The Chimera Secret

by Dean Crawford

  ‘I might be able to help with that,’ Jarvis said.

  ‘First things first,’ Consiglio insisted. ‘Where’s Natalie?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jarvis said. ‘She visited me and then swore she’d get to the bottom of it all. I didn’t know at the time what she meant. You got any leads on her?’

  ‘Last I heard she planned to go see one of the survivors of MK-ULTRA, some old guy living out near the Edwards Base. But I don’t know the name or exact location. We need to find out.’

  Jarvis thought for a moment. ‘You think she’s a target?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Consiglio replied. ‘What I do know is that somebody in our office must have been an informer to whoever’s doing this. Nobody but the people in our team had any idea of where I was going or what I was doing.’

  ‘Your team have gone home,’ Jarvis said. ‘Only people left are Guy Rikard and someone called Larry. They know the risks.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Consiglio chuckled bitterly, ‘I bet they do. Most likely person working for the CIA is Rikard. He’s got a photographic memory, something that the intelligence agencies would find very useful, and he’s had it in for Natalie ever since the investigation started. If he already knew she was being treated as a person of interest to the CIA that might explain why.’

  Jarvis frowned.

  ‘Doesn’t fit,’ he said. ‘Rikard’s an ass but he was first to act when he realized what was really going on. He agreed to sending the team home for their own protection and he’s already put himself on the line for Natalie.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I sent him to tell the committee everything that had happened. Left him collating the evidence with the other guy who stayed back, Larry.’

  Consiglio looked at the traffic streaming past them on the freeway as he thought furiously.

  ‘He’ll never let that happen. Larry could be in real danger. We need to find them both, now.’

  Jarvis nodded and pulled out his cell. ‘I’ll call ahead. Then I’d better call my boss and explain what’s happened.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ Consiglio said as he accelerated.

  Jarvis dialed in a number and held his cell to his ear. Almost immediately the dial tone changed to a strange humming noise. Jarvis stared at his cell for a moment and then shut it off. He opened the car window and tossed the phone out into the night.

  ‘The hell you doing?’ Consiglio asked.

  ‘Cell’s being jammed,’ Jarvis replied and closed the window again. ‘They’re trying to close us down. You got a cell?’

  ‘No,’ the younger man replied. ‘It burned with the car. I didn’t try to buy a new one either. I’ve got no cash on me and using an ATM would be suicide right now.’

  Jarvis clenched his fists in frustration and then made a decision.

  ‘We turn up at the GAO, the entire Metropolitan Police Department will be on us within minutes. Only chance we’ve got now is to find Natalie and use whatever she may have discovered as evidence. The fact that you’re not dead proves me innocent of any crime.’

  ‘We need to find Larry,’ Consiglio insisted. ‘He’s in real danger and Rikard might destroy all of the evidence Natalie had collated.’

  ‘There’s nothing that we can do for Larry,’ Jarvis snapped. ‘We can’t go back there. You said that you watched the man who tried to kill you pour accelerant into your fuel tank.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You get a good look at him? Good enough to pick him out?’

  Consiglio looked across at Jarvis.

  ‘I’ll never forget his face as long as I live. You find him, I’ll pick that bastard out from a line-up of a thousand people.’

  Jarvis nodded. ‘Find a store. We’re going to need a disposable cellphone first, and then we need to find Natalie. Fast.’

  58

  NEZ PERCE NATIONAL FOREST, IDAHO

  ‘Where the hell have they gone?’

  Kurt Agry swept the room with the flashlight beam on his rifle, but there was no sign of the tracker and his daughter. Ethan stared in disbelief as Kurt kicked boxes across the floor and ran a gloved hand over his stubbled skull.

  ‘How would I know?’ Ethan uttered. ‘You’ve had me strapped to a table in the control room.’

  ‘Don’t fuck with me!’ Kurt yelled, ramming the muzzle of his rifle against Ethan’s chest. ‘You were in here with them. They must have said something.’

