. People going through the same thing. They watch your back and keep you alive. You do the same for them because there’s nobody else who can. You get through every day because if you fail, if you lower your guard even for a moment, your friends might die. Friends isn’t even the right word. They’re more than that. There’s no good term at all for what your buddies become. But that’s the compensation. It’s the consolation for all the horror you face. You get these people in your life, these people who mean everything to you, and you know they feel exactly the same way about you. You’d never say it. They would tease the hell out of you if you did. But you love them.”

“You… do?” Julia asked. Maybe because she understood what he was trying to say to her.

“Believe it,” he told her. “Believe it. When you’re a soldier, you’re not alone. You are never alone.”

She pressed her face against his chest, and he just held her, held her close, because he knew that was exactly what she needed.

SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+73:21

After she’d rested for a bit, CPO Andrews went out and got some food and other supplies — some antibiotic cream for Chapel’s various wounds, new clothes for both Chapel and Julia, some toiletries for all of them and three disposable cell phones so that they could all stay in touch with Angel. Andrews and Julia both had their own phones, but they were afraid to use them. None of them were sure what was going to happen to them, whether CIA agents were hunting them down even then.

“Laughing Boy could be coming here, right now,” Julia pointed out.

“I’m actually more worried about Hollingshead,” Chapel told her.

CPO Andrews found the idea shocking — that was her boss he was talking about — but she’d worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency long enough to know it wasn’t impossible.

“He sent me to Denver,” Chapel explained, “and I’m sure he knew what was waiting there for me. I pushed him too hard when I investigated Camp Putnam. I wasn’t supposed to see that place. Now I’m a liability. Angel,” he said, because she was always listening via the speakerphone, “I don’t know how you left things with him—”

“I told him you’re dead,” she answered.

“Oh,” Chapel said.

“Judge Hayes had announced as much in his press conference. He claimed he had your body and was going to turn it over to the Denver county coroner. Director Hollingshead sounded pretty upset when I confirmed it.”

“I’ll just bet he did,” Chapel said, frowning. Hollingshead was an excellent spymaster, and that meant he had to be an excellent actor, sometimes.

CPO Andrews shook her head. “I don’t get it. Why would he want you dead? He chose you to track down the chimeras. There’s still one at large. Why would he want you dead now?”

“Because while I was so busy digging up CIA secrets — which suited him just fine, since he’s at war with Director Banks over there — I accidentally turned up one of his.” Chapel sat down on the bed and reached for a plastic container full of roasted chicken. He was starving. Blood loss could do that to you, he knew. “Rupert Hollingshead was in on the chimera project from the beginning. I’m pretty sure he ran the whole thing.”

No one spoke. The two women in the motel room stared at him. He was sure Angel was listening intently, too.

Chapel took a bite, chewed, swallowed. Wiped his hands on a napkin. “In 1990, Ellie Pechowski was recruited to teach the chimeras. She was recruited by a captain in the navy. It’s funny how ranks work — I’m a captain in the army, but that’s not the same rank. In the navy—”

“Captain is O-6, one rank below O-7, a one-star rear admiral,” CPO Andrews said. “You’re talking about my branch, now.”

Chapel nodded. “Captain Hollingshead was the one who recruited Pechowski. When we talked about her, he called her Ellie Pechowski, not Eleanor. Only people who know her call her Ellie.” He took another bite. “I can’t prove it. But I think he probably recruited William Taggart and Helen Bryant as well. I think he was the commanding officer at Camp Putnam. I think the chimera project wasn’t a CIA project at all. I think it was a Department of Defense project all along.”

“That’s — that’s—” CPO Andrews couldn’t seem to accept it.

“It makes sense. It makes a lot of sense,” Angel said. “It explains why Camp Putnam is a DoD facility, and why Hollingshead was the one who captured you when you went there, not Banks.”

Chapel nodded. He didn’t like this much. He wished it weren’t true. But the evidence kept mounting. “I think he’s been lying to me — to us — all along. For one thing, I don’t think there even is a virus.”

“What?” Julia asked, laughing as if the idea was ludicrous.

“Think about it,” Chapel said. “Ellie Pechowski and your parents had constant exposure to the chimeras for years. But nobody ever treated them like Typhoid Mary. They were never quarantined, and until now nobody tried to kill them.”

“No virus,” Julia said, staring at her hands. “But… Laughing Boy…”

“They claim he’s tracking down anyone who might be exposed. That’s a great cover story. It lets him kill anyone who might be a witness — there won’t be any serious oversight if Banks can claim that Laughing Boy is just controlling the outbreak of a weaponized virus. Even the president would sign off on that. But it also means Laughing Boy can kill anyone who even saw a chimera. Hollingshead and the DoD started this thing. Banks is trying to erase it from history. That’s what this has all been about. I understand the kill list now. I know why those people were chosen to die. They’re the only ones who know what happened. The only people who could bear witness to what Hollingshead did.”

“Which means,” Angel pointed out, “that everyone in this room is on that list — and I am, too.”

“They want to kill us,” Julia said.

“Yes,” Chapel told her.

“Okay. How do we stop them?”

SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+74:22

Chapel gave her a warm smile. “I have an idea about that. It means getting your father — alive — to someone who’ll listen. Congress, maybe. Or the media if that’s not an option. We make this thing part of the public record. Expose the secret. Tell the world what they did to those two hundred women.”

Julia and CPO Andrews both seemed to like the idea. Chapel wasn’t as crazy about it, himself. It was treason. It was breaking every rule he’d ever learned as a spy. But it was the only way out of this.

“We have one advantage,” Chapel said. He reached for the new shirt Andrews had bought him and started pulling it on. “They think I’m dead. Angel, what did you tell Hollingshead about Julia?”

“He thinks she’s on a train headed back to New York City. I considered telling him that CPO Andrews was taking her back on the jet, but it would be too easy for him to track that. She has to file a flight plan every time she moves to a new location.”

“If you’re headed for Alaska, I’ll take you, of course,” Andrews said. “But by that same reasoning he’ll know right away that you’re alive, as soon as he checks the flight records. There would be no other reason for me to take the plane to Alaska.”

“We’ll just have to risk it. Hope that he’s preoccupied and doesn’t check those records, at least not until we’ve got Taggart. It puts even more time pressure on us, but I don’t see any other way to get there in a hurry. How soon can you have the jet ready?”

“Hold on,” Julia said.

Chapel stopped buttoning his shirt to face her.

“You lost nearly half your entire blood volume,” she said.

“And got it back, from the transfusion. I feel fine,” he insisted.

“I’m sure you feel great. People always do after getting new blood. You’re still weak, regardless of how you feel. You were shot, Chapel. You have a gunshot wound. You shouldn’t be going anywhere except a hospital.”

“We don’t have time,” he told her.

“Believe me, I get it. All our lives are at stake. And I hear what you’re saying, that we have to move quickly before they come for us. But if your wound reopens in the middle of a firefight, or you just collapse from anemia… I don’t know how I’ll feel about that. I can’t just let you kill yourself, Chapel.”

“ ‘First do no harm,’ right? That’s the oath they made you swear?”

“I’m not a people doctor. My oath said something about only using my skills for the benefit of society. Whatever. I’m not saying this as your veterinarian. I’m saying it as your… buddy.”

Chapel reached out and put his hand on her arm. She didn’t shy away.

For a long moment they just stared into each other’s eyes.

“Angel,” CPO Andrews said, “can you book these two a room? Another room, I mean?”

Julia and Chapel turned to face her as one. “What?” they both asked.

The CPO just smiled knowingly.

“Are you going to try to stop me from going to Alaska?” Chapel asked Julia.

“I guess not. Just consider it to be against medical advice.” Julia turned around and started gathering up her things. “It’ll be cold in Alaska. It’s probably still winter there. Angel, can you order us some parkas? And maybe some nice, warm boots.”

“I’ll have them sent to the plane,” the speakerphone told her.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 15, T+75:37

There were no mandarin oranges or goat cheese salads left on the jet — the tiny galley had never been meant to be used so often. Besides, it felt wrong to ask CPO Andrews to act like a stewardess now that she was part of their conspiracy. The three of them waited for takeoff together and ate cold chicken, the remains of the meal Andrews had gathered in Boulder.

On the table between the jet’s seats lay a cell phone, a cheap disposable flip phone that they left open so Angel could join their conversation. There was no need for hands-free sets now, since Chapel wanted Julia and Andrews to hear everything that was said.

“It’s five and a half hours in the air to reach Fairbanks International,” CPO Andrews told them. “That’s the closest airport to the address we have for William Taggart. Probably another hour in ground transport. That probably means snowmobiles, of all things. My weather data says it’s still very much winter up there — the snowpack won’t melt until May — and there are drifts five feet deep in the surrounding areas.”

“Snowmachines,” Chapel said. “In Alaska, they have snowmachines, not snowmobiles.”

“What’s the difference?” Julia asked.

“In Alaska, they’re called snowmachines. Everywhere else they’re called snowmobiles.”

Julia stuck her tongue out at him and he laughed. It was good to see her smiling again. He’d worried that the trauma she’d endured might have broken her spirit. Of course, every time he’d thought the woman must surely be at the end of her rope, she’d surprised him by coming back stronger. He should have expected no less.

“Angel,” Chapel said, “assuming Ian was traveling by train, how long would it take him to reach Fairbanks?”

“It’s hard to say. There’s no direct rail service — Amtrak only takes you as far as Vancouver,” Angel answered. Chapel could hear her clacking away at her keyboard. “If he was driving a car, it would take three days and nine hours, but of course, he won’t know how to drive. So it has to be longer than that, given the weird ground transportation options he’s looking at. How much longer I can only estimate. Say, a minimum of three and a half days.”

Chapel checked his watch. “So we’ll still arrive before him. It’ll be close, but we’ll make it.”

Everyone sighed a deep breath of relief.

“What about Laughing Boy?” Chapel asked. “Have you had any luck tracking him?”

Angel sounded apologetic. “No. He checked himself out of the hospital in Atlanta shortly after you left Stone Mountain. Since then he’s been a ghost. I did find out one thing you’re not going to like. There was a fire at the visitors’ center on Stone Mountain. A bunch of park rangers died. I think we can assume that was no accident.”

Chapel leaned forward in his seat. “What about Jeremy Funt?”

“Still in a hospital in Georgia. Still under armed guard — guards sent there by Director Hollingshead,” Angel pointed out. “Banks may very well want him dead, but Hollingshead is protecting him.”

Chapel nodded. He had a sudden hunch. “What about Ellie Pechowski? Have you been in touch with her at all?”

“She’s very much alive, if that’s what you’re asking. Do you want me to go down the list? Ellie, Marcia Kennedy, Olivia Nguyen, and Christina Smollett are all fine; there’s no sign they’ve been visited by the CIA or anybody else who might wish them harm. I got a phone call from Marcia Kennedy just an hour ago, asking if it was still dangerous for her to go outside. I told her yes, but I think you were right, that Laughing Boy needs to have proof someone’s been exposed to the virus before he can kill them. I think they’re safe, as long as Ian doesn’t come to see them.”

“That’s what we’re going to try to stop, now,” Chapel told her. “I almost hate to ask, but what about Franklin Hayes?”

“Perfectly healthy,” Angel told him, “and giving nonstop press conferences. He’s still reporting that you’re dead, that you died saving him from Quinn.”

“Wishful thinking,” Chapel said. “He’s probably assuming Laughing Boy will kill me before I can prove him wrong.”

“In the press conferences, whenever he talks about the ‘assassin,’ he always uses the term ‘domestic terrorist.’ There’s been no release of information concerning Quinn’s identity — or the fact that he wasn’t quite human. The media’s going crazy with the story, though, trying to link Quinn to everyone from Timothy McVeigh to the Unabomber to the Earth Liberation Front. Both sides, Democrats and Republicans, have been quick to blame the lunatic fringe of the other party. I’m guessing that Franklin Hayes won’t be getting any tricky questions at his confirmation hearing when he goes before the Senate. If they stop short of giving him a Bronze Star, I’ll be surprised.”

