The Chimera Secret (31 page)

Natalie scanned the details of the orphanage and made a decision.

‘I’m going to check this place out,’ she said. ‘It’s another long shot but they may have records that reveal new information that the CIA might not have thought to
erase.’

‘Long shot doesn’t begin to describe that,’ Ben said. ‘Want me to come with you?’

‘No, you’ve done enough for one day,’ she replied. ‘How about you just see if you can uncover any names for me connected to Harrison Defoe who are still alive, who might
know about what really happened to him. There may be somebody he confided in who can tell us more about what happened.’

Ben threw her a mock salute as he span in his chair and began typing at his keyboard.

‘Going somewhere without me?’

Guy Rikard’s rotund face appeared before Natalie’s, a limp smile hanging from his face.

‘Going anywhere that you’re not,’ Natalie replied as she slipped past him.

Rikard wrapped his thick fingers around one of her arms firmly enough to stop her in her tracks.

‘You’re not holding out on me over here, are you?’ he asked. ‘Looks like you’re onto something juicy about the Church Committee.’

Natalie wriggled loose from his grip.

‘Guy, if I thought for a single moment that I could share anything with you, trust me, I would. But I don’t.’

Guy’s features hardened. ‘That’s not team-play, Nat,’ he snapped.

‘It’s
Natalie
to you,’ she shot back.

‘Well,
Natalie
, this is a team and right now you’re not  playing along. Our job is to collate information from the Congressional investigation and present it to the
committee, not run around Washington DC like you’re in a friggin’ Dan Brown novel!’

‘I need to follow this lead,’ Natalie said. ‘It could be important to the committee’s investigation.’

‘It’s a good lead,’ Larry Levinson intervened as he moved to stand alongside Natalie. ‘It could get us somewhere, and if the Investigator General accepts what
Natalie’s found as tangible evidence of malpractice within the CIA, this office will be at the forefront of it. You sure you want to miss out on what could be the next Watergate,
Guy?’

Natalie looked at Larry in wonderment, unable to conceal the smile on her features.

Rikard looked down at her for a long beat, as though deciding whether she would even have a job at the end of the day, and then he glanced at Ben Consiglio.

‘Ben, you do it.’ Rikard looked at Natalie and Larry. ‘You two, on the other hand, will stay in this office until I say otherwise, is that understood?’

Hot acid flushed through Natalie’s veins as she glared at Rikard but there was little she could do. Ben stepped up alongside her and Larry as Rikard stalked away.

‘Good work, Larry,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back as soon as I can. Maybe we can pick up the threads of this outside of office hours without Rikard poking his nose
in.’

‘Larry!’ Rikard snapped. ‘Get over here! I need help with these translations!’

‘I need to pop out of the office for a moment, boss,’ Larry replied meekly.

‘You can pop out when I damned well tell you!’ Rikard thundered back at him.

‘But it’s important,’ Larry pleaded.

‘So is national security! Get over here.’

Larry sighed. Natalie mastered her fury as she turned to them.

‘Thanks, guys. I owe you both, really.’

Ben smiled as he grabbed his jacket and slung it over his shoulder.

‘You owe me nothing,’ he said, ‘except maybe a drink later.’

He swept from the office with a flash of a smile before she could respond. Larry raised an eyebrow at her and grinned as he walked toward Rikard’s desk, leaving her with a warm tingling
sensation in the pit of her belly. She didn’t even realize that her anger had melted completely.

‘He’s gone.’

Ethan stood alongside Lopez and watched as Kurt Agry pulled the stretcher’s plastic cover over Simmons’s face, his skin now pale and his eyes ringed by blotchy purple sclera. The
rain pattered down on the plastic sheet and ran in rivulets into the mud as they stood in a forlorn circle around the body.

They had walked only for an hour before Corporal Jenkins had noticed that Simmons had stopped breathing, his lips turning a dull blue.

Kurt stood up and stared vacantly at the stretcher for a few moments. Ethan watched the soldier for a moment before speaking.

‘We’d have never got him back in time, even if the valley weren’t blocked,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t going to survive this mission once we lost our
radios.’

Kurt nodded, ignoring the streams of chill rainwater streaming from his shaven head to run down his face. He finally ran a hand over his head, the motion sounding like sandpaper rubbing against
drywall, and turned to the group.

