Chimera Read Free Page B

swimming with one arm and one leg looked
kind of like a drunk dolphin flopping back and forth in the water. He had a lot
of trouble swimming in a straight line, and even one lap of the pool left him so
exhausted he had to rest for an hour before he started again.
    In the end, though, Top could swim. “I ever fall
off an ocean liner on one of those celebrity cruises, I guess I’ll be okay,” Top
had said when he decided they were done. When he’d successfully swum ten laps,
in less than eight hours. “Now, Captain Chapel. Sir. You want to tell me why we
went to all this trouble? Sir, you want to tell me why I forced you to do this
demeaning task, sir?”
    â€œBecause,” Chapel had said, “if I can show an
enlisted man like you how to swim, sorry sack of guts that you are, I can surely
figure out how to do it with my own glorious and beautiful officer’s body.”
    â€œSir, yes, sir,” Top had said. “Now get in that
goddamned pool or I will throw you in.”
    Now—years later—Chapel was up to twenty laps at a
time, in less than an hour. He would never do the butterfly crawl again, but
he’d mastered a kind of half stroke that used his arm mostly for steering and
let his legs do all the work. Fort Belvoir had a wonderful pool in its fitness
center, and he availed himself of it daily.
    There was no feeling like it.
    The blood-warm water streamed past him, buoying him
up like gentle hands. He didn’t have to think about anything else while he
swam—he just focused on his body, on his movements. His muscles moved in perfect
concert, his arm and his legs snapping into an old familiar rhythm. His head
turned from side to side as he drew in each breath and let it out again in a
long, slow exhale. There was no better feeling in the world.
    Thanks, Top, he
thought, as he kicked off for the start of lap seventeen.
    The last time he’d seen Top had been at the master
gunnery sergeant’s wedding, less than a year previous. Top had walked down the
aisle with two legs and two arms—the only way anyone could tell he wasn’t whole
was that he was wearing an eye patch. Chapel had gotten to know Top’s bride a
little bit and she had turned out to be the toughest, most sarcastic woman he’d
ever met. She needed to be if she was going to keep up with Top.
    Lap eighteen. Chapel would have stayed in the pool
all day if he could have. He needed to get back to work, though. The frustration
and boredom of his morning and of Major Volks’s rejection were gone, or at least
he’d worked off enough of that negativity to actually start drafting some memos
of his own.
    Still. Maybe he’d shoot for twenty-five laps
today.
    Across the pool. Back. He kicked off for lap
nineteen.
    And then stopped himself in the water before he’d
gone five yards out.
    â€œHello?” he said.
    A man in a pin-striped suit was standing at the
edge of the pool, looking down at him. He had a thick white towel in his hands
and something else. A BlackBerry, maybe.
    â€œCan I help you with something? Make it quick,
though,” Chapel said. “I’m pretty good on the straightaways, but treading water
isn’t exactly my forte.”
    Anyone wearing that kind of suit in Fort Belvoir
was a civilian, and Chapel had a bad moment where he thought the guy might be
some kind of CEO from one of the corporations he was watchdogging. The buzz-cut
hair said otherwise, though, as did the sheer bulk of muscle crammed into the
jacket.
    Chapel was trained in Military Intelligence. He’d
studied all the different ways to put clues together, to draw conclusions from
scant evidence. From just the look of this guy he knew right away that he had to
be CIA.
    The agency had tentacles everywhere, and there were
plenty of them wrapped around INSCOM and Fort Belvoir. They tended to stay in
other parts of the fort though, where Chapel couldn’t see them, and he’d