The Chimera Secret (41 page)

‘Because I fucking said so,’ he hissed. ‘You either get on here of your own accord or I’ll break your arms and your legs and haul your sorry ass onto it.
Understood?’

Ethan stared down into Kurt’s raging expression and decided that he didn’t have much choice in the matter. He was pretty sure that he could disarm Kurt, the soldier’s fury
clouding his judgement and putting the Beretta pistol easily within Ethan’s reach. But there was no way he could take Kurt down and then shoot Klein and Milner before they retaliated. He knew
without a doubt that they would shoot straight through Kurt in order to stop him, to avoid failing in their mission.

Ethan pushed Kurt away hard enough to make him stagger and then turned and climbed onto the table.

Kurt gestured to his men with a flick of his head and they instantly moved forward and began strapping Ethan to the seat using cables ripped from useless computer terminals.

‘I don’t know what you think this will achieve,’ Ethan said, managing to keep his voice level despite the cold dread flooding his stomach. ‘There’s nothing that I
can tell you that you don’t already know.’

Kurt looked down at him for a moment and then smiled.

‘Oh, don’t worry, I don’t have any questions for you.’

‘Then what the hell are you doing?’

Kurt watched as the two soldiers stood back and checked the restraints, tugging on them before picking up their weapons again. He nodded at them, and they retreated back down the corridor into
the facility. Kurt waited until they were gone before he moved forward to stand over Ethan.

‘That thing out there,’ he said, ‘is in our way. I don’t know why, but as long as those doors stay shut we can’t do our job.’

Ethan thought for a moment.

‘You can’t blow the facility,’ he said. ‘No way out.’

‘Top marks, Mr. Warner,’ Kurt replied. ‘We could go out there with all guns blazing and take it down, maybe, but I figure why waste the ammunition? Let’s offer it some
dinner and see if it sits down at the table, right in our sights.’

Ethan stared at Kurt for a long moment before he managed to get his breathing under control enough to respond.

‘You’re going to lure it in here into a crossfire,’ he replied. ‘And I’m the bait.’

‘Yes, Ethan, you are.’

Kurt walked across to the steel doors and hauled the bars out from their mounts, then pulled the doors open, his rifle aimed out into the inky blackness beyond. Then he turned and stalked away
into the darkness of the south corridor, leaving Ethan strapped to the table in full view of the mine entrance.

Natalie drove down between rows of battered clapperboard single stories that lined the steeply inclined street, searching for the address she’d gotten for the name
deciphered from the files at the National Archives.

Coral Hills was a rundown residential area just to the southeast of the district border, where the Maryland side led down toward Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility and the capital beltway.
There wasn’t much here, but for the increase in drug-related homicide that kept the police departments on their toes.

Natalie spotted the home she was looking for and pulled into the sidewalk. The single story was painted an off-white that had faded over the years, the paint flaking away to reveal patches of
undercoat. The two properties either side of it were well maintained with brickwork walls and broad lawns, but only a warped chain-link fence and weeds adorned the tiny house between them as
Natalie pushed open a metal gate that squealed in protest as she passed through.

The porch was bare but for an old chair stacked with frayed cushions. Natalie walked up to the shutter door and rapped lightly on it. She waited and watched as someone inside shuffled about and
made their way to the porch. To her surprise, she found herself looking down into a wizened old face that peered up at her suspiciously through a crack in the door, restrained by a thick metal
chain.

‘Hank Anderson?’ she asked.

‘Who are you?’

Anderson’s voice was throaty. Crooked fingers grasped the edge of the door and threatened to slam it shut at the slightest provocation.

‘My name’s Natalie Warner,’ she replied. ‘I work for Congress.’

Anderson’s face folded in upon itself in disgust and he shoved the door shut. Natalie called through as she watched the old man’s silhouette turn and shuffle away.

‘We’re working on an investigation into corruption within the intelligence community,’ she called after him.

He kept walking.

‘One of my colleagues has already been killed as a result of the investigation. They’re trying to silence us.’

He kept walking and turned out of sight. Natalie raised her voice even further.

‘MK-ULTRA is still active.’

