Chimera by David Wellington Read Free Book Online

chances of them breaking someone’s skin—or, to be frank
about it, biting them—is quite high. In fact it seems to be their chief joy in
life.”
    â€œAll right—that’s enough,” Banks said. He went over
to the bar and poured himself a highball. “That is the absolute limit of need to
know. Tell him what he has to do, Rupert, so he can actually get to it.”
    Hollingshead took off his glasses and wiped them
with a handkerchief. “Easy enough to say, of course. Much easier than it will be
to do. But we need you, Captain Chapel, to go into the field and recover these
men.”
    â€œSir, yes, sir,” Chapel said, standing up. “You
want me to lead an investigation to locate them, so we can send in appropriate
squads to pick them up. I’ll need to rendezvous with local police and National
Guard units in New York State to—”
    â€œNo.” Hollingshead held up his glasses so he could
look through them, presumably so he could find any remaining smudges. Or maybe
so he just didn’t have to look Chapel in the eye. “No. Nothing that simple.
We’re asking you to go into the field and deal with these men personally.”
    â€œYou mean I’m to track them down . . . on
my own,” Chapel said, because he was certain that was what Hollingshead had just
said. Even if it made no sense whatsoever. “Four men who each took
out—single-handedly—a rapid response team.”
    â€œWe’re saying that we need you to find them and
remove them from play,” Hollingshead said.
    â€œRemove them from play?”
    â€œIf you get a clear shot on them,” Banks confirmed,
“you take it. Bringing them in alive is not required. They’re much more valuable
to us dead than they are on the loose.”
    â€œYou want me to kill them,” Chapel said.
    â€œIt’s the damned sensitivity of the thing,”
Hollingshead said.
    For once Banks had more to say. “The public can
never find out what’s happened. It can’t learn where they came from, and it
can’t learn what they’re carrying. We can’t risk any more high-profile
incidents. It’s been hard enough covering up what happened to the original
teams.” The CIA director swallowed his liquor with a grimace. “It has to be just
one man, to keep our involvement quiet. Secrecy is imperative here.”
    Jim Chapel was no stranger to the need for secrecy.
He’d spent his professional life keeping secrets and not asking questions. He
knew how this sort of thing worked, and he knew what Banks wasn’t saying. That
the blowback from a leak in this operation would be devastating. Which meant
that these detainees weren’t just terrorists, and the human-engineered virus
they were carrying wasn’t the product of some black laboratory in a rogue
state.
    It was something the government had made. The
government of the United States. The detainees—the psychopathic, violent,
homicidal detainees weren’t just dangerous criminals. They were guinea pigs.
Specimens that the CIA or the DoD or maybe both had experimented on. And letting
that fact out of this room was unthinkable to Banks.
    He noticed one other thing, too, from what Banks
had said.
    When Banks talked about the public—meaning the
American people, the citizens of the United States—he referred to them as an
“it.”
    He was beginning to see why Hollingshead hated this
man.
    THE PENTAGON:
APRIL 12, T+5:35
    â€œYou’ll need to leave immediately,” Banks
told him. “You’re going to have to work damned fast if you’re going to catch
them. We’ll do everything in our power to help you—everything that doesn’t
damage national security.”
    â€œI know we’re asking a very great deal of you,
son,” Hollingshead said. “I wish I could give you opportunity to volunteer for
this mission. I wish I could let you turn it