Chimera

by Sonny Whitelaw

  Absently, Spinner handed him the towel she was carrying, then turned and walked into the kitchen.

  "Thanks." He pulled off his shoes, closed the door, and went to the fireplace. The flames hungrily bit into the freshly stacked pieces of firewood. Whatever was troubling her, she was still thinking clearly enough to deal with mundane tasks-something that often eluded him. Of course, this was Spinner.

  The apartment wasn't a whole lot different to when he'd first seen it, just a few weeks ago. Meg had found it, declaring it was 'just perfect'. And it was, in a completely different way to the apartment Meg had found for him. Looking around, he saw a big Apple flat screen sitting on the stylish, purpose built pine desk. A scattering of file folders and papers, and an empty jewel case was stacked up near a printer.

  Spinner returned with two steaming mugs of what smelled like chocolate. He smiled his thanks and accepted the drink. She had called him; whatever it was she wanted, it had to happen on her time, in her terms.

  "I was going through Douglas' things-his paperwork. Although I suspect you know that." She tucked a few hairs behind her ear in a familiar, nervous gesture, then went to the desk and picked up a piece of paper. "I came across this."

  The paper looked like an old spreadsheet, listing what appeared to be usernames and passwords for Internet service providers. "And?"

  "Most of them are out of date; they're old FTP access codes for file servers. The ones that still exist are just public access files, the sort of thing Douglas used for work, although these are five years old."

  McCabe nodded. Five years were a lifetime in the software industry.

  "I'm showing you these so you can see the kind of codes Doug used. He didn't really need records; he had an extraordinary memory-like you. Not eidetic, but close. Then I saw this." She reached across the desk for another paper. It was a letter offering Douglas Spinner a contract in Iraq.

  "These were in a sealed box in his attorney's office in LA." She glanced down at the floor where a bunch of file folders sat in an archive box. "The firm were moving offices and came across them, and, well, forwarded them to me. There's not much in them, but on the cover of one was…here." She picked it up. "There's a label with the date, and this."

  Setting his mug down, he looked at the label. It could have been a series of index numbers but it looked more like the format on the spreadsheet. "An Internet service provider and password?"

  "That's what I thought." Spinner sipped her chocolate. "On a hunch, I tried an FTP programme and…" Her words trailed off and she bit her lower lip.

  It was completely out of character for her to hesitate like this. "You connected," he said.

  "McCabe, you saw all of his files, the ones I gave you from the server. Doug worked for the federal government, or at least, that's what I thought. I found details of a bank account in Gibraltar-with a balance in excess of several million dollars."

  The man she had loved and grieved over, who had fathered a child with her, had lived in a secret world. It did not come as a shock to McCabe; he knew all about secret worlds.

  "At first I assumed it was the equivalent of a Swiss bank account hiding undeclared money he'd made during the height of the dotcom era. But I soon realised you were right. This is why my apartment was ransacked after Oklahoma; the hidden files that Adams found and Williams died to protect. They were never included in the forensic evidence used to convict McVeigh. The CD was listed under 'victim's personal effects'."

  He looked at empty CD case on her table. It was cracked and dirty and distorted by heat.

  Sitting in front of the computer, Spinner grabbed the mouse and clicked an icon on the desktop. The message declared the disc 'untitled'. It was empty, a blank.

  And that was when it hit McCabe.

  "Back then was the Jurassic age of computer networks. But Douglas was…brilliant. He didn't just set up networks. He had access to highly confidential files. And he kept a record."

  If her husband's memory was as good as Spinner said, and he'd been dodging taxes, he would not have needed to keep a record unless he'd intended using the file as proof of something. Or for blackmail.

  "The day before the Oklahoma bombing, something was troubling Doug. He'd put a CD on to burn just before coming to bed that night. He generally did that when there was a lot of data to transfer because CD burners back then-"

  "Took all night."