“Civilians aren’t eligible for that medal. You can only earn it during wartime.”

Angel laughed. “Honey, they’re already calling him a frontline veteran of the culture wars.”

Chapel fumed, but he had worse enemies to face yet. Maybe someday, when the case was broken wide open, he’d have a chance to tell the real story and take Franklin Hayes down a peg.

Maybe.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 15, T+76:06

Once they were in the air, CPO Andrews brought a bottle of Scotch and three tumblers out of the galley and they all shared a drink. “This is good stuff. Sorry you can’t join in, Angel,” Chapel said, as he sipped at the brown liquor.

“I’ve got a Red Bull here and some leftover Chinese food,” Angel told him over the phone that lay on the table. “Works for me.”

Chapel exhaled deeply and lay back in his seat. “We should all try to get some sleep,” he said, and the women agreed. CPO Andrews helped them recline the seats so they became full, comfortable beds. She dimmed the cabin lights and then headed back toward her galley.

“You’re not going to sleep in one of these things?” Julia asked.

“I have a bunk back there and a little TV set,” Andrews said, shrugging. Chapel thought she might have winked at Julia, but he couldn’t be sure. “I’ll be fine.”

Before she left, Chapel had one question for her. He glanced toward the front of the cabin, toward the jet’s cockpit. “I’ve never seen the pilot of this plane,” he said.

“No, and you won’t,” Andrews told him. “He has his own exit from the cockpit, and he never needs to come back here. Hollingshead wanted it that way — he holds all kinds of meetings in this jet, and the things he has to say aren’t for everyone’s ears. Don’t worry about the pilot. He has no idea what we’re up to, and he doesn’t want to know. He’s cleared to receive my orders about where we fly to and that’s it. If we need to communicate with him or vice versa, there’s an intercom system, but it’s only used in emergencies.”

Chapel nodded. It was for the best, of course. CPO Andrews had probably wrecked her career already by conspiring with him and Julia. There was no need for the pilot to be implicated.

“Good night,” Andrews said, and she headed aft.

“Good night,” he told her. He lay down in his seat-turned-bed and grabbed a blanket. Before he could pull it over himself, though, Julia came and lay down next to him, spooning up against him in the seat. He didn’t ask why. Frankly, he was glad for her warmth lying against him.

Julia said nothing. She pulled a pillow around to support her head, pulled the blanket up over their shoulders, and was probably out like a light. Maybe she was learning a few things, like how to sleep anywhere and whenever she was given the chance.

He regretted that she’d had to learn that. Or what it felt like to kill a man. But he was grateful she’d been there — grateful that she’d saved his life so many times, but also just grateful that he’d gotten a chance to know her. To be with her.

For a long while he just lay next to her, watching her red hair stir in front of his face, blowing this way and that with his breath. Eventually he lifted his arm and gently placed it around her waist.

“Mrmph,” she muttered, and snuggled back against him some more. The smell of her, the presence of her, filled his senses. It was like they were alone, floating on a cloud high over the mountains, high above the world.

He couldn’t help it. He leaned forward and kissed the back of her neck. In response she brought her hand down and placed it over his. He kissed her neck again and she shivered, then laced her fingers through his.

“Can’t sleep?” she whispered. She wriggled back against him again and gasped in surprise. He had a pretty good idea what she’d just felt. “Apparently not,” she said. She turned her head so she could look at him over her shoulder.

“I’m just glad you’re here,” he told her.

She twisted around enough to kiss him on the lips. “Me too,” she told him. She rearranged herself to spoon him again as if she planned on going back to sleep, but she stroked his thumb with hers, and he knew she was at least half awake now.

He kissed her neck again, and this time her back arched. She let out a pleased sigh and pulled his hand up to her mouth. She kissed each of his fingers in turn. “This might be our last chance,” she said, and he knew exactly what she meant, but he waited for her to make the next move.

She did so by bringing his hand down to cup her breast. He squeezed it gently and she sighed again. Through her sweater and her bra he felt her nipple begin to harden and he stroked it with his fingers. He kissed her neck more passionately now, and she squirmed against him, rubbing up and down on him until he couldn’t stand it. He moved his hand down between her legs and felt the heat there, heat and a little dampness, even through the thick fabric of her jeans.

“Ohhh,” she said. “Chapel… last time, in Atlanta, it was about comfort. This time it’s more. Right?”

“Yes,” he told her, and he pressed his mouth against her neck, her back. He unbuttoned her jeans and unzipped them. She moved his hand down inside her panties and he slipped a finger inside of her, feeling how wet she was.

With her help he pushed her pants down, then unzipped his own fly. Her hand found him and guided him into her from behind. Their bodies fit together effortlessly. She was more than ready for him and he grabbed her hip, ready to thrust deeply into her, but she pushed back. “No,” she said. “Take it slowly. In fact, don’t move. You shouldn’t be exerting yourself.”

“Oh,” he said. “Should I… stop?” He moved his hand against her body, his fingers making circles through her damp pubic hair, finding the right spot.

“No,” she told him. “No, I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that at… all.” Her ass slid back and forth against him in tiny movements that were going to drive him insane. “Just… stay there. Oh, yes. Right there.” She ground against him and he started to gasp. It was torture, utterly sweet torture, and he desperately wanted to grab her and just fuck her, but he knew how to obey orders. The tip of his index finger made tiny circles on her clitoris and she moved with her own rhythm, her own pace. He could feel her body shivering, feel her rising toward climax. Deep inside her, he felt his own body surging with blood as she took him along for the ride.

“Right there,” she said again, and pushed her hand down over his, crushing his fingers against her body. “Right… yes… there… yessss… Don’t you dare stop,” Julia told him, and pushed his hand back to where it had been. The whole time her ass shifted against him, rubbing up and down in tiny increments until he complied. He forgot all about — whatever it was that had made him stop — and moved his finger in quicker, ever smaller circles until Julia was bucking against him, thrusting backward with her ass again, and again, and again, and—

“Chapel, I’m going to come,” she told him, and looked back over her shoulder at him. “I’m going to — I’m going to—” Her lips were slightly parted and her hair had fallen down over one of her eyes. “I want you to come with me,” she begged, and he kissed her deeply even as their bodies jerked and ground together, and he felt himself surging, passing the point where stopping was even an option. She pushed herself back against him one last time and then put her free hand up over her face as her body squeezed him inside of her, as they came together. He pulled his hand free of hers and lifted her fingers away from her face so he could watch her, watch her eyes as she came. He stared deep into her eyes and saw what he was looking for there, even as his own body released all his tension into her. He cried out and she covered his mouth with hers and they kissed, just kissed for the longest time as they rode out the wave of their shared orgasm.

Eventually she relaxed and dropped back against him, her back wriggling against his chest. She turned her face toward the pillow and just breathed, breathed in the same rhythm as his own breath. She took his hand in both of hers and used it for a pillow and in a moment he realized she was falling asleep, spent and in perfect comfort with him there, still inside of her.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 15, T+80:49

Chapel woke later to find the cabin lights slowly coming back on. He blinked his eyes and gently stirred Julia. “I think it’s time to get up,” he said.

CPO Andrews’s voice over the intercom was soft and pleasant. “Good morning. We’ll be landing soon. I have a simple breakfast of leftover chicken and vegetables, and a little bread. I’ll come into the cabin in a few minutes to serve it.”

Julia looked up groggily. She smiled when she saw Chapel’s face and leaned in to peck him on the lips. Then she squirmed around to pull her pants back up and zip them. Chapel did the same.

When CPO Andrews entered the cabin, she carried their breakfast on a tray, which she set down on the table between the seats. “It’s a little before eleven in Fairbanks,” she said. “The current temperature is hovering around thirty-six degrees and it’s snowing, but just a little. It won’t interfere with our landing. I’m going to the galley to prepare for landing, so you won’t see me again until we touch down,” she said.

“Uh, thanks,” Chapel told her, reaching for a glass of juice.

This time, Andrews definitely winked before she headed aft.

Julia dropped her fork. “She — she must have heard us,” she said.

Chapel watched her face. She was blushing, and with her fair skin her whole face turned red, as well as her ears.

“It’s a small plane,” Chapel said, apologetically.

“But I was trying to be quiet!” Julia put a hand over her mouth. “Oh God. I am so embarrassed.”

Chapel bent over his breakfast and ate heartily. He had no comment to make.

IN TRANSIT: APRIL 15, T+81:21

Fairbanks International Airport might have been huge and cosmopolitan or it could have been a tiny airstrip. There was no way to tell. The snow had picked up while they taxied across the runway, and now the whole sky had turned featureless white. Fat, wet flakes landed on Julia’s blue-gray parka and collected in her unbrushed hair. Chapel squinted through the snow and tried to make out the terminal.

CPO Andrews hugged herself in the cold. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

“No,” Chapel told her. “I need you here, ready to take off again as soon as we get Taggart.”

Andrews shook her head. “Listen, at least — Julia, you take this.” She reached inside her jacket and drew her sidearm. It was a snub-nosed revolver. She handed it over to Julia, who held it as if it were a poisonous snake.

Then Andrews wished them luck and closed the door behind them.

They walked across to the main terminal building. At the ground transportation desk, Chapel learned it was easier to rent a snowmachine than it was to rent a car.

“The roads here are treacherous all winter,” the clerk explained, showing them to their vehicle. “Snowmachines are the best way to get around. Now which of you is driving—” He stopped suddenly and stared at the way Chapel’s left sleeve hung loose from his shoulder. “Here you go,” he said, handing Julia the keys.

Chapel looked at the snowmachine. It was bigger than he’d expected, a long, sleek model with skids in front and big, powerful-looking tracks in back. It had room for two, a high windshield, and a spare gas can mounted behind the rear seat. It was no racing model — this was a utility vehicle, meant for getting around over rough, snowy terrain. A workingman’s snowmachine.

Steering it, however, meant holding on to a pair of handlebars. That was beyond him now that he’d lost his artificial arm.

“You ever drive one of these before?” he asked Julia as she climbed into the front position. He remembered she was from New York City. “You ever drive a car?”

“Back in the Catskills, sure,” she said. “Admittedly, that was fifteen years ago.” She shrugged and reached up to touch the new hands-free unit in her ear. Angel had made sure they each had one so she could talk to them both. “I have someone to walk me through it,” she said. She gunned the throttle, and the machine roared underneath her. “Ooh,” she said. “I might like this.”

Chapel climbed on behind her and wrapped his arm around her waist. They leaned forward together, and she steered the machine out onto the open snow, and they were off.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+81:45

The first mile on the snowmachine made Chapel consider seriously just jumping off and walking to their destination. Julia kept goosing the throttle when she thought she was going too slow and stamping on the brake every time the machine fishtailed on a patch of ice, and it was all Chapel could do to hang on. But he should have known by then that she was a fast learner, and she rarely made the same mistake twice. After a while she was driving like a pro, keeping her speed steady and her treads well in contact with the ground. He had to admit he was impressed. He wondered if he could have taught himself to drive the machine as quickly.

The snow made no sound as it fell, and the afternoon sun melted it nearly as fast as it accumulated, but it never stopped. Julia stayed close to the roads where she could, but they were already slick with ice and she had an easier time cutting across open fields. They headed south of the city, across the Tanana Flats, a vast frozen plain that ran unbroken as far as Mount McKinley and the Alaska Mountains.

