Page 20 (1/2)

A little parking lot sat on the far side of the hangar Three vehicles were parked there-two coh aon the side of the hangar There was an olddaubs of paint to a canvas the size of a barn door Chapel saw no sign of anyone else-ht attendant, there to make sure nobody ran off with the row of private planes parked inside the cavernous hangar Loudwild and classical The attendant probably hadn&039;t even heard the G4 land on his runway

So far so good

The compacts werein for the weekend-people who lived soot up here The pickup probably belonged to the painter, but it was the best choice for where Chapel was headed It would also be the easiest vehicle to acquire The doors weren&039;t locked He stuck Julia in the passenger seat-she did as she was told without coment Then he bent down under the dashboard and pulled some wires away from the fuse box "You can&039;t do this on modern cars," he told Julia, who didn&039;t even look at hi to fill up the silence "The coned to be fixed by their owners, so everything&039;s out in the open" He found the tires he wanted With his fingernails and teeth he stripped a little insulation off thehed to life

As Chapel threw the truck in gear and rolled through the open gate of the airfield, there was no sign the painter was even aware he&039;d just been robbed

PHOENICIA, NEW YORK: APRIL 13, T+44:19

The night was impenetrably dark The skeletal branches of trees looht The truck&039;s headlights could illuravel of the road Chapel had to take it slow, consulting the GPS in his phone every time the road branched or turned

Occasionally they passed by an open field and the silver light of the overcast was just enough to see by Old wooden buildings crouched on that open land, barns and farhts of their own

Suddenly Julia sat up straight in her seat and peered through the truck&039;s , her hand on the glass

"I know this place," she said, as he slowed the truck down to a crawl "I remember this"

Chapel couldn&039;t see anything but darkness and more trees "You sure?" he asked

"We&039;re on the road to Phoenicia," she said "I grew up there"

Chapel had forgotten that much of Julia&039;s youth had been spent on these back roads Her parents had lived here, working by day at Caenetic ht to check her homework and take out the trash He shook his head "What was it like?" he asked

She shrugged andonce ht she wouldn&039;t answer, that that would go beyond the bounds of their new professional relationship Then she ht, I guess I went skiing a lot in the winter, and in su"

"Tubing?" Chapel asked

Julia actually set 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 ti

"Now, yeah When I was a teenager, I thought it was boring as hell I used to drearew up and I couldto be a reporter, for a while, until I realized that newspapers couldn&039;t coer" She laughed, a welcos really I miss about this place In Phoenicia there&039;s a restaurant called Sweet Sue&039;s They make the best pancakes in the world"

"I&039;ve had soood 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&039;s the pancakes are like half an inch thick, and lighter than air Except they fill you up fast I could never eat , but my dad would order four of the you want to eat an entire birthday cake all at once He neverperfectly good carbohydrates Then she would pull out a pen and work out how rams of fat he&039;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&039;t respond, he nodded at the road "You know this road? You knohere it heads?"

"Yeah-out to nowhere There are some farms on the far side of the mountain, but from here it&039;s fifty miles of just trees and little creeks and crazy people"

Well, he couldn&039;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&039;s directions the fenced-in area was surrounded on ravel road snaked alongside a river for a while and then ended at a guardhouse very close to the periuess 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 ahile he drove, and now the sky was a blanket of light He could clearly auzy trail of the Milky Way, but he had trouble figuring out the constellations because there were just tooAs he watched, ain a trail of fire that was gone so fast he thoughttricks on hi to stand next to hiht out of a horror love co She pulled it out and Chapel saw she&039;d found a flashlight, a big heavy Maglite of the kind security guards used He realized he hadn&039;t thought of that He hadn&039;t considered what it would be like traht at all

Not for the first time, he felt lucky he had her with hile a civilian into a compromised facility Well, he&039;d been trained for this "Okay There shouldn&039;t be too uards down there The place is empty, now-they just need so a look around We do need to be careful, though From noe need to be silent and keep our heads down Just follow ht until I tell you it&039;s safe"