  Ethan said nothing. Just stared down at Kurt in disgust. One of the soldiers called out and Kurt walked across to him. Ethan watched as Milner pointed down at the locking mechanism on the door.

  ‘The screws are loose,’ he said. ‘Looks like they got out and then rigged the locks back in place to hide their escape.’

  Kurt looked down the corridor from which they had come.

  ‘They must have slipped past us while we were watching for that thing to come in here.’

  ‘Don’t see how,’ the soldier replied. ‘I was in the corridor.’

  ‘You were at the other end of the corridor,’ Ethan corrected him, ‘with line of sight to the mine entrance. Both Duran and Mary are adept at moving quietly through the forest – in here it would have been child’s play. Factor in the low light and your attention on the mine entrance, it’s my guess they slipped past you.’

  Milner scowled at Ethan but did not respond.

  ‘They’re still in here,’ Kurt muttered. ‘They can’t have gone out the main entrance so they must be holed up out back someplace. Bring the men forward into the laboratory. That way we control the front of the facility. We get the data uploaded and then we move out.’

  Ethan laughed.

  ‘You’re not in control of anything, Kurt,’ he said. ‘You’re trapped and you’re doomed. The CIA has burned you. None of you is going anywhere.’

  ‘That’s for me to decide,’ Kurt snapped back. ‘You’re done, Warner.’

  With that, he stepped out of the store room and slammed the door shut behind him. Ethan heard the locking mechanism slide back into place on the outside, and found himself alone in the room.

  59

  ‘This isn’t working.’

  Archer squatted in the control center, his shotgun trained on the door to the mine entrance.

  Klein nodded in silence. Jenkins could hardly blame them. With their officer lost, communications gone and their sergeant apparently losing his authority and their respect, the situation was as bad as anything faced in a true war zone. The one thing that a soldier relied upon was a clear picture of who was calling the shots. Even among such a close-knit and elite team like the 24th STS, a breakdown in the chain of command could be lethal.

  Worse, Jenkins knew that every single man in the squad, himself included, was now aware that even if they did manage to escape the mine they had been marked as an expendable asset by their superiors. Their job, to extract and send the data kept in the facility’s computer servers, was expected to be their last living act.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Archer asked him.

  In the gloomy darkness, two pairs of eyes swiveled to look expectantly into Jenkins’s and the weight of responsibility bore down upon him. Officially the third-ranking soldier when they set off on this mission, the men were clearly now looking to him for decisions while Sergeant Agry was out back.

  The prospect of outright mutiny would have scared the corporal enough, but the idea of being hunted down by the CIA for the rest of his life scared him even more.

  ‘We need that data. It’s the only thing keeping us alive right now.’

  ‘Kurt’s not going to just hand that shit over,’ Klein pointed out. ‘He’ll cover his own ass, even kill us before giving it up.’

  Jenkins nodded slowly in the darkness. Agry was already at the tipping point, unable to take the stress of command to the point that he was abandoning the basic principles of humanity. Locking up the civilians wasn’t any part of the briefing they’d received from Lieutenant Watson before deploying. Even if the CIA had dec
ided to burn them, wasn’t it worth trying to find a solution that fit all parties? They could still salvage something from this mess. That was what they were trained to do: get results, not kill fellow countrymen and flee into the woods.

  Yet he was the corporal, and Kurt Agry would be relying on him to maintain the morale and cohesion of their unit in his absence.

  ‘I’m going to take the drives from him,’ Archer said finally. ‘We can figure this out once we’ve sprung Warner. He seems to know what he’s doing.’

  ‘Are you fucking kidding?’ Jenkins hissed. ‘What the hell will that achieve? We’ll still be here and the sergeant will shoot you on sight.’

  ‘That’s a chance I’m willing to take,’ Archer snapped. He looked at the other men. ‘Who’s with me?’

  Klein nodded. Archer got to his feet.

  ‘Let’s do it.’

  Archer turned and stared straight into Kurt Agry’s eyes staring at him over the barrel of a pistol. Before Jenkins could intervene, Kurt’s voice growled in the shadows.

