Chimera Read online

  Holding the wounded Agent Adams before him as a shield, Williams hardly spared Brant a glance. "You have no idea what it's all about, what sacrifices have to be made to protect the country, the entire free world. If it wasn't for us the goddamned place would be overrun by terrorists! But we know, don't we McCabe?" Williams splattered saliva across Adams' drooping head. "We know what it's really like, what's inside their minds, don't we, Josh? Don't we !"

  The scene could have been a caricature of an FBI posse cornering its man-except that the perpetrator was one of their own. Half a dozen technicians crouched around the large, glass-walled briefing room, peeking around tables and upturned chairs. Five shirt-sleeved FBI agents took cover behind the concrete columns, and levelled their weapons at Robert Williams.

  Only McCabe, who was closest to Williams, had held his ground amidst the pandemonium. "No, Rob. Tell me," McCabe said, his eyes belying the softness in his voice. "Tell me how blowing up a building protects the American Way of Life. Tell me how shattering people's lives does that?"

  More agents poured into the room. Williams tightened his grip on Adams, who was slumping against him. Blood from Adams' shattered chest bubbled out between Williams' fingers and flowed onto his shirt and gold cufflinks.

  The former head of the Behavioural Science Unit might be insane, but McCabe knew that Williams wasn't stupid. A tactical support team would already be surrounding the building; Quantico was on a Marine Base. Williams had no way out. The only thing stopping the agents from shooting him was his hostage, Agent Adams. But Adams was dying, a liability now. Soon, a sniper could make a clean hit.

  "You snivelling little brat," Williams sneered at McCabe. "You cut and ran. First to a woman, then, after you fucked her over, you tossed away everything I gave you. Your old man was right about you; you're just like the rest of 'em. Too gutless to admit the truth even as you work against it!"

  Adams abruptly collapsed, causing Williams to stagger under the dead weight. His voice dropping to a whisper, Williams added, "Stopping us, stopping your father and brother from protecting the American people."

  An icy chill clutched McCabe. Before he could stop himself, he mouthed, "Ed?"

  "You whimpering little asswipe. You of all people know that sacrifices have to be made. But too fucking clever Joshua McCabe-" Williams eyes flicked, and he grinned maniacally.

  McCabe saw it too, a glint through the window and a flash of red from a sniper tracer; time was up.

  Robert Williams lifted the gun's muzzle to his right eye and pulled the trigger. With over three hundred foot-pounds behind it, the nine-millimetre projectile tore through his brain. Curdled grey and pink and yellow, and splinters of bone spewed backwards through the gaping hole, and hit the wall behind.

  Horrified FBI agents, trained to react instantly, froze at the sudden and shocking end to what would later be amorphously described as 'a situation'.

  McCabe reacted first. Catching Adams, he gently lowered the wounded man to the floor, and placed a hand over the gaping wound in his chest. Swearing, Peter Brant crouched opposite McCabe and began ripping away Adams' shirt. A flurry of confusion took over. Shouts for emergency kits and medics, expletives, questions, demands for answers, then Marine medics roughly pushed McCabe aside.

  Eyes flickering open, Adams demanded, "McCabe!" A medic tried to place an oxygen mask over his face, but he batted it away. " McCabe !"

  "Let him through," Brant ordered.

  "Take it easy," McCabe said, pushing through the Marines and leaning over Adams.

  The dying agent grabbed McCabe's tie, pulled him close, and rasped, "Oklahoma…five knew who. Chimera…human trials implemented. Convince them…sacrifice hundreds…for billions." Adams' grip relaxed, and he shuddered and convulsed. Hot blood erupted from his mouth and gushed across McCabe's hair and face, inadvertently catapulting him into another time and place.

  A medic pulled McCabe away, then Brant jerked him to his feet, thrust a contorted face into his and demanded to know what Adams' had said.

  Unresponsive, McCabe stared down at the blood dripping onto his shirt.

  Chimera .

  Demands from new arrivals were now directed at Brant. McCabe used the distraction to push a path through the frenzy of dour-faced agents and hysterical clerks. Then he was outside and running. Ignoring the shocked looks and cries of those he passed, his first instinct was to keep running. But there was nowhere to hide, not from this, so he went to his room at the Quantico 'Hilton'.