‘We push on,’ he said. ‘The way home is blocked, but without the stretcher we can take the high ground and push over the valley, then head north.’

Ethan glanced up at the sky, heavily laden with clouds, the forests forever entombed in their foggy grip.

‘Why not just head north right now?’ he asked. ‘Pick up Highway 14 and get back to Grangeville?’

The climb back up into the valley, weighed down by the stretcher, had taken all of the morning and most of the early afternoon. Everybody was exhausted, especially Dana and Proctor.

‘Because we’re not done yet,’ Kurt growled back. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll let Simmons, Willis or Lieutenant Watson’s lives be lost in vain. We finish
what we came here to do, then we head home. We can send a recovery team for the stretcher when we’re done.’

Duran Wilkes, his beard glistening with beads of water, gestured back down the valley.

‘What makes you think that thing is going to let us head back down anywhere? It blocked our route, Kurt. It did that for a reason.’

‘It’s an animal!’ Kurt yelled as he whirled on his heel and marched up to the old man, getting right in his face. ‘It’s a creature, a big, hairy son of a bitch but
nothing more. It’s not thinking, it’s not planning and it’s sure as hell not chasing a vendetta against us!’

Duran Wilkes stood for several long seconds, not averting his eyes from the soldier’s raging gaze.

‘Then why are we running away from it, back up the valley?’

Kurt stood immobile in front of the old man, and Ethan sensed his chance.

‘It’s time to come clean, Kurt,’ he said. ‘You’ve lost three of your men and we’re stuck up here being chased by God knows what. If you’ve got some
other reason for being here then now would be a great time to share it because we might not survive this if we don’t work together.’

Kurt turned away from Duran and looked at Ethan.

‘Our task is to protect your team from harm and—’

‘Bullshit!’ Lopez snapped. ‘Do you really think we’re all just goddamned idiots, following you and your team up and down this mountain like sheep? Right now I don’t
trust you as far as I could throw you.’

Kurt watched her for a long moment and then glanced across at Dana and Proctor.

‘That a universal opinion?’

Dana nodded once beneath her tightly tied hood, and Proctor shrugged. ‘Guess so,’ he replied nervously. ‘Y’all seem like you’ve got something on your minds other
than the man-eating creature from hell that’s on our case, which surprises me a little.’

‘That part wasn’t in our briefing,’ Kurt said. ‘Guess they must have omitted it.’

‘And what are
you
omitting, Kurt?’ Duran pressed him. ‘What aren’t you telling us?’

‘I don’t have to tell you a goddamned thing,’ Kurt snapped.

‘About your mission, no,’ Duran replied. ‘But I’m eight thousand feet up in the mountains with low supplies and my granddaughter to think about, and that wasn’t in
my
briefing either. You’re the commander of a heavily armed team of soldiers, so I’m going to ask you again: why are we running away from that thing, back up the
mountain?’

Kurt swallowed, seeming to quiver on the spot with impotent rage before he turned away and looked at his men.

‘Good question,’ he snapped. ‘I’m about done with this shit. Any of you guys fancy making a stand and sending that goddamned thing back to hell?’

Ethan heard a chorus of ‘Hell, yeah’ ripple through the soldiers as they gripped their rifles tighter. Kurt turned to Ethan.

‘You, marine. My suggestion is that we find somewhere to hunker down and use Duran’s advice. Let it come to us.’

Ethan stared at Kurt for a moment. ‘You asking me, or telling me?’

‘Both,’ Kurt said. ‘We’re not leaving until the job’s done and right now we’re three men down.’ He reached to the ground by the stretcher, lifted
Simmons’s M-16 and tossed it toward Ethan, who caught it instinctively. ‘You’ll take his place, and your partner there can cover the science team and our guides. Oh, and one more
thing.’ Kurt gestured to Simmons’s bergen. ‘That’s yours now.’

Ethan walked across to the bergen and hefted it onto his shoulders. Despite the overall weight of the backpack, maybe sixty pounds or so, he could still feel the twenty pounds extra from the
stashed explosives.

Sergeant Agry turned to Duran Wilkes.

‘Okay, old man, this is how it’s going to play out. One way or another we need to get out of this valley and we’re going to do it in the direction that I tell you because
that’s where I need to go. We may find some kind of shelter in that direction and a place where we can rest and reorganize ourselves defensively. What I need from you is everything you know
about this damned
thing
that’s following us.’