Chapel thought that William Taggart could have chosen a more hospitable location for his lab. Ahead of them, at the far edge of the Flats, lay a maze of twisting canyons carved by glaciers, a landscape of nothing but snow and dark rock. It would be way too easy to get lost back in those canyons if you didn’t have Angel whispering in your ear. Visitors weren’t even allowed into the more mountainous parts of the park except on special buses. It was rugged terrain even in summer, and now, with winter only slowly loosening its grip on Alaska, it seemed like a great place to get yourself killed.

They started to see signs warning them that the park was off-limits to snowmachines, but Angel told them to turn off and head west anyway. They entered a narrow canyon between two high ridges and headed south again, skirting the highway as it bent around to follow the river that formed the northern border of the park. Down here in the shelter of the mountains more trees grew, and the only path they had to follow was the road, which they had to cross every once in a while to avoid obstacles.

“You’re close, now,” Angel said, and Chapel was glad for it. It felt colder and darker by the river, and the snow was falling heavier. They headed away from the road, north along an old logging trail. The ground was broken by permafrost and general disuse, and the snowmachine bounced and shook even when Julia slowed them down to a crawl. “We never would have made it this far in a car,” she shouted back over her shoulder. “What the hell does my dad do out here?”

“I thought you might have some clue,” Chapel shouted back.

“What?” she asked.

Angel repeated his words, but Julia just shrugged. “I haven’t spoken to him in years. I knew he was in Alaska, but I didn’t even know which city.”

An even rougher path split off from the logging trail. It wound through a stand of pine trees that looked like new growth — few of them were more than ten feet tall. The darkness of the place grew, even though somewhere overhead, through the cloud cover, the sun was shining.

Up ahead, in the lee of a high cliff, stood a small cluster of unremarkable buildings. There was no fence, nor any sign, but Angel was sure of it.

“You’re here,” she told them.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+83:01

Julia switched off the snowmachine and an incredible silence settled over the clearing in the trees. After a few seconds Chapel could hear the individual snowflakes falling on the ground around him.

He climbed off the back of the machine and took a few steps toward the main building. It was a squat, windowless structure, built of heavy brick that looked like it could survive being buried in snow every year. A metal stovepipe stuck up from one end, pushing white steam or smoke into the air that was the same color as the snow, the same color as the sky. A snowmachine not unlike theirs sat parked near the single door. The machine looked like it had seen some heavy use — duct tape had patched a crack in its windshield, and the skids were scuffed and pockmarked.

Chapel looked back and saw Julia still straddling their snowmachine, her hands on the handlebars as if she might start the vehicle up and drive away.

“You coming?” he asked her. “You don’t have to.”

She nodded. She was looking at the building as if she could see through its walls. “Give me a second,” she said.

He understood. Her father was in there, a man she’d never gotten along with. A man who had done terrible things. He waited in silence. He could feel his nose hairs freezing, but he just gave her the time she needed.

“Okay,” she said, finally. Just as he’d known she would. She got off the machine and came up to the door with him. Reaching out one hand, she knocked hard on the door. There was no bell or intercom or any other way to summon the inhabitants.

Nor was there any answer to the knock. They stood together, their breath frosting the air between them. Snowflakes settled on Julia’s eyelashes. She knocked again.

Chapel tried the knob. It turned easily — the door wasn’t locked.

They stepped inside, out of the snow. The room beyond the door was wide and open, only a little warmer than the outside air. The inside of the building was even less impressive than its exterior. The interior was lined with row after row of cinder blocks, and one wall of the room was a big rolling door, like a more secure version of a garage door. If it were opened, the building would offer no shelter at all from the elements. There was little furniture inside except for three waist-high aluminum slabs.

On top of each slab lay a grizzly bear, curled up and sleeping, their enormous bodies rising and falling slowly as they breathed. Electrodes were buried in their thick fur and attached to wires that hung from the ceiling. Where the wires came together they were gathered into thick cables.

Chapel put his arm out to hold Julia back. “Watch out,” he said.

The bear closest to them had opened one eye. It watched them with a dull indifference. The bear moved its forelegs a few inches, sliding them across the slab as if it would start to get down at any moment. Then, as Chapel held his breath, the bear tucked the foreleg in, closer to its body, and its eye closed again.

“This is not what I expected,” Julia said.

“No,” Chapel agreed. He tried to think of something else to say.

Before any words came to him, Julia approached one of the bears — one that had not stirred — and walked slowly around its slab, examining it without touching it. Chapel wanted to drag her back, to get them both out of there, but he didn’t want to risk making any noise.

“They don’t appear to have been ill-treated,” Julia said, bending low to examine one bear’s nostrils.

“Are they drugged?” Chapel asked, whispering, though she’d spoken at conversational volume. Having grown up in Florida, he’d learned a healthy respect for animals that could maul and eat him without much provocation. You didn’t mess with alligators if you wanted to live to go to high school, and he had a feeling grizzly bears belonged in that same category.

Of course, she was a veterinarian. Maybe she knew what she was doing.

“They’re hibernating,” Julia told him. “Actually, ‘denning’ is the preferred term. Bears don’t really hibernate.”

“No?” Chapel asked.

“No, their body temperatures never fall low enough for that, and they can be woken up a lot more easily than, say, a hibernating bat or hedgehog.”

“Then maybe you should keep your voice down,” Chapel told her.

“Aren’t they gorgeous? You just want to curl up with them and pet their fur,” she said, almost touching a bear’s two-inch-long claws. “Not a good idea, though. They’re way stronger than they look, and a hell of a lot faster. They can run faster than us. And they’re highly aggressive — it doesn’t take much to set them off.”

“Like the chimeras,” Chapel pointed out. Meaning, she should get away from them and the two of them should leave. As cold as it was, the air in the room was humid and full of the smell of the bears, and he was feeling distinctly uncomfortable. Give Chapel a squad of heavily armed Taliban screaming for his death and he knew how to react to that. This was wholly outside his sphere of knowledge.

“My dad’s not here,” Julia said. “He must be in one of the other buildings.” She took one last look around and inhaled deeply. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“Okay,” Chapel said. He backed toward the door slowly, not wanting to take his eyes off the bears.

When the door opened behind him, he jumped and nearly shouted in panic.

A man in a heavy parka stood there, looking in at them. He looked like he was in his midtwenties, and he had a calm, unexceptional face. “Who are you?” he demanded. “What are you doing in here?”

“We’re looking for William Taggart,” Julia told him. “He’s my father.”

The man’s expression didn’t change. “He’s over in the lab. You shouldn’t be in here. We can’t risk exposing the bears to anything you track in. What do you want with Dr. Taggart?”

Julia looked confused. “I told you, he’s my father. And he’s… in danger. I’ve come to find him and take him out of here.”

The man turned to face Chapel, as if expecting him to introduce himself. Chapel stayed silent. There was something about this guy he didn’t like. He felt wrong, even though Chapel couldn’t have said why.

“Dr. Taggart can’t leave. Not now,” the man said. He was still staring at Chapel. When Chapel didn’t say anything, he held out one hand for Chapel to shake.

Chapel grabbed him by the wrist and twisted around to get the stump of his left shoulder into the man’s stomach, knocking him off balance. Chapel pushed hard, and the man fell backward out of the door, into the snow, with Chapel almost on top of him.

A look of sudden rage passed over the man’s face. But that wasn’t what Chapel was watching. When the man staggered out into the daylight, the sun hit him right in the eyes. Just as Chapel had expected, black nictitating membranes slid down over the man’s eyes to protect them from the sudden light.

Chapel rolled off him and up to his feet, drawing his sidearm in the same motion. He pointed the weapon right at the man’s face.

“Ian,” he said, “don’t you fucking move.”

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+83:16

The chimera blinked and spat some snow out of his mouth. He put his hands down on the ground as if he might spring up at any second, jump up and right at Chapel.

“Where’s Taggart?” Chapel demanded. “What have you done with him? Did you kill him? I don’t know how you got here so quickly, but if you killed him, you’re going to pay. And don’t get any crazy ideas about trying to trick me. I’ve met your brothers. Malcolm, and Quinn, and the one who went to New York. The one who killed Helen Bryant.”

“Brody,” Ian said.

“Brody, fine. He’s dead. They’re all dead, except for you. And I don’t think you’re going to last much longer.”

“Brody killed her,” Ian said. “He actually did it.” He shook his head. His body was tense on the ground, a steel spring ready to be triggered.

Chapel took a step back, his aim on Ian’s forehead never wavering. He should just do it, he knew. He should shoot now and end this. He’d tried to convince Malcolm to come in peacefully and look where that had gotten him.

Ian started to sit up.

“I told you, don’t move,” Chapel said.

Julia appeared in the doorway of the building where the bears were hibernating. She looked scared.

“Stay back,” Chapel told her, and she nodded.

“You killed them,” Ian said. “All of them?”

“Three of them. Yeah,” Chapel said. “I had to. They would have killed me, otherwise. They would have killed a lot of people. You need to realize, right now, that you’ve already failed. That getting up right now, that fighting me, will get you exactly nothing. Just because I killed them doesn’t mean you need to fight me.”

“You must know a little about us,” Ian said. He held himself perfectly still. Probably biding his time. “Maybe you know how we feel about someone who can kill a chimera in a fair fight. We respect that.”

Chapel thought of Camp Putnam. Of four corpses mounted on a blackboard, and the words scrawled beside them. He remembered what Samuel had told him, about the gang that Ian had ambushed and destroyed. “I know about Alan, and what you did to him and his gang,” Chapel said. “So I know your respect isn’t worth a whole lot.”

“You probably also know I won’t make this easy on you. Why don’t we both back down? You leave here. I won’t kill you.”

Chapel squinted at Ian, wondering what to do. Then, over to his left he heard feet crunching on snow. He didn’t move, didn’t look away from Ian’s face.

Julia stepped out of the doorway. “Dad?” she said.

Chapel couldn’t help himself. His eyes flicked sideways, and he saw another man, an older man, standing twenty feet away. William Taggart. Alive and apparently unharmed.

“What are you doing with my new lab tech?” Taggart asked.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+83:26

“Everyone just stay calm,” Chapel said, once they had relocated to the lab.

“Young man,” William Taggart said, “that would be a lot easier if you weren’t holding that gun.”

Taggart was in his midsixties but looked younger to Chapel. He had a wild shock of red hair that stuck up almost straight from his receding hairline, and bright eyes that never stopped moving. He talked elaborately with his hands and always seemed excited about something.

His lab was little more than a shack, much smaller and more cramped than the building that housed the three bears. Much of it was filled with equipment — centrifuges, racks of test tubes, piles of computer towers tied to laptops by thick bundles of cables. The rest was filled with cages. Cages full of bats and hedgehogs and squirrels in three different colors. Every animal in every cage was fast asleep, breathing so slowly it was hard to realize they weren’t dead. They were all hibernating, and like the bears they were being constantly monitored by electrodes buried under their fur.

“What — exactly — are you studying here?” Chapel asked. “And why is the CIA funding it?”

Taggart’s eyes went wide, and his smile lit up the room. “I’ve found the DNA sequence that codes for hibernation,” he said, grabbing a nearby cage and peering down at the sleeping hedgehog inside. “It’s so simple! For a long time we’ve understood the metabolic pathways involved in hibernatory behavior, but we’ve lacked the genetic understanding to know why some animals do it and some don’t. Just imagine what we could achieve if humans could hibernate. Can you grasp how useful that would be, to be able to program yourself to sleep that deeply, any time you wanted? The possibilities are enormous, from spaceflight to military applications—”

Chapel shook his head. “I don’t think the CIA has manned missions to Mars planned for this.”

“Well… no, probably not,” Taggart admitted. “They probably want to use it to torture people or something; that’s what they’re good at. But what if I could put you to sleep for four months, at the end of which you would have lost twenty-five percent of your body weight? We could end obesity and curb the diabetes epidemic!”