  He didn't quite make it to the toilet before puking his guts out. Wrenching off his clothes, he turned the shower on as hot as he could stand it, and stepped in and washed himself down as fast as he could.

  The bathroom door burst open. "What the hell is going on?" Brant's eyes slid to mess on the floor, and his nostrils quivered with disgust. "If this is how you react-"

  "My old man used to call it the puke factor." McCabe spat out the last of the bile, tossed his head back, and shook himself like a wet dog. "What happens when you're exposed to a Level 4 organism." Odd thing, that. He never shook, just threw up. Stepping out of the shower, he pulled a white towel from the rack, and roughly dried himself.

  "A what?" Brant demanded.

  Ignoring him, McCabe walked into the bedroom and dropped the towel on the bed. He tugged a pair of shorts from the suitcase, and pulled them on.

  " Agent McCabe! Brant's voice was just short of murderous.

  McCabe almost laughed. Instead he sat heavily on the bed and muttered, "The bastards have really done it."

  A knock on the door startled them both. "Come!" Brant called, apparently oblivious to the fact that it was McCabe's room.

  Assistant Director John Reynold strode in. Trailing him were two agents and a Marine major.

  "What the fuck was Williams doing here?" McCabe demanded, belatedly adding, "Sir."

  Reynold turned to the men with him. His eyes ordered them to wait outside. The major looked like he was about to object, then he nodded and closed the door.

  Shrugging out of his dark overcoat, Reynold replied, "Williams was suspended from duty pending the outcome of an internal enquiry. That was delayed due to the Oklahoma bombing. The Director reinstated him-administrative duty only, he wasn't allowed to run cases."

  For a brief moment, McCabe regretted not pulling the trigger in his office eight months earlier. He pushed his wet hair off his forehead and said, "Adams knew every single piece of evidence tabulated for McVeigh's trial like the back of his hand. And he learned something; something he knew only I would understand."

  "Go on," Reynold said, ignoring Brant.

  "A weaponised chimera is being tested on a human population." McCabe stood, and rummaged around his suitcase looking for a tracksuit.

  Reynold sucked his breath in, and then demanded, "What were Adams' exact words?"

  " 'Oklahoma, five knew who. Chimera, human trials implemented. Convince them, sacrifice hundreds for billions .'"

  "Chimera?" Brant's face screwed up. "What's a chimera?"

  "A marriage born of insanity." McCabe eyed the tracksuit and wrested it from the bag. "It's a weaponised virus created with the properties of multiple viruses. Human trials don't mean in a lab; the lethality will already have been established. Someone is testing a bioweapon on a human population. Williams wasn't just insane, he was a megalomaniac, in the purest, clinical sense."

  "Jesus, of all the people I might've suspected, Williams…" Reynold stared at him. "Okay, McCabe, talk to me."

  It was a familiar routine. Reynold needed him to connect the dots. "Someone in the Federal Murrah Building stumbled over the evidence, or he or she was directly involved. At any rate, they had become a risk. In the days immediately following the bombing, local law enforcement agencies were overwhelmed by a spate of burglaries in victims' homes-"

  "I've heard about your whacked theories, McCabe!" Brant exploded. "The robberies were unrelated opportunism by local thieves."

  "Really?" McCabe shot him a scathing
look. "Have you examined the pattern of the robberies? Or considered the victims? Adams found something in the evidence room linking the bombing of the Federal Murrah Building to a planned test using a chimera, so Williams silenced him."

  " McVeigh bombed the Federal Murrah Building!" Brant lifted his hand and gestured angrily. "And what the hell has any of that got to do with Williams going psycho?"

  "Robert Williams didn't go psycho; he already was." McCabe pulled the sweatshirt over his head. "But insanity does not preclude his acting in a calculated manner."

  "I saw Outbreak, too, McCabe." Brant took off his rimless glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Sci fi conspiracies don't belong in an FBI investigation. Besides, you're a profiler, not a bioweapons expert!"

  Snorting, McCabe glanced at Reynold, who shook his head. Okay, so Brant was out of the loop. "Lemme spell it out for you." McCabe continued dressing while he talked. "Adams burst into the briefing room, agitated as all hell. Williams ran in and shot him-but deliberately did not make it a killing shot."