She nodded to indicate she understood

Together theyas 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 theht-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 as 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 ured the patches were just the right size to have been craters before soround lay trees and darkness This was definitely the way in The only way in, since he was certain the rest of the fence rehts orbetween 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 ht-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 saht should be outside the box, illu the approach of the road Of course, the soldier had no reason to expect anyone now Caotten 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 cohts that the soldier would see co from half a etting as close to the re away his position A stand of trees had grown alood visual cover When he&039;d picked the right spot, he hunkered down and put a hand on Julia&039;s shoulder, keeping her down as well

And then he waited

Julia never said a hile they waited She didn&039;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 so she had an incredible amount of patience and that most important talent of a covert operator: the ability to sit still

Chapel knew she would eventually lose her cool, that she would have toasleep It would happen to hi it would take

In the end they got lucky

The soldier in the sentry box was keeping hi two-liter bottle of cola that he sipped at frootten war soda to keep yourself alert was that it was a diuretic Less than half an hour after Chapel picked his hiding spot, the soldier was forced to answer the call of nature

He lifted a radio to his lips and said so Chapel couldn&039;t hear, then climbed out of the box and waddled toward the trees on the far side of the road

Chapel wasted no ti up and ap in the fence

They were in

CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+46:22

The camp comprised a hundred acres of woods surrounded by a fence A hundred acres can be an interminable wasteland if you don&039;t knohat you&039;re looking for and you have to search every corner

For the most part the camp was exactly what it looked like-uninterrupted forest, an endless stretch of trees that grew so close together the two of the, cramped trails that twisted between the creek, the icy water bright in the starlight Very seldom they found an old shack or lean-to, beaten down by years of wind and weather until it was littleup from the broken rens that anyone had ever lived in Ca if the shacks had been built by the chio It was iht of Julia&039;s flashlight Some of the shacks had latches on their doors, while others had more modern doorknobs Beyond that they all looked the same They were all empty save for a few scraps of fabric in one, the re inside the with mushrooms

"It looks like this place has been abandoned for years," Julia said at one point

"The chih he had to agree with her

They found no sign of habitation for nearly an hour, until they stumbled on a pond in the middle of the forest

The water stretched away from them as far as they could see, black and full of stars except wheredown over the water, perfect for swinging out over the still pond Nearby a row of changing stalls had been built back in the trees The door of each stall had been torn froround Julia shone her light into one of the stalls, and Chapel saw a splash of bright red on its back wall

He stepped closer, intending to take a closer look, and nearly crushed a skull under his shoe

The skull was half buried in the dirt, only one eye socket looking up at them as if its owner had been disturbed in his bed and wanted to go back to sleep Nearby the re, perhaps dragged off by aniuy with a chain saw and a hockey mask shows up, ask hi in this place"

Chapel squatted to examine the skull It was fractured in a couple of places, but otherwise it seeh "Looks human," he said

Julia shook her head "Butlook at those ribs-they&039;re too thick, and too close together"

When he knehat to look for, Chapel saw it at once This was the skeleton of a chi of the ribs explained, perhaps, how they could take unshots to the chest and not even slon The skull was huh that when you shot them in the head they tended to die Itat this," Julia said, "I&039;d say he ca him He went into the stall to hide, but it didn&039;t work The pursuer tore the stalls open one by one until he found him After that the cause of death looks to be multiple traumas to the head with a blunt weapon"

Chapel felt his jaw fall open "Ied "When your patients can&039;t tell you what&039;s wrong, you have to get all kinds of CSI on thens of abuse and trauma"

"That&039;s no poodle," Chapel pointed out

She shrugged "I&039; like a professional helps"

"Then please, keep it up," he told her "Look over there, on the far side of the pond," he said, pointing

She swept her light across the water, but it couldn&039;t reach that far It didn&039;tand shadoas hidden in the trees there, so

"Ellie h for her and two hundred students," Julia said

Chapel nodded "Let&039;s take a look"

CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+46:31