The Chimera Secret

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Sir,’ one of them said to Mitchell. ‘I’m afraid we have to take Mr. Jarvis into custody.’

  ‘You have to do what?’ Mitchell demanded, rising from his seat to tower over them like a Greek Titan.

  ‘Mr. Jarvis has had a warrant for his arrest issued,’ the security guard explained, ‘from detectives investigating a homicide in Virginia.’

  Jarvis blinked in amazement. ‘What homicide?’

  ‘The detectives are outside, sir,’ the guard said. ‘They’re here to arrest you for complicity in the suspected murder of a Ben Consiglio.’

  ‘On what evidence?’ Jarvis uttered.

  ‘The accusation has been made by an associate of the deceased, a woman named Natalie Warner, Congressional aide.’

  Jarvis gaped at them for a moment and then looked at Mitchell. ‘Wilson.’

  Abraham Mitchell rubbed his temples.

  ‘This is a civil case, Doug,’ he said. ‘I can’t protect you from arrest.’

  ‘Then at least get Ethan and Nicola out,’ Jarvis said. ‘Find a way before that air strike hits. And find out who the hell the mole is in the GAO! We need them arrested as evidence or they’ll be in the wind by tomorrow!’

  56

  NEZ PERCE NATIONAL FOREST, IDAHO

  Ethan lay on his back on the cold metal of the table and tried to peer down the corridor to his right that led to the mine entrance. He could feel the cold mountain air whispering through the mine tunnel and raising bumps on his skin beneath his jacket, could smell the damp but fresh scent of the forests beyond.

  He looked away from the darkness and searched the control room, desperately seeking some means of escape. Kurt’s men had yanked the cables fixing him to the table savagely tight. Ethan’s chest felt constricted and he was struggling to get enough air in as it was, but if he could maybe free one arm then he’d be able to undo the cables and get away.

  He pulled on his arms, but they were also held fast by smaller wires that secured his wrists. He twisted his hands sideways, trying to create a gap large enough that he could begin wriggling free, but it was no use. He finally gave up after fifteen minutes of scraping the skin from the back of his hands against the unyielding bonds.

  His only real hope lay with Lopez, but she was sealed up with Proctor and Dana in the living quarters, while Duran and Mary were locked in the store room. Only way out of that room was down the corridor into the laboratory, where Kurt’s men would most likely have set up.

  Ethan turned his head and looked at the other two exits, those to the east and west. Both were dead ends but both corridors provided a field of fire into the control room where Ethan lay. If it were up to him he’d have posted two snipers in each, with the heavy firepower to the south in the laboratory, aiming down the corridor. Anything that came in through the entrance from the mine tunnel would instantly be caught up in three fields of fire.

  Size didn’t count for so much in the face of that kind of lethal barrage.

  The breeze drifted over him again and this time his skin crawled with fear as a faint but unpleasant odor stained the air. Ethan felt his heart quicken in his chest as he slowly turned his head and stared out of the laboratory entrance, down into the utter blackness of the mine tunnel.

  Nothing moved, the blackness was absolute. He realized belatedly that to be able to move freely in the dead of night, out here when darkness was so complete, the beast must have evolved excellent night vision. The explanation for the red eyes, increased vascularity to the optic nerves. Ethan blinked. His mind was racing as a distraction and he knew it, trying to focus on anything but what he knew was approaching from somewhere out there in the dark.

  Wild. Dangerous. Curious.

  Something shifted, a tiny sound as though a single grain of sand had trickled down from the wall of the mine to land gently on a metal tile. Ethan’s gaze was fixed upon the dark maw of the tunnel, unable to tear himself away from it. He could hear his lungs sucking in air in short, sharp breaths. And then he realized that wasn’t the only breathing he could hear.

  Ethan held his breath.

  The sound came in long, slow rasps from out of the darkness. Ethan was briefly reminded of the sound a diver’s oxygen tank makes, though this was far deeper in tone.

  Ethan stared at the darkness, and then in the faint glow he saw two discs of light near the top of the door briefly reflect the emergency lights in the laboratory, like translucent red orbs floating nine feet high in the darkness.