  ‘Let’s.’

  The gunshot was shockingly loud in the confined space of the corridor. Archer’s head flicked backward and his body flailed as the impact of the bullet into his skull hurled him into the control center.

  He hit the floor hard, the back of his smashed skull crunching across the tiles.

  Kurt Agry lowered his pistol. Jenkins stared at Archer’s lifeless corpse and then looked at the sergeant.

  ‘Jesus, Kurt, that didn’t help anything. We’re a gun down now.’

  Kurt glared a challenge into the eyes of the remaining soldiers as Milner joined them and stared in disbelief at Archer’s body.

  ‘Gentlemen, our survival depends upon our ability to stick together. We split now, we’ll be dead before dawn. Anybody else tries to take control of this situation I’ll put a bullet in them too, understood?’

  Klein stood up and pointed down at Archer’s body.

  ‘That what you call sticking together?’

  ‘That’s what I call mutiny,’ Kurt shot back. ‘We’ve got to get the hell out of here, and the only currency we have is the civilians. Unless any of you would like to set foot out there and tempt that fucking thing inside?’

  ‘We tried baiting it,’ Milner snapped. ‘It didn’t go for it.’

  Kurt’s thin lips curled into a grim smile.

  ‘We’re not going to bait it,’ he replied, ‘just keep it occupied. Milner, get Proctor and Dana out here, and bring Lopez too.’

  Milner hurried down the west corridor toward the living quarters as Kurt glanced at the mine entrance. The warped metal bars could hold the creature back, but not forever. Sooner or later it would come through.

  He turned as Proctor, Dana and Lopez were marched into the control center, Milner prodding them along with his rifle.

  ‘This won’t work,’ Dana said. ‘We could hear what you were up to earlier. You tried this with Ethan and failed.’

  Dana Ford stood with Proctor at the door to the mine entrance, their hands cuffed as Kurt Agry aimed his rifle at them.

  ‘It’s better than nothing,’ the sergeant replied. ‘It’ll have to come through you to get to us, and that’s all the extra time we’ll need.’

  Proctor swallowed thickly, his eyes quivering behind his spectacles.

  ‘It’ll kill us,’ he said, his voice trembling.

  ‘Better you than me,’ Kurt grinned, ‘and it’ll save on bullets. Move.’

  Dana Ford stood her ground.

  ‘Go to hell,’ she spat. ‘You’re going to kill us anyway, so the way I see it, it’s better to die quickly from a bullet than get torn to pieces out there. You want to escape so badly? Go do it yourself, asshole.’

  Kurt Agry stared at her for a moment in what might have been surprise. He performed a brief calculation.

  ‘Have it your way.’

  Kurt Agry fired his rifle.

  The shot impacted Dana Ford’s chest. Her body jerked as it was thrown backward, the bullet passing through her heart and exiting her back in a fine mist of blood that splattered the paneled wall behind her.

  She collapsed to the floor and slumped against the wall, her eyes wide but sightless.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Proctor blurted as tears flooded from his eyes. ‘You’ve killed her!’

  Kurt sneered at him. ‘I can see why you’re a scientist.’ He swung the rifle to point at him. ‘You too?’

  Proctor stared in terror at the rifle as his hands flew into the air beside his head.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ he blubbed, his legs jerking and swaying as he tried to stay upright. ‘I’ll do it.’

  Kurt, his rifle pulled tight into his shoulder, gestured with the weapon for Proctor to move to the main door. The scientist shuffled miserably across as Klein reached out and pulled the steel bolts out of the locks before hauling the door slowly open.

  The dark, damp interior of the mine entrance yawned open in front of Proctor as he stood with his hands in the air and stared into the blackness. His legs trembled and he seemed to crouch forward slightly as though he wanted to crawl into the tunnel.

  ‘Get moving,’ Kurt snapped, and with one boot shoved Proctor forward.

