The Chimera Secret Read online

  Duran, his rifle lying uselessly on the forest floor beside him, quivered as tears spilled from his eyes onto his beard.

  ‘It got her,’ he croaked. ‘It took Mary.’

  42

  Ethan stared out into the forest, unable to process the fact that this animal had so comprehensively outwitted them. He was attempting to formulate some kind of response when Klein jogged back into the camp.

  ‘Simmons’s body’s gone,’ he said, and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Ripped right out of the trees.’

  Kurt Agry turned to the soldier. ‘It’s gone?’

  ‘That thing was twenty feet up in the air,’ Lopez uttered.

  Kurt Agry turned and looked down at Duran Wilkes, who was still on his knees and staring into the forest where the creature had presumably run off with Mary.

  ‘Duran,’ Kurt said, and crouched down on one knee alongside the old man. ‘Can you track it?’

  Duran stared blankly into the wilderness, muttering to himself behind eyes glazed with emotions that Ethan didn’t like to see. He imagined that he might have borne that same, wild-eyed disbelief for months after Joanna had vanished without trace from Gaza City.

  ‘Duran,’ Kurt repeated more urgently, grabbing the old man’s shoulder. ‘Do you want to find Mary alive?’

  Duran looked at the sergeant and nodded, the wild look in his eye vanishing in a blink to anger.

  ‘Can you track it?’ Kurt asked.

  Duran looked into the forest and his paralysis vanished. ‘Damn right,’ he hissed, and reached down to grab his rifle.

  Agry stood up and looked at them all. ‘We’re not running anymore,’ he said. ‘We’re going after this thing. Anybody have a problem with that?’

  Ethan watched as everybody shook their heads. He looked back to where the dead elk lay somewhere in the distance, then at Duran Wilkes, and then out to where Mary had been dragged away into the forest.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said finally, ‘I do.’

  ‘What?’ Kurt snapped, grimacing at him. ‘You want to go home instead? I thought you were a goddamned marine?’

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ Lopez asked.

  Ethan gestured back to where they had hung the soldier’s body as bait.

  ‘We set a trap for this thing,’ he said. ‘It then deceives us to distract us away from Duran and his group, steals Simmons’s body, and then takes Mary away. Doesn’t anybody else think that’s a deliberate plan of action on its part?’

  ‘I don’t care if this thing reads War and Peace every night and plays fucking chess,’ Kurt snapped back. ‘Only way we’re getting out of here is if it goes down, and it’s going down.’

  ‘That’s what you said yesterday,’ Lopez pointed out.

  Kurt gestured at Duran. ‘He’ll take us to it, and we’ll kill it.’

  ‘And that’s my problem,’ Ethan said. ‘I don’t think it’s doing any of this randomly. I think it wants us to follow it.’

  Kurt stared at him for a long moment. Ethan noticed that Duran now turned his head and looked straight at him.

  ‘You think?’ the old man snapped.

  ‘I can’t figure out any other reason for why this is all happening,’ Ethan replied. ‘It stopped us from getting back out of the valley, but let us travel north. It took Willis, then hurt him so that we’d hear it, to keep us following. Now, it’s outwitted us and taken one of our number again, giving us a reason to keep following it. It killed that elk as bait and tore off the antlers so that we wouldn’t identify what we were looking at until it was too late.’

  Duran clenched his rifle tightly as he shook his head. ‘That’s not what happened to my wife. It just took her and disappeared.’

  ‘Different circumstances,’ Ethan said. ‘If we start following it instead of trying to kill it, we might be able to figure out why it’s doing what it’s doing.’

  Kurt Agry turned away from them in disgust. ‘This is bullshit. You really think the ape’s gone all Einstein on us?’

  Duran Wilkes got up from his knees and hefted his rifle onto his shoulder.

  ‘We’ve done things your way twice now, Kurt,’ he said, ‘and both times it has cost lives. Now my Mary is gone. You’re not my priority right now: she is. I’m going to follow this thing and find out where it leads me.’

  Duran looked at Ethan and nodded once before he turned on his heel and walked away between the broken and trampled ferns. Ethan looked at Lopez, who shrugged.

  ‘I’m in, if you want to go for it?’

  Ethan nodded and picked up his bergen. ‘What we’re here for.’

  ‘What you were here for,’ Kurt Agry corrected him, ‘was to find Cletus MacCarthy’s body, and he was killed miles from here in Fox Creek.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ethan agreed, ‘and we haven’t found him yet. This creature just strolled out of here with at least two bodies in its grasp and didn’t seem to find it that hard, so my guess is that wherever it takes them is where we’ll find Cletus and the answers we need. You got any better ideas, how about sharing them?’