  "How do you know?" Brant snapped.

  "Because Williams was a crack marksman. He needed a shield to keep himself from getting gunned down just long enough to find out what Adams had told me." McCabe grinned weakly. "When Williams realised that I didn't know anything, he killed himself."

  "And? So? What the fuck is all of that supposed to mean?" Brant barked, but Reynold clamped a warning hand on his shoulder. Replacing his glasses, Brant stared at his superior in disbelief. "You're not taking him seriously?"

  "Williams' not only believed in protecting the American way of life," Reynold explained. "He was obsessed with it. He had no compunction using every available resource in order to fulfil what he saw as a moral obligation-no matter how sticky the ethics. No matter at what cost to people's lives."

  McCabe stood and let out a short, bitter laugh. Williams had viewed him as one such…resource.

  "We've got McVeigh-" Brant objected.

  "You've got what they wanted you to get," McCabe interrupted. "You heard him. Before he killed himself, Williams said, 'sacrifices have to be made, not just for this country, but the entire free world.' McVeigh made a similar comment. Ever wondered why the FBI has been directed to ignore certain forensic evidence and not to pursue enquiries that might draw attention to the 'Middle Eastern' men seen with McVeigh the week prior to the bombing?"

  Eyeing both of them suspiciously, Brant replied, "The Attorney General wants a solid conviction against McVeigh, not one muddied by conspiracy theories."

  "So the facts, the truth has to be sacrificed." McCabe snorted. "One thing I'll say about Rob Williams, he was no hypocrite. He was prepared to forfeit his own life in pursuit of his goddamned ideals."

  Brant's look was frankly disbelieving, until Reynold said to him, "Don't fall into the same denial that afflicts half of our government, beginning with our esteemed Director. Remember the Sarin attack in a Tokyo subway a few months back? We dodged a bullet that time. If it had been a biological weapon instead of a fast acting toxin, it would have been days, weeks, before anyone got sick. Meanwhile, anyone infected could have left Japan, spreading it to damned near every country on the planet."

  "So what does that make McVeigh?" Brant's eyes darted between them. "A front man for a foreign attack? A latter day 'lone gunman'? The Iraqis-"

  "Williams involvement points to a group within our own government," said Reynold, looking queasy.

  McCabe sympathised. They'd finally caught the dragon by the tail, but they still had no idea how far the monster reached.

  "You're both crazy!" Brant ran the back of his hand across his jaw, but his voice lacked conviction.

  "A few FBI, CIA, and DIA agents, and the more intelligent senior White House staffers, including the President and Vice President, have been alerted to what's going on." Reynold's expression darkened and he turned to stare out the window. "Everyone else, including Congress, Senate, and the Pentagon, have deluded themselves into thinking that bioweapons are science fiction. If McCabe is right-and I wouldn't bet against him-this group, people we know only as the Consortium, are planning a demonstration that'll put the fear of God into this country." He pivoted around, picked up his overcoat and headed for the door. "If it is a chimera, or if it becomes airborne after the initial contagion, there's no guarantee it won't spread beyond the test area."

  "And," McCabe added. "There'll be no cure."

  Clammy tendrils of evening mist drifted around the winter bare trees that lined the jogging track. McCabe barely noticed anything except his feet hitting the gravel path in a comforting rhythm. Pound, pound, feel the blood pump, hear your heart beat .

  Williams' death had extinguished one nightmare in his life and resurrected another. The bastard hadn't been able to resist playing one last, sick mind game.

  Pound, pound .

  Still, the doubt niggled. Could Ed be involved? For God and Country, of course. Just like their old man. Yep, his brother had become a real chip off the old block. But Ed was in Brussels attending the WHO post-mortem on the recent Ebola outbreak in Kikwit. And Ed hated Ebola with a passion-he had good reason to.

  Mud and bugs, jungles and planes, fear. The stench of blood and human excrement, terror; not from snakes or scorpions or vindictive witchdoctors, not even from the cough of a leopard or snapping jaws of a crocodile, but of things unseen.

  Run into the darkness. Pound, pound, feel your heart beat.

