Chapel had good reason to appreciate body armor. Still— “That sounds ludicrous.”
“It’s a field that’s just starting out. But the implications are incredible. They want to breed a kind of tomato chimera that contains vaccines. You could inoculate children by feeding them their vegetables. They want to make chimera animals, pigs probably, that have human organs which can be harvested for transplants.”
“I am starting to feel a little nauseated, now,” Chapel said. “This is messed-up stuff.”
“I agree,” Julia said. “But I’m willing to accept that if it means saving lives.”
“Okay, okay, enough with the ethics debate.”
“Why are you asking me about this?” Julia asked.
He shot a glance at her eyes and saw she was desperate to know. And for once he could answer — she would find out soon enough anyway, from the police. “Your mother wrote the word ‘chimera’ on her wall. Probably while she was being killed.”
“Oh my God,” Julia gasped.
He was sorry to have to shock her like this. But it was important. “Do you know what she was trying to tell us?”
“I have no idea,” Julia said. “She never used the word ‘chimera’ in my presence, not that I remember. But then, she never talked about her work to me. Ever.”
Chapel rubbed at his eyes with the balls of his thumbs. Chimera had to mean something. Helen Bryant had died to get the word to him. She must have thought he — or someone — would understand. But what could it possibly mean?
In his head he saw black eyes. The eyes of the detainee when blinding light shone on them. They had turned black because an extra eyelid had slid across the maniac’s eyes.
Even at the time, Chapel had thought they looked like the eyes of a snake or something. Lots of animals had an extra eyelid, didn’t they? He seemed to remember that cats and birds did, too.
No. What he was thinking was crazy. But—
“If you could do that to a goat. If you could have a pig that grows human organs — you could — you could have a human being with animal organs as well, you could make them stronger, tougher, even—”
He couldn’t finish the thought out loud.
But he had another one. “Julia. What kind of research does your father do?”
She bit her lip. “He’s one of the world’s leading experts on gene therapy,” she said. “He works with human DNA.”
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+11:16
It was impossible. It simply couldn’t be.
And yet Chapel had seen the evidence with his own eyes. The detainee in the gutted department store had been far stronger and faster than any human being had a right to be. And he’d had an extra eyelid, one that shut down automatically when he was exposed to bright light, protecting his eyes. Making them as black as eight balls in his head. He had seemed inhuman. A monster. Chapel had refused to accept that, and so he had thought of the detainee as human, completely human. He’d been of the same opinion as Julia — that the guy had to have been full of drugs to make him so inhumanly strong and resistant to damage.
But if in fact the detainee had been a chimera — a combination of human and animal genes — it made a kind of crazy sense. Chapel had seen a documentary on chimpanzees, once, that had startled him. He’d always thought chimps were just smart apes that could be trained to do circus tricks or maybe learn some basic sign language. Instead, the chimps in that documentary — wild chimps — had been incredibly strong and very dangerous. They were capable of tearing a human being to pieces, and if their territory or their dominance was threatened, they had no qualms at all about doing it.
If the detainee had possessed chimpanzee genes, or genes from some other species stronger than a human being—
“You’re tough, for a human,” the detainee had said to him. Because the maniac wasn’t human. At least not entirely.
His phone was buzzing in his pocket. He pulled it out and saw the call was coming from the number (000) 000-0000. That had to mean it was an encrypted call, from Angel most likely. He hit the end button, and the phone stopped vibrating.
Before he could even put it in his pocket, it started ringing out loud. He checked and saw that he’d turned the ringer off, but apparently Angel could override that.
Probably she was just checking in to make sure he was all right. It might be something else, though. Something important.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Julia said, staring at him and his phone. “Either take that call or yank the battery out of that thing.”
Before he could do either, the flatscreen on the wall flickered and the image there changed. It showed a line drawing of a human head with one ear highlighted. The screen animated and showed an earpiece like the one in Chapel’s pocket being inserted.
Not exactly subtle.
“What the hell?” Julia asked.
“That screen must be attached to the Internet,” Chapel said to her while he fished in his pocket. He took out the earpiece and stared at it. “I have a friend who’s… good with computers.”
He put the earpiece in and was not surprised to hear Angel calling his name. “Are you alone, sugar?” she asked.
“Not quite. I—”
He turned to look at Julia, but she was already storming out of the examining room. “I’ve got work to do,” she said, and slammed the door behind her.
“I’m alone now,” he told Angel.
“That’s good. I like having you all to myself,” she told him. “Tell me you’re okay. Your vitals look all right, though you seem tired.”
“It’s been a long day. Wait a minute — you can tell I’m tired from the earpiece?”
“It’s got a few sneaky features. It can collect biometric data. Among other things.”
“And those other things—”
“Sweetie, if you ask me about classified things, you know I have to lie. And I don’t ever want to lie to you.”
“Fair enough. All right, Angel. What’s so important you needed to cut in on me like that?”
“I’m going to put Director Hollingshead on the line, and he can tell you all about it. Director?”
“I’m here,” the admiral said. “Chapel — it sounded like you took a pretty good blow to the head, there. Are you recovered?”
“I was dazed for a minute,” Chapel told him. “But I’ll be all right. Dr. Taggart took care of me. She also told me a few interesting things about chim—”
“Ahem,” Hollingshead broke in. “No need to tell an old dog anything about digging up bones, son.”
“Ah.” So Hollingshead already knew about chimeras. And what Chapel was facing. It would have been nice to have some warning, but Chapel supposed some things were meant to stay secret. Apparently so secret it couldn’t even be discussed over an encrypted line. “Okay, then, sir, I’ll tell you all about it some other time. Maybe in person.”
“You’re on the trail, son, and that’s all that matters. What’s the status of your, ah, investigation? What’s your next step?”
“There’s one more name on the list with a New York address. She shouldn’t be in danger now — the other three are probably hundreds of miles from here by now. Still, it won’t hurt to pay her a visit and make sure she’s safe. After that, it’s either Chicago or Atlanta. Any thought on where I should head first?”
“Angel’s looking for clues. Maybe she’ll turn something up. I know you’ll make the right choice, Captain Chapel. I have utter faith in you. Director Banks on the other hand…”
“Oh?”
“You’ve got some competition, let us say. Oh, nothing you can’t handle — and no one you haven’t met before. Someone you’ve seen around the Pentagon, perhaps.”