“Or turn Guantanamo Bay into a warehouse full of people the government doesn’t like,” Julia said, “asleep for as long as we wanted.”

“That’s a horrible thought,” Taggart admitted.

“The CIA is famous for taking horrible thoughts and making them realities,” Chapel pointed out. “Like, say, the chimeras.”

Taggart threw his hands in the air. “I knew it would come to this! That’s why you came here, isn’t it? To accuse me of doing bad things. Maybe you thought I would get all ashamed and start apologizing.”

“It would be a start,” Julia said. “Dad, we found out what you did to all those mentally ill women. We found out about their — their mothers.”

Every eye in the room turned to look at Ian.

The chimera was sitting quietly in a chair at one end of the room. He’d allowed Chapel to tie him to it with lengths of computer cable. Chapel had no doubt that when Ian was ready he could break those bonds without much trouble. But tying Ian up made him feel marginally better.

“Apologies and the like can wait,” Chapel insisted. “We actually came here to save you. From him.”

“As you can see,” Taggart said, “that wasn’t necessary. Ian’s been quite pleasant company, actually. He just showed up here about three days ago, and since then he’s been helping me with some of the more mundane tasks. Cleaning the place, at first, but now I’ve taught him to titrate samples and prepare them in a centrifuge. He’s an amazingly quick learner and—”

“Three days?” Chapel asked. “He’s been here three days?”

“Yes. He showed up even before I got that phone call saying I was in danger.”

Chapel’s eyes went wide. There was no way Ian could have gotten to Alaska that quickly on trains or even in a car. He must have flown directly to Fairbanks after escaping from Camp Putnam. The Voice must have helped with that. This whole time Chapel had been racing against the clock, trying desperately to get to Alaska before Ian could… and the chimera had been here the whole time.

But then something else occurred to him. “When Angel called you to warn you someone was coming here to kill you, you didn’t even mention to her that someone — that a chimera — had already arrived?”

“Ian and I had already come to our arrangement by then,” Taggart pointed out.

“Arrangement?” Chapel asked.

It was Ian who answered. “I had questions. I had a lot of questions. I needed to know why I’d been created, mostly. I needed to understand. So I made a deal with Dr. Taggart. I promised I would control myself, that I wouldn’t hurt anyone, if he would tell me what I wanted to know.”

“You’re a chimera,” Chapel pointed out. “You can’t make a promise like that. Any kind of frustration, any small thwarting of your will can set you off. I’ve seen it — I’ve watched your brothers go from reasonable to homicidal in seconds. You can’t control it!”

“Any kind of frustration,” Ian said, smiling. “Like, for instance, having a gun pointed at my face and being threatened with death right when I’m about to find out the answer to the most pressing question of my life? You mean a frustration like that?”

Chapel had to admit that Ian had already proven him wrong. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said.

“It’s a matter of will,” Ian told him.

Chapel shook his head. “No. I’ve tried to reason with chimeras. I know where that gets you. You’re a time bomb, Ian.” He turned to face Taggart. “Doctor — back me up here. I don’t know why you created the chimeras, but I know they were a failure. You had to lock them up in Camp Putnam, seal them off from the world because they were too violent. Maybe you thought they could be something else, but their level of aggression was more than you could handle. They—”

“I beg your pardon,” Taggart said, sneering. “There was no failure. The chimeras were — are — exactly what I meant them to be.”

“You meant them to be so aggressive they killed each other off while the U.S. military could only stand back and watch?” Chapel demanded. “You meant for them to be violent psychopaths?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Taggart said. “But the answer is yes.”

“Good God!” Chapel exclaimed. “What the hell did you think you were playing at? Why on earth did anyone authorize you to make these things?”

Taggart took a step backward and leaned against a stack of cages full of sleeping bats. “As an insurance policy, of course.”

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+83:37

“Insurance policy?” Chapel asked, deeply confused. “Against what?”

“All this is top secret, Captain,” Taggart said. “Are you sure you’re cleared to hear this? I know my daughter isn’t.”

“Dad,” Julia said, “he has a gun.”

Apparently that was enough. Taggart shrugged and inhaled deeply before beginning his story. “It was 1979 when I was first brought in to consult on what became the chimera project. It had a code name back then — Project Darling Green — which thankfully was abandoned later, when we actually realized we could do it, we could solve the problem.”

“What problem?” Chapel demanded.

“Nuclear winter,” Taggart said. “You’re young. You might not remember what it was like back then, during the Cold War. We were locked in a stalemate with the Russians for so long. They hated us, wanted to conquer us. And we would do anything — anything — to stop them from taking over the world. After the Cuban Missile Crisis we understood that if either side started a war, it just wouldn’t stop. Nuclear missiles would launch. The world would be reduced to ashes. There were generals back then, smart men, really, who thought we could still win. That even after a nuclear exchange America could prevail. By the seventies, though, we scientists had figured out that was wrong — simply untrue. A thermonuclear exchange on a global level wouldn’t just turn cities to rubble and give a few people cancer. It would fill the sky with dust that would linger for years. It would change the planet’s climate and make human survival — not just American survival but the future of the human race — next to impossible. If the Russians launched against us, it would be the end of humanity.”

“But the Russians knew that, too,” Chapel pointed out. “That’s why they never launched.”

“It’s why they didn’t launch when they could still control their people,” Taggart said. “Even then, even in ’79, we could see the Politburo wouldn’t last forever. The Soviet Union was crumbling. The Pentagon was convinced, absolutely convinced, that if a coup or a popular uprising began in Moscow, then the Kremlin would start a war just as a last-ditch attempt to consolidate their power. At the time it was taken as gospel — a nuclear war was coming and could happen at any time.

“The generals came to me with an idea. A crazy idea, I thought, though it had potential — and they had money to make it happen, more grant money than I’d ever seen before for a project like this. What they wanted was… visionary. They wanted to create a new human race, a new phenotype based on good American DNA. A race of men and women who could survive even through a nuclear winter. People who were highly resistant to radioactive fallout, who were strong enough to live on polluted water and whatever food they could dig out of the ground. People with the immune systems of gorillas, people with the healing factors of lizards, people with the vision and the resistance to ultraviolet light of hunting birds. People to survive the apocalypse.”

Chapel glanced at Ian. “You gave them chimeras.”

“If you want to skip ahead, then, yes,” Taggart said. “The work was fascinating. It was incredible — Helen and I invented whole new fields of genetics and even basic biology. We had the money, the equipment, anything we wanted, anything we needed to do work that would have been unthinkable at the time. No one back then had even considered transgenics. The idea of splicing together disparate genomes to create a functional organism was pie in the sky, it was science fiction. Nobody understood homeotics at the time, work on atavisms was partial and hesitant at best, and we had barely begun to experiment with plasmids and gene therapy. But we knew it could work.”

“ ‘We,’ ” Julia said, softly. “You and mom both signed off on this.”

“Helen…” Taggart’s face grew wistful. “She was a genius. She and I together were… something more.” He shook his head. “We would stay up all night, hurling ideas back and forth, tearing holes in each other’s hypotheses, spinning out new trains of thought, building on each other’s brilliance. It was — it was the most satisfying relationship any two human beings could ever have. She understood what we were really doing. We weren’t just working for the Pentagon. We were working for the future. Both of us should have gotten Nobels out of that work. But it had to be kept secret, utterly secret.” He shook his head, but then he smiled as if he was reliving a happy memory. “DNA sequencers were so primitive back then, it was like coding genes by hand, like writing computer code on a legal pad.” He laughed. “We had to do all the basic research ourselves, compile our own library of sequences. There was no Human Genome Project to consult. I remember the night we finished writing down the final strings. When we had the recipe for what would become Ian and the others. It was well past midnight. We were tired, but we were also so full of As and Cs and Gs and Ts that we couldn’t sleep. We were talking in code, in genetic code, making jokes about our favorite proteins and dreaming of ribosomes hard at work. We went outside and looked up at the stars. We watched the moon set. It was like we had become something more than just human beings. Like we were little gods, at the dawn of a new creation.”

“And then you created two hundred embryos, which you implanted in the wombs of mentally ill women without their consent,” Chapel pointed out.

“Hmm. Yes. All right, we did,” Taggart admitted, waving his hands in front of him as if he’d like to argue the moral niceties but didn’t have time. “We ended up with two hundred perfect little organisms.”

“Babies,” Chapel said.

“Hardly. These weren’t like human infants. They could walk within weeks of being born — almost as fast as horses. They had teeth and they could eat solid food after a few months. No, these weren’t babies. They were the children of a new race. A new species, almost.”

“You locked them up in a camp in the Catskills. You gave them basic medical care, a little education, and nothing else,” Chapel said. “You raised them like children, but then they started killing each other.” He looked over at Ian. The chimera’s face was totally passive, unreadable. “They tore each other to pieces. They were too aggressive. Too violent. So you sealed up the camp and abandoned them.”

“Is that what you think we did?” Taggart asked, looking offended. “You think we made a mistake? That we were surprised and horrified that they were dangerous? Please. The world they were created for — the world under nuclear winter — was going to be a harsh and dangerous place. We made them aggressive so they could rule it. So they could own it. That was always part of the plan, Captain. They were always supposed to be that way.”

Chapel’s blood went cold. He couldn’t believe it.

“You wanted us to kill each other,” Ian said. It was the first time he’d spoken since Taggart began.

“We wanted you to be fighters. And when you fought each other — well.” Taggart made an expansive gesture. “That was just Darwinian selection. The strongest survive. The most fit. We needed you fit.”

“Not everyone agreed with you,” Chapel pointed out. “Dr. Bryant seems to have changed her mind about things. She left you and went on to spend the rest of her life trying to make amends for what she’d done.”

“She lost her detachment, yes,” Taggart agreed. “She started thinking of the chimeras as humans. As children. Well, she was a woman. She was genetically coded for that kind of sentimentality.”

Julia leaped up, her face red with anger. “Dad—” she began, but Chapel gestured for her to wait a moment.

“Not just Dr. Bryant. The CIA didn’t like it, either. They decided at some point, maybe when Malcolm ran away, that the project was too dangerous. Especially since there was no more Soviet Union, and no real possibility of nuclear winter. They decided to shut you down. Kill everyone involved to keep it secret. They’ve spun a cover story, claiming the chimeras are infected with some kind of virus. They’re killing anyone who might possibly be infected, even though we’ve figured out there is no virus.”

Taggart said nothing.

He didn’t need to. His face went white. His hands stayed frozen in the air.

“There is no virus,” Chapel repeated.

“Dad,” Julia said. “Dad — answer him! Tell him there’s no virus!”

Taggart slowly shook his head. “I can’t do that,” he said.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+83:44

“There is a virus,” Chapel breathed.

He’d been so sure. He’d been certain it was a ruse. But they’d told him the truth all along. The chimeras were carrying a virus, a man-made pathogen, and they could infect anyone they came in contact with.

Laughing Boy wasn’t using it as an excuse. He was cleaning up a very real mess.

Ian leaned forward against the cables that bound him. He looked very interested. On the other side of the room, Julia let out a little whimper.

“There had to be,” Taggart said, softly.

“What do you mean?” Chapel demanded.

“It’s… it’s how it’s done. There was no other way. We wrote the code, the one percent of the genome that had to change to create a chimera from human gametes. We assembled the code in a virus. A virus doesn’t reproduce on its own. It needs a host. It latches on to a cell and injects its DNA into the cell’s nucleus. The cell has no defense against this; it can’t tell one strand of DNA from another. So it replicates the viral DNA exactly. Over and over again. The virus we used to create the chimeras was designed to target egg and sperm cells only. It takes over the normal egg, say, and turns it into a chimera egg. When the egg is fertilized, it develops into something like Ian here, not a human embryo. Look, this is all very basic stuff, it’s the foundation for gene therapy and—”

“Then skip to the part where the chimeras are still carrying the virus,” Chapel told him.

