The Chimera Secret

by Dean Crawford

  Same plate. Same vehicle.

  Natalie slowly turned around and looked again at the burning pool vehicle and the tire marks on the road that betrayed where the accident had taken place. She walked across to them and then turned toward the scene of the accident.

  She saw the marks left by Ben Consiglio’s car as it had suddenly locked up and skidded hard left. Ahead of her, the asphalt glittered where thousands of tiny pieces of glass had scattered when the windows in Ben’s car had imploded under the impact. A few scattered chunks of fender plastic and chrome trim littered the side of the road.

  ‘Ben travels along here,’ she murmured to herself as she walked the course of his car, ‘then suddenly brakes and swerves left toward the opposite lane.’

  She looked up. Ben’s burning car was facing her on the opposite side of the road, and although the foam blocked some of her view she could see enough of the tire marks to tell that it had spun through a hundred-eighty degrees and come to rest where it was.

  The sedan, on the other hand, was sitting nose-first into the shoulder, its passenger-side front fender mangled and warped but otherwise undamaged.

  And there were no tire marks on the road. No attempt to avoid a collision.

  ‘It swerved deliberately toward Ben,’ she went on to herself, voicing her thoughts aloud. ‘Hit him, then stopped here.’ She walked to the driver’s side of the vehicle. ‘The driver gets out, and does what?’

  The soft earth of the verge bore a couple of footprints heading back onto the road. Which meant that the driver had gotten out and walked back to Ben’s vehicle, then presumably vanished.

  Natalie didn’t need to think about it anymore. Ben had been the victim of a deliberate attack, one probably meant for her. But for anybody to have known he would be coming out here and would in fact pass this spot meant that the killer must have been told about it. Natalie felt a chill run down her spine as she realized that only one person could have known about this, the same person that had been blocking her investigation from the very start.

  Guy Rikard.

  Natalie rushed across to the Virginia state troopers standing guard near the wreck. Out here, she felt confident enough that they were far enough removed from the Capitol to not be in the thrall of the CIA or anybody else. She showed them her phone and the pictures of the blue sedan from earlier in the day.

  ‘This guy followed me for almost an hour this morning, and it was me who was supposed to come out here this afternoon,’ she explained. ‘I work for Congress on a team investigating illegal activity by the intelligence community, and we’ve learned that we’re being followed day and night by government agencies that presumably want to prevent us from uncovering too much about their activities.’

  The trooper looked at the photograph of the car.

  ‘I appreciate what you’re saying, ma’am, but that car could have been driving quite innocently across the Potomac earlier in the day. It could have been stolen since. There’s nothing to link it to this accident.’

  ‘No there isn’t,’ Natalie agreed, and then flicked to the next picture on her cellphone. ‘But you guys can’t trace the car to a driver.’

  Natalie held the picture up to the two troopers, that of the sedan’s driver from the previous day. The long, gaunt face was half in shadow but the features were clearly recognizable.

  ‘Good enough for you?’ she asked them.

  ‘Damn straight,’ the trooper said, and pulled out his own cell. ‘Send me the images you have to my cell and we’ll get them distributed.’

  Natalie did as she was asked and then looked at Ben’s burning car. Her cellphone started ringing in her pocket. She looked at it, and frowned. It wasn’t a number she recognized. She looked at the cops: if there was ever a place that she was safe, this was it. She shut off the call.

  ‘This was a deliberate attack,’ she said to the officers, ‘and I think I know who orchestrated it.’

  The troopers looked at her expectantly.

  ‘Two men,’ she said. ‘Guy Rikard, my boss and the only person who knew that Ben would be here this afternoon, and Douglas Jarvis, a senior security specialist at the Defense Intelligence Agency. It’s my belief that they’re working together to silence anybody who gets too close to whatever they’re up to.’

  48

  NEZ PERCE NATIONAL FOREST, IDAHO

  The interior of the mine was an inky black void that smelled heavily of mold and dust. Ethan glanced behind him to the last pale light from outside that was visible through the entrance some fifty yards away.

  In front of him, Kurt Agry and the soldiers advanced with their rifle-mounted flashlights cutting through the dank darkness like strobes in a damp, cold nightclub.