Duran hesitated for a few moments and then nodded.

‘That, I can help you with.’

Kurt turned to his men. ‘Wrap the body real tight in the stretcher bag. We’ll rig a line up into one of the trees and hoist it off the ground. Last thing I want is for his family to
be handed his corpse after it’s been chewed into little pieces by wolves.’

Ethan and Lopez helped the soldiers with the body-bag, double-wrapping the body and then rigging a jury line. One of the soldiers weighted the end of a para-cord and used it to loop a rope over
a large tree branch in the forest some twenty feet above the ground.

Moments later and the body was dangling out of reach of anything that lived in the woods.

‘A bear might plausibly climb up for it,’ Duran said as he got his breath back, rubbing his hands from the rope. ‘But hopefully it won’t detect any scent of food for a
few days with all that plastic around it.’

Kurt hefted his bergen onto his back.

‘Let’s move out. Duran, with me. Ethan, you too. Lopez, you join Klein and Jenkins as rearguard.’

Lopez scowled irritably but obeyed, heading to the rear of the group with her pistol drawn.

Ethan fell in alongside Kurt and Duran as they led the way up an animal trail that climbed a slope through the forest. The rain was still falling heavily but within the dense trees it was
reduced to fat, heavy drops that splashed down around them in a constant patter.

‘Talk to me,’ Kurt said to Duran. ‘Everything you know.’

The old man took a long breath before he began.

‘Sasquatch is not a modern myth like most people think,’ Duran said. ‘Encounters with large, reclusive bipedal creatures are found among the stories of our earliest ancestors.
Members of the Lummi tribe of Washington State speak of the
Ts’emekwes
. The
stiyaha, kwi-kwiyai
and
skoocooms
are all ancient tribal names given to species said to
live in the forests, and in 1840 a Reverend Elkanah Walker spoke of stories of nocturnal, hairy giants among the native American Indians living in what is now Spokane, Washington. The natives said
that the giants lived near the peaks of mountains and sometimes stole salmon from the fishermen’s nets. Even the name, sasquatch, is derived from an ancient tribal name for the creatures the
Halkomelem called
sásq’ets.
’

‘Fascinating,’ Kurt uttered without interest. ‘Now tell me what I actually need to know. What does it eat? How does it live? Does it hibernate, or make camps, or
sleep?’

Duran sighed as they walked.

‘There are so few confirmed, recorded sightings that fine details are hard to figure,’ he replied. ‘It’s omnivorous as far as we know. Large scat samples have been found
that do not correspond to any known creature that contain everything from wildflowers, nuts and grasses to the remains of carpenter ants, rodents and fish. That matches other wild primate species
like gorillas and chimpanzees, which are generally herbivores but will eat meat when it becomes available.’

‘Do they hibernate?’ Ethan asked.

‘Nobody knows,’ Duran replied. ‘They’re very large creatures, living in a region with harsh winters where food of any kind would be extremely hard to find. I’d say
it’s likely that their activity is greatly reduced during the winter months, but sightings persist so true hibernation is unlikely.’

‘Camps,’ Kurt pressed. ‘Do they have homes or are they wanderers? Do they have territories?’

‘Every now and again in the woods I’ll find cedar trees bent over at the trunk with incredible force,’ Duran said, ‘the branches wedged beneath another tree’s
branches alongside. That can’t happen naturally. Nature also doesn’t plug the gaps in the branches with smaller bushes and twigs, so yes, they make camps out of trees and they’ve
been photographed and documented regularly. As for territories, it’s possible. Most reports show that they will remain in one area for a number of months. Other wildlife tends to vacate the
area when they’re around, and there are literally hundreds of recordings of sasquatch howls and communications during these periods.’

Kurt nodded, taking it all in.

‘Any evidence of causing harm to humans?’

‘Almost none,’ Duran said. ‘Some people claim to have been pursued but those claims are unsubstantiated. Almost all sightings end with the sasquatch moving off as quickly as it
can. They seem almost intimidated by humans despite their physical size, or shy of contact.’

‘You said they were inherently curious,’ Kurt said.

‘They are,’ Duran shrugged, ‘just like us.’