“Well… they have to. To do what they’re designed for. The chimera DNA has to be copied exactly, or the much more robust, more proven human DNA will take over. The chimera virus has to spread so that any normal human who reproduces with a chimera will bear a chimera child.”

“Wait — you wanted them to reproduce?”

“Yes, of course,” Taggart said, blinking. “Oh. I see. You thought our insurance policy was supposed to survive on its own. You thought our two hundred male specimens were supposed to be the entire batch, that they would survive when the rest of us died.” He seemed to find the idea amusing. “That wouldn’t do us much good, would it? They’re all male. They would only last one generation.”

“Wait,” Julia said. It looked like she’d figured this out. “Just wait.”

“In the event of a nuclear war, the chimeras would have been released into the survivor population,” Taggart explained. “They would have mated with female survivors — human female survivors — and produced chimera offspring, which would breed true. We couldn’t afford to have their children be human. So the virus remains in their systems. It looks for other hosts, hosts that can allow it to reproduce. It looks for human sperm and egg cells.”

“And it spreads through any bodily fluid contact,” Chapel said.

“Well, yes. It would be nice if it only passed on through sexual contact, that would be more elegant, but—”

“Anyone who gets infected has chimera babies?” Julia demanded. “Anyone? And all their babies are chimeras like him?” She jabbed a finger toward Ian. “Dad — you fucked up. You really fucked up!”

“Julia, sit down and watch your language,” Taggart commanded.

“No. No, I will not,” she said, striding toward him.

Chapel grabbed her arm. “Dr. Taggart. You and your wife, and Ellie Pechowski, all had constant contact with the chimeras at Camp Putnam. How is it you were able to avoid becoming infected? Is there a vaccine against the virus?”

“Not exactly a vaccine,” Taggart said.

“Then — what? A cure? A treatment?”

“You could call it that. I had a vasectomy and Helen had her tubes tied. Ellie was already in menopause when she came to work at the camp.”

A chill ran down Chapel’s spine. So that was the nature of the virus. Angel had been told it had a long incubation period and it was hard to detect. She couldn’t have known the whole truth. The virus would sit dormant in the body of anyone it infected, lie there waiting for them to have children. Only then would it manifest itself. There would be no symptoms, no warning. Just, one day, a little baby would be born… and blink its nictitating membranes. That would be the only way to know you had it.

“Dad, I always knew you were an asshole, but—”

“What are you going on about, Julia? Why are you talking this way?”

“Because I probably have it, Dad. I probably have your fucking virus! Tell me, were you looking forward to having grandchildren? How about grandmonsters instead?”

“What? I… what?” Taggart said, his face as white as the snow outside.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+83:44

“Enough,” Chapel said.

They all turned to stare at him.

“This isn’t getting us to where we need to be. So there is a virus. That’s good to know, but it doesn’t change anything. We still need to get you out of here, Dr. Taggart. I have no doubt the CIA is sending men here right now to kill you. They’re trying to shut up anyone with knowledge about the chimeras or Camp Putnam or Project Darling Green. They’re done trying to pay you off with grant money — the virus, and the escape of the chimeras, has given them the excuse they need to just kill you. Julia and I are in the same boat.”

“So you came here to protect me?” Taggart asked.

“I came here to extract you,” Chapel said. “We need to move you to a safe location. The problem is, we’re still not sure exactly where that might be. The CIA has a long reach. Moving you to Canada won’t be enough… I need to talk to somebody.”

“Angel?” Julia asked.

“Yeah,” Chapel said. “Excuse me.” He holstered his weapon and took out his phone. “Julia — you watch Ian. If he tries to get free, just shoot him.”

“I guess I don’t get to be protected,” the chimera said. He didn’t sound particularly offended.

Chapel ignored him and walked over to the door of the shack. He dialed Angel’s number and put the phone to his ear. Waited for the cheap phone to find a signal.

And waited. And waited. Eventually the phone beeped at him three times to say his call had failed.

“You won’t get reception out here,” Taggart said, looking mildly amused. “The mountains are in the way of the nearest cell tower.”

“This is Angel we’re talking about. She’s very good at getting around obstacles.” Chapel tried the call again. “Huh,” he said, when the call failed again. The third time, he said “Damn,” instead.

It took him a while to realize that the phone in his hand was just a cheap disposable. He’d been working with Angel so long he’d come to think she was magic. That she could communicate with him anywhere. But that hadn’t been the case, had it? In Atlanta, when he’d gone too far underground, she couldn’t reach him. In Denver, her signal had been jammed.

Crap. He’d lost his arm. He’d lost the backing of the DIA. Now he’d lost his guardian angel. He’d been reduced to just his own, natural resources. He had to think this through. Pick his next step very carefully.

“Okay,” he said, walking back over to the others. “Okay. We just have to do this the old-fashioned way. I’m going to go outside and scout the road, make sure we have a clear route out of here. Then we’re all going to get on the snowmachines and head for the nearest town.”

“That’s Healy, back at the highway,” Taggart told him. “It’s just a little tourist trap of a place, though. They sell things to the tourists who come to see Denali.”

“If we can just get to civilization, any kind of civilization, we can hide in the crowd there. That’ll help,” Chapel told him. He looked at Julia — then at Ian. He didn’t like the idea of leaving her in the shack with the chimera. The alternative wasn’t great, but it would have to do. “You,” he said, pointing at Ian. “You’re with me.”

“Okay,” the chimera told him.

“You try anything, I will have to kill you,” Chapel said.

“Understood. Just make sure you understand — that deal goes both ways. You try to execute me, and I’ll twist your head off.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Chapel told him.

Chapel untied the chimera and let him grab his parka. Then he went to the door and cracked it, peering out into the afternoon light. He saw nothing but snow out there — it had been falling the entire time they’d been inside talking. A thick layer of snow sat on top of the snowmachines, and more snow had fallen against the door so it tumbled inside around his shoes and started to melt instantly. The weather could be a problem, he thought. If they got back to Fairbanks only to find the airport shut down while it was snowing, they could be stuck, vulnerable and alone, waiting for the CIA to show up.

Nothing for it.

“Come on,” he said to Ian. The two of them pushed their way outside, shoving the door open against the new-fallen snow. Outside, visibility was cut down considerably by the snow in the air. Their feet made loud crunching noises with every step. If someone was out there, waiting to ambush them, they would never know it.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+83:55

Chapel’s feet sank deep into the snow with every step, slowing him down to a crawl. If he’d had snowshoes, maybe it would have been different. “Why did it have to be Alaska?” he asked.

The question had been rhetorical, but Ian answered anyway. “For the grizzlies. If you’re going to study hibernation, you need to understand why small animals do it so well but large animals have a hard time with it. And why grizzly bears, which are very large, can do it while primates can’t. And if you want to study grizzlies in anything like their natural habitat, you need to be right here.”

“Taggart told you all that?” Chapel asked. He headed through the clearing, intending to make it as far as the road before he turned back. “You and he are getting along pretty well. Considering you were supposed to kill him.”

“The Voice wanted me to do lots of things,” Ian replied. “But I’m not a machine. I don’t do things just because someone tells me to.”

“The Voice got you out of that camp,” Chapel pointed out. “Some people would think maybe you owed it.”

“People, maybe. Not chimeras. We know better than that.”

“How did you get here so fast?” Chapel asked. “You can’t have come over land. You must have flown. The Voice must have arranged things for you.”

Ian stopped in place and seemed to have to think about it. “I stowed away in the cargo hold of a plane that brought me as far as Fairbanks. From there I walked. The Voice gave me directions. As long as it was helping me, sure. I did what it said. When it wasn’t helping me any more, I stopped listening.”

“Stay in front of me,” Chapel said, gesturing for the chimera to walk ahead of him on the path.

“You don’t trust me,” Ian said. “I don’t blame you. You met some of the others. Malcolm, and Quinn, and Brody. I’m different.”

“I met your old gang,” Chapel pointed out. “The ones who helped you kill Alan and his gang.” Ian said nothing. For a while they just kept wading through the snow, headed south, toward the road. Chapel thought about Samuel. The Voice had told Ian to kill Samuel, and Ian had refused. Maybe — just maybe — there was something to what Ian claimed. Maybe he was different from the others. Maybe he could control his impulses. Maybe that meant Chapel couldn’t treat him like the others. Couldn’t treat him like a monster.

That was a dangerous line of thought. But if Ian really was able to control himself, to act like a human, then Chapel had to treat him like one, too.

“I met Ellie Pechowski, too,” Chapel said, finally.

“Miss P,” Ian affirmed.

“Yeah. She said you were different. And I’ll admit, you showed a lot more leadership potential than the others. A lot more emotional stability. But you’re still a chimera. You’re still genetically programmed for violence and aggression.”

“You’re still a human,” Ian said. “You’re still programmed for mercy and compassion. It didn’t stop you from killing the others.”

“I did that to protect other humans,” Chapel said. “You did what you did — why? So you could escape from Camp Putnam? See the real world for once?”

“Would that be an unacceptable reason to you?” Ian asked. “Would you have done any differently?”

Chapel thought about it. The chimeras had been created for a purpose they didn’t understand. Then, simply because of what they were, they’d been locked away from the world forever. In that situation, yeah. He would have done almost anything to get his freedom. But he would have wanted something else, too.

“They gave you books to read in there. Did they ever give you Frankenstein?”

Ian shook his head.

“I read it after I lost my arm. I felt like I was made out of spare parts, then, and I thought maybe I’d find some answers there. It’s the story of a man, a scientist, who creates a new life form. In the book he builds it out of parts of dead people. Dead humans. Then he animates it with life, but he’s so horrified at what he’s done that he runs away from his own creation. Refuses to accept it. The creature ends up killing everyone he loves, and then pursuing him halfway across the world to hound him to his death.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Ian asked.

“If I was that creature, I’d want to kill my creator, too.”

Ian was quiet for a while. The two of them waddled through the snow, not covering much ground. There was no sound but the crunching of the snow. No smell in the air but the smell of snow.

Maybe the weather would help them, in the end. Maybe it would slow down the CIA even more than it slowed down Chapel.

When Ian spoke, it was like the air had frozen and his words broke the ice. “But that’s not true. You don’t want to kill God, do you?”

“What?” Chapel asked. “That’s insane.”

“You were created by God, weren’t you? Do you want to kill him? Look at what he’s done to you. He took your arm.”

“That wasn’t God. That was the Taliban.”

Ian shook his head as if it didn’t matter. “This creature, in your story. He’s upset because his creator was horrified by what he’d done. His creator hated him. Your God loves you, I’m told. He created you and he loves you for it. Don’t you think he’s proud of you?”

“I… I guess I hope he is,” Chapel said.

“Dr. Taggart is proud of me,” Ian said. “He sees in me what I am, and to him, that’s good. Worthy.”

“The reason you were created doesn’t exist anymore. You were supposed to replace us in case of nuclear war. But there was no war.” Chapel glanced up at the mountains, at the sky. He reached for his cell phone, but that meant putting away his weapon.

Too late he realized he’d made a mistake. Ian was already moving, already rushing toward him.

“I’m sorry,” Ian said. “It has to be this way.”

Chapel dropped the phone and reached for his pistol. He managed to draw it from its holster — but even as he brought it around to fire, Ian smacked it out of his hand. It went spinning off into the snow.

Ian’s other hand was already coming toward his face. It was balled into a fist.

Bright flecks of light exploded in Chapel’s head. He could feel the cartilage in his nose snapping, feel the bones of his skull shifting on their sutures. He flew backward, propelled by Ian’s inhuman strength, and landed on his back in a snowdrift, dazed and unable to move.

“You would have killed me, eventually,” Ian said. “You would have had to.”

Chapel waited to die.

