“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.