Nothing but silence issued from the house. Natalie clenched her fists in frustration and glanced around for some other means of accessing the property. She considered smashing a window when the
front door suddenly snapped open in front of her.

Anderson peered at her for a long moment before speaking.

‘What would you know about it?’

Natalie took a breath and picked her words with care.

‘A friend of mine vanished several years ago, and the investigation has uncovered links between her and her father, who was a member of MK-ULTRA.’

‘Who?’ he demanded.

‘Harrison Defoe.’

Anderson’s eyes widened, and he hesitated for a moment before he dropped the latch on the door and opened it. Natalie walked in and saw Anderson peer suspiciously out of the door again
before closing and immediately locking it behind her.

The house was as tiny inside as it looked from the outside, more so because of the incredible amount of junk piled from floor to ceiling in all of the rooms. Making it into the lounge was an
obstacle course in itself; Natalie was forced to step over piles of boxes, newspapers and glossies to get through the door.

‘Excuse the mess, obsessive-compulsive disorder,’ Anderson croaked in explanation. ‘And I don’t want to forget another day like they made me forget all the
others.’

Natalie looked at him curiously but said nothing as she picked her way toward an armchair in one corner of the lounge and perched on the edge. Anderson slumped with a sigh onto a couch littered
with copies of
National Geographic
.

‘I get you anything?’ he asked. ‘Coffee? Juice?’

‘I’m good,’ Natalie decided, wondering if the juice in Anderson’s cooler would be as old as the 1982 copy of the
Washington Post
on a coffee table next to her.
‘I just need to know about MK-ULTRA.’

Anderson humphed as though sick of the subject.

‘Read the conspiracy websites or the books,’ he replied. ‘You’ll find everything you need right there.’

‘No I won’t,’ she responded. ‘I’ll find out about the MK-ULTRA from the 1970s, and that’s not the one I’m interested in.’

‘How did you know Harrison Defoe?’

‘I didn’t,’ Natalie admitted. ‘I knew his daughter, Joanna. She disappeared from Gaza City several years ago and hasn’t been seen since.’

Anderson’s wrinkled face creased into a faint smile.

‘Ah, Joanna. I only met her the once when she was barely five years old. Harry was so proud of her.’

For a brief moment Natalie glimpsed the man that Anderson had once been, the bitter old eyes melting with warmth and the hard line of his narrow lips softening. Anderson noticed her gaze and the
moment passed as though the warmth had been physically drained from his body.

‘Harry died a few years back,’ he said. ‘Heart attack.’

‘So it was said,’ Natalie replied.

Anderson chuckled without mirth and waved one thin hand at her in dismissal.

‘Harry wasn’t assassinated,’ he said. ‘He was still a patriot despite what those bastards did to him. He would never have done anything to compromise security and they
knew it. All he did was draw attention to the illegal aspect of CIA programs, not the fact that they were ultimately designed with the best intentions in mind: the protection of our
country.’

‘He testified against the CIA in front of the Senate,’ Natalie pointed out, ‘and spent most of his life railing against governmental corruption.’

‘Yes, he did,’ Anderson agreed, ‘and quite rightly so. But he didn’t slate government itself, or the CIA, or the fact that many covert operations have to stay out of the
public eye for all kinds of reasons. Harry just wanted those reasons to be good ones, not the kind of betrayal that sent him into a goddamned Singapore prison.’

Natalie gathered her thoughts.

‘Mr. Anderson, Joanna may have something to do with MK-ULTRA.’

Anderson’s gray eyes narrowed. ‘How so?’

‘My entire family is under surveillance by the CIA,’ she replied. ‘We couldn’t figure out why until we realized that they were not watching us, but were instead looking
for Joanna, as though hoping she’d make contact with one of us.’

‘You two were close?’

‘Not as close as she was to my brother, Ethan,’ Natalie replied. ‘They were together for four years and worked as investigative journalists, exposing corruption in countries
all over the world.’

Anderson slapped his thigh in apparent delight.

‘Good old Jo,’ he said. ‘And good old Harry. He brought her up to continue his work, and, hell, she went and did just that.’

