The Chimera Secret

by Dean Crawford

  Ethan whirled on the spot. The laboratory was behind him, to the northwest. If the original miners had used a tunnel that circled the ore body in a declining spiral, then it must have run somewhere close by where he now stood, essential ventilation for the shafts themselves.

  Ethan walked in between the racks and studied the ceiling, lifting the back of his hand and running it along the seams between the metal panels. It took him only a few moments to find what he was looking for – a soft breeze that felt cool on his skin, seeping down between the panels.

  Ethan turned and grabbed the side of the racking, seeing as he did so a boot print in the dust that betrayed where Duran Wilkes must have done the exact same thing. Ethan vaulted up until he was standing on the lower of two adjacent shelves, then reached up and pushed against the panel.

  It was heavy, solid metal, but it moved as he pushed, and with a squeak of metal against metal it popped out. Ethan hefted it to one side and then reached up and hauled himself out of the room and up into a low tunnel that smelled of dust and mold and was completely, utterly black.

  He reached into his jacket and yanked out his cell, turned it on until the screen glowed brightly and illuminated the tunnel.

  It was roughly hewn and descended to his right while ascending gently to his left, curving in both directions as it circled the central columns where the ore had once been.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ he murmured to himself, and smiled as he saw Duran and Mary’s footprints leading up the tunnel and away from him. They would probably be clear of the mine and on their way home by now.

  Provided the sasquatch didn’t intercept them.

  It was then that he smelled something on the air, an overpowering odor like raw sewage and sweat that caked itself thickly across the back of his throat. Ethan covered his mouth and nose with one hand and pressed himself against the wall of the tunnel in the darkness as he looked left and right.

  Fear crept like lice on his skin as he searched for glowing eyes in the gloom, but nothing appeared, and he could not hear the deep, heaving breath of the creature despite the confined space in which he was cramped.

  A sudden awareness dawned upon him, as he looked at the roughly hewn walls of the tunnel and thought of the immense bulk of the sasquatch. There was no possibility that such a huge creature could have worked its way down through this maze of winding tunnels.

  Ethan sat in silence within the tunnel for a long moment, and then suddenly he realized what had happened. The reason why the creature had led them here, had gone to such extraordinary lengths to ensure that they reached this remote mountain. He thought about his mental map of the facility, of where he actually was in relation to the chambers below him.

  Another waft of putrid air drifted toward him and he looked left, down the tunnel to where the slim grating of a ventilation shaft glimmered in the faint light from his cellphone. He crept down toward it, trying to make as little noise as possible on the rough floor of the tunnel, until he was able to peer down through the grating and into the room.

  It was larger than most of the other subsidiary rooms, and in the faint glow he could see an oven-like structure built from unadorned metal. A wide cylinder extended up from the oven into the ceiling. Ethan looked to his right and saw the open face of the central ore shaft. He guessed that the oven was some kind of incinerator, which made the room he was looking into the one with the locked door.

  He peered back down and saw a heavy-looking cage against the rear wall of the room. He tried to hold his breath but the stench was too great to avoid a tight, strained cough.

  Instantly, he heard a movement from within the cage. A rustle of wiry, dense fur.

  Through the darkness, two silvery discs flashed briefly within the cage, reflecting the pale light from his cellphone.

  ‘Duran was right,’ he whispered to himself.

  This was why they had been herded into the facility.

  A low growl came from somewhere within the cage. Ethan backed away from the grating and eased his way down the tunnel until he reached the ore shaft. The ceiling of the locked room was visible as a narrow strip of steel girders that formed the floor of the tunnel: the rest of the room below him was hacked from the bare rock. Ethan carefully stepped over the girders and passed a vertical cylinder half set into the bare rock wall, an exhaust stack of some kind. He guessed that the locked room must have been some kind of crematorium or similar waste disposal room, most likely connecting to an existing ventilation shaft somewhere above Ethan’s position.

  He continued on until he reached the far side of the ceiling, above the door. A pair of thickly sealed power cables extended out from a junction box atop the door structure and turned to his right, passing into a hole drilled into the bedrock. From his position, Ethan guessed that they ran to the main and reserve power generators, providing power to the door itself. With the power down, the door would have remained locked.

  But why had it not opened again when he had activated the emergency generators?

  Ethan backed out of the tunnel and turned left, following the direction of the cables and searching for another point of access to them.

  He found it fifty yards later, directly above the store room in which he had originally been held. In the darkness and his haste to examine the tunnels he had passed by a small access passage that took him to his left until he was directly above the corridor between the laboratory and the containment area at the rear of the facility. There, set inside the tunnel, was a power junction. As Ethan approached he could see that it had been sabotaged.

  Both the main and the emergency lines had been hastily severed, the cables frayed, bare metal glinting in the light from his cell. But the junction itself was active, powered by the emergency generators in the containment area nearby. Ethan looked at the floor of the tunnel, picked up one of the two cable ends poking from the bare rock below and examined them. They had not been torn but instead severed by a hacksaw or similar.

  ‘Cletus MacCarthy,’ Ethan said softly.