  It’s here. It can see me.

  Ethan saw a slow movement against the tunnel, like a shadow upon a shadow as a tuft of brown hair glinted in the soft light. All at once Ethan’s brain digested the information and identified the tuft of hair as being from an immense, muscular arm, and in an instant Ethan could see it standing there on the edge of the light.

  His gaze flicked instinctively up and once again he looked straight into a pair of dull red eyes, the retina occasionally flashing as they reflected the emergency lights. Ethan swallowed as his stomach twisted upon itself and shuddered involuntarily. It was fear, but not like he had ever felt before. This was something ancient, buried deep in the cerebral cortex, a flashback from prehistory when men huddled together naked and afraid in the night, listening to the sounds of huge, dangerous creatures prowling nearby.

  Whatever is watching me is far from human.

  It moved again, a tiny step forward until the soft glow bathed its thick fur in a pale red light. Ethan stared at a huge form, bipedal just like a human but with thick, stocky legs of immense musculature. Even with the thick, knotted fur that covered them it was still obvious that this creature was possessed of incredible strength.

  Ethan could see ranks of abdominal muscles beneath the finer fur covering its belly, each as big as his fist, bulging prominently outward and flexing slowly as the creature drew its breath. The chest was broad and muscular, thickly forested with more hair, and the shoulders were like cannonballs.

  The arms hung long by its side and almost reached its knees, as though it were stooping slightly. Ethan saw that its legs were not straight but slightly bent at the knee, as though acting like shock absorbers.

  Ethan looked into its eyes again and felt the same ancient fear course through his veins.

  The features were unmistakeably human, far more so than a gorilla or chimpanzee. The nose was more pronounced, not flat, and the line of the mouth was wider than a human’s. Even in the low-light conditions Ethan could just make out that the creature’s head was conical in shape, but that the skull was round like that of a human. Only the thick fur coating the top of the head gave it a conical appearance, perhaps an adaption to prevent heat loss from the scalp during the cold mountain winters.

  No gunshot broke the silence. Ethan realized that although he could see the creature’s skull from his position on the table, the creature was too tall for Kurt to spot its head or even its eyes from his position down the south corridor. Without a clean shot at the head he couldn’t be sure of a kill. All that was saving this immense creature’s life was the fact that it was too tall to walk into the control room. It would have to stoop to get in.

  Ethan shivered as he became aware that the creature was looking directly at him. The eyes seemed black now, bottomless pits beneath a slight ridge running along the skull above them. He could see that the creature’s facial hair was like a man’s, thick around the jaw and the sides of the face, but the nose and cheeks were hairless, the skin there darkened by exposure to a thousand Idaho suns.

  The eyes remained transfixed upon his as they stared at each other. Ethan searched desperately for some kind of recognition, an emotion to appear on that face, but he saw nothing. The eyes stared back at him blankly for what felt like an eternity.

  Then, they began looking around the control room.

  Ethan felt a new kind of fear tingle uncomfortably through him as he saw the creature slowly scan the room, sweeping methodically from one side to the other. Watching. Observing. Waiting. He real
ized without a shadow of doubt that it was thinking.

  Ethan flinched in shock as it suddenly sniffed loudly, sucking in air like a hoover. It looked at him for a long moment and then softly let the breath out, its huge chest sinking as it did so. Now it focused on Ethan again and seemed to look at the cables securing him to the table. Thinking. Assessing.

  Ethan took a chance and whispered.

  ‘Hey.’

  The dark eyes flicked back onto his and bore into him like laser beams. The face remained impassive but Ethan was in no doubt that he had its attention. He swallowed, and then looked up at the east corridor before looking down at the west corridor. Ethan looked back at the creature, saw it still focused directly upon him, and then repeated his gesture, checking out the two corridors and looking back at the creature.

  It stared at him blankly.

  Ethan tried the whole routine again. The animal just looked at him, unreadable. Ethan tried again, looking at the corridors intently and then back at the creature.