But he didn’t. Nothing more happened. Eventually he regained enough strength to lift his head, to look around.

He saw nothing but snow, nothing but pure white light reflected back at him by a trillion crystals of ice.

Ian was gone.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:14

“What’s taking Chapel so long?” Julia asked. She was pacing back and forth in front of the door of the laboratory shack, holding CPO Andrews’s pistol in both hands. She’d been doing so almost every second Chapel and Ian had been gone.

Behind her, her father was busy tending to his experimental animals. If he had to leave his lab behind, he’d said, he at least wanted to make sure his pets were healthy and had plenty of food and water in case they woke up. He seemed to think he’d be coming back in a day or two. Julia hadn’t bothered to tell him otherwise.

“I wouldn’t worry,” her dad said. “He has Ian with him.”

“That’s a reason for me to not worry?” Julia asked.

“Ian’s quite strong and capable,” Taggart replied. “If your friend gets stuck in a snowdrift or falls over and can’t get up, Ian will help him. For a chimera he’s really quite helpful. Can you hand me that spray bottle?”

Julia looked around and found the bottle he wanted, a plastic spray can half full of something straw colored. She tossed it to him. “You lived with them. For years. You spent every day at Camp Putnam. And then you would come home from work and I’d get back from school and we’d sit down to Shake ’N Bake pork chops or maybe Mom’s stew for dinner. And you would ask me about my day and what I was learning.”

“I remember that time fondly, dear,” Taggart replied. He spritzed a little of the yellow liquid on the wings of a caged bat. “The happiest time of my life.”

“I never thought to ask you anything about your day,” Julia said. She couldn’t believe this. She couldn’t believe what her life had become. “I could have asked how many of my brothers died that day. How many of them tore each other to pieces.”

“You never had any brothers,” Taggart said, with a little sigh.

“It’s hard not to think of them that way. You and Mom spent more time with them than you did with me.”

Taggart put down the bottle and dragged a stool over so he could sit and look at her. “You’re an adult now, Julia. You’re almost thirty.”

Her eyes went wide. “I’ve been thirty for a couple years, now,” she said. “You can’t even remember how old I am?”

“Old enough, I am certain,” Taggart said, “to stop blaming everything in your life on your horrible parents.”

Julia wanted to scream. She wanted to throw something at him. “I’m not allowed to blame you? I’m not allowed to blame you because one of your experiments killed Mom? I’m not allowed to be angry that one of them tried to kill me, and maybe infected me with his tiny weird-eyed babies?” She put the gun down so she didn’t accidentally shoot him in her rage. “I’m not allowed to be upset that now the CIA wants to kill my entire family?”

“I assure you, if I’d know any of that in advance—”

“Oh, no. Oh, no, you don’t get off that easily. Let’s put aside what you’ve done to my life. I know what you did to those women, Dad! I know how you took advantage of all those women, those mentally ill women. And I know what you did to the chimeras — studying them, testing them — and then walking away when they got too violent. I’ve found out all your little secrets. I know exactly what you’ve done, and now — now — you—”

Tears crowded up in the corners of her eyes and refused to spill over. She was shaking with rage, filled up with excruciating anger. She had to get it out of her body, had to vent it or she would explode.

“What the hell were you thinking?” she demanded. “Why would you do those things? Didn’t anybody, even once — didn’t Mom ask if what you were doing was moral? Not even once?”

“Your mother was my partner in all of it,” Taggart said, in a very small voice. Clearly he’d never expected this. Everything he’d done had been top secret. He’d never expected that anyone would call him on his actions. Much less his own daughter.

But who else had the right, more than she? Julia felt like she was a sword of vengeance wielded by some indignant archangel. She was going to make him pay. She was going to get even for all those women. She would—

“You want to know why I did it?” he asked, finally.

“Yes,” she said, blazing with wrath.

“I did it for you,” he said.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:15

Ian didn’t mind the cold.

He ran over densely packed snow, spreading his feet so he didn’t sink through the crust, didn’t leave footprints. He did this by reflex. There had been snow in the Catskills as well, and he’d spent plenty of time running there. His muscles remembered.

There was much about this place that resembled Camp Putnam. The trees, the rocks, the snow — all familiar. The birds and even the bears, there had been bears in the Catskills, though they were smaller and not so dangerous. The harshness of this landscape sang to him. It called to him. He had been built for a place like this, a land of winter. This place was a good place for him. He thought of his brothers, of Brody and Malcolm and Quinn. The Voice had led them into cities, into human places. Perhaps that was why they had failed.

Ian didn’t mind being alone.

In the camp, he had fought all the time. He had never been at peace in the company of his brothers. He had never had a friend in the humans there, not even Miss P. He saw that now. It had not mattered. His biggest fights, his greatest war, had always been with himself. He had worked so hard, struggled daily, to make himself like the humans. To control his rages, to overcome his emotions. To be worthy of being free. In the end it turned out all that work had meant nothing.

Ian didn’t mind that. The futility. Not too much, anyway.

He skidded down a steep hillside, grabbing at tree branches to check his fall. Powdery snow flicked down across his shoulders, danced off his scalp. At the bottom of the slope was a trickling stream. He thought of Samuel and how his fingers had turned black, how they’d died on his hands and had to be taken off. Ian leaped over the stream, not wanting to get his feet wet in that cold, cold water. Even he had limitations.

On the far side of the stream the ground rose again, toward a narrow ridgeline high above. From the trees up there he would be able to see for miles. He would be able to see where he had to go next.

Except…

That was the one thing that burned inside him. The question. Dr. Taggart had given him so many answers. He’d explained almost everything. Why Ian had been created. Why he had then been spurned. It made sense. It all made such perfect, crystalline sense in his mind, a graph with clear data points forming a straight line headed… headed toward somewhere. Somewhere he couldn’t yet see.

He climbed the slope on all fours, grabbing at anything his hands could seize to help him gain more ground. He moved faster than any human could. Any bear. He was so strong. They’d given him that. They had made him strong, and fast. They had made sure the sun glaring on the ice would not hurt his eyes.

They were going to give him a world. A whole world where he would be king.

The last question was like a spiky thing, a worm with sharp-edged armor burrowing through his brain. There had to be an answer. There had to be a final point on the graph, a place where the line came to its end.

But how could he find it now, without Dr. Taggart? Who could tell him what came next? He had worked and fought and bled all his life for freedom. What was he to do with it now?

That was the one thing he minded. And it was tearing him apart.

Just before he reached the ridgeline he stopped. He was about to stand up, to make himself visible on that high ground. But his instincts, the instincts of some predator who had given him some small portion of his DNA, made him stop. He crouched low, cutting down his profile. Making himself invisible against the dark trees.

Perhaps he had heard something in the distance. Something so quiet his conscious mind did not register it. He lowered his third eyelids. He held his breath.

And then he saw it. Movement, very far away. Just now becoming visible. Something — several somethings — moving across the white land.

Others. Other humans, coming this way.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:16

Another concussion, Chapel thought.

But no. This didn’t feel the same. He’d had chimeras hit him before, and it had been enough to lay him out. This felt like he’d gotten the bad end of a fight in a bar. It felt like he’d fallen off a bicycle and did a face-plant. It did not feel like he’d been hit by a truck, or a jackhammer.

Ian had pulled his punch. He had been trying not to kill Chapel, just stun him a little and buy himself time to get away.

Thank heaven for small favors, Chapel thought and slowly, very slowly, he sat up. He’d been lying in the snow long enough for the flakes to gather on his legs and start to build up a thin blanket there. He shook himself to clear the snow away.

He touched his face, and his fingers came away bloody. He definitely had a broken nose. Well, that was survivable. He used his arm to get up to his feet. He felt shaky, still weak from losing all that blood back in Colorado. He felt like all his joints had been loosened by all the hits and injuries he’d taken over the last few days.

“Damn it!” he shouted, and his voice echoed around the snowscape, knocking small cascades of white off the nearby trees and rocks.

Ian was going to get away.

It took a while for the echoes of his voice to die down. For silence to return to the rocky woods. Except, it wasn’t quite silence. There was a sound in the distance, a rumbling, droning sound.

Chapel thought Ian must have left a trap for him. The chimera must have rigged an avalanche, or maybe he’d just set it off himself by shouting like that. He looked up, all around him, looking for where the waterfall of snow and ice and rocks would come from. But as he listened he realized he wasn’t hearing an avalanche at all. Instead the sound he heard was more like a swarm of bees, coming closer.

Snowmachines. More than one. Moving toward him at high speed.

He spun around, looking for the lab buildings. They were invisible in the snow, too far away to see. He would never make it back to them in time.

Cursing again, under his breath this time, he threw himself into the snow and used his one arm to cover himself, bury himself in its soft whiteness.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:21

“You did it for me?” Julia repeated.

Even to her own ears her voice sounded like a tiny squeak.

“We — your mother and I — did it all for you. Our daughter,” Taggart said.

He wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at his hands, which lay folded in his lap. She knew him well enough to understand what that meant. Her dad was an excitable, boisterous man who talked with his hands, gesturing for emphasis because words wouldn’t come fast enough to keep up with all the ideas in his head. If his hands weren’t moving, it could only mean that what he had to say was breaking his heart.

“It was 1979. The year the Soviets invaded Afghanistan,” he told her.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It was the end of the world. Everybody thought so back then; I mean, everybody in our circle. Fellow scientists. Intellectuals. The military people who asked us to help them only confirmed it. The Soviets were going to take over the Middle East and then India and the president would have no choice but to retaliate with nukes.”

“Dad, that has nothing to do with me,” Julia pointed out.

“Oh, you’re wrong. Because you’re not thinking about what else was going on in 1979. That was the year Helen got pregnant. We were so excited when we found out — we knew you would have red hair, we talked about it all the time. We argued about whether you would have my eyes, or her nose. You’ve never had kids.”

“No,” Julia said.

“Maybe you can’t understand, then. You can’t know what that’s like. When you start thinking about the future, not just in terms of your own life, of how many years you have left, but in terms of what your child’s life is going to be like. What kind of world she’s going to live in. What kind of world her grandchildren will have, and what their grandchildren will inherit. And there we were, looking at the future based on the best possible projections. And what we saw was the apocalypse. Civilization, gone. Agriculture, gone. No clean water, no food at all, people in chaos everywhere. That was the world you were going to grow up in.”

“That’s nonsense. None of that happened.”

“Because Gorbachev was actually sane, maybe. Or maybe because Reagan took a hard line with him. Who can say? We couldn’t know that at the time.”

Julia put a hand over her mouth. She couldn’t believe this. “No,” she said. “No, that doesn’t get you off the hook. What you did was unforgivable.”

“If you say so. It’s not my place to judge,” Taggart admitted.

“It was criminal. Dad — you — you can’t just—”

She was on the verge of breaking down and she knew it. If he said one more thing, one more word—

“I don’t care if it was wrong. I loved my daughter and I wanted her to have a future, that’s all. I loved you, Julia, and I still do.”

She opened her mouth; she wasn’t sure if she was going to say she loved him too or scream in rage or just howl in anguish, but she had to open her mouth to do it, and then—

— closed it just as fast.

“Julia, you don’t have to forgive me, it doesn’t matter,” Taggart said, “because—”

“Shut up,” she told him.

“No, you need to hear this,” he said.

“No, you need to shut up,” she replied. She ran to the door of the laboratory shed and cracked it open. The sound she’d heard was much louder, then. It was definitely what she’d thought it was. The sound of snowmachines coming closer.

“That’s not Chapel,” she said.

Taggart got up from his stool and joined her.

Together they watched as four snowmachines came roaring up the clearing toward the lab complex. The men on them were dressed in black parkas and goggles that hid their features.

All of them were carrying guns. One of them carried a big shiny revolver. He used it to wave the others forward.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Julia said. “Dad, they’re going to kill us. We have to fight them off.”

