The Chimera Secret

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Maybe they’re not military?’ Lopez suggested. ‘But paramilitary?’

  Ethan knew that paramilitary units were often attached to government agencies like the DIA to act as instructors to foreign armies or as security to heads of state. Putting them out in the middle of Idaho on what was effectively a state police case was not standard procedure by any means. Jarvis would not have bothered using such units as back-up to their mission. He would have known that firepower was their main requirement, not explosives.

  ‘We need to watch our backs,’ he said to Lopez and Duran. ‘Until we figure out for sure what’s going on here.’

  ‘You think that we’re a target?’ Lopez asked. ‘The surveillance on your family? You think it’s Doug Jarvis after all?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

  Duran Wilkes stepped forward.

  ‘Whatever this is about, your man Kurt has his own agenda and I’m not sure I want to be a part of it. This was supposed to be a search for a missing woodsman. Now we’re without communication, one man dead and another who’s severely injured and we’re being attacked by a wild animal that clearly doesn’t want us here.’

  Ethan pulled his jacket tighter about him to fend off the cold.

  ‘You saying you want more money to be here?’

  ‘No,’ Duran said, and glanced at his granddaughter. ‘I’m saying that I want to get off this mountain alive.’

  35

  NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION, CONSTITUTION AVENUE, WASHINGTON DC

  ‘This is a long shot, even for you.’

  Ben Consiglio walked alongside Natalie up the steps toward the administration building’s entrance.

  ‘If this thing is as big as I think it is,’ Natalie replied, ‘then long shots are all that we’ll have. Everything else will have been classified way out of our reach.’

  The Rotunda entrance to the NARA on Constitution Avenue held the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, along with other major historical documents like the Louisiana Purchase Treaty and the Emancipation Proclamation. However, Natalie and Ben were climbing the steps to the research entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue, well away from the tourist crowds.

  An agency independent of the United States Government, NARA existed to preserve and document historical records as well as publish acts of Congress, executive orders and various federal regulations. The archives included vast records of once sensitive documents declassified after periods of time determined by the administration that created them. Natalie knew that within were documents over fifty years old yet only recently released into the public domain.

  ‘You’re not going to find everything you need in here,’ Ben warned her as they walked inside toward the public desk. ‘The administration reclassified many documents back in 2006.’

  Natalie knew that certain government agencies had withdrawn from public access many documents considered a threat to national security. In what was described as an ‘understanding’ between the agencies and the Archivist of the United States, those withdrawals would also be conducted in such a way as to prevent researchers from realizing that the documents ever existed. The public enquiry that revealed the collaboration had provoked an outcry in the media, one that the government of the time had simply ignored.

  However, Natalie had a simple way around that.

  ‘It won’t affect what we’re looking at,’ she replied. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘How’d you figure that?’ Ben asked as they collected their identity badges and affixed them to their jacket lapels.

  ‘Joanna Defoe disappeared after that protocol was enacted,’ she replied as they entered the archives. ‘I’m guessing that the surveillance has been in place sometime since then.’

  Ben frowned as he followed her.

  ‘Sure, but wouldn’t that mean that any further documents or files wouldn’t have made it into the system here? They’d have been pulled beforehand and never made public.’

  Natalie nodded as she walked.

  ‘That’s right, but my thinking is that whatever it is about Joanna Defoe that attracted the attention of government agencies occurred long before 2006. I’m here to find out what I can about her past, see if there’s anything here that might have been overlooked.’

  Ben didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘If the government has a reason for silencing this woman’s history they’re not going to have just missed a couple of things. They’ll have cleared out everything, every incriminating reference.’

  Again, Natalie nodded.

  ‘Yes, but Joanna Defoe was an investigative journalist. Her work was made public before any agency would have known about it.’

  Ben stopped walking and thought about it for a moment. ‘You figure that she did an article on something, maybe dug too deep, and that was where it all started.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Natalie said. ‘There has to be a catalyst and that something must be in the public domain because Joanna never served in the military or on an administration. She completed a college degree in photojournalism just like Ethan did, but she then went straight to work as a freelance journalist. There’s nothing to suggest that she did anything else in her life.’

  Natalie worked her way through the halls of the archive and began tracking down the documents she felt would most likely lead to new information on Joanna Defoe. Ben remained by her side as the hours passed, carefully documenting and filing the papers that she found until they had a stack of documents and printed images of magazine covers and articles that both Joanna and Ethan had written that had reached the public domain.

  Ben leaned back in his chair and examined the pile.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so the picture is simple. Joanna starts work as a journalist and right from the get-go she’s focusing on corruption in political circles, but not in North America. She travels to Palestine, South Africa, the Malay Peninsula and South America.’

  Natalie nodded. ‘It’s like she wanted to get abducted. Most of those places harbor the most dangerous cities on the planet.’

  ‘Either that or it was a Pulitzer she was after,’ Ben said, a little more cynically than Natalie would have liked. ‘These journos have a habit of putting themselves in the middle of a shit-storm in the hope of breaking the next big news scoop.’

  ‘True,’ Natalie conceded, ‘but look at the stories she wrote. Government-sponsored abductions in Colombia; same thing in Palestine and South Africa. Corruption in the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami in Aceh. It’s like she was more interested in hitting government fraud than anything else, and governments have a way of preventing the media from championing their journalists when it’s not to their advantage.’

  ‘Maybe she’s got an anarchistic streak?’ Ben mused out loud. ‘That would justify our government keeping one eye on what she was doing.’

  Natalie laughed. ‘Even if she was, waving anti-nuclear flags and joining Greenpeace don’t warrant twenty-four-seven surveillance on your family. It’s not enough.’

  ‘What about after she got together with Ethan?’ Ben asked.

  Natalie looked through the papers, flipping forward, and then flipped back again as she realized something.

  ‘That’s odd.’

  ‘What is?’ Ben asked.

  ‘She goes back around and does the whole thing again, same countries, same order,’ Natalie replied. ‘After their work in Iraq and Afghanistan, they pull out and head back to Colombia.’ Natalie sat back thoughtfully. ‘I remember Ethan saying once that because everybody else was reporting on the War on Terror, they decided to change tack and start covering smaller, more personal stories.’

  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.’

  36

  NEZ PERCE NATIONAL FOREST, IDAHO

  The forest was as thick with fog as it had been at first light as E
than 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.’