  ‘What would this thing be doing coming in here?’ Lopez wondered out loud.

  Her voice sounded hollow and rolled back and forth in the tunnel. Ethan looked up at the roughly hewn walls around them.

  ‘Shelter, maybe,’ he replied. ‘A nest, some kind of lair?’

  Ahead, Kurt Agry’s voice cut through the darkness.

  ‘We’ve got a door up ahead,’ he said.

  Ethan looked up in surprise as the flashlight beams bounced and reflected off a steel panel that blocked the mine ahead. A thick blast door hung on its hinges, the handles smeared with blood that had dried long ago.

  ‘It went in there?’ Lopez asked.

  Duran Wilkes peered into the gloom within, the flashlight beams reflecting off metallic objects but nothing that appeared to have fur or eyes.

  ‘I ain’t sure,’ he replied. ‘Lot of tracks comin’ in and out, but nothin’ I can be certain is fresh. No weather underground.’

  ‘No,’ Ethan agreed, ‘but that doesn’t hide the smell.’

  The odor was faint but unmistakeable, the taint of unwashed skin and fur drifting in the darkness.

  ‘Jesus, now what?’ Proctor asked. ‘You want us to actually go in there?’

  ‘You can do what you goddamned want,’ Duran said, and got up to move forward into the gloom.

  He was stopped by Kurt Agry’s firm hand on his shoulder. The soldier looked at him.

  ‘You can go in, but how about we make things a little safer first?’

  Kurt hefted a flash-bang grenade in front of Duran’s face, and the old man nodded and covered his eyes.

  ‘Fire in the hole,’ Kurt whispered urgently, then pulled the grenade’s pin and tossed it into the darkness. The device clattered on what sounded like a tiled floor as Ethan and the entire group covered their eyes.

  A bright flare of light and a deafening bang shuddered through the mine as the grenade detonated, and in a rush Kurt and his soldiers charged into the darkness ahead, followed by Duran and Ethan.

  Flashlight beams sliced through the gloom and the smell of decay became stronger as they moved into the room. Ethan glimpsed what looked like multiple glass doors, all of them shattered, the soldier’s boots crunching on broken glass that littered the floor.

  ‘Some kind of hazardous materials facility,’ Kurt Agry said as he swept the room with his flashlight. ‘Those glass doors were a pressure barrier, to keep air in and prevent toxins from escaping.’

  Ethan watched as Lopez glanced back at the steel wall and hatch, and then approached it. The hinges were bent outward as though warped by an incredible amount of pressure. She touched her hand to them as Ethan looked at the twisted metal bolts and the warped edges of the doors, and then Lopez realized what had happened.

  ‘This wasn’t a break-in,’ she said. ‘Something broke out.’

  Duran squatted down and looked at the glass on the floor.

  ‘She’s right. It came through here,’ he said. ‘Picked up bits of glass on its feet as it went. But all of the rest of the glass is on the outside of the pressure hatch, not the inside. Something crashed through here and killed everybody that got in its way.’

  Ethan looked back out of the doors to the open mineshaft entrance fifty yards away.

  ‘We should sea
l these doors shut, keep our tail clear.’

  Kurt Agry nodded, and together the soldiers heaved the warped doors closed, then picked up the bent and battered steel bars that had secured the doors and wedged them back into their holders. A thin gap in the battered doors allowed the cable from Jenkin’s camera outside into the room.

  The soldiers glanced nervously at each other. Kurt Agry pointed ahead. ‘We push on.’

  Ethan followed as they stepped through the shattered glass doors and entered a narrow corridor of modern-looking paneled walls. The combined flashlight beams illuminated the corridor with shards of white light that reflected off the polished panels.

  Ethan spotted smears of blood along the floor, some of them handprints that trailed finger lines along the tiles, the old blood black in the harsh beams of the flashlights. Ahead the corridor opened out into a large room, the flashlights glinting off darkened monitor screens and what looked like a large yellow sack.

  Kurt and his men rushed the room at once and fanned out as Ethan and Lopez followed.