  It wasn’t looking at him. With a chill that ran down through his bones he saw it looking from one corridor to the next, the big dark eyes rolling from left to right before looking down at Ethan. Ethan could not tell if the creature was simply mimicking him or actually understanding what he was trying to do.

  Ethan repeated his gesture one more time, and then looked at the creature and shook his head slowly.

  The vast majority of human civilizations used identical means of indicating ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Ethan had once read that the origin of this universally accepted gesture was conceived shortly after birth, when hungry babies would search for milk from their mother’s breast by moving their heads up and down, and would generally decline milk by turning their heads aside.

  And if this creature could understand that, then it might also have recognized that Ethan was trapped, perhaps just as it had once been.

  The creature looked at him again, that blank and inhuman expression still cast across its face. Ethan repeated the entire gesture again and shook his head. This time, he put on a worried expression.

  The creature stared at him for several long seconds, then looked at the corridors again.

  Slowly, ever so quietly as though it were not walking but floating above the ground, it began to melt back into the darkness.

  ‘Open fire, now!’

  Kurt’s voice shouted out, shockingly loud in the silence. It was instantly drowned out by a salvo of deafening shots. Ethan heard a shriek of rage and pain and then the creature vanished as though it had never even existed. He heard footfalls receding swiftly into the night beyond the mine tunnel.

  Ethan stared at the darkness for a few moments, and then he breathed out.

  The entire encounter had taken less than a minute, but it felt as though he had been watching the creature for a lifetime.

  ‘Damn it!’

  Kurt burst into the control room, his rifle pulled into his shoulder as he worked his way around the table and kicked the steel doors shut. Two of his soldiers emerged from the other corridors and helped him seal the doors with the bars before Kurt turned to look at Ethan.

  ‘You see it?’ he asked. ‘Did we hit it?’

  Ethan nodded and then let a grim smile curl from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘I saw it,’ he said, ‘and, believe me, we’re not getting out of here alive.’

  Kurt Agry used a combat knife to slice the cables off Ethan’s body and hauled him onto his feet.

  ‘You’re not getting out of here alive,’ he corrected, and shoved Ethan toward the south corridor.

  Ethan did not resist, his mind filled with the image of the sasquatch’s face, those blank yet intelligent eyes, that otherworldly essence.

  Agry waited as one of his men unlocked the door to the store room and opened it. Ethan was shoved inside, and Kurt was about to slam the door behind him when all three of them stopped and stared at the room.

  It was empty.

  Duran and Mary Wilkes had vanished.

  57

  DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, WASHINGTON DC

  Jarvis was led by the two detectives to an unmarked police car, probably a pool vehicle like his own. He saw that it had no grilles on the windows, no means of preventing escape should he decide to make a run for it, although his wrists were cuffed in front of him.

  The sun had long gone down, the car park lit by the harsh fluorescent glow of street lights as the detectives drove him out of the lot and onto the main highway south for the district.

  ‘I have an alibi for the time of the murder,’ Jarvis said to the two detectives in the front of the car.

  ‘Is that so?’ one of them replied. ‘That’s convenient, especially as we haven’t yet told you the time of death.’

  ‘I’ve already been to the Capitol,’ Jarvis explained, ‘and visited Ben Consiglio’s colleagues. That’s where I heard that he’d been killed.’

  The older of the two detectives turned in his seat to look at Jarvis.

  ‘And why would you be doing that?’

  ‘Ben was working for a Congressional committee looking into the CIA’s activities,’ Jarvis explained. ‘So was his partner, Natalie Warner, who is the sister of a man who works for me. Natalie visited me earlier today but because I couldn’t tell her what she wanted to know due to national security, she thinks I’m part of some conspiracy to derail the committee. Now that Ben’s been killed she’s implicated me.’

  The detective nodded.

  ‘And rightly so. Consiglio was killed in an automobile wreck and the vehicle that hit him was untraceable.’

  ‘As expected,’ Jarvis replied, ‘it was CIA.’

  The two detectives looked at each other and chuckled.