  "I know he took the CD with him when he dropped me off at work, because I almost sat on it in the car. Instead of leaving Jamie at the day care centre and going home like he normally did, Doug told me that he was meeting someone in the sixth floor, but he had a few minutes to kill. Jamie loved riding in elevators, so Doug took him for a ride.

  "McCabe, take a look at this CD." She ejected it from the computer. "It's mint new; there's not a mark on it. Now look at the jewel case."

  The cracks in the plastic were filled with dark dust. He sniffed it; residual traces of carbon, a burnt smell. As he'd suspected, there was also heat distortion but the label adhered to the inside although damaged and hard to read, showed Douglas Spinner's name and contact details.

  "Doug always labelled both the CDs and the cases. He might have had a good memory, but he was a meticulous file keeper when it came to other people's work. He made a point of tagging all of his blanks when he bought them. The FBI returned some of Douglas and Jamie's personal effects almost immediately-but this CD and a couple of other items were only returned to me after McVeigh's trial. I never looked at it before; I had no reason to."

  It was not the evidence, but the lack of evidence that proved it had been tampered with. McCabe fingered the disc. "All they had to do was replace a CD."

  "The original CD probably was damaged, just like the jewel case. But Agent Adams must have found a way to retrieve the data. And we know exactly what was on it, what Adams' saw!" Spinner declared.

  She had obviously retrieved the files from a previously unknown server, and read them before calling him. It was the evidence they had been looking for. Douglas Spinner had kept a journal of his trips to Iraq between 1980 to 1988. The files contained photographs, many of people that McCabe recognised, including his father and the five Iraqi scientists killed at Oklahoma. Some of the photos were eerily reminiscent of those destroyed when his apartment had been blown up.

  "The 'five' were kept on the sixth floor of the Federal Murrah Building," he said. "Spinner, your husband must have seen them-or they recognised him. Douglas wasn't blackmailing anyone," he said, gently clasping her shoulder. "He was providing supporting evidence to their claims!"

  "McCabe, if we try to do anything with this before McVeigh is executed-"

  "I know," he said, unable to hide his excitement as he read the titles of the files. Her husband really had been meticulous. He'd kept records of the initial experiments with the chimera, including the names of the researchers. There was even a mention of Mathew Island. And it had all been undertaken in the United States. The Consortium had moved their operations back home, and easily hidden themselves amongst the hundreds of burgeoning biotech companies scattered around Washington DC. "It'll take months to tie it all together, Spinner, and build a watertight case, but we have 'em!"

  Pulling up another chair, McCabe grabbed the mouse and began flipping through the files at random. It was all there, all the things they'd been searching for, and more, far, far more. And all this time and it had been sitting right in their laps.

  It took him a few moments to realize that Spinner wasn't moving. He glanced at her. Her normally tanned face was stiff and pallid with shock. "What is it?" he said, standing.

  "The money," she replied in a cracked whisper. "Where did Doug get so much money? And why did he hide it? There's only one reason, McCabe. Douglas knew what these people were doing. He hacked into their files for years, even after they moved back to the States. He knew about their plans for Mathew-that's what Agent Adams saw. He either kept a record to blackmail the Consortium. Or worse, he was working for the
m!"

  Tears rolled silently down her face. Despite the horrors they had encountered over the years, he'd never seen her lose control before. "Welcome to the family business, Spinner."

  She collapsed into his arms as grief welled up and burst out in deep, aching sobs.

  -Chapter 41-

  Nadi, Fiji August 04, 2001

  Miriam Singh looked at her washing machine in disgust. Her brother, Tashi, had given it to her as an early Christmas gift in 1995. Miriam remembered the occasion clearly because she had come home from work, somewhat disgruntled that the airport toilets had not produced a more lucrative haul. And there, waiting for her in the outdoor kitchen, was a brand new washing machine! Electricity and lighting were relatively new, luxury items in this part of Nadi, but a washing machine! It would elevate her status in the community beyond measure.

  Tashi had made a great deal of money from Miriam's fruitful job; a modest washing machine was a small thing, but then Miriam's needs were few. He'd promised her that if things went well, he would buy her a refrigerator the following year.

