Duran had stopped again, this time crouching down on one knee near a rock face that loomed up some twenty yards ahead of them. The trail ended there, where a dark rectangular crevice was sliced into the bare rock of the mountain, hewn by the hands and tools of men long dead.
‘It’s a mine,’ Lopez said. ‘Probably abandoned years ago.’
Duran Wilkes shook his head. ‘People have been here recently.’
The old man pointed out across the patch of clear ground in front of the mine, and as Ethan looked so his guts convulsed inside him.
The bare earth was littered with perhaps a dozen rotting corpses, many of them reduced almost to bare bones from which hung tattered ribbons of flesh. A skull seemed to look right at Ethan, the jaw crushed and the back of the skull collapsed as through struck by something with immense force.
‘How long ago?’ Ethan asked, glancing across at Kurt.
‘Maybe three or four weeks,’ Kurt guessed, looking at the state of decay of the bodies. ‘It’s been cold here for a while now and the bodies don’t look like they’ve been chewed up by predators.’
‘No,’ Lopez agreed, ‘but they look like they’ve been smashed up by something.’
‘Miners, maybe?’ Kurt hazarded.
‘No,’ Duran said. ‘They’re scientists, or lab workers at the least.’
Ethan squinted at the bodies in surprise, and then realized what Duran meant. Several of them were surrounded by the tattered remains of lab coats, the once white material stained heavily by mud and perhaps dried blood. One thing was clear: every one of the bodies was horribly mutilated, the ribs stoved in or skulls shattered or legs broken. Worse, the earth around the bodies was littered with large footprints, sufficient that they could not tell where the trail they had been following actually went.
‘They were running from something,’ Lopez said. ‘They’re all facing out from that mine.’
Kurt nodded and waved his men forward briskly. ‘Cover the entrance,’ he instructed them, ‘while the rest of us head in.’
‘We don’t know what’s in there,’ Lopez said. ‘It could be a trap.’
‘It is a trap,’ Duran said. ‘But I’ve got no choice.’
Kurt gestured to Jenkins. ‘Unpack the video camera and set it up outside the mine entrance,’ he instructed. ‘We can link it to a portable screen. It’ll give us some warning if anything tries to follow us in there.’
Jenkins pulled the camera from his bergen, along with a tripod and a loop of thin black cable.
Ethan checked his rifle and looked at Duran. ‘One step at a time, okay? We’ll find her but we’ve got to stick together. Don’t go rushing off.’
The old man nodded, and with a deep breath he stood up and walked across the clearing. Ethan, Kurt, Jenkins and Lopez followed with Dana and Proctor as the rest of the soldiers formed a loose rearguard, their weapons trained out into the forests behind them. Jenkins jogged ahead and swiftly set up the camera on its tripod, plugging the cable jack into the camera and then into a small headset that he pulled on, a screen the size of a matchbox suspended over his left eye.
Then, one by one, they entered the darkness of the mine entrance.
46
GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE, WASHINGTON DC
‘The hell do you mean, she’s been fired?’
Doug Jarvis stood at the door to the office of a low-ranking analytical official by the name of Guy Rikard, who blocked his access with wide, fat shoulders and sneered down at him.
‘Pending assault charges,’ he spat back at Jarvis. ‘The little bitch is going to get everything she deserves.’
Jarvis glanced at Rikard’s sweaty brow and saw the thick purple bruise swelling around his left eye. He smiled.
‘Not the only one by the look of things.’
‘Who the hell are you?’ Rikard snapped.
‘Defense Intelligence Agency,’ Jarvis growled back, and flashed his identity card. ‘Either get out of my way or I’ll put you on your ass too.’
Rikard stared in amazement at the ID card and then backed away from the door. Jarvis strolled in and glanced around. Several members of staff were looking at him with interest. Jarvis turned to Rikard.
‘What was Natalie working on here?’
‘I am not at liberty to discuss that with outside parties from any governme—’
Jarvis took one pace toward Rikard, grabbed his testicles and twisted them hard as he yanked them upward. Rikard yelped as he staggered backward on his toes and collided with a water cooler in the corner of the office.