  They entered what looked like a command center. The room was round, maybe fifty feet across. Computer terminals were mounted into the walls, overturned office chairs littering the floor. Ethan glimpsed a couple of shattered plasma screens, what looked like freezers filled with vials of obscure, colorful liquids, and two large reclining seats with headphones and large helmets dangling from cables beside them. Three further corridors led away from the room, one on either side and a third that led deeper into the facility. In the center of the room was an oval table covered with discarded bits of paper, files and randomly scattered pens and clipboards.

  Upon the table lay Simmons’s remains, the yellow body-bag tossed aside nearby. In the cold, harsh light of the beams his body looked strangely glossy, reflecting the light as though wet. It was only a moment later that Ethan realized why.

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  Proctor turned away and gagged a thin stream of bile that splattered onto the tiles at his feet. Ethan just managed to hang onto the contents of his stomach as he looked at the corpse.

  Simmons’s body was a mass of flesh and bone that remained intact despite having been methodically stripped of its skin. Like some macabre museum waxwork, the soldier’s entire innards were displayed. In the wavering flashlight beams he could see the glistening shape of the muscles, tendons and even arteries that sagged from the bones. The soldier’s eyes stared like bright white orbs at the ceiling above, lifeless and yet wide open as though alive, and his teeth were white and bared where the lips had receded postmortem.

  The dead man’s skin lay in tattered strips and ribbons on the floor or dangled like gruesome banners from the table on which he lay.

  Dana Ford stepped up to the corpse.

  ‘Ritualistic skinning,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve read of this before. Humans have performed precisely the same procedure on victims both dead and alive throughout history.’

  ‘Why would it do that to him?’ Lopez uttered, her normally dark features ashen. ‘He’s gone. There’s nothing to gain.’

  ‘Revenge,’ Proctor muttered, gulping down water from a bottle. ‘To deny the victim his skin, to leave him naked and defenseless. It’s another form of stress relief.’

  ‘Christ,’ one of the soldiers muttered, ‘what the hell is this place?

  Ethan scanned the walls of the control center and spotted a fuse box on one wall, the yellow and black warning graphics easily visible. He made his way over and yanked the box open.

  A series of columned fuses labeled with locations filled the box, many of them tripped. Ethan tried a handful of them but nothing reacted in the building, the lights remaining dark.

  ‘Look for an emergency power source,’ Lopez said. ‘Place as remote as this must have run off generators and would have had some kind of back-up system.’

  ‘Fuel oil,’ Kurt Agry agreed.

  Ethan scanned the fuses and spotted two named E1 and E2 at the bottom of the columns. He reached out and flipped them both.

  A distant rattle echoed through into the control center from the adjoining corridors, spluttered for a few moments and then leveled out into a steady hum. Above their heads a series of emergency lights flickered into life on the walls, half of them white and half of them red, casting feeble patches of light across the room.

  ‘Like being in a friggin’ submarine,’ Lopez uttered and glanced at the huge dissection tables. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’

  ‘You and me both,’ Ethan agreed as he looked around. ‘I’m guessing that this thing wanted us to come here. Question is, why?’

  Duran’s old features were grotesquely half-lit by the glow from one of the red emergency lights as he turned to look at Ethan.

  ‘I don’t care. Either it gives up Mary or it dies.’

  ‘You’ve changed your tune,’ Kurt Agry said as he looked around the room. ‘Thought we were all for treating it like an innocent animal?’

  Duran glared at the soldier. ‘That was before it started acting like a human being.’

  Kurt grinned tightly but said nothing in reply. Ethan looked around at the control room.

  ‘This place must have cost a fortune to set up, and the locals sure didn’t know about it.’

  ‘Or the sheriff,’ Lopez agreed. ‘Place like this would need some serious finance, good security, a way of keeping people out.’ She looked at Ethan. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’

  ‘Military,’ Ethan agreed as he paced around the room and came to a stop, ‘maybe government sponsored. Either way, I know this wasn’t a corporate gig.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Klein asked.

  Ethan lifted his boot and kicked a large metallic object across the floor. It slid across the polished tiles and clattered against a wall. Klein looked down at the M-16 rifle, the barrel of which was bent over as though twisted in a vice.

  ‘Could have been bought on the black market,’ Kurt Agry said.

  Ethan nodded. ‘And this guy?’

