Rob Thurman - Chimera

The best.

“ Saul, you’re giving me a headache.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but he was adding to my already existing headache.

“Giving you a headache?” Outraged and louder than the voice of God booming down on Moses, it had me yanking the phone from my ear with desperate speed. “Giving you a headache? I’ve got Pudgy the Pervert crying to me from his hospital bed that his balls have been cut off. Have you ever heard a fat ex-con cry? It’s no goddamn fun.”

“I didn’t do anything to the man’s sack, okay?” I repeated with weary patience for the third time.

“The balls are gone, aren’t they? And my business relationship with the dickwad isn’t looking too good either. He might be a bastard, but he was handy to have on the roster.”

“He still had balls when I left, Skoczinsky,” I growled.

“You can’t blame that on me.” On Michael maybe, but I was thoroughly innocent. As for the missing balls, either the hospital had amputated them or Vanderburgh had botched a do-it-yourself home job.

“I know you, Korsak. You had something to do with it.” He’d said my name on a cell phone, the least secure connection in the world today, which broke his rule of “protect the client.” He was pissed all right. There was a groan that turned into an aggrieved sigh and then a reluctant question. “He wasn’t doing that shit again, was he? With the kids?”

“I have no idea,” I answered honestly.

“If he was, I would’ve driven up to hold him down while you made with the cleaver. You know that, right?” I did know, but he didn’t wait long enough to hear my confirmation. “Ah, hell, balls or not, he can still work. And speaking of work, I’ve got that info you wanted.”

Fumbling for the bottle of pills on the nightstand, I wrestled with the stubborn cap. “Yeah? Lay it on me.”

There was the rustle of papers and Saul became even louder as he cradled the phone between shoulder and chin. “John Jericho Hooker. Forty-seven years old, raised in Massachusetts. He’s a doctor several times over, medical and otherwise. He has doctorates in human and molecular genetics and biochemistry. Started college at the tender age of fourteen—a genius brat apparently—and hasn’t looked back since. Genetic replacement and manipulation—what there is to know he practically wrote the book on. What his peers felt wasn’t worth knowing is where he got into trouble.”

This sounded promising. Getting up, I filled a glass at the bathroom tap while Michael showered. “How so?”

“Two words. Human chimeras.”

Okay. I got one of those words, and that wasn’t so bad. I was the king of partial credit in college. “Come again?”

“Human chimeras, obviously. Surely you’ve heard of them, Korsak. Big college-educated mob guy such as yourself.” Then Saul dropped the lofty tone and admitted, “Yeah, I’d never heard of them either. Apparently there are more things in Heaven and Earth, just like my bubble gum wrapper said. A human chimera is the result of twins, mostly identical but occasionally fraternal, intermingling in the womb. Blood or other genetic material mixes between the two of them. One twin usually dies in the womb and the twin left has the building blocks of two instead of one. Sort of like human to the second power, I guess.”

All right. It was vaguely interesting, but was it pertinent? The jury was still out on that one. “And what’s this have to do with the man in the moon?”

“Hooker is one. A natural chimera—and damn proud of the fact. He did a lot of groundbreaking work, so says Google, that’s the backbone of the field of genetics today, but his true passion was for chimeras. He was of the opinion that his humans squared should be stronger, faster, smarter . . . everything we are, but only much more so. Now, the fact that he wouldn’t submit proof of that was really no big deal. It was a pet theory; all scientists have them. It was when he started into the psychic crap that eyebrows began to rise.”

A single cold finger climbed my spine as if it were a ladder. Psychic. I didn’t know exactly how to classify what Michael and the other Institute children could do, but it had to occupy some twisted corner of the psychic realm. “Psychic? What the hell?”

“I know. As we said in the van, he’s a goddamn fruit loop. He calculated that if they would be stronger and faster, they would also have a heightened psychic ability. Of course, if he’d ever bothered to demonstrate all those abilities himself, maybe he wouldn’t be the pariah he is today.” I heard him yawn. “Shit, maybe I’m a chimera myself. Twice the sexy jammed into one body. Now that’s a science project worth the bucks.”

“Bucks? How about cents?” I replied absently. Michael had come out of the bathroom. Bare-chested, he was wearing a pair of my jeans that bagged ridiculously on him and a towel hanging around his neck. My eyes went instantly to the incision on his lower back. He’d said it hadn’t hurt when he’d gotten up this morning, and now I could see why.

It was gone.

The only sign the surgery had ever taken place was the thinnest of silvery lines, nearly invisible to the naked eye. I felt my mouth go dry. Stronger or faster, I didn’t know if there was truth in that or not, but Jericho had certainly proved resilient. It had to be the same resiliency that Michael was exhibiting. The recollection of his tattered feet from the night of the rescue hit me. The next day he’d said they were fine when I’d asked and had seemed puzzled by the question. At the time I’d thought he was reacting to a concern he was unfamiliar with, but it could’ve been simple confusion over what he thought a pointless question. Of course they’d been fine, no doubt completely healed.

Turning, he blocked my view as he dumped the towel and pulled on a long sleeve T-shirt. He caught me staring and raised his eyebrows in question. Shaking my head, I strong-armed my attention back to the phone conversation. Saul was still indignantly jabbering about my cheap shot and I interrupted without mercy. “So, you say he’s a pariah. Then what’s he been doing lately?”

“Once his pet theory became his only theory, he literally dropped out of sight. The scientific community probably wasn’t very sorry to see him go. The chimera line was on shaky ground, but then he went over the edge. Psychic research isn’t any more accepted now than it ever was, not when it comes to the big boys. These are the guys who have their eyes on the Nobel, and they don’t have the patience for anything that isn’t one hundred percent for that goal.”

“Then there’s nothing else? About the kids or the compound?”

“Nada. For nearly twenty years he’s been off the radar. Forgotten except for textbooks and old articles.” There was the explosive pop of a soft drink can being opened and then a long slurp. “But with what was in that room we saw there, he couldn’t have been up to anything good. And that’s above and beyond kidnapping kids.”

“Was there anything in the news?” Saul had made the 911 call the night we’d broken in, but I hadn’t heard anything on the radio over the following days regarding captive children held in a walled compound.

“Not a thing. Not a damn word. And if that doesn’t scream government connections out the ass, I don’t know what does. I even sent one of my people out there to take a casual look. It’s still locked up, but the guards are gone. I’m betting everyone else is too. They’ve pulled up stakes.”

And taken the children with them. I had my brother back, but there had to be more than thirty families out there whose sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were still missing—worse than missing. While I wished we’d been able to take more of them with us, I realized it might not have been so simple. The thought of that tiny porcelain Wendy on the loose in public was bone-chilling. As she skipped down the sidewalk, her fair hair floating behind her like spider silk, her huge eyes would be wax doll empty as people collapsed in showers of blood all about her. Wendy was a victim, I knew that, but was she a salvageable one?