  The scientist cried out as he plummeted into the darkness and crashed down onto the rocks, his sobs echoing down the tunnel. The rocks dug into his palms and his knees as he struggled to his feet and reluctantly started pushing one foot in front of the other.

  60

  Ethan walked to the door and knelt down beside the lock. In the dim light he could see that the screws in the mechanism had indeed been loosened, a few dull scratches in the steel betraying Duran’s efforts to disassemble the lock. Ethan ran a finger over the gouges and frowned. The scratches were deep, as though great force had been applied. Too much force. Duran was a patient man who preferred thought and planning over desperate measures; a man who would have thought his way out of his predicament first and acted second.

  The door locked from the outside via the simple electronically controlled system that was now being manually shoved into place by Kurt and his crew. Three solid-steel bars an inch thick and six inches long securing each door. Even without the electronic locking, it was hard to see how Duran could have gotten the door undone from the inside. A single word infiltrated Ethan’s mind.

  Deception.

  Ethan stood up and turned to look around the room. The only logical solution to the mystery was that Duran had only tampered with the lock as a diversion, and that he had escaped from the room some other way.

  There were six racks of aluminum shelving, each six feet high and maybe ten feet long, stacked with cardboard boxes containing medical supplies, dehydrated food sachets, cover alls and the flashlights. While Ethan could entertain the idea of Duran fashioning a lock-pick out of syringe needles or similar, it was easy to reject an image of the old man frantically tunnelling his way out of the room. Ethan realized that Duran had known he was going to escape from this room the moment he entered it: that was why he’d been satisfied when he’d found the flashlights. It was dark outside.

  Ethan checked his watch. Dead of night. Perfect timing. If there was to be an air strike, or if Kurt and his men were successful in blowing the facility, nobody would hear anything at this range from civilization and anybody camping within ten miles would pay little attention to what could probably be passed off as a rock fall or some other natural event.

  ‘Come on, Ethan,’ he murmured to himself. ‘If Duran could do it . . .’

  Ethan closed his eyes and stood for a moment in the center of the room. He let his mind grow calm and then built a mental picture of the facility in his mind. The mine entrance led into the circular control room, which itself was connected in a straight line to the other two circular main rooms – the laboratory in the middle and the stimulus and containment cages deepest in the mountain. From both the control room and the laboratory extended two corridors to the left and right; the armoury and living quarters from the control
room; and further down from the laboratory the mysterious locked room and the store room in which he stood. As far as he knew there were no rooms extending from the containment area at the back of the facility.

  Ethan kept his eyes closed, thinking hard. He retraced their steps through the facility, from where he stood and back, from being disarmed by Kurt to finding Mary Wilkes and Simmons’s body. All the way back to following the tracks laid down by the creature that had led them here.

  In the dim light, Ethan’s eyes flicked open. Lopez’s words of hours before drifted through the field of his awareness. Something broke out.

  Ethan stared vacantly into the darkness, not seeing the room now but studying at the mental map he had created of the facility. The place had once been a hard-rock mine, which was dug for the extraction of minerals and ores like gold, silver, zinc and so on. To access the ore before the presence of modern machinery, miners were forced to dig decline ramps that descended from the mine entrance in a sort of spiral that circled the deposit. But in those days, haulage of rock to the surface would not have necessarily been performed by mules working alongside the men in the tunnels. Sometimes, vertical shafts were sunk and the ore hauled out via mules turning a mechanical wheel on the surface.

  Ethan saw the facility in his mind’s eye again.

  The corridors were level, not declining. Those excavations were known as adits, where the ore bodies in the mountain were horizontal rather than vertical and there was no need for ramps or shafts to transport the ore to the surface.

  But if this mountain had contained shafts also, they would not necessarily have been used by the construction teams that had built the facility. They would only have used the parts of the mine easiest to access.

  Suddenly it all became clear.

  The facility sat at the bottom of vertical excavations made into the mountain, making use of the cavities but placing false ceilings. That was why the three central rooms were the same size: the same size as the three ore bodies that had been extracted from the rock, one after the other.