‘She was tasked to disseminate from public office records information pertaining to alleged misconduct by government agencies against American citizens!’ Rikard sang in a bizarre high-octave voice.
Jarvis nodded slowly. ‘Good. Now, why did she hit you?’
Rikard’s patchy red face was glowing like a beacon as he struggled to talk in quick, abrupt sentences.
‘Her friend was involved in a car wreck. I got mad because it would leave us one man down. She got mad about that and then whacked me.’
‘And you were surprised?’ Jarvis uttered. ‘Who was her friend?’
‘Ben Consiglio. He works here.’
‘What was he doing?’
‘Chasing up leads on Natalie’s work,’ Rikard squeaked. ‘She was looking for somebody called Joanna Defoe, some orphanage or something.’
‘Where?’ Jarvis snarled and twisted harder.
‘Virginiaaaah,’ Rikard squealed as tears began flowing from his eyes.
Jarvis thought for a moment. Virginia was a long way to go to pursue Joanna Defoe’s life story, if that was what Natalie had been doing.
‘Why was this Ben doing it for her?’ he asked, and released some of the pressure.
‘Because I wanted Natalie in this office,’ Rikard heaved in response. ‘She was going off too much on her own mission and not doing her job.’
‘Sounds like she was doing her job just fine,’ Jarvis said. ‘Anything else?’
Rikard shook his head.
‘Not much, just some old junk files from something called MK-ULTRA.’
Jarvis let go of Rikard as though he’d been electrocuted. The office manager let out a gasp of relief as he slumped against the wall and slid to his knees, his hands clutching his groin. Jarvis barely noticed. Suddenly a huge missing piece of the puzzle had fallen into place and he realized what the whole charade had been about.
He knew all about MK-ULTRA. In fact, anybody who knew anything about the CIA would know about the controversial program that had been blown wide open by the Senate’s Church Committee back in the 1970s. But if Natalie had been researching the files from the testimonials then Jarvis could think of only one good reason why. Either Joanna Defoe was more involved with her father’s history than he might have otherwise assumed, or MK-ULTRA was still an active program.
Only one explanation really provided a reason for the extensive surveillance operations now extending to himself at the DIA and to Natalie Warner. A new and unexpected concern flooded his awareness as he considered the implications of Natalie discovering anything about an active MK-ULTRA program that the CIA would want to remain covert.
‘How far had she got with her work?’ he demanded of Rikard as the office manager struggled to his feet.
‘This is assault!’ he gasped, ‘I’ll have you up in front of a tribunal and—’
‘People are dying,’ Jarvis snapped. ‘Your man Ben Consiglio was possibly the subject of an assassination. Anybody involved in the Congressional investigation of intelligence agency corruption could become a target.’
The office around Jarvis went deathly silent. Rikard stared at him for a long moment before he spoke.
‘That’s insane,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t dare do such a thing.’
‘Believe me,’ Jarvis replied, ‘they’ve done far, far worse in the past and nothing’s changed, except for the fact that things are covered up much better than they used to be.’
Rikard’s slitty little eyes glazed over for a few moments.
‘I’ve got two kids,’ he said.
‘So have I,’ said somebody from across the office.
Jarvis scanned the members of the analytical team and made a decision.
‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Each and every one of you. Take two days off and don’t come anywhere near this office. You’re all sick with a bug. You don’t come here, you don’t do any work and you won’t be a target for anything more than a disciplinary hearing from your boss, which we’ll ensure won’t happen, right, Guy?’
Rikard looked at his team and nodded. ‘Get out of here.’
The office emptied quicker than a high school at the end of semester. Only one person remained, a thin-looking man with big brown eyes who seemed cautious of approaching either Jarvis or Rikard.
‘I’ll stay,’ he said. ‘Nat’s had a rough day.’
‘This is Larry,’ Rikard said. ‘He follows Natalie around like a pet puppy.’