  But things had not gone well. The disease that struck down Mathew Island in Vanuatu had also devastated Fiji's economy. Then Mathew Island had erupted and a tsunami had hit the southern coastline of Viti Levu, killing dozens and destroying coastal resorts and hotels. Fiji had reopened for business soon after, but because of the fear of disease, tourists-and their dollars-had stayed away for months.

  "It's broken!" Miriam declared. "And Moti didn't come to work today."

  Moti was her Melanesian house girl; a middle-aged woman whose job was to clean the house and look after the younger children while Miriam was at work. It was normally Moti's job to do the laundry, but in the last weeks the house girl had become increasingly unreliable. Old fears and resentments had rekindled since hundreds of Fijians had been laid off work in the sugar industry. The new Prime Minister was Indian-Fijian, not Melanesian, and there were rumours of discontent in the military.

  "Maybe it's just a fuse, or the solenoid," Tashi said, and directed two of Miriam's eldest sons to pull the machine from the wall.

  Shaking her head, Miriam went into the house to fill the bathtub with water. She was on the nightshift at the airport. If she hurried, she could soak the clothes, and her daughter could wash them when she came home from school.

  While Miriam scratched shavings of coconut soap into the bathtub, she listened to the radio. The outside world thought of people like her as part of the 'Fijian-Indian' problem. Her great-grandparents had been brought from India to Fiji to work the British owned sugar plantations-the indigenous Melanesian Fijians having been dismissed as too lazy. Generations passed, and the Indians had thrived socially, economically and after the British had left, politically. It soon became clear that the Indian population, who had purchased the sugar plantations from their erstwhile masters, and who now dominated Fiji's economy and political structure, would outgrow the numbers of native Melanesians living in the island nation.

  The upshot was that in 1987, Colonel Sethi Rabuka had led a bloodless, military coup against the government, demanding that constitutional changes be made to guarantee that Melanesian Fijians rights, especially in matters of land ownership, culture and self-determination. Fiji belonged to Fijians. Indians were imports, guests. The coup had instantly dented the perennial 'friendly islands' image Fiji had once presented to the world.

  Miriam had been at work when the military arrived at the airport with their trucks and their guns. She'd crouched in the corner; terrified that they would shoot her. The soldiers were happy for the tourists to leave; part of their plan was to destroy Fiji's economy, which was almost entirely dependent on tourism and sugar-industries dominated by Indians. The scramble to leave the country had continued for three days. Miriam had convinced the soldiers to let her do her job; consequently she had brought home a considerable haul from panicked tourists anxious to escape on whatever flight they could.

  Eventually things had returned to normal. The tourists had returned, the economy had recovered and racial tensions had eased. The country had its share of natural disasters, annual cyclones, floods, unexpected outbreaks of dengue and of course, the problems that had come about because of Mathew Island, but politically, things had been going well-until a young upstart Eastern Province Fijian with a university education began stirring up old resentments.

  Tugging a worn sweater around her shoulders, Miriam left for the four-mile walk to the airport. People outside Fiji thought it was all about Indians versus Fijians, but that was wrong. It was a power struggle between the Western Province Fijians and the Eastern; Indians were political pawns in the middle. But the grumblings amongst native Fijians grew louder every day. Unless the Prime Minister acted, she feared something bad would happen.

  In the laundry shed, Tashi was examining the rusty, soap-encrusted fittings. In the void where the machine had stood was a tawdry pile of socks and underwear, a five-year old collection of items that had slipped behind. He picked up a blouse that had been wedged between the washer and the laundry sink. It was old and smelled a little mouldy, but it had remained surprisingly intact during the five years of its confinement. Tashi shook out Katie Wood's discarded blouse, wiped his greasy hands on it, then tossed it on the pile of mildewed socks. Hundreds of chimera particles scattered into the air of the dark laundry room. Despite sharing living space with an assortment of mould spores, the chimera had lost none of its potency.

