The Chimera Secret

by Dean Crawford

  Above the whine of the engines Ethan heard a sudden series of whooshing noises as though somebody had let off a box of massive fireworks.

  ‘Hit the deck!’

  Ethan’s last word was drowned out by the rocket propelled roar of eight Maverick air-to-ground missiles that roared overhead and plowed not just into the mountainside but directly down the open mine entrance with precision, laser-guided accuracy.

  Before Ethan and Lopez had even hit the ground the side of the mountain exploded in a supersonic cloud of fragmented rock and superheated gas as the powerful missiles sliced into the facility and then detonated deep within the hillside.

  Ethan hit the ground and felt his back being hammered by chunks of shrapnel and debris, and then his vision blurred and his consciousness was ripped brutally away from him.

  72

  FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA

  Douglas Jarvis sat behind an oak-paneled table in a conservatory that looked out over a perfectly manicured lawn that he had spent many years carefully cultivating. Most all of his colleagues over the years were highly amused to find that a former marine captain and veteran of several conflicts liked nothing more than to spend his spare time gardening.

  Jarvis reminded them, when he could be bothered, that there was little more peaceful in life than a simple garden, especially when his entire career had been spent fighting in war zones or trying to prevent wars from starting in the first place.

  A career that was now over.

  Winter was coming now, the fall almost over and the lawn littered with the last red and brown leaves. He would have to clear them again soon enough, and at least now he’d have the time to do it properly. The sky above was laden with gray clouds, a fine drizzle spilling down against the glass windows.

  ‘Any word?’

  Natalie Warner stood in the doorway to the conservatory. Dressed in jeans and a loose cardigan with her hair hanging across her shoulders, she looked five years younger than she had in the Capitol. Only her face carried the weight of her worries.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ he replied. ‘Ben okay?’

  Natalie nodded, and walked into the conservatory.

  Ben Consiglio had been admitted to hospital in Washington under Jarvis’s strictest orders, even though he no longer had the authority to enforce them. The younger man’s injuries were not serious, they’d learned, but he had been suffering from exhaustion and dehydration, enough that they had kept him in overnight before releasing him in the morning.

  Natalie had insisted on staying by his bedside until he was released.

  Jarvis had likewise insisted that she accompany him to his home rather than return alone to her apartment in the district. Fact was, she wasn’t safe and there was nobody that she could turn to except Jarvis for protection.

  ‘They haven’t found him?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Jarvis replied. ‘And I don’t believe that they will.’

  Wilson had been gone by the time the emergency services converged on the crime scene. Most probably Wilson, a long-service agent with enormous experience, would have worn a protective vest. The bullet would have knocked him out cold but would have caused nothing more serious than bruising on his chest. Had Jarvis been quicker he would have taken the head shot, but Natalie was not experienced with firearms and had done the right thing: aimed for the biggest target, the torso.

  Guy Rikard’s homicide was being investigated by the Metropolitan Police Department, who would be unlikely to find themselves making connections to the CIA. The murder would most likely become a cold case, maybe the victim of a random freak accident or a crude suicide bid. Rikard was split from his wife and had financial difficulties, was a known drinker and womaniser and suchlike. His past would be trawled by the detectives on his case but the extinguishing of his life would be forgotten by all but those closest to him by the following morning.

  ‘You think he’ll come here for us?’ Natalie asked him.

  Jarvis looked out of the window for a moment and then shook his head. ‘No. Too obvious. He’ll lie low for a while, avoid attracting any more attention to what’s happened. The death of one Congressional investigator can be put down to bad luck: another one and everybody will start to take notice. It would defeat the object.’

  ‘Which is what?’ Natalie asked. ‘He was going to kill me.’

  ‘He almost certainly was not,’ Jarvis said.

  ‘The CIA had Guy Rikard killed,’ Natalie snapped.

  ‘Larry Levinson was a CIA agent, that much is for sure, but there’s no way he’ll be traced back to them,’ Jarvis said. ‘The name will be an alias, his entire history forged: it’s unlikely he’ll even be on the CIA’s payroll: the kind of units Mr. Wilson and Larry Levinson work for are funded through the Pentagon’s Black Budget, which is protected from Congressional scrutiny.’

  Natalie stared down at the floor for a moment.

  ‘So what happens now?’

  Jarvis stared at the news channel and then leaned forward and turned up the volume as a newscaster read a report. Behind her on the screen was a large image of a forested mountain range.

  The National Guard was called out last night after an enormous blast at the site of an old abandoned mine in northern Idaho where several people are believed to have been killed. The explosion, believed to have been caused by a build-up of heat and gas inside the mine, was heard more than twenty miles away in Grangeville. The National Guard has placed a ten-mile exclusion zone around the blast site to prevent any further fatalities due to rock falls or subsidence of unmapped mine tunnels beneath the mountain.