‘Better than treating her like a dog,’ Larry muttered back.
Jarvis looked at Larry. ‘Where did she go?’
‘To the scene of the accident, out near Aden on the 646.’
Jarvis’s mind went into overtime as he considered what had happened to Natalie’s colleague Ben. If Rikard had sent Ben out to the orphanage to chase a lead on Joanna Defoe, then whoever made the hit had to know something about it. And for them to have known about it, somebody had to have told them, because the CIA was tasked with tailing Natalie, not random colleagues from her office. Even with the intense security around anything like MK-ULTRA, if it was still running, the CIA just didn’t have enough manpower to keep tabs on an entire Congressional investigation. An informer would be a much wiser resource, planted within Congress and most likely within the analytical team itself.
‘Who knew where Ben Consiglio was going?’ he asked Rikard.
‘Me, and anybody who overheard the conversation, I guess,’ he replied.
Jarvis nodded. The office had emptied almost immediately. Jarvis had flashed a DIA identity badge in front of all of them, which meant that any CIA mole would most likely have hotfooted it out of the office with the rest of the team for fear of being spotted.
All that was left was Rikard and Larry.
‘Listen to me very carefully,’ Jarvis said to them. ‘Nothing that I tell you can ever be heard by anybody else, understood?’
The two men nodded in understanding.
‘Good,’ Jarvis said. ‘Then this is what we’re going to do. Natalie is in great danger and may need protection. I’ll call the police and have her taken into custody in the nearest station to the car wreck. I want you both to stay here and search through Natalie’s work – try to figure out exactly what she was doing and how far she got. Rikard, you gather together everything the pair of you find out and take it to the Congressional committee, Congress, the Investigator General of the CIA – anybody, and tell them what’s happened, understood?’
Rikard nodded as his bad attitude suddenly evaporated in the face of a true crisis. Larry whirled and headed toward Natalie’s desk and the piles of paperwork still sitting there.
‘Give me Natalie’s cell number,’ Jarvis ordered Rikard, who quickly dictated the number from memory.
Jarvis turned and strode out of the office, taking the elevator back down to the ground floor and walking out of the Capitol. He made no effort to conceal his presence as he walked across the street to the lot and scanned for the silver GMC that had followed him into the district. He spotted it within just a few moments of entering the lot, parked discreetly some fifty yards down from his own vehicle.
Jarvis strode brazenly down the lot toward the GMC and fixed his gaze on the shadowy form of the driver inside. He got no closer than thirty yards before he saw the driver’s head turn in apparent panic as he started the engine, and then faced a dilemma.
Traffic was flowing through the parking lot toward Jarvis, who had picked his point of entry deliberately as far to the right of his own vehicle as possible, giving any watching spooks little opportunity to get away without being identified. The GMC pulled out. The driver clearly wanted to turn left away from Jarvis but was forced by the cars moving through the lot to join the flow toward the nearest exit.
Jarvis waited until the GMC was almost level with him before he leapt out into the center of the road, his cellphone in his hand with the video function running. The driver ducked his head aside and tried to hide his features, but it did him little good as the GMC lurched to a halt in front of Jarvis.
The old man scanned down to record the vehicle’s plates, although he knew that by the evening the GMC would have been dismantled into spare parts and sold to merchants across the breadth of the country. The CIA was nothing these days if not thorough.
Jarvis leaned against the hood of the vehicle and smiled in at the driver.
‘You’ve been made, son, because you’re an amateur,’ he said to the man, who refused to make eye contact. ‘I’m guessing that your boss back at the CIA will be seriously pissed about it, so I’ll make this easy on you. You drive around the lot here and park somewhere else, sit there for three hours, and I’ll make sure that this film never makes it back to the CIA, okay?’
The driver peeked at him sideways, suspicious.
‘I’m not the main mark of this observation cell,’ Jarvis said, and waved his cellphone at him. ‘All you tell them on the radio is that I’m still in the Capitol. If you tell them that I’ve left I’ll broadcast this across the entire intelligence community. You’ll be assigned to an administration desk in an Alabama backwater by tomorrow morning. Catch my drift?’
