The Chimera Secret (27 page)

Ben inclined his head. ‘Sounds like a smart move. Did it get them anywhere?’

Natalie leafed through the reports.

‘They were able to expose repeated acts of injustice within the police force in Colombia, which resulted in several high-level figures being forced to resign or even sent to prison. Death
threats followed, so Jo and Ethan pulled out.’

‘To where?’

‘Gaza City.’

‘Not such a smart move.’

‘No, wait,’ Natalie said, checking back. ‘They were right here in Washington DC for six months before flying out to Gaza. Joanna only wrote two or three articles during that
period, mostly concerning the presidential election and allegations of fraud in southern states.’

‘Maybe she was working on something else?’ Ben hazarded. ‘A bigger, longer-term project?’

Natalie traced a line of article titles that Ben had compiled, and stopped on one of them.

‘Here,’ she said, turning the page to face Ben as they sat together. ‘The presidential primary of two administrations ago: Joanna gets a piece published about alleged ties
between the front-running candidate and an arms company called Munitions for Advanced Combat Environments – MACE.’

Ben nodded.

‘I remember them from my army service,’ he said. ‘Big contractor, strong ties to several governments around the world. They used to provide a lot of high-tech equipment to
combat troops, aerial drones, that kind of stuff. Went down spectacularly a couple of years ago.’

Natalie nodded, grabbing relevant articles off the computer beside her as quickly as she could.

‘Byron Stone, CEO of MACE, was killed by a car bomb in Jerusalem,’ she read aloud from the first news archive she found, before turning back to the files and quickly flipping through
them. ‘I’ve seen that name before here,’ she said, and then found what she was looking for. ‘Here, got it.’

The document was a small piece in a newspaper that would not have been easily traced by archivists who were looking for Joanna Defoe’s work.

‘It’s in Spanish,’ Ben said, surprised.

‘Joanna must have not been able to get it into the big broadsheets here in the States, so she settled for the next big thing, a national in Colombia. I can’t read Spanish, but I know
what that says.’

She pointed to a couple of lines in the text, and Ben nodded.

‘Byron Stone, and MACE,’ he read the English words in the line. ‘Any idea what the article is about?’

Natalie shook her head but sifted quickly through the text looking for words that were recognizable.

‘Corruption,’ she said, ‘fraud, weapons.’ Then she paused. ‘Abductions.’

Ben’s eyes narrowed.

‘Wasn’t MACE shut down by the FBI because of links to abduction cases around the world?’

Natalie nodded. ‘They acted as both abductors and hostage negotiators,’ she said as she read from the computer screen. ‘They earned millions from high-level figures in ransom
money. Turns out that in Gaza they were supplying militants with high-quality improvised explosive devices, bypassing Israel’s blockades on weapons-grade material and allowing the conflict
there to continue. Which then justified the sale of MACE weaponry to Israel, to defend itself against the attacks.’

‘Nasty,’ Ben uttered. ‘Kit like that probably made its way into Iraq and Afghanistan, taking out our own troops.’ He looked at her. ‘So you think that maybe Joanna
dug into this MACE company long before they were exposed and got herself noticed?’

Natalie nodded.

‘That’s not all. The period that Byron Stone got himself blown up in Israel is the same period that Ethan was out there.’

Ben looked at the dates. ‘But that was long after Joanna had disappeared, right?’

‘Two or three years,’ Natalie confirmed. ‘So, Joanna and Ethan are in Gaza, possibly searching for links between MACE and abductions or weapons supplies there, which would be a
big story if it broke during a presidential race. Joanna gets abducted, possibly by MACE, and vanishes. No ransom, no nothing. Ethan eventually returns home, alone.’

‘Ethan crashes out of life for a couple of years,’ Ben said, ‘then this Doug Jarvis from the DIA appears and offers him . . . something?’

‘The chance to find Joanna,’ Natalie said with near-clairvoyant certainty. ‘Probably he dangled that carrot in the hope that Ethan would do something else for the DIA while he
was there, but what?’

Ben shrugged, not sure where to go next.

‘There’s nothing much in the media from the time, just another failed peace process in the region. If anything major happened, politically or in terms of intelligence, it would have
been wiped clean by now.’