  Kurt’s features creased with indignation.

  ‘You need to get yourselves out of this,’ he uttered.

  ‘Out of what, exactly?’ Lopez snapped.

  Kurt looked at her for a moment. ‘Out of this forest.’

  ‘We will,’ Ethan replied, and turned to follow Duran. ‘Right when we’ve done what we came here to do.’

  43

  BENEDICTINE ORPHANAGE FOR GIRLS, VIRGINIA

  Ben Consiglio stepped into the office of the principal, an elderly lady named Martha Knight who had overseen the residents of the orphanage for almost forty years. Conservatively dressed and with a sharp eye like a bird of prey, Ben guessed that she was one of the old-school types, a firm but fair hand. Certainly the orphanage itself was immaculate in its appearance.

  ‘Thank you for seeing me,’ he said as they sat down opposite each other at her desk.

  ‘We get a lot of visitors,’ Martha replied by way of an explanation. ‘Often from biological parents seeking to contact their lost children. Lives change, people change, and sometimes parents who could not afford to raise a child in their youth find themselves in different circumstances in later life.’ She smiled. ‘Was that why you came here?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Ben said. ‘I was one of the lucky ones, my folks are still together. This is regarding an investigation by a Congressional committee. I’m on the analytical team and we’re trying to gather information.’

  ‘On whom?’ Martha asked. ‘We have detailed records of all residents here.’

  ‘Joanna Defoe,’ Ben replied, ‘she would have been resident here somewhere between—’

  ‘1986 and 1996?’ Martha suggested with another smile.

  ‘You have a remarkable memory,’ Ben said. ‘I can barely remember what I did last week sometimes.’

  ‘I have a thing for names,’ Martha explained, ‘which then leads me to recall everything else. Joanna was indeed a resident here after her father died tragically young, a heart attack I think?’

  ‘Cardiac arrest,’ Ben confirmed.

  ‘Joanna was sent here shortly afterward,’ Martha went on. ‘I remember her well because she was so active, a real handful but in a good way. She was a wonderful sportswoman, keen on tennis and field sports. I thought that she might have pursued a professional sporting career but she seemed more interested in politics and world affairs. She went to college after she left here and then became a journalist, I believe, but I haven’t heard from her for some time.’

  ‘When did you last speak to Joanna?’ Ben asked.

  ‘She used to come by here if she was in DC,’ Martha said. ‘I suppose the last time was probably about four or five years ago.’

  ‘And did she seem as if anything was troubling her at all?’

  Martha shrugged.

  ‘Joanna was a closed book,’ she said. ‘She was always upbeat, optimistic, cheerful, but it meant that you could never really tell whether
she was actually happy or not. She very rarely opened up.’

  ‘But she did?’ Ben pressed. ‘Sometimes?’

  ‘Occasionally,’ Martha replied sadly, ‘when she spoke of her parents. She never knew her mother, you see, which must be an extremely difficult thing to deal with. Then her father passed away. You must understand, Mr. Consiglio, that these things all happened before she was eight years old. Joanna Defoe was scarred even before she reached adulthood. Who knows how she really felt inside?’

  Ben frowned as he thought for a moment. ‘Who actually sent her here?’ he asked.

  Martha stood up and strode across to a bank of filing cabinets that stretched along one wall of her office. She pulled one open that was marked with a D, and rifled through for a moment before lifting out a thick file. She sat down again opposite Ben, who saw the name printed in neat ink on the top corner of the file: ‘DEFOE, J’.

  ‘Here we are,’ Martha said, pressing a finger precisely down on one of the first pages in the file. ‘Joanna Defoe was sent here by an agency based in Washington DC. I don’t believe that we had any links to them at the time, so it must have been by referral or similar.’

  ‘What was the name of the agency?’

  ‘The John J. Carter Memorial Trust,’ Martha read from the page.

  Ben glanced up at her in surprise. ‘The military agency?’

  Ben knew of the trust – in fact most people with a military background had heard of it. It was named after John Carter, the son of a shipping magnate who had forgone the chance to join his father’s empire and instead joined the draft for Vietnam. A stellar officer, he had been killed in action with the 101st Airborne Division during the battle for Hamburger Hill in Thua Thien Province. His grief-stricken father had founded the Trust in his memory, to help former US soldiers through periods of financial or professional distress.

  Ben’s familiarity with the trust was personal. He himself had been gravely wounded in Iraq: the trust had paid for his treatment and rehabilitation.

  ‘The agency serves former soldiers,’ Ben said, ‘but why would they extend that service to Harrison Defoe’s daughter?’

