“If you were trying to keep a low profile, maybe you shouldn’t have named the group after a mythical chimera utopia.”
She shook her head. “Chimerica the organization came long before the imaginary…whatever it is people envision. Apparently not everyone kept it one-hundred-percent secret. That’s how the legend of Chimerica got started. Anyway, as our mission changed, that secrecy became even more important.”
“What is the mission now?”
“That is a bigger question than we have time for right now,” she said. “Although I would love to sit down with you sometime soon and talk to you about it in depth. I would love to hear your thoughts, actually. Right now, though, I have some questions for you, if you don’t mind.”
I sat back in my chair and looked at the bay. Here and there, bits of wreckage from old houses poked through the water, echoes of the world that used to be there. But it was still peaceful and still beautiful. A large seabird flew past us, a heron or something, its shadow sliding across the marsh grasses and the water.
“Okay,” I said.
“What is the nature of your connection to CLAD?”
I laughed and shook my head. “You sound like the FBI.”
“Sorry, but it’s important.”
“I have no connection with CLAD that I know of.”
She stared at me for a moment, studying, appraising. The sun was behind us now, so her face was in the shade. Her blue eyes glowed as they rested on me. “Weren’t you just meeting with a CLAD operative? Isn’t that where Sly picked you up?”
“We were there trying to get an answer to that same question.” I paused, thinking about how that sounded. “Okay, I guess it would be more accurate to say I don’t know what my connection is to CLAD. They grabbed me off the street, I think to make sure I didn’t get blown up by their latest bomb. The FBI said that members of CLAD had been heard talking about me, and my picture was in the house where the bomb was made. So yes, there is some sort of connection, but I don’t know what that is. I am trying to find out.”
She nodded slowly, considering my words. “Did you learn anything today?”
I shook my head. “Not really. Ogden, the guy we talked to, he said he didn’t know what the connection was.”
“Is that it?”
I shrugged. “I think he was trying to enlist me in CLAD, or at least convince me their philosophy was right. He said he’d look into it if we helped him break into this Wells Life Sciences facility in Delaware. He thinks something bad is going on there.” I looked her in the eye. “He used to be in Chimerica, you know. He said he had told Chimerica about the facility and nothing happened.”
“What kind of thing did he say was going on there?”
“Do you know about what happened in Pitman? And Omnicare?”
She nodded solemnly. “Of course I do. And I’m very proud of you for what you did to stop them.”
It felt weird to hear her say she was proud of me. It felt good, but I couldn’t help bristling a little. Despite all her reasons, I wasn’t entirely over the fact that she had abandoned the family, had disappeared from our lives. She had accomplished so much that she deserved to be proud of, but I wasn’t sure she deserved the right to be proud of me. “Well, he said whatever was going on there was worse than Pitman or Omnicare.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“He said he went to Chimerica with his concerns and they did nothing,” I repeated. “Do you know about that?”
She was still for a moment, then she nodded. “I do. And all I can tell you right now is that this is a very delicate situation. The governing council is taking it very seriously.”
“The governing council?”
“Our executive board.” She took a deep breath and continued. I got the feeling that this was her making an effort not be so secretive. “There are twelve of us, one from each regional division. We deliberate on all major decisions. I serve at-large, the others all lead their divisions. They oversee the twenty-seven training locations around the world, like the one you visited on Lonely Island. Plus all other Chimerica operations. The Mid-Atlantic region would be responsible for the Wells Life Sciences facility in Delaware.”
“So, you think there is something going on there?”
“As I said, we are taking it seriously. Did he say anything else?”
I thought back to what Ogden had said about E4E and Chimerica, about the suspicions that they were somehow being funded or controlled by Howard Wells. It made even more sense knowing that the head of the organization, the founder, was at one time extremely close to Wells. I wanted to trust Dymphna, but before I told her more, I had to be sure.
“He said Chimerica and E4E are being funded by Wells.”
She shook her head with a wry smile. “That’s preposterous.”
I shrugged. “Just telling you what he said.”
“I oversee all of Chimerica’s finances, and I know and trust every member of the governing council, but apart from that, they wouldn’t be able to get anything like that past me or past one another. I can tell you, without the slightest uncertainty, that is not the case.” She leaned forward. “In fact, we have reason to believe CLAD itself is receiving funds from Wells.”
“Really?” I said, unable to keep my doubts out of my voice. The counteraccusation seemed like a tit for tat.
Dymphna ignored my tone, her face gravely serious. “Think about the damage CLAD has done. Think about the wave of anti-chimera fervor they have provoked, wiping out the sympathy generated by what happened in Pitman and Gellersville.”
“It wasn’t just pro-chimera types killed in that blast, you know. Senior members of H4H’s governing board were there, too.”
Her eyes flashed. “Yes, moderate voices who were exploring reconciliation and compromise. Think about it: CLAD managed to generate sympathy for Wells and H4H while at the same time purging the few sane voices that might have challenged Wells’s extremism.”
What she was saying made more sense than the other way around would. And Ogden used to work at Wellplant. Then again, so did Dymphna, more or less.
“Look,” she said, “we don’t know it for sure, and if there is a connection, CLAD might not even be aware of it. But it’s not just a supposition. We have intelligence to support the idea. And it makes sense.”
I nodded, conceding the point.
“Was there anything else?” she said, pressing forward.
“Yes,” I said, deciding I needed to trust her. “He said something about a plan to take down the Wellplant network, to hit back at Wells that way.”
“Hmm.” She thought about that for a moment. “That’s ambitious. Did he say how?”
“No. I don’t know if they even have a plan. Seemed like bluster.”
“Probably so. Wellplants use a distributed network. There’s no central node, just the individual implants, all networked together in a single powerful array. That makes it very stable, and very powerful. So, when he asked you to go with them to the facility in Delaware, what did you tell him?”
“I said no. I said I couldn’t condone what CLAD had done. And the FBI was already suspicious, so the last thing I wanted to do was prove them right.”