“The guy in question was CIA, which wasn’t exactly a surprise — somebody says ‘Langley,’ that’s what you think. His name was Banks. Asshole. Giant asshole.”
Chapel fought back a grin.
“Tells me,” Funt went on, “that he’s got a missing person he needs found. A kid, about ten years old, named Malcolm. He’s been missing for over a week. I always hated hearing something like that. With abducted kids, unless it’s a parent who took them, if they’ve been gone more than forty-eight hours you think to yourself, I’m not looking for a kid. I’m looking for a body. That’s how you approach the case — otherwise you go insane when you do find the body. Banks assured me this kid was still alive, though he wouldn’t say how he knew that. And he told me it definitely wasn’t his parents who took him. Then he asked for my security clearance. He already knew it by heart, but I gave him what he wanted. He said I was going to see some things nobody was ever supposed to know about. At the time I didn’t realize that meant I wasn’t supposed to know them either, and I was going on his hit list.”
Chapel interrupted. “Why did he bring you in on this in the first place? The CIA couldn’t find the kid on their own?”
“This was the mid-nineties. There wasn’t even an Internet to speak of back then,” Funt pointed out, “much less the kind of satellites we have now. Back then when you needed somebody found, you went to the FBI. I was simply the best man for the job.
“The CIA flew me up to some place in New York State, I never did find out exactly where. They introduced me to William Taggart — your father who, forgive me, miss, was an asshole as well, though not as big an asshole as Banks.”
“I’m not exactly offended,” Julia said.
Funt nodded in thanks. “He treated me like I was a kid. You could tell when he talked he was translating in his head, from big multisyllabic science words down to the kind of slangy English somebody like me might understand. He said the kid I was looking for was named Malcolm, and he was very, very special.
“They showed me some of the chimeras. Had them come out and speak to me, say, hello, Mr. Detective, isn’t the weather nice today. Then one of them took off his shirt. There were a bunch of cinder blocks set up in the room. This kid — his name was Ian, I remember — goes over to them and breaks them, one at a time, by punching them. When he’s done, he’s breathing a little heavy and his eyes go weird. You know what I mean. An extra black eyelid slides down over his eyes and blinks at me a couple of times.
“When I stopped wanting to scream for my mother, I said, thanks, that was very impressive, but what in God’s name did I just see? Dr. Taggart explained they were called chimeras, and they’re the next step in human evolution. Ninety-nine percent human, he said, just like you and me. The other one percent was cobbled together from DNA sequences he stole from chimpanzees and rattlesnakes and something called a water bear, which I’d never heard of. They were survivors, he said. They could live through anything, they could survive gunshot wounds, blood loss, hypothermia. They were faster than people, stronger, and, he thought, probably smarter, though they had a hard time testing for that.
“I asked a whole bunch of questions, like how one percent difference could account for everything he’d told me, and why on earth he’d chosen to do this, and whether he thought the devil had a special place for him in hell or if he was just going to get the usual treatment. He got pretty pissed off then and walked out on me. It was another scientist, a woman with red hair like yours but going gray, who showed me the rest.”
“That… would have been my mother,” Julia said.
“Are you going to get mad if I tell you she was kind of an asshole, too?”
“She’s dead,” Julia said.
“Oh. Crap. I… didn’t know—”
“She’s dead, which is the only thing that keeps me from agreeing with you,” Julia told him.
“… Right. Well, this woman, who didn’t even tell me her name, she showed me the place they had the chimeras living. Camp Putnam, they called it. They were all living in a sort of dormitory there. It looked pretty much like a summer camp, except all the kids were exactly the same age and size, and they all kind of looked alike. And instead of hot little counselors in tight T-shirts and short shorts, they had soldiers carrying M4 carbines. The kids didn’t seem to think it was weird. They’d never known anything else, your mom told me. They’d been there their whole lives.”
“Hold on,” Chapel said. “Julia — your parents moved away from the Catskills in, when, 1995?”
“We moved to our house, yeah. For the first couple of years Dad only came to see us on the weekends, and Mom would commute to and from work. She had to get up really early so I had to get myself ready for school in the morning.”
“But if the camp was operational then, why wouldn’t they want to live closer to it?” Chapel asked. “If that was where they worked—”
“Did you want to hear the rest of my story?” Funt asked.
“Yes. Sorry,” Chapel told him. “Just trying to keep the facts straight.”
Funt snorted in derision and went on. “Good luck with that. This was the weirdest case I ever saw, and I only got little glimpses of it. Your mom took me to see the fence around the camp. At the time it was just a normal cyclone fence, twelve feet high. They were already building a new one when I was there. Much bigger, and with barbed wire on top. Your mom told me the fence was electrified. They didn’t think the chimeras would dare climb it. In this one case, they were wrong. Malcolm had gone right over it. The guards caught him when he landed on the other side.”
“They caught him?” Julia asked. “But—”
“They caught him. They couldn’t hold him, though. Three soldiers, heavily armed. He killed all three of them, snapped their necks, and ran off into the woods. He was ten years old at the time.”
STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+35:48
“He was… ten?” Julia asked, her face pale even in the darkness that had settled over the top of Stone Mountain. “In 1996, he was ten… they were all… ten?”
“Yeah,” Funt said. “That significant, somehow?”
“Just… to me. No. I mean, no — it’s not significant. Please, go on.”
Chapel shot her a glance, but her face wasn’t giving anything away. Maybe she had some secrets of her own.
Funt shrugged and went on. He took off his ranger hat and rubbed his arms. “I had my case, anyway. This weird mutant kid had escaped from the camp and I had to track him down. I tried not to think too much about what he’d done to those soldiers, or what the other one, Ian, had done to those cinder blocks. I worked it like any other missing persons. I asked a lot of people a lot of questions, made a lot of phone calls, wore out some shoe leather. I’m guessing the details aren’t too important, not now. I spent three weeks looking, and every day Agent Banks from the CIA would call me and bitch me out for not finding Malcolm. Eventually I tracked the kid down to a house outside of Philadelphia. Nice place, just on the edge of farmland. No fence, just a real big lawn he could play on. It was owned by a family called the Gabors. They’d found him walking along the side of a country road outside of Utica, New York, while they were on vacation. Figured he was a runaway so they took him in, raised him like their own. Hippie types — Mr. Gabor worked for a nonprofit feeding homeless people. The Mrs. was a lawyer, but the bumper sticker on her car said No Blood for Oil, so she wasn’t exactly the rich kind of lawyer. I’m guessing they were nice people.”
“You’re guessing? You didn’t talk to them?” Chapel asked.
“Nope. What I know about them I got from their daughter. She was a student at Villanova. She came home for Thanksgiving and found them in their bed. Her mom had been strangled. Looked like her dad tried to put up a fight. He was in pieces.”