‘And got herself abducted,’ Natalie continued. ‘Now my brother has vanished along with his work partner. My own colleague was killed this afternoon in a hit-and-run automobile
wreck, and the car that hit him spent much of this morning tailing me around DC. To cap it all, I’ve been conveniently fired from my position by my boss just as I’ve collated enough
evidence to expose the CIA’s interference in our investigation and a possible homicide.’

Anderson thought for a moment.

‘You think your boss is working for the CIA?’

Natalie inclined her head but said nothing.

Anderson raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you want me for?’

‘I want you to tell a Congressional committee and the CIA’s Inspector General what happened to you when you were a part of MK-ULTRA, and to give them your best estimate of what such
a program would be doing today if it were still active.’

Anderson chuckled, then the chuckle turned into a deep, rattling cough. He managed to bring himself back under control and looked at her with his rheumy old eyes.

‘I’m dying, Miss Warner,’ he said finally. ‘Government’s got nothing on me so I’ve nothing to fear from them. I’ll testify if that’s what you
need, but I wouldn’t have a clue what they might be up to right now if MK-ULTRA is still active.’

‘You must have some idea,’ Natalie pressed. ‘You were there. You saw what happened.’

‘Yes, I was,’ Anderson agreed, ‘but these are different times. The technology is so much more advanced. It makes what they were doing in the 1970s look remedial. They can track
brainwaves and use magnetic fields to influence what a person is thinking. They can do things with a single microchip now that an entire division of scientists could not have achieved forty years
ago.’

Natalie thought for a moment.

‘That may be true, but the technology is only the means to an end. What was the purpose of MK-ULTRA? What was the ultimate goal?’

Anderson sighed and stared at his hands as he spoke.

‘The mission objective was to create assassins who would undertake their work without the slightest hint of emotion. The purpose was to develop a means to temporarily, via hypnosis or
drugs or whatever, entirely erase an individual’s personality so that nothing remained but their pre-programmed mission: they would become like a robot, utterly devoted to their cause. A
terminator, if you like.’

Natalie sat in silence for a long moment before she spoke again.

‘They wouldn’t know anything of this?’

‘Not a thing,’ Anderson said. ‘MK-ULTRA was specifically working toward a method of ensuring that not only would people be purged of any memory of their involvement with the
program, but that they would also undertake their assassinations before then taking their own lives. They were the perfect way to commit murder, Miss Warner: a human, programmable suicide bomber
who would take all evidence of their crime and their motivation to the grave with them. No person, no country, could ever be held accountable for their actions.’

Natalie felt a cold chill embrace her as she realized the implications of what MK-ULTRA had set out to achieve. If it had indeed been operating beneath the veil of the Pentagon’s Black
Budget, for some forty or more years, then the scope of its operations could be vast.

‘And these experiments were conducted on American citizens?’

Anderson chuckled bitterly.

‘On any citizen, of any nation on earth,’ he replied. ‘You have to remember that this was a paramilitary program, designed to ensure that the United States of America had on
hand a number of programmed killers living, working, marrying and reproducing in countries all across the globe. At any time, if the need arose, they could be sent into action to do the bidding of
the CIA, including murder.’

Natalie sat in stunned silenced for a long time. ‘They could take down unfavorable world leaders, dissidents or dictators.’

‘Or otherwise innocent people whose world view didn’t fit with that of the United States,’ Anderson pointed out.

‘How many victims were there of the program?’ Natalie asked.

Anderson shrugged. ‘Nobody knows.’

‘Do you know how many people might have been programmed by MK-ULTRA over forty years?’

Anderson stared at the grimy carpet beneath his feet for a long time before he replied, his voice softer as though he himself had not considered the question before. Natalie heard his words
cross the room to her as though from another world.

‘Hundreds,’ the old man whispered. ‘Thousands.’

Doug Jarvis drove back into the parking lot at the DIAC just over an hour after he’d left the district. He’d used every trick in the book to ensure that his tail
was clear, and had taken the final, paranoid step of parking his pool car in a side street in Anacostia before renting a Ford Taurus to drive back across the border.