  ‘Sure it is, Mr. Jarvis,’ the younger man replied. ‘But don’t worry, I’m sure Jack Bauer’s on the case for you right now.’

  Jarvis was about to shout his reply when a set of headlights flared like nuclear detonations through the side of the car. Jarvis threw his cuffed hands over his head and bent forward in his seat as the vehicle slammed into the side of the car with a deafening crash of metal and shattered glass. The detectives in the front seats were hurled violently sideways by the impact as the car screeched along the asphalt and shuddered to a halt in the darkness.

  Jarvis, his body doubled over forward to protect him from whiplash and to hide himself from view, reached forward between the front seats and grasped under the older detective’s jacket. His hand fell upon the pistol in its shoulder holster, the unconscious man unaware as Jarvis pulled the weapon out. He fumbled for the keys to his cuffs on the detective’s belt, then lay down silently on the back seat. He worked the key into the cuffs and felt the restraints loosen as they slid from his wrists.

  The lights from the car that impacted them illuminated the steam pouring from the detectives’ vehicle, the vapour glowing in white clouds as Jarvis waited silently, listening to the tinkling of the engine as it cooled.

  Moments later he saw a shadow appear, cast by the same lights as the driver of the other car approached them. Jarvis saw the pistol in the man’s hands first, the weapon held out in front of him as he reached the car. An amateur. He’d announced his arrival by not masking his approach, letting his shadow be seen by Jarvis. Maybe some kind of punk hired by Mr. Wilson to trash the car and kill the occupants, like maybe a jacking gone wrong.

  The man, still holding his pistol aimed at the detectives’ heads, reached out and opened the passenger door. Jarvis watched silently as the man reached in and rested a finger on the unconscious man’s neck. Jarvis masked his surprise and waited for the man to reach in further and check the driver.

  Jarvis watched the man’s hand move further into the car.

  He leapt outward, grabbed the hand and yanked it into the car as he slammed the detective’s pistol up against the man’s head.

  ‘Move and I’ll blow your brains out across the windshield.’

  The man squinted sideways at Jarvis, his dark eyes smea
red with blood from the crash impact. It took a moment for Jarvis to realize that the man had already bandaged his wounds.

  ‘Douglas Jarvis?’ the man croaked.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  The man raised a hand slowly, palm up at Jarvis, and with the other he set the pistol down on the dashboard of the car.

  ‘My name’s Ben Consiglio. We have to leave, now, before these two wake up.’

  ‘They’ll be onto us real fast,’ Jarvis said. ‘You just T-boned a police vehicle and I’ve stolen a detective’s pistol.’

  Jarvis scrambled from the back seat as Ben led him to his vehicle.

  Ben Consiglio drove, joining the freeway headed south. His face was a mess, caked in dried blood and hastily applied bandages, the skin around his left eye turning purple and yellow with bruises.

  ‘I know,’ Ben said. ‘What I didn’t know was that you were under arrest.’

  ‘Natalie put them onto me. She thinks I’m out to sink the investigation.’

  ‘Are you?’ Consiglio asked.

  ‘I’m a victim here too,’ Jarvis said. ‘This is a CIA-sponsored operation. How the hell did you survive the assassination attempt, by the way?’

  Ben shook his head.

  ‘Pure luck. This guy hit my car then gave me a beating. He strapped me into the seat and pistol-whipped my head. Then he used some kind of accelerant and poured it into the filler cap. I watched him do it in the wing mirror.’

  ‘You were still conscious after being pistol-whipped?’ Jarvis asked in amazement.

  ‘I feigned unconsciousness,’ Ben replied, and tapped his skull. ‘Four titanium plates, fitted to hold my head together after I got hit by shrapnel in Iraq. They’re not due out for another couple of years once the bones have healed.’

  Jarvis shook his head.

  ‘Okay, lucky strike. You want to tell me why the hell you haven’t checked into a hospital, or a police station?’

  ‘I’m a target,’ Ben said. ‘Long as they think I’m dead, I’ll be alive. This was a professional hit and I’m not taking any chances until I’ve figured out what the hell’s going on here.’