“What, make a last stand like the French Foreign Legion?”

“I have my pistol,” she said. “You must have some guns in here, right? You live in Alaska. You must own guns.”

“I have a tranquilizer rifle,” he said. “Huh.”

“What is it?” she asked.

Outside, the men were climbing off the snowmachines and spreading out to approach the buildings. She saw that they were making the same mistake she and Chapel had made when they first arrived. They were headed toward the biggest building in the complex, assuming that had to be where everyone was.

“I have a sudden brilliant idea,” Taggart said.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:33

“Where the hell is Chapel?” Julia breathed, as she watched the CIA men swarm over the little complex. Any second now they would realize where she and her dad were hiding. They would come for them, with their guns, and—

Taggart tapped a key on his keyboard, and his computer flashed a warning at him. He tapped the same key again.

“It turned out to be quite simple, really. A single hormonal pathway that I could manipulate with a very small molecule, something easily synthesized. In the end I could put them into a denning state or wake them up any time I wanted, simply by misting them with a low dose of the chemical.”

Julia stopped listening to him. Outside men started screaming, and something like hope burst inside her chest. Because she understood what her father had just done.

In the big building, she realized, the three bears were waking up. And waking up angry — and hungry.

The screams came from inside the big building and they didn’t stop. Julia shuddered to think what was happening in there. The man with the revolver — who was obviously in charge — waved more of his men inside, but they looked like they didn’t want to go. Julia could hardly blame them.

The leader shot one of his men in the arm.

That got their attention. Two more of them rushed inside the big building. That just left the leader and the wounded man standing outside.

Two too many. Julia had killed Malcolm and shot Laughing Boy in the foot, but she knew better than to think that made her an expert gunslinger. She could hardly expect to get the drop on both those men without getting shot herself.

But if she stayed inside the lab shack, she and her dad were going to die. The bears had bought them a few seconds of grace, but that was it.

Behind her Taggart loaded a dart into his tranquilizer rifle. It was a big weapon, and it looked unwieldy.

“Aim for the one standing next to the snowmachines,” Julia told him. That was the leader. “I’ll take the other one. You really think that dart will drop him?”

“Every dart is dosed to take down a grizzly,” Taggart told her. “It might kill him, actually.”

“I can live with that. Okay. When I say go, we go, right?”

“If you’re sure about this,” he told her.

“I have never been more sure about anything in my life,” she promised.

Which was, of course, a lie. She didn’t believe this would work, not at all. But she had no other ideas.

“Go,” she shouted and kicked the door open. She didn’t let herself think about what came next; she just started shooting, barely bothering to aim as she fired three shots in the direction of the wounded man. He looked up and even through his goggles she could see the surprise on his face.

Taggart ran out of the lab shack holding his rifle like it was a club. She started to yell at him, to tell him to shoot, but then he brought the rifle up to his eye, aimed carefully, and squeezed his trigger.

The dart bounced off the side of the snowmachine, a few inches away from the leader’s arm. The leader looked down and saw it glinting on the snow.

Then he lifted his revolver and pointed it straight at Julia’s face.

She froze in place, paralyzed by fear. Part of her brain was screaming at her to move, telling her how ashamed Chapel would be if he could see this, but her legs wouldn’t work. She barely had control of her hands. As if in slow motion she started to bring her own gun up.

The leader aimed his revolver and started to squeeze his trigger.

And then his hand exploded in a cloud of blood.

“Over here,” Chapel shouted, firing round after round at the men staggering around the clearing. He was running toward her as fast as he could, his feet digging deep into the snow with every step. He waved toward the old, dirty snowmachine that was parked outside of the large building. He jumped on the back of it and pointed his pistol at the leader’s head.

He needn’t have bothered. The leader was too busy just then, down on the ground searching for his severed fingers.

“Come on,” Julia said, and grabbed her father’s arm. She dashed across the flattened snow between the buildings and jumped on the snowmachine. It started up as soon as she turned the throttle. She glanced down and saw the keys were in the ignition. She hadn’t thought to check before.

Other than the leader, the rest of the men who’d come to kill them were down on the ground, dead or wounded. She didn’t have time to check each one. She saw that one of them had three big slashes across the front of his parka, exposing the white stuffing inside. She remembered the sleeping bears, how sweet they had looked when they weren’t dangerous, and she shuddered.

She glanced back just once to make sure that both Chapel and her father were on the snowmachine. Then she put it in gear and roared out of the clearing as fast as she could go, even as bullets started whizzing all around her.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:37

Trees and rocks flashed by as Julia sped them down the trail toward the road. Chapel held on as best he could with one hand while constantly looking back, trying to see who was coming after them. He could hear nothing over the roar of the snowmachine’s engine, but he was certain they weren’t in the clear yet.

Up ahead the trail headed down a steep slope toward a creek. It looked like the surface had frozen over. Chapel didn’t want to have to find out if it was solid or not.

Behind him a black snowmachine came into view, the man driving it struggling to control his vehicle with one wounded hand while fumbling with a pistol at the same time. It was their leader, the one he’d shot before he could kill Julia. Apparently he’d gotten over the shock of his wound. Chapel had a bad feeling about that — he was pretty sure he knew exactly who that man was.

“Into the trees,” Chapel shouted, “lose him in the trees!”

Taggart shook his head. He couldn’t hear a word.

Luckily Julia seemed of the same mind as Chapel. She powered away from the slope, then slid around in a tight bend until they were racing between trees, pine branches smacking off the windshield and making Taggart duck. It was all Julia could do to keep them zigging and zagging between trees and avoid a collision.

Behind them the black snowmachine appeared, lifting up on one skid as it cut the turn too sharply. The driver rose up off his seat, bracing his pistol on the top of his windshield.

Chapel saw a small animal trail up ahead on their left. “Left!” he shouted, over and over, but Taggart was shrugging and Julia didn’t seem to hear him at all. Instead she plowed straight on, weaving and darting through the trees. One branch was low enough to ruffle Chapel’s hair and dump a pound of snow down the back of his collar. The trees seemed to be growing closer together now, the room to maneuver between them even tighter. A bullet scored the paint on their machine, leaving a bright oval of silver as it exposed the metal beneath.

Chapel reached for his pistol, hugging the machine with his knees so he wasn’t thrown clear. He swiveled around at the waist and fired wildly, not worrying about conserving ammunition. It didn’t seem like it mattered much now. With the snowmachine bucking and jouncing under him, he failed to hit the pursuer at all, but at least he made the man duck and kept him from shooting.

“We’ve got to lose him somehow,” Chapel shouted, but no one bothered replying. It was painfully obvious to all three of them. They needed some kind of miracle, some lucky break, or they were all dead.

Too much to hope for.

Directly ahead he could see the trees gave way altogether. So did the ground. The snow ended abruptly and beyond was only sky. They were racing full throttle straight toward the edge of a cliff.

“Julia!” he shouted. “Julia, look out!”

She didn’t even turn around. Didn’t she see what he saw? How could she not? And meanwhile, behind them, the pursuer was lining up another shot. Chapel was pretty sure he wouldn’t miss this time.

There was nothing he could do but watch as the world went into slow motion, as the cliff edge raced toward them and the gunman behind took careful aim. It was going to be close — it was going to be—

The snowmachine hit the cliff edge and for a second, a sickening, horrible second, they were airborne. Weightless. Chapel saw the sky all around him, white and featureless. He felt Taggart rise up from the snowmachine’s seat, felt him start to come loose and go flying off on his own. Chapel hugged at the snowmachine with his knees, using every muscle in his swimmer’s legs, and tried to pull the scientist back down.

And then the snowmachine hit the earth again, hard enough to rattle every bone in Chapel’s body.

They had only fallen about ten feet. On the other side of the cliff was a gentle slope headed downward into a narrow canyon.

Taggart hit the seat hard and nearly spun off. It was all Chapel could do to hold him on to the snowmachine. Julia had lowered her head under the dubious protection of the windshield, and now she raised it again and gunned the throttle.

The snowmachine underneath her gave a whining, coughing sputter. It lurched forward a few dozen feet and then stopped. The engine died. The fall must have damaged something.

The machine was dead.

Chapel craned his neck around to look behind them. Up there, on top of the cliff, the pursuing snowmachine had come to a stop just before the precipice. Its driver stared down at them through his goggles as if he couldn’t believe what they’d just done.

“I was kind of hoping he would follow us over and break his neck,” Julia said, softly.

“What about our necks?” Taggart asked.

“It was the best idea I had at the time. Anybody have a better one, now?” she asked.

Chapel watched the black snowmachine spray ice from its tracks as the driver turned his vehicle and headed away from the cliff edge, presumably so he could find a safer way down and continue the chase.

“How about now we run?” Chapel suggested.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:59

The canyon was only a few hundred yards wide, surrounded on every side by high jagged cliffs that Chapel knew he would never climb with only one arm. It stretched out ahead of them, curving gently to the north. There were no trees in the canyon, nowhere to hide except for a few big rocks. A broad but shallow stream ran down its exact middle, glittering in the wan sunlight, rippling over a bed of smooth, moss-covered stones. Away from the stream the snow lay three feet deep over the entire canyon floor.

They had no choice. They ran.

The stream took them around the bend of the canyon quickly enough, even though to Chapel it felt like they were just strolling along, taking their time. He could occasionally hear the whine of a snowmachine up on the cliffs as the assassin searched for a good way down into the canyon.

They came around the final bend and Chapel nearly screamed in frustration.

The canyon dead-ended in a little tarn, a glacial lake surrounded on three sides by cliff. There was no way forward.

They stopped running. There was nowhere to go.

Chapel ejected the magazine of his weapon, wanting to see how many rounds he had left. He got a bad shock when he saw the clip was empty. There was one round in the chamber, still, but—

The sound of the snowmachine grew louder and louder… and then stopped abruptly. They could hear the engine wind down and then ping as it cooled in the frigid air. There was no other sound.

“He could be right around that boulder,” Chapel whispered, pointing at a giant rock that shielded the bend of the canyon from view. “Find some cover.”

There were plenty of smaller rocks to hide behind, scattered around the edge of the waterfall. The three of them each found a good sheltering spot and hunkered down.

And waited.

“Where is he?” Taggart whispered.

“Shh,” Chapel said. His eyes scanned the big rock and the ground around it. It was half buried in the side of a massive cliff. A few scrubby pine trees had found anchorage near its top, where scree from the cliff had gathered to form a kind of rudimentary soil.

Along the edge of the boulder a shadow moved. He glanced across at Julia and saw her still peering over the edge of her rock, trying to spot the assassin. He gestured for her to get her head down.

Chapel heard the sound of a foot crunching on snow. The barrel of a revolver peeked around the edge of the boulder. Sunlight glimmered on its silvery metal.

Julia reared up and fired a shot that knocked chips off the boulder. The revolver barrel drew back, out of sight.

The echoes of the gunshot faded away slowly. Only to be replaced by another sound. A kind of dry, wheezing laughter.

“No,” Julia said, louder than she’d probably meant to.

“Ha ha heh,” Laughing Boy chuckled. “Hoo! Ha ha.”

He had followed them all this way. He’d come personally to make sure they were dead. Banks must have wanted to be certain.

Chapel remembered something that gave him a tiny flicker of hope. “You really think you can hit us firing left-handed?” he shouted.

Back at the laboratory complex he’d ruined Laughing Boy’s shooting hand.

“Hoo ha hee heh,” Laughing Boy spluttered. It might have sounded like a laugh, but it had plenty of anger in it.

“No toes,” Chapel said. “No fingers. Pretty soon you’ll look like me.”

“I’m no fucking — ha ha — cripple!” Laughing Boy shouted, and he leaned out from behind the boulder to fire three rounds at them, one after another. Chapel shouted for Julia not to take the bait — he could visualize Laughing Boy dropping into a roll, lowering his visual profile, making himself almost impossible to hit — but it was too late.