  He must have watched the mines and found these passages, then worked out what was happening inside. Jesse had told them that he hated tourists visiting the area and preferred to be alone in the wilderness. Some kind of government operation might have remained concealed from casual hikers, but Cletus would have known all about it. Maybe even witnessed the suffering of the creatures detained in the facility.

  He must have sabotaged the operation. But even if he managed to escape the area and the Special Forces soldiers guarding it, he would have left evidence, maybe fingerprints. Local enquiries would have been enough to track him down, along with his brothers. Randy’s mother had said she felt her home had been searched in her absence.

  ‘They got the wrong brother,’ he muttered bitterly to himself.

  They had staged Randy’s suicide, believing him to be the culprit. Yet in a strange twist of fate, Cletus had also died, victim of the enraged sasquatch attack that had claimed the life of ranger Gavin Coltz. That left Jesse, a man the authorities that owned this place would no doubt be happy to see jailed for life.

  He looked down at the power junction box and at a digital display on the front that provided timed power cycles, probably meant for internal heating and hot-water supplies. The timer had reset itself to zero when the emergency generators had been started. Ethan looked down at the power cable in his hand and the one still lying on the ground as an insidious idea formed in his mind.

  He knelt down in front of the power junction, checked his watch, then set the timer to activate in five minutes.

  He reached down and shoved both of the power cables back into position, careful not to touch the exposed metal, and then used strips of his shirt to tie them into place. He stood up, satisfied, and then hurried away toward the living quarters where Lopez, Dana and Proctor were being held.

  Kurt Agry was about to get what he deserved.

  Payback.

  61

  CORAL HILLS, MARYLAND

  Nata
lie Warner stepped out of the battered house into the night air, her head filled with a thousand revelations that fell like the rain pouring down from the cold dark sky above. As Anderson closed the door behind her, she knew that there was no way the CIA could keep its illegal program covered up if Anderson agreed to testify to the Senate and maybe even the Supreme Court. Burning the papers might have worked in 1973, but now she had hard evidence of CIA intervention in the investigation that would be virtually impossible for any district attorney to ignore.

  The CIA would have a hard time stopping the commission now.

  The last time the agency had tried to conceal evidence was after video tapes of the CIA ‘waterboarding’ a suspected jihadist after the victim was rendered from the USA into a prison believed to have been in Thailand. The videos, which had shown the victim screaming and vomiting, had been destroyed by the then head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. When the trials of major terrorists began, their defenses hinged on the fact that waterboarding at the hands of CIA interrogators was, in any sensible way, considered to be a form of torture. Along with other known forms of extreme punishment such as sleep deprivation, often for weeks at a time, enforced nakedness, stress positions and suchlike, which the CIA and the US Department of Justice had referred to as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, the defense would argue that under such torture anybody would confess to just about anything in order to gain relief from their suffering. Natalie herself had read of men who had experienced extreme rendition to CIA-run prisons in countries non-signatory to the Geneva Convention, who had confessed afterward that they had become expert liars in order to avoid torture. Their lies had cost the intelligence community millions of taxpayers’ dollars wasted chasing phantom agents and nonexistent cells, all from the imaginations of men who had committed no crime at all.

  Now, she finally understood what had happened to Joanna Defoe. She had not been abducted by militants in the Gaza Strip. She had been the victim of rendition by the CIA in order to silence her investigation and prevent a scandal in the White House, the support of the then president for a corrupt arms company called MACE and to prevent her exposing whatever she knew about the still operational MK-ULTRA.

  Joanna was still alive. If Natalie could somehow contact her and tell her what she now knew, the evidence she had collated, then she could blow the whole damned thing wide open. The results would no doubt echo through government for decades to come.

  Natalie pulled out her cellphone and started to dial a number as she hurried to her car, using her jacket to shroud her head from the rain.

  Natalie had no problem with the intelligence community extracting information from the kind of insane bastards who sought to burn Western civilization to the ground for nothing more than imaginary religious ideals. What she did resent was the heavy-handed way in which the CIA sought to do so. There were smarter ways to get results, and she intended to make sure that—

  The blast did not register in her mind at first.

  For a split second Natalie believed that she had tripped on the sidewalk in the dark as her legs crumpled beneath her and she felt herself in midair. Then something plowed into her from behind and she thought that she’d been hit by a truck as she span through the darkness, the street lights around her flashing crazily past.

  Then the heat hit her like a blast furnace, stinging her eyes as they dried out instantly as the heat wave washed over her. Natalie hit the asphalt hard, rolling as the force of the explosion rattled her brain in her skull and caused her vision to blur.

  The noise hit her last, a roaring crash of thunder and shattered glass as behind her Anderson’s home suddenly vanished within a snarling fireball. Chunks of scorched clapperboard and twinkling jewels of glass crashed down around Natalie as she sat dazed on the sidewalk, blinking and staring into the crackling flames.

  She shivered slightly and then bent over as she coughed and spat a globule of phlegm onto the sidewalk. She felt sick but managed to control herself, sucking in a lungful of night air as doors to other houses opened, people looking out and pointing at the flaming wreckage of Anderson’s home.