Natalie nodded. It was pointless searching for evidence of covert operations in what was already one of the most sensitive places on the planet. With presumably both American and Israeli forces
on task, no stone would have been left unturned.

‘Ethan comes home from whatever he was doing there,’ Natalie murmured, ‘and suddenly he’s going into business with Nicola Lopez. How did he meet her?’

Ben sifted through a handful of papers and pulled out a news report from the
Washington Post
.

‘Nicola Lopez left the force after the death of her partner, a detective called Lucas Tyrell, who was investigating a case involving . . .’ Ben smiled, ‘. . . Byron
Stone, CEO of MACE.’

Natalie snatched the paperwork from Ben, scanned it quickly and then tossed it down.

‘I’ll be damned,’ she said. ‘So this was all to do with MACE being involved in various types of fraud and treason. Only reason for covering that up would be if the
company was linked to a high-level government figure, maybe one of the presidential candidates.’

Ben nodded.

‘Ethan gets asked to investigate MACE, with the payoff being some kind of information on Joanna. He does the job and gets paid for his work, which helps put his life back on track. He goes
into business with Lopez and everyone moves on with their lives. It’s a sealed deal, everything’s here.’

Natalie shook her head.

‘Everything’s
wrong
,’ she insisted. ‘Why send Ethan? He was a wreck at the time, the last person you’d send into a war zone on a high-risk
mission.’

‘Deniability,’ Ben said. ‘He would have been out on his own.’

‘Deniability
why
?’ Natalie demanded. ‘There’s something missing here, something big enough for it to have been wiped from the public record.’ She thought
for a moment. ‘We’re getting off track, looking too hard at the recent stories. Joanna’s our target, let’s stay with her.’

Ben shrugged as he picked up a sheaf of papers. ‘Okay, but I think you’re chasing rainbows. Joanna Defoe studied photojournalism and then went to work as a freelance, that’s
all there is to it.’

‘How?’ Natalie asked. ‘Who financed her college degree? How did she survive working freelance with no previous experience? Who supported her? Her parents?’

Ben frowned as he scanned through the papers in his hand.

‘No evidence of any financial concerns,’ he said. ‘Joanna was an orphan, her father died when she was eight years old. Raised in an orphanage – ah, here you go. Her
father’s estate passed to Joanna. Not a huge amount but enough to see her through to adulthood and cover her education.’

‘How did her parents die?’ Natalie asked. ‘She never mentioned them.’

‘Mother died in childbirth,’ Ben said, the timbre of his voice softening. Natalie liked that about Ben – he had a heart. ‘Father raised her, then he died of a heart
attack.’

Natalie thought for a few moments. ‘What was his name?’

‘Harrison Defoe,’ Ben replied, ‘born Kansas, 1948.’

Natalie typed the name into the search engine and a list of hits flashed up almost instantaneously. She scanned down them, searching for relevant articles about his life. And then something else
appeared.

‘Project MK-ULTRA’. Natalie frowned at it. ‘What’s that?’

Ben Consiglio glanced at the acronym and his features darkened.

‘I know what it is,’ he replied. ‘And it’s not good. Not good at all.’

The forest was as thick with fog as it had been at first light as Ethan checked his watch. A quarter of two, and the sun was a feeble orb of pale light hovering in the murky
gray sky.

‘Easy there, watch those roots,’ said Duran Wilkes.

Ethan hefted Simmons’s stretcher onto his shoulder and carefully stepped over the thick, damp and gnarled roots of a fallen tree blocking their path. The hillside was steep, the terrain
treacherous and slick with water from the incessant drizzle drifting down around then. Ethan guessed that the temperature was no more than forty degrees, probably a lot less, although the effort of
shouldering his corner of the injured soldier’s stretcher was generating a lot of heat beneath his waterproof jacket.

Duran had the other corner, with two of Kurt’s soldiers manning the rear. Mary, Dana and Proctor walked ahead, picking the easiest path they could find, while Lopez and the remaining
soldiers formed a loose guard around the group.

‘How much farther?’ Proctor called as he looked back at Duran Wilkes.

The old man glanced up at their surroundings for a moment before he replied.

‘Another four hundred feet.’

Proctor’s face creased with misery beneath his hooded jacket as he turned and followed Dana down a steep animal trail that descended into deep forest below the ridge line.