The driver looked at Jarvis for a moment longer and then nodded once.
Jarvis pushed off the GMC’s hood and walked to his car.
As he drove out of the lot, he saw the GMC parked way back in the distance behind him, and that was where it stayed.
47
ADEN, VIRGINIA
Natalie saw the pillar of oily black smoke smeared across the afternoon sky five miles before she reached the scene of the wreck.
Two fire trucks and an ambulance were parked by the side of the road, which was shut off to traffic by two patrol vehicles on either side. Natalie had managed with a quick telephone call to her Capitol office to gain access to the accident itself, the state troopers reluctantly waving her through. Rikard had obviously not yet managed to have her name wiped from the system, although she felt certain that before sundown any authority she had would be erased from existence.
Ben Consiglio’s pool car was a smoldering black wreck of tortured metal that sat on the rims of its wheels amid a sea of white foam sprayed by the emergency crews when they’d arrived on the scene.
Natalie felt a plug of nausea lodge in her throat as she detected the acrid stench of burning chemicals, molten plastic and rubber. A dull gray haze hung in the air around the vehicle like a chemical halo.
Natalie approached a group of paramedics clustered nearby, sipping coffee from a thermos flask. They saw her approaching and quietened down as the senior man among them stepped forward.
‘Natalie Warner,’ she said, ‘I’m a friend of the driver of the vehicle. Is he . . .?’
The paramedic’s features were strained.
‘We found the remains of some clothing in and around the vehicle, ma’am,’ he said softly. ‘They’ve been bagged for forensics, but if you could identify them for us?’
Natalie nodded, not able to find the strength to say anything as she followed the paramedic to the rear of the ambulance, where a number of scorched items of clothing were laying in clear plastic bags. In an instant she recognized part of Ben’s jacket, and what was clearly a scorched and tattered white shirt.
Natalie sucked in a deep breath of air and turned away as the nausea swilling in her stomach intensified. Hot tears scalded the corners of her eyes as she put her hand to her mouth and struggled to keep her breathing under control.
‘That’s his shirt and jacket,’ she confirmed in a whisper.
The paramedic nodded and gestured to one of his men.
‘We’ve got an identification, Ben Consiglio, works in DC,’ he said. ‘Soon as the vehicle cools down we’ll find him and get him out.’
Natalie blinked her tears away and turned to the paramedics.
‘He’s still in there?’
‘I believe so, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘The vehicle burned with extreme ferocity, much more than I’ve ever encountered before in a vehicle wreck. Our hoses weren’t having much of an effect, so standard procedure is to drench the surrounding area to prevent the fire spreading and then let it burn itself out.’
Despite herself, Natalie’s eyes flicked across to the burning wreck.
‘Jesus,’ she muttered to herself. ‘It was supposed to be me coming out here.’
‘Ma’am?’ the paramedic said. ‘It’s normal for people to find a way to blame themselves for the loss of life, but believe me this happens every day somewhere in every county. It’s a hit-and-run wreck, and there’s absolutely nothing that you or anybody else could have done about it.’
Natalie blinked away some of her tears, knowing that he was right.
‘Did anybody get an ID on the other vehicle?’
‘Sure did, ma’am,’ he replied, and gestured across the road. ‘It’s against the shoulder, right over there. Weird, though – we can’t get identification for the driver. The vehicle’s not in our database or on the police files.’
Natalie turned away and walked around the wide patch of churning foam surrounding the burning pool car. She was halfway around when she caught sight of the abandoned sedan on the shoulder opposite. Her heart skipped a beat as she laid eyes on it.
A blue Cadillac Catera.
Natalie began walking quickly toward it as she fished her cellphone out of her pocket. She flipped through a series of images, selected one of them and zoomed in. She read the license plate of the blue sedan that had followed her earlier the day before over the Potomac, and then looked at the abandoned sedan before her.
The Chimera Secret Page 28