She fired wildly, squeezing her trigger until her hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Wasting all her bullets. She screamed in frustration and stared down at her weapon, then dropped behind her rock just as Laughing Boy started firing again. Chapel dropped into cover as well, throwing his arm over his head to protect it.

The shooting stopped. Chapel risked a glance over the top of his rock. Laughing Boy was gone. He’d exhausted the six rounds in his revolver. Chapel was certain, absolutely certain he had more, and had just gone back into cover to reload.

“Jul… ia,” Taggart said.

Chapel looked over and saw the scientist slumped behind his own rock. Blood slicked Taggart’s neck. He’d caught a round.

“Dad,” Julia gasped, and ran to him before Chapel could tell her to stay in cover. Maybe she could do something for him.

Maybe Chapel could do something for both of them. He jumped up from behind his rock and ran toward the boulder as fast as his legs could carry him.

“Hee heh ha,” he heard as he ran.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+85:06

Ian saw it all. He saw blood explode from Dr. Taggart’s neck. He rose halfway to his feet in terror. If Dr. Taggart died — how would he ever learn the final answer? How would he ever know what his life was to become? No one else could tell him.

He had followed the snowmachines, crept after them, keeping himself out of sight. Knowing if he showed himself one human or another would kill him. He had followed and stayed close on the off chance there would be one more opportunity, however unlikely, to talk to Dr. Taggart. To ask the final question.

Even if he was beginning to think he knew the answer. Even if he was terrified of what it would be.

Indecision was not a trait common to the chimeras. Their rages led them on, made everything simple. But Ian had mastered his rages. Mostly.

He crept closer, careful not to show himself, and watched.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+85:07

Chapel kept his head down as he ran, knowing that at any second Laughing Boy could start shooting again. The boulder loomed overhead. Its irregular shape made a hundred deep shadows, a dozen good hiding places. Smaller rocks lay tumbled against it, creating natural cover. Laughing Boy could be anywhere in there.

Up ahead he heard rocks patter and fall. He raised his pistol. Kept his trigger finger loose. He couldn’t afford to snap off a hasty shot. He had one bullet left. He had to make it count.

He ducked low under an overhanging ledge of rock. Padded across bare stone and came upon a patch of snow that glared in the sun. The sky was clearing, and light was streaming down in thick golden beams that lit up every patch of lichen on the rocks, made every crevice a vein of impenetrable shadow.

Click. Click. He heard the sound and knew what it was. He’d heard it before. Laughing Boy was loading shells into the cylinder of his revolver. It was taking him a while.

“I don’t know — ha heh — how you do this one-handed,” Laughing Boy said, not shouting now. At a conversational level. He knew Chapel was close enough to hear him.

“You learn to do all kinds of things. You want the chance to learn them? You can put that weapon down and come out with your hands up,” Chapel said, because there was no point in stealth now. Laughing Boy was right around the side of the boulder. He couldn’t be more than ten feet away. “I’ll let you live.”

“Oh — ha — will you? Wonderful! Except, heh heh, that’s a terrible, heh, deal for you. You kill me, you — ha ha ho — let me live, doesn’t matter. They’ll send — ha — more like me.”

“There’s no one else like you,” Chapel said.

Laughing Boy seemed to find that amazingly funny. He laughed and chuckled and guffawed. “Guess you’ll — heh — find out!”

Chapel dashed around the side of the rock, his arm held out straight, the pistol an extension of his arm, his eyes focused on where his shot would go, his—

Laughing Boy was crouched among some rocks, looking right at Chapel. Revolver shells lay scattered on the ground around him. The cylinder was full, with the brass casings of six new shells loaded into its chambers. All Laughing Boy had to do was snap the cylinder shut and he’d be ready to fire.

Chapel took his shot.

The noise of it was enormous. It blasted around the rocks, came caroming back from the cliffs to deafen him. The stink of the gunsmoke filled his nostrils and he had to blink as it stung his eyes. He forced his eyelids open, forced himself to see if he’d fired true.

He’d aimed for Laughing Boy’s center of mass, just like he’d been trained to do. The heart lay just to the left of the sternum, but it was a thick mass of muscle and it was not unknown for a bullet to just graze it, to be turned by its knotty texture, and leave the target alive. You shot for the aorta, the swollen blood vessel just above the heart. Pierce that and death was almost instantaneous.

A red dot appeared on Laughing Boy’s parka, just left of center. Blood welled from the wound. But it didn’t spurt.

Laughing Boy screamed and gurgled and choked on his pain.

But he didn’t die.

His eyes stared into Chapel’s, as if he couldn’t believe it either. But the light didn’t go out of those eyes.

“Must have — heh — missed it by… by a — he heh — hair.”

“Guess so,” Chapel said.

Laughing Boy flicked his wrist, and the cylinder of his revolver snapped shut. He cocked the hammer and was ready to fire again.

Before he could, though, Ian dropped from the rocks above them, to land in a catlike crouch.

His eyes were black from side to side.

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+85:10

Chapel could only stare in utter surprise as Ian rose slowly to his feet.

He didn’t think he had the capacity for any more shock, but then it happened and he was left reeling.

“Good,” Laughing Boy said, “you’re — heh — here. Kill this fucker for me.”

Ian turned to face Chapel. His nictitating membranes were still down, and his eyes were unreadable. “You didn’t know, did you? You didn’t know who the Voice was.”

“He — you mean—” Chapel had no idea what to say.

“He freed me from Camp Putnam. He showed me how to get here.” Ian turned to look at Laughing Boy. “He told me what to do.”

“Yeah. Heh ha hee. Yeah,” Laughing Boy said. His face was turning pale, and sweat was forming beads on his forehead. He was hurt, and badly, by Chapel’s shot. But he wasn’t bleeding out. He would live through this, Chapel knew. Laughing Boy was going to survive. And Ian — Ian would—

“I was supposed to be the father of a generation,” Ian said, softly. “Instead they made me a weapon. I was supposed to live on after the greatest war, and instead, I am a foot soldier in this petty little squabble.”

“Ian, just — let’s talk about this,” Chapel began.

The chimera lashed out with one hand and knocked Chapel away, sent him flying. The empty pistol leaped from Chapel’s hand as he threw his arm back to arrest his fall.

“Good, yeah, heh,” Laughing Boy said. “Good. Looks better — ha ah ha — this way, if you do him. Heh.”

“You used me,” Ian told the CIA assassin. “But I used you, too. I used you to get my freedom. I thought I could be something more, but no. You humans. You can’t understand us. You’re too limited to understand. All you see in us is death. Well, so be it.”

Laughing Boy frowned. “Wait. Heh. What?”

Ian took a step toward Laughing Boy. Another step.

Laughing Boy was no fool. He brought his revolver up. Pointed it at Ian’s chest.

“Dr. Taggart made me promise I wouldn’t hurt anyone anymore,” Ian said, stopping in place. “But he broke so very many promises he made to me. Humans break promises all the time. We can, too.”

Laughing Boy fired as fast as he could pull the trigger, pouring lead into Ian’s chest and face. He got off five bullets of his six before Ian snapped his arm like a piece of dry wood.

He broke Laughing Boy’s other arm with a punch. Another punch took him in the throat and stopped his laughing. After that—

After that it was largely superfluous. When Ian was done, there wasn’t much left of Laughing Boy.

Then he turned to face Chapel.

Chapel had no weapons left. He knew he couldn’t fight Ian hand to hand. Trying that had nearly gotten him killed when he faced Malcolm — only Julia had saved him then. He tried to scramble away, tried to fend Ian off with his arm, but it was impossible, there was nothing he could do. Ian grabbed Chapel by the throat and just picked him up off the ground and held him in the air. Chapel grabbed at Ian’s wrist with his hand, tried to force him to let go, but it was like trying to free himself from an iron manacle.

Chapel couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t speak.

“No,” Ian said, but he didn’t let go. “No, I don’t have to do this!” He was arguing with himself, trying to step back from the all-consuming rage that ruled him. “No, I will not. I will not!”

He threw Chapel away from him like a piece of garbage.

Chapel rolled through the snow, his whole body racked with pain. He thought he had broken some ribs. Maybe his shoulder, too. He could barely breathe, couldn’t think at all. He opened his mouth and tried to talk. Tried to reason with Ian. “Ian, it’s over — no one wants to kill you now, you—”

“I had a question,” Ian said.

He sounded perfectly calm.

Chapel struggled to sit up. To get back on his feet. Ian was different from the others, maybe. But he was still a chimera. He could still kill them all without any real effort. And he was bleeding. Even if he didn’t kill them, if he got his blood on Taggart — on Julia—

Chapel would die before he let that happen.

He forced himself upward. Forced himself to stand. Walking was probably out of the question. But he dropped into a fighting crouch. Got his arm up. Made a fist.

“I had one question left to answer,” Ian said.

“What — is it?” Chapel asked. If he could keep Ian talking, maybe Julia could get away. Get her father back to the lab, to the snowmachines there.

“It doesn’t matter. I found my answer. I found it while I watched you fight among yourselves.”

“Try me,” Chapel said.

Ian came closer. One big stride and he was almost close enough for Chapel to touch. It was hard to read his eyes, covered as they were, black from side to side. But the way Ian kept twisting his mouth around, the way he held his hands, spoke volumes.

All his control, all that self-restraint that made Ian different from the others, was just a veneer. A surface. Underneath he was still a chimera, with all that meant.

“I wanted to know what I’m supposed to do now,” Ian said. He closed his mouth with an audible click. His blood was draining away, cascading out of him to stain the snow. He didn’t seem to be weakening, though. He would never be weak enough that Chapel could take him in hand-to-hand combat. “What comes next for me?”

“You can come south with us,” Chapel said. “You can tell the world what they did to you. You can make sure the people who did this to you pay.”

Ian studied Chapel’s face with his black eyes. His nostrils were flaring. He was one wrong word away from turning into a machine with tearing hands and pummeling fists, a machine that could only kill. “That’s what you want from me?”

“Isn’t it what you want? Revenge?” Chapel asked. “Killing us won’t do it, but you can—”

The chimera grabbed Chapel again and threw him down on the ground. Raised one foot high in the air as if he would stomp Chapel to death, there and then. Chapel closed his eyes and threw his arm across his face, for all the good it would do.

The foot didn’t come down.

Slowly Chapel opened his eyes and looked up.

“In another life, I would have been a great man,” Ian said. He glared down at Chapel with those black eyes. “I would have been a hero. A king. And you want to give me revenge. You want to make it all better by punishing the guilty. That’s not how it works.”

The chimera looked down at himself. Blood covered the front of his parka. He tore it away with hands like claws, tore away the shirt beneath. Four massive wounds like red roses had blossomed on his chest. A fifth marred his cheek.

“This world,” Ian said, “isn’t my world. My world was to be cinders and dust. My world was a place where I could build something new. In this world I have no place.” He bent down and sorted among the ruins of Laughing Boy’s body and picked up the assassin’s revolver.

Chapel was on his back in the snow, still gasping for breath. He tried desperately to get up, to run toward Ian, but it was too late.

Ian pressed the barrel of the revolver under his chin and fired.

UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: APRIL 15, T+85:14

Angel saw it all on the satellite feeds. She couldn’t reach Chapel without a cell signal, but she could still watch him from orbit. She saw Ian die.

In a corner of one of her many computer screens she had a clock running, a timer that she’d started around six ten on April twelfth. The moment the fence of Camp Putnam came down and the chimeras walked out into the world. It had been counting up ever since then, telling her how much time had expired, measuring the length of their escape.

She stopped the clock now, at eighty-five hours and fourteen minutes.

All four targets had been neutralized. The mission was complete.