Ethan could see that the valley below them was deep, almost like a ravine, with thickly forested slopes either side that led to a narrow exit to the south. There was no river in the valley,
although it was possible that there might be a creek deep inside the forest that he couldn’t see from up on the slopes.

‘We’re not going to get him down before the sun sets,’ Lopez said as she edged in alongside Ethan. ‘Captain America over there is getting agitated about it
already.’

Ethan glanced across to where Kurt Agry was leading his men, stopping impatiently every few minutes to observe the progress of the cumbersome stretcher.

‘There’s no rush,’ Ethan said. ‘We know Cletus MacCarthy is dead and we know that his remains may well be scattered by now. I don’t give a damn about his agenda.
He’s here to escort us and we’re here to find a body. Period. He’s probably just bored.’

‘After last night there’s nothing boring about this expedition. There’s something out here, Ethan, and it’s not friendly,’ Lopez said. ‘Why don’t we
just hike down with our injured friend here then come back in helicopters? Preferably the gunship kind.’

Ethan smiled with gritted teeth as he and Duran slipped and slid down a muddy track and onto firmer ground, the stretcher rocking and shuddering as the soldiers followed them down.

‘The weather’s too heavy here for flying,’ he replied. ‘We’d never see a thing.’

‘Oh no,’ Lopez murmured, ‘what a great shame that would be. Then we’d have to go back to Illinois or maybe take a vacation down Bermuda way.’

‘
Now
you’re tempting me,’ Ethan grinned at her.

Duran Wilkes looked across at them as they walked through trees that were once again densely packed but on mercifully level ground. ‘You can’t run away from destiny.’

‘You’re damned right there,’ Lopez replied, ‘and it’s my destiny to live out my years on a beach with a small army of servants tending to my every need.’

‘Your
every
need?’ Ethan enquired.

‘Keep it clean, Warner,’ she said, watching him from the corner of her eye. ‘This is my fantasy world we’re talkin’ about, not yours.’

‘You might want to put that fantasy on hold,’ Duran said quietly.

‘You okay?’ Ethan asked, looking at the old man.

Duran nodded once.

‘So far,’ he replied, ‘but we’re being watched.’

Ethan turned and looked out across the forest. He saw nothing but the endless, densely packed ranks of cedars and pines, the carpet of damp foliage shivering as drops of water fell from the
canopy above in a constant torrent.

‘I don’t see anything,’ Ethan replied.

‘Nor do I,’ Duran replied. ‘And I don’t hear anything either. That’s my point.’

Ethan attuned his ear to the forest around them and suddenly became aware of the absolute silence, so quiet that it almost seemed tangible. No birds sang. There was no rustle of animals in the
bushes. Just the endless pattering of raindrops stretching away to infinity around them.

Lopez whispered across to Ethan.

‘You remember what Cletus’s wife said, about the woods outside her home?’

Ethan nodded. ‘The wildlife left when the sasquatch appeared.’

Ahead, Kurt Agry slowed down and raised a clenched fist into the air. Ethan stopped walking and watched with interest as the soldier stood motionless, looking around him at the forest as though
uncertain. He glanced back at Ethan and the stretcher, then continued to survey their surroundings.

‘You think he’s noticed?’ Lopez whispered.

‘Definitely,’ Ethan said. ‘He may be an asshole, but you don’t lead a paramilitary platoon if you’re not a great soldier.’

‘How did he figure it out?’ Lopez asked.

‘Sixth sense,’ Ethan whispered back. ‘You’d be surprised how common it is with soldiers.’

Ethan knew that although there was little time for the supernatural among the military, there was a sincere appreciation for the strange but undeniable ability of people to detect the watching
gaze of an observer, often from great distances. Ethan himself had been trained never to look too long into the eyes of a target, especially an animal if hunting for food. Sooner or later, they
would sense the presence of the hunter and flee.

Likewise, human targets occasionally detected snipers with supernatural accuracy and avoided the bullet that would otherwise have opened their skull like an axe through a melon. There was no
predicting when such a bizarre event would occur, but the fact that it did meant that the military took the ability seriously.

Lopez looked around her at the woods and shivered.

‘It’s out there, isn’t it,’ she said.

It was Duran who replied.