  Tashi took a deep breath and stared at the machine. He figured it would take him three days to get the parts to fix the washing machine.

  In three days he would be dead.

  -Chapter 42-

  Canberra, Australia August 13-16, 2001

  The soap bubbles slide down Jordan's leg and into the water. She had always loved her grandmother's bathtub. Its enamel had cracked and the bronze claw feet were dull green with corrosion, but it was a warm, private place to escape her brother.

  Thankfully, she'd seen little of Brian after he'd left Vanuatu to attend boarding school. Her parents had doted on him whenever he'd returned, leaving her to feel forgotten and, if she was honest with herself, resentful. Finally, it had been her turn to escape, except that, instead of going to boarding school, she'd been sent to live with her grandmother and attend day classes at the local college. Even during school holidays she hadn't flown back to Vanuatu. Brian and their parents had joined her and her grandmother in the big old Canberra farmhouse. Consequently, Jordan hadn't been to Vanuatu in years. Except, of course, for their little boat trip to Mathew Island.

  She turned her attention back to the National Geographic programme airing on the portable television. Mathew Island, declared the narrator, was just a tenth of its original size. The volcanic eruption six years ago had transformed it into a low-lying horseshoe shaped chunk of basalt, with a narrow, beach of ebony sand. Hundreds of white seabirds had taken to roosting on one of the island's craggy cliffs. With nowhere to land their helicopter, the film crew had contented itself with documenting the pockmarks in the shallow water near the western end of the island. Underwater vents, they explained. In a few years one would break through the steel-grey waters, Mathew Island would begin to rebuild itself, and the two coconut trees and short grasses that had taken root on the beach would seed, and extend to that side of the island. Then in another millennium or two, the volcano would once more burst forth in monumental fury and-

  "Georgie?"

  Jordan winced. Brian had been only three years old when she was born. Unable to get his mouth around her name, he'd called her Georgie and done so ever since. It hadn't much bothered her until he started calling her Georgie Porgie, teasing her for her tomboy traits. "Yeah?" she replied, trying very hard to keep her tone marginally less acerbic than she felt.

  "Some guy named Nate calling from Sydney. I hope it's not something to do with work, Georgie. You promised you'd spend the week helping me clear out this dump."

  Climbing out of the bathtub, Jordan grabbed
her Grandmother's old robe and wrapped herself in it. It was winter, cold enough outside to freeze the pond outside, and the bathroom wasn't much warmer. That's another thing they would have to take care of, the ducks. "It's not a dump," she said, angrily opening the bathroom door and snatching the phone from Brian's hand.

  He sneered and returned to the kitchen.

  "Nate? Nate Sturgess?" she said.

  "Hey, gorgeous! How's it going?"

  "I was just watching a television documentary on Mathew Island." Jordan smiled, delighted to hear from him. "Long time no see, buddy. Where are you?"

  "Sydney. I was in Fiji for a conference. Stopped by in Vanuatu a few days back. Bumped into your parents at the airport. I'm sorry about your grandmother."

  Her grandmother's funeral had provided the setting for an awkward family reunion. Brian had accused her of insensitivity to their mother, who'd been worried sick every day for the last five years. Jordan's face had been plastered across television screens a dozen times, usually in some confrontational situation with yet another short-tempered, gun-toting Iraqi official. The ignominious disbanding of UNSCOM, Brian opined, had underscored its complete waste of taxpayers' money. As a medical doctor, he said, she should be ashamed of herself for having played a supporting role in trade sanctions that had caused the suffering and death of so many innocent children.

  Brian's ignorance was surpassed only by his presumptuousness, but Jordan reminded herself that most people thought the same way. Not the ones who mattered, and certainly not her peers, but nevertheless, it rankled. If her brother knew a fraction of what she'd really been doing, the number of fire fights she'd been in, the number of men she'd killed while she and McCabe had traipsed across one Godforsaken desert and Iraqi prison hell-hole after another in search of the truth, he'd have a seizure.

  "They let you back into Vanuatu without arresting you?" she said to Nate.