  Sometime during the night he came out of the jungle and went to look for help. Packs of dogs wandered around, growling and fighting over human remains and crusted black pools of blood. The smell was so bad that it almost choked him. It was not just the odour of faeces and death, but what he later realised was that of burning flesh. Down by the river, the villagers had built a fire. They were vainly trying to exorcise the invisible demons by cremating the victims. When they saw him, they ran away, the expressions on their face, terrified.

  Still naked, he returned to the clinic to wash and find some clothes. He soon gave up on the shower-there was no water-and went to the storeroom to find a lantern. Tucked away behind the Perrier were cartons of milk cookies, the ones that the nurses gave extremely malnourished children. He ripped open a packet and ate as many as he could.

  Still weak from illness, but determined nonetheless, he carried the lantern outside and spent the remainder of the night scratching at the ground. He had to dig a hole deep enough to stop the leopards and dogs from digging up his mother.

  When the sky finally began to lighten he saw how ineffectual his scratching had been. That left him with only one choice.

  Steeling himself against the sight of her corpse, he went inside his room. Rats scurried under the bed, but the flies that gathered on her face and chest, ignored him. The smell was bad enough, but when he tried to drag her across the floor, her skin sloughed off in his hands. He yelled out in grief and frustration, sat down beside her, and, for the first and only time, cried.

  The rats started getting bold, and soon, they joined the flies crawling over her. He had to do this, had to give her a proper Christian burial, just like the nuns did. By pulling on her belt, he managed to get her to the veranda before his stomach revolted. The bile and half-digested cookies stung his sinuses as he spewed, and kept spewing.

  A hand grasped his shoulder. Josh flinched and lifted his fist to strike back-a habit he'd acquired in boarding school. Staring at him with knowing eyes was a wizened-faced old man. In a surprising display of strength, the man picked up her body, and, ignoring the gore, slung her over his naked shoulder and carried her down to the river.

  Unable to speak, Josh followed. Another villager, a middle-aged woman with no front teeth, helped the old guy toss the body onto the pyre.

  First, her long, once beautiful hair went up in a bright yellow flare. Then the bloodied remnants of her shirt caught fire. Josh turned away, unable to witness the blackening of her corpse, unable to listen to the sizzling and crackling as his mother's flesh b
urned from her bones.

  Back in the clinic he helped the old man pull out the remaining boxes of food and Perrier-the only safe drinking water in the village. Afterwards, they set the building alight. Then Josh went with the man to check all of the huts, not entirely certain what he was seeking. What he found was something that he'd never spoken of, to anyone. By the end of that day, most of the village was in flames.

  He wanted to go mad, because in madness lay sanctuary. But he was not granted that relief. The surviving villagers' fatalism kept him sane, while the scavenged supplies and his immunity to the disease kept him alive.

  Weeks passed in this strange non-madness, and then his father and brother returned.

  The death of his mother should have driven Josh, of all people, to find a way to control hemorrhagic viruses. Or so his father had said after learning that Josh had taken his MD and, rather than turning to epidemiology and the 'family business', had instead taken refuge in psychology.

  Even then, it had been impossible to put the nightmares behind him. Eggnog around the Christmas tree each year had been punctuated by candid snaps of erupting pustules and corpses piled like cordwood, the ground black with body fluids harbouring microscopic mass murderers from countless outbreaks in a dozen countries.

  When he'd started consulting for the FBI, he'd been tempted to bring to the Christmas celebrations a few snapshots of his own, to outmatch his family's liturgy of horrors. But one or even a dozen brutally raped and murdered children were nothing compared to a killer that could mindlessly eradicate thousands. Or millions.

  Or, under the right conditions, billions.

  He was in a unique position to understand the potential of these bugs, but he'd avoided them as much as he'd avoided the awful talent that Williams had lusted after. Adams had come to him knowing that he would have no choice but to listen.

  There was another choice. Simple, really. Just pick up your weapon, and do exactly what Williams had done. Fast, and conclusive.

  So why was he staying? Because of his promise to Reynold? Some sense of moral obligation towards his fellow man? Or was it morbid curiosity? A need to pick and prod at his gross misjudgement of Williams, to understand what he had failed to see in the man?