  Natalie turned and saw her phone on the sidewalk, the screen still glowing and a soft ring tone just audible over the flames and the shouts of alarm. She crawled forward on her hands and knees and picked up the cell. Her voice was croaky and weak as she spoke.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Natalie? Where are you?’

  The voice sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Douglas Jarvis.’

  Natalie’s fists clenched on the asphalt beneath her. ‘You son of a bitch. You killed him.’

  ‘Shut up!’ The voice crackled down the line with enough force and venom to both surprise and silence her. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I’ve been fired. The CIA are coming after all of us, Natalie. Get away from the case as fast as you can.’

  Natalie blinked in confusion.

  ‘My chief witness just got killed in an explosion,’ she said meekly.

  ‘Natalie,’ Jarvis said. ‘Run. Now!’

  Natalie staggered to her feet, one hand reaching out to balance herself on the trunk of her car as she wobbled around to the driver’s door. Her hand, the knuckles scuffed and bleeding, reached into her bag for her keys and she climbed into the seat.

  People were emerging from their houses, some of them pointing at her as others stared, cellphones to their ears. Natalie switched on the engine and pulled away in a screech of rubber.

  She saw the headlights behind her almost immediately as they followed her down the road, heading north as she drove out of Coral Hills and toward the district.

  Shit. She didn’t care about the potential CIA mole in her office now. The only place that seemed even remotely safe was the Capitol. Then she thought of her parents. Christ, if the CIA’s cleaning team didn’t get her, maybe they’d head for her parents’ home instead. They could blackmail her, do anything. Worst of all, Ethan was gone, unheard of in days.

  The net was closing in and suddenly there seemed to be no safe place to turn.

  Natalie yanked the wheel of the car to the left and headed directly for the Sousa Bridge. Pennsylvania Avenue would take her in a near-perfect straight line into the heart of the district, where even the CIA would find it hard to make a hit on her without leaving some kind of evidence behind. The avenue was a two-lane that became a three-lane as it crossed the river into the district. Heavy traffic and plenty of witnesses – if she could get there.

  The car headlights behind her grew larger as the vehicle behind accelerated, and then suddenly it swerved out to her left wing and smashed across the trunk of her car. The vehicle swerved to the right as she fought for control along Marlboro Pike, but the car smashed up onto the sidewalk and skidded out of control onto an abandoned forecourt just off the main road.

  Natalie grabbed the steering wheel and turned the key to restart the engine, only to see the huge form of an SUV bump up onto the sidewalk in a flash of headlights and screech to a halt in front of her car.

  From within climbed a tall man, one hand holding a pistol that was pointing directly at Natalie as she sat behind the wheel and stared at him. His outline was distorted by the rain streaming down her windshield.

  ‘Step out of the car!’

  Natalie froze, unsure of what to do. A moment later and the man fired at her vehicle, the gunshot deafeningly loud as the bullet shattered one of her headlights.

  ‘Get out now!’

  Natalie reached down with a trembling hand and opened her door, then stepped out into the rain. It pummeled her hair and streamed down her face as she stood beside her car with her hands in the air and stared at the long, gaunt face of the man. His voice, when he spoke, was low and murderous.

  ‘My apologies, Miss Warner, but you’ll have to come with me.’

  ‘Where’s my brother?’ she uttered, trembling from more than just the cold. ‘Where’s Ethan?’

&nb
sp; The long face cracked with a cold little smile that made the man seem even more cruel.

  ‘Busy,’ he replied.

  From somewhere inside of her a spark of the Warner spirit flared into life, and she dropped her hands. Behind him, a car slid in alongside the sidewalk, its lights extinguished. Natalie kept her eyes fixed on her assailant.

  ‘You followed me this morning, and you killed Ben,’ she said with sudden, unshakeable conviction.

  The man shook his head.

  ‘I didn’t kill anybody,’ he replied. ‘They got themselves killed because they didn’t understand the importance of national security.’

  Natalie’s anger flared brighter.

  ‘The only thing the citizens of this country need security from is people like you,’ she snapped back, ‘because you’re the ones killing us.’

  The man inclined his head. ‘C’est la vie.’

  He raised the pistol and aimed at Natalie’s head.

  Natalie barely saw the figure that lurched out from behind the parked SUV and rushed at the tall man from behind. The splashing of footfalls on the wet asphalt alerted the agent and he span, but not soon enough. The figure plowed into him and sent them both sprawling to the ground.

  In the light from the SUV’s headlights, Natalie stared in disbelief as she saw Ben Consiglio crash to the ground on top of the CIA man.

  ‘Get out of here!’ Ben yelled at her. ‘Run!’

  Natalie staggered backward as Ben smothered the CIA man with his weight and struggled to keep the man’s gun arm on the ground. She whirled and leapt into her car, started the engine and slammed it into reverse. The remaining headlight beam flashed across the two men as they fought on the ground in the pouring rain, and she heard another gunshot and saw a flash of light as the shot went off into the air. Ben twisted the weapon from the agent’s hand and hurled it across the lot.

  Ben’s head jerked awkwardly as a knife-edged hand sliced across his throat, and then another slammed palm-first up under his jaw and he was hurled off the CIA man’s body to sprawl onto the asphalt as he struggled to get away.