“He won’t order that. Even if she does have the virus, she’s probably better off with you where you can watch her and make sure she doesn’t spread it. Still — it’s just going to make your job harder if you have to babysit her at the same time.”
“I’m not so sure about that. She’s proved herself to be pretty resourceful, and she might have information I need. Answers to questions I haven’t even figured out how to ask, yet.”
“Fair enough. Hollingshead says it’s okay, she can travel with you. Just make sure she doesn’t learn anything too sensitive, and it should be all right.”
“That’s good,” Chapel said. “About Laughing Boy — what can we do about him? If he’s running around killing people, then he must have gone rogue, right? Please tell me that Banks didn’t order him to kill Julia. Please tell me we can have him arrested and remove him from the field.”
“I wish I could,” Angel said.
Chapel tapped at the armrest of his seat with his good fingers. “The CIA doesn’t just kill American citizens. I mean, it has, and I suppose things happen that I don’t get to hear about. But—”
“Chapel, he was authorized to do this. And the authorization came from higher up than Banks.”
Chapel grabbed the armrest hard enough to make the leather creak. “So he’s got a license to kill? That’s something from the movies. Only the president can authorize the execution of American citizens without a trial.”
“Higher up, I said,” Angel told him.
Chapel shivered at the thought. “Is the threat of this virus really that high? That they would just kill people on suspicion they might have it?”
“I don’t have a lot of information on it. But clearly someone thinks so,” Angel told him. “This is way beyond top secret stuff. What we do know, and this from confidential sources, is that the disease caused by the virus is incurable and almost impossible to detect until it’s way too late to do anything.”
“Jesus.” Chapel glanced at Julia again. She could be a ticking time bomb right now. She could be incubating the virus while she slept. And there was no way to know for sure. “That doesn’t excuse his behavior. We need to find a way to stop Laughing Boy now. Before he can kill anyone else.”
“Chapel,” Angel said, “I want to tell you something. You were right.”
“What?” It had been a while since somebody had said that to him.
“I do have my own agenda,” she told him. “Or rather, my agenda is the same as Director Hollingshead’s, and it may not match up with yours. We’re not like Director Banks and his operative. We don’t want to just kill people to keep this thing under control. But we do intend to control it, regardless of what that takes. Director Hollingshead can’t stop Laughing Boy. He doesn’t intend to try. He may not like Laughing Boy’s methods — but he agrees with Banks, at least in principle, about what needs to be done. If Julia does have the virus, we won’t kill her. But we will lock her up for the rest of her life in a facility like the one the chimeras escaped from. Because we have no other choice.”
PART TWO
IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+15:48
When Chapel was convinced Julia wasn’t going to wake up at any moment, he took care of one task he’d neglected all day. Removing his jacket and unbuttoning his shirt, he plugged his artificial arm into a power outlet near his seat, using a retractable cord built into the shoulder. While he waited for it to recharge he called Angel again and asked her about the next two names on the list. “Start with the one in Chicago, first,” he said.
“Eleanor Pechowski,” Angel replied, and he heard her clacking at her keyboard. “Eleanor, who are you? Let’s see. She’s a retired schoolteacher.”
“That doesn’t sound like someone a genetic freak would want to kill,” Chapel pointed out. “Maybe a disgruntled former student…”
“She worked for the UN, for a while,” Angel went on. “In UNESCO. Let’s see… she lived in New York City at the time, on Roosevelt Island. Looks like she taught English, math, and American history to the children of UN delegates. Maybe she fell in with the black helicopter crowd.”
Chapel rolled his eyes. “Please tell me you’re not a conspiracy nut, Angel,” he said.
Angel laughed. “No, I was just kidding. But just to work at the UN schools, Eleanor Pechowski had to have a security clearance. So the intelligence community would have been aware of her.”
“It’s a pretty tenuous connection. Just because somebody did a background check on her doesn’t mean she ended up working for the CIA. And the last time I checked, the agency didn’t hire a lot of English teachers. Okay, what about Jeremy Funt, the one in Atlanta? What’s his story?”
“That one’s easy. He was a government employee, and all his records are right here. Nothing hidden at all.”
“Tell me he worked for the CIA,” Chapel said, leaning forward and nearly pulling the plug on his arm.
“Not exactly,” Angel said. “He worked for the FBI.”
“Huh,” Chapel said. That didn’t make much sense. The CIA and the FBI had little to do with each other, other than both being government agencies. They weren’t even overseen by the same cabinet department. “Is it possible that’s a cover?”
“Not unless it’s an extremely good one. His service record is an open book, here — and it shows him working a steady load of cases from 1981 to 1996, all pretty standard stuff, missing persons, kidnappings, wire fraud. The one question mark is that he left the bureau in 1996 at the age of forty-five, long before mandatory retirement. With a file like that, normally you’d expect that he left the bureau in disgrace, that he messed up somehow and was forced to retire, but there’s no indication here he was anything less than a solid asset to the bureau.”
“So Funt just dropped off the bureau payroll with no explanation, huh? That’s interesting. And at least he sounds like a more likely target.” He had no idea why the chimeras would want to kill Funt, but if he had to prioritize targets, an FBI agent sounded higher in value than a retired schoolteacher. It sounded like Atlanta might have been the right choice after all. “Angel, what else can you tell me about this guy? What does he do for money? Does he have any family in Atlanta?”
“I’m looking at that right now. It looks like — hold on. Chapel, give me a second here, there’s something wrong with one of my laptops. Looks like somebody got a keystroke logger in my system, but that’s — hey!”
“Angel?” Chapel asked.
“Somebody’s piggybacking on my signal,” she said, sounding indignant. “Just who the hell do they think they are? Hacking me, why, I ought to—”
Static filled Chapel’s ear and then the signal went dead.
“Angel?” he called. “Angel, come in. What just happened? Angel?”
A new voice spoke to him.
“Captain Chapel, I presume,” the voice said. “You and I need to have a little talk.”
IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+16:02
“Listen, I don’t know who the hell you are, but this is an encrypted line,” Chapel said, pulling his phone out of his pocket. The screen showed he was still connected to the number (000) 000-0000. There was no indication anything had changed. “Intruding on this channel is a violation of any number of laws, and—”
“Law?” The voice in his ear chuckled. It was a male voice, a little gravelly as if its owner was a habitual cigarette smoker. There was iron in that voice, but also a little silver — it was the voice of someone used to speaking for a living, like a salesman or a voice-over actor. “I know all about the law,” the voice said. “I apologize for cutting in, but they weren’t going to let me speak to you, otherwise.”