  He pointed down to the corner of the room where a body lay slumped against the steel wall units. Kurt’s men hurried around to stare at the remains. The dead soldier was dressed in full disruptive-pattern material combat fatigues, and on his shoulder was a distinctive Stars and Stripes patch. His face was an unrecognizable, bloodied pulp of smashed bone and ripped flesh.

  ‘Mercenary,’ Kurt replied, turning away. ‘Probably an amateur, that’s why he went down.’

  ‘Like your lieutenant was?’ Lopez challenged. The soldiers all turned to glare at her, but Lopez stood her ground. ‘Stop bullshitting us, Kurt, you know what this is all about.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about this place!’ Kurt shouted at her.

  The control room echoed with the sound of his voice, stark against the lonely silence haunting the abandoned facility. The echo of his voice rolled away and then seemed to bounce back toward them. Ethan stared at Kurt for a long moment, and then he heard it. A distant voice, something or someone calling out.

  ‘You hear that?’ he asked.

  The group stood in silence for a few moments, and then the distant cry sounded again. A woman’s voice. Duran was moving before he’d gotten her name fully out of his mouth as he charged toward one of the laboratory exits, the one that led deeper into the mountain.

  ‘Mary.’

  49

  Kurt Agry leapt over one of the table tops and dropped down in front of Duran Wilkes, bringing the old man up short with the barrel of his rifle.

  ‘Get out of my way!’ Duran yelled at him.

  ‘Stand down, old man,’ Kurt growled. ‘We don’t know what’s down there.’

  ‘Mary’s down there!’ Duran bellowed, and raised his own weapon toward Kurt.

  ‘Don’t do it!’ Kurt shouted, as the other soldiers turned their rifles on Duran.

  ‘That’s enough!’ Lopez snapped, and pushed herself between them both. ‘Put your weapons down, now, both of you!’

  Kurt kept his rifle up. ‘Ge
t out of my way.’

  ‘Like hell,’ Lopez shot back at him.

  Kurt’s men switched their aim to Lopez. Ethan stepped forward and aimed his own M-16 at Kurt Agry. The soldier glared at him from the corner of his eye.

  ‘Seriously, Warner? You better be ready to pull the trigger.’

  ‘This is getting us nowhere!’ Lopez yelled. She reached out and bashed Ethan’s rifle down with one hand, but kept her gaze on Kurt. ‘We’ve got to find Mary.’

  ‘You both said it yourself,’ Kurt replied, ‘this thing led us down here. It’s a trap.’

  ‘She’s just a child,’ Duran pleaded.

  ‘Then more fool you for bringing a kid on an expedition like this!’ Kurt yelled. ‘You’re not my responsibility.’

  ‘That’s exactly what we are,’ Ethan growled. ‘Or are we, Kurt? Why are you really here?’

  Jenkins’s shout cut Kurt’s reply off.

  ‘We’ve got company!’

  Ethan looked at Jenkins, the soldier not focusing on the room around them but peering into the tiny screen in front of his left eye.

  ‘You see it?’ Kurt demanded.

  ‘I saw something come by,’ Jenkins replied. Ethan detected a tremor in his voice. ‘Christ, it was fast, just a huge blur.’

  Kurt was about to reply when something smashed into the doors behind them with a crash that echoed away through the facility down endless empty corridors. Ethan whirled around in shock as the steel doors shuddered and then warped to the sound of screeching, rending metal being tortured under immense pressure.

  ‘It’s coming in!’ Lopez shouted. ‘It got behind us!’

  ‘Secure the door!’ Kurt yelled.

  The soldiers rushed forward as one and slammed into the door, heaving it shut as their boots slipped and slid on the tiles. Ethan dashed in behind them and leaned his weight into the steel. The huge doors rumbled and buckled under the competing forces as Proctor and Dana joined in.

  The door was open by a three-inch crack, the steel bars bending under the stress. Ethan heaved against them, his face inches from the darkness beyond. In the dull light he saw something glinting there, and focused on a mass of wiry russet-brown hair bulging into the gap. The breeze blowing in from the mine entrance stank of sweat and he coughed as his eyes automatically flicked upward into the darkness.