“I know this place,” she said, as he slowed the truck down to a crawl. “I remember this.”
Chapel couldn’t see anything but darkness and more trees. “You sure?” he asked.
“We’re on the road to Phoenicia,” she said. “I grew up there.”
Chapel had forgotten that much of Julia’s youth had been spent on these back roads. Her parents had lived here, working by day at Camp Putnam where they were raising a small army of genetic misfits, coming home at night to check her homework and take out the trash. He shook his head. “What was it like?” he asked.
She shrugged and made herself small in her seat again, withdrawing once more. For a second he thought she wouldn’t answer, that that would go beyond the bounds of their new professional relationship. Then she made a small noncommittal noise and said, “It was all right, I guess. I went skiing a lot in the winter, and in summer my friends and I would steal some beer and go tubing.”
“Tubing?” Chapel asked.
Julia actually smiled a little. “It’s the local sport, I guess. You get an old inner tube from a tractor tire and you throw it in the river, then you sit with your butt in the hole and your legs dangling in the water. The current takes you downriver while you lie back with the sun in your face and the water splashing you to keep you cool. The river keeps the beer cold for a long time.”
“Sounds pretty idyllic,” he said, to keep her talking.
“Now, yeah. When I was a teenager, I thought it was boring as hell. I used to dream about when I grew up and I could move to New York City. I was going to be a reporter, for a while, until I realized that newspapers couldn’t compete with the Internet. Then I was going to be a famous blogger.” She laughed, a welcome sound in the dark cab of the pickup. “There are some things really I miss about this place. In Phoenicia there’s a restaurant called Sweet Sue’s. They make the best pancakes in the world.”
“I’ve had some pretty good pancakes,” Chapel told her. “Down in Florida we used to get panqueques from street vendors. They served them with fruit and honey on top.”
“No comparison,” Julia said. He could almost hear her roll her eyes. “At Sweet Sue’s the pancakes are like half an inch thick, and lighter than air. Except they fill you up fast. I could never eat more than one of them at a sitting, but my dad would order four of them, which is the equivalent of saying you want to eat an entire birthday cake all at once. He never managed to finish and Mom would scold him for wasting perfectly good carbohydrates. Then she would pull out a pen and work out how many grams of fat he’d just eaten and how many calories he would burn if he walked all the way home.”
“You really were raised by scientists,” Chapel said. When she didn’t respond, he nodded at the road. “You know this road? You know where it heads?”
“Yeah — out to nowhere. There are some farms on the far side of the mountain, but from here it’s fifty miles of just trees and little creeks and crazy people.”
Well, he couldn’t disagree. They were only a few miles from Camp Putnam.
CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+44:37
Chapel parked the pickup well clear of the camp. Based on Ellie’s directions the fenced-in area was surrounded on most sides by mountains and hills, but a one-lane gravel road snaked alongside a river for a while and then ended at a guardhouse very close to the perimeter. It was the best guess Chapel had for where the fence had been breached when the chimeras were released.
He stepped out of the truck and into a chaos of stars.
The overcast had cleared away while he drove, and now the sky was a blanket of light. He could clearly make out the gauzy trail of the Milky Way, but he had trouble figuring out the constellations because there were just too many stars up there he wasn’t used to seeing. As he watched, a meteor streaked by overhead, silently burning in a trail of fire that was gone so fast he thought maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him.
“Beautiful,” he said.
“Yeah,” Julia replied, coming to stand next to him. “Funny place to put something straight out of a horror movie, right?” She opened the truck’s glove compartment and rummaged around inside until she found something. She pulled it out and Chapel saw she’d found a flashlight, a big heavy Maglite of the kind security guards used. He realized he hadn’t thought of that. He hadn’t considered what it would be like tramping around in the dark woods with no light at all.
Not for the first time, he felt lucky he had her with him.
He inhaled deeply. He needed to focus. He had to smuggle a civilian into a compromised facility. Well, he’d been trained for this. “Okay. There shouldn’t be too many guards down there. The place is empty, now — they just need someone to keep curious people from coming in and taking a look around. We do need to be careful, though. From now on we need to be silent and keep our heads down. Just follow me, and don’t switch on that light until I tell you it’s safe.”
She nodded to indicate she understood.
Together they moved out, staying as low as possible. Chapel kept them under trees or near bushes when possible. He had no idea what kind of surveillance equipment the camp boasted, nor did he want to find out.
He led Julia down the side of a hill toward the end of the road. There was enough cover to screen them but not as much as he would have liked. Anyone with night-vision goggles or — worse — active infrared would have spotted them in a second. As the minutes ticked by and no one ordered him to halt he forced himself to keep his fear at bay.
At the end of the road stood a single sentry post, and beyond, the fence — or what was left of it.
Twisted chain link had been pulled down and stacked in heaps by the side of the road. It looked like it had been torn out of the ground by the hands of giants. Beyond lay a wide stretch of open ground scored here and there by roughly circular patches of bare earth. That must have been where land mines had exploded — Chapel figured the patches were just the right size to have been craters before someone had filled them back in.
Beyond the zone of tortured ground lay trees and darkness. This was definitely the way in. The only way in, since he was certain the rest of the fence remained intact.
He saw no sign of working cameras or floodlights or machine-gun nests. All good. The one thing between Chapel and his goal was that sentry box. It was a narrow little box the size of a tollbooth. Inside sat a single soldier reading a magazine. A single lightbulb over his head provided light — but it would also make it hard for the soldier to see outside, to see anyone sneaking up on him until they were lit up by the same bulb he read by.
Sloppy, Chapel thought. The light should be outside the box, illuminating the approach of the road. Of course, the soldier had no reason to expect anyone now. Camp Putnam was empty, a forgotten relic of a history no one knew. And it was unlikely anyone would hike up here in the dark, especially at this time of year. If anyone did come up here, say a lost motorist, they would be showing headlights that the soldier would see coming from half a mile away.
Chapel led Julia in a wide path around the box, getting as close to the remains of the fence as he could without giving away his position. A stand of trees had grown almost right up to the fence. It would give them good visual cover. When he’d picked the right spot, he hunkered down and put a hand on Julia’s shoulder, keeping her down as well.
And then he waited.
Julia never said a word while they waited. She didn’t fidget, except to shift her weight from one foot to the other now and then. She kept her eyes on the sentry box, just like Chapel. For someone with no military training she had an incredible amount of patience and that most important talent of a covert operator: the ability to sit still.