  Natalie’s hand flew to her mouth as the newsreader went on.

  The bodies of a man and a woman were pulled from the rubble but the force and heat of the blast means that it’s unlikely the two victims will ever be identified. The remains of a third person were found outside the mine but also defied identification. Local officials say the area will be closed to the public until a full clean-up of the area has been completed under the control of the National Guard.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Natalie gasped, and whirled away out of the conservatory.

  Jarvis muted the television and sighed as he leaned back into his chair.

  A cleaning team would be put into the mine now that a suitably convincing cover story had been put in place. They would remove any last pieces of evidence of whatever existed there and then seal the mine shut.

  Nobody would ever get in there again.

  Jarvis wanted to hope that Ethan and Lopez had gotten out of the mine before the blast, but he had no idea who the remains that had been found belonged to. The admission that any fatalities had occurred meant that the CIA most likely would be forced to hand over the bodies at some point, perhaps due to the inevitable pressure that would be applied to the Sheriff’s Office and the National Guard by concerned families of people missing in the Idaho wilderness. But nobody would ever be informed of exactly who had died, or what they were actually doing there.

  He stood up from his chair and stared out of the window for a moment longer.

  Mr. Wilson had done his work well, and now there was nothing left and nothing that Jarvis could do to change it.

  It was over.

  He turned and walked out of the conservatory. As he did so his cellphone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out and glanced at the screen before answering the call. An unidentified number waited for him. He punched the answer button and lifted the cell to his ear.

  ‘Doug Jarvis.’

  The answer was brief.

  ‘Doug, it’s Ethan. We’re on the run and dark until further notice. Whoever did this to us is going to pay.’

  The line clicked off and the dead-line tone buzzed in Jarvis’s ear.

  He slipped the cell into his pocket and walked through to the kitchen, where Natalie sat at a table with her head in her hands.

  ‘You’d better write down everything you found out about MK-ULTRA,’ he said. ‘Your brother’s alive, and he’s on the warpath.’

&nb
sp; ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As more and more books in the Ethan Warner series are published I’ve come to realise that writing novels is no longer a solitary pursuit, and the knowledge that I have so many people supporting my efforts is a huge comfort when staring at a computer monitor and wondering where the story should go next. As ever, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my literary agent Luigi Bonomi and his team at LBA, to the publishing team at Simon & Schuster who all work so hard to develop and promote my work, and to my family and friends who all champion my work so enthusiastically. There cannot be many people who feel that they have the best job in the world, so I am very fortunate to count myself as one of them.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The history of mankind is filled with stories of monsters, some real and others imagined. The origin of werewolf legends have been traced to medieval cases of lycanthropy in Eastern Europe, the origin of vampires found within the deity myths of ancient cultures around the world. But while most such stories are legends, others remain tantalisingly within the realms of possibility. Separating the fact from the fiction is often difficult, but today’s proliferation of video cameras on mobile phones and explorers willing to traverse the harshest terrain in search of the impossible have vastly increased our knowledge of life upon this planet.

  The vast majority of the creatures described within these pages are real. This might surprise some readers, but one only has to consider the dinosaurs to realise that it is possible for species to reach truly terrifying proportions without being considered either supernatural or the product of pure human imagination. From the magnificent silver serpent Regalecus glesne to the extinct ape Gigantopithecus; from dragonflies with wingspans equal to that of eagles to giant squid large enough to bring down sailing vessels: all were once considered fantastical legends yet all have now been documented either by direct observation or through the study of their fossilised remains.

  Sasquatch remains to this day an enigma. No solid evidence of its existence has ever been presented, yet credible and knowledgeable witnesses continue to encounter some kind of ape-like creature in high mountain regions across the entire globe. Our species has endured enormous catastrophes throughout its history, from meteorite strikes to super-volcano eruptions to tsunamis and Ice Ages, and has prevailed. Is it so ridiculous to consider that another bipedal species of ape might have likewise prevailed in deep forests and mountains, far from human contact?

  It is said that we know more about the moon than about our own oceans. Over three quarters of our planet is covered by water, little of the ocean’s mysterious depths explored by humans. Somewhere out there something lives that is unlike anything we have ever seen, because the sounds recorded by the United States Navy’s SOSUS network in the deep sound channel of the Pacific Ocean are also real. A creature with a mass some five times that of a blue whale would be an incredible sight to behold, and one that I hope will be found and documented someday along with so many others that might be waiting out there in the farthest reaches of our planet.

  Dean Crawford

  London 2013