  ‘I don’t know that they did,’ Martha said. ‘I assumed that it was her father’s financial legacy that paid for her education and time here at the orphanage.’

  Ben shook his head.

  ‘Her father didn’t have enough money to pay for her time here,’ he said. ‘Besides, Joanna received her inheritance from her father when she was eighteen years old and used it to pay for her college studies. So who paid for her time here, when she was younger?’

  Martha looked down at the file.

  ‘It just says here that the agency provided the funds for her upbringing via her father’s estate, but it doesn’t provide details.’

  Ben thought for a moment. It was possible that Harrison Defoe’s passing had indeed been a tragic natural death and that the government had perhaps decided that it would provide for his orphaned daughter in recompense. But there were also many thousands of soldiers who had fought in conflicts around the world who had received no such support from the government – indeed many of them had been reduced to vagrancy.

  A thought occurred to him. If Harrison Defoe had been such a successful member of MK-ULTRA, then perhaps the CIA may have suspected that his daughter would share some of the same characteristics. If they could shape one person to do their bidding, then maybe they could shape another in much the same way. Except that her father had been a patriot willing to do anything for his country, whereas Joanna had inherited her father’s later bitterness toward his country and government. Such a mindset would be a difficult thing to overcome, even with the deepest hypnosis or whatever those crackpots had been using to turn ordinary people into ticking psychological time-bombs. Hell, to break a spirit as strong as Joanna Defoe’s would need some kind of massively traumatic event, the kind that wipes the brain clean like a computer format and . . .

  ‘Christ,’ Ben muttered out loud.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Martha responded, offended. ‘We don’t take kindly to idle use of that name, young man.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Ben said, his mind racing. ‘Something just hit me that I hadn’t considered before. Did Joanna ever mention something called MK-ULTRA?’

  Martha’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Only once or twice, when she was very upset just before she left for college.’

  A tingle of excitement whizzed up Ben’s spine. ‘What did she say, exactly?’

  Martha sighed.

  ‘To be honest I didn’t listen very well because it sounded like something she’d picked up from watching the X-Files or similar. Joanna was very impressionable, easily whipped up into a frenzy about injustice or the uncaring hand of fate. Considering her past, that’s not unusual.’

  Very impressionable. The words rolled around in Ben’s head as he spoke.

  ‘Anything you can recall may help us,’ he said.

  Martha nodded.

  ‘Well, the long and short of it all was that Joanna believed that her father was murdered, and that something called MKULTRA was behind it all. I never did get to the bottom of why she would think that, but she insisted to me on the rare occasions that she spoke of it that MK-ULTRA was still active. She swore to me that she had evidence that the government was experimenting on its own citizens illegally.’

  Ben sat still and silent for a long moment. In the warm office, with the low sun streaming in through the windows, it seemed impossible to consider what he was thinking. And yet all possible avenues pointed in the same direction. Joanna Defoe was still alive, MK-ULTRA was still active and somehow Joanna had got the drop on them. For some reason Joanna knew far more than anybody had realized, and that was something that would make the CIA extremely interested in apprehending her. A journalist with a history of exposing governmental corruption in possession of such explosive knowledge, and perhaps solid evidence too, would be an immense threat to national security.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs. Knight,’ Ben said, and stood. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  Ben walked out of the orphanage to his car, unlocked it but did not climb inside. Instead, he pulled out his cellphone and dialed Natalie’s number.

  Almost immediately the line connected with a whining, undulating buzz that sounded like a distant hairdrier. Ben looked down at his phone and then around him at the rolling hills. He had no idea where the nearest mast would be but guessed that he was out of range of a decent signal. He pocketed his cell and got into the car before driving out of the lot. He headed back onto Route 646 toward the main highway into Fairfax and across the Potomac into Washington DC.

  The 646 was a narrow road lined with high hedges and trees. Ben cruised north toward the highway and took the sweeping right-hand bend past Nokesville at a steady fifty as a blue sedan appeared heading back toward Aden.

  Ben leaned on the driver’s door sill and glanced out across the open fields, nothing much but a couple of distant farmhouses and small copses of woods, the trees thinning as the last leaves of the fall were—

  The sedan flashed into view as it crossed lanes and screamed toward him. Ben felt a split second of fear lance his spine as the sedan loomed large in his windshield. He yanked the wheel to the left, the car’s tires locking up and screeching on the asphalt as the sedan plowed into him.

  Ben’s head flicked sideways and he felt the muscles in his neck crunch under the impact. The sedan’s engine roared as it smashed into the passenger door, shattering the glass and smashing Ben’s car sideways as it bludgeoned its way past.

  Ben kept his foot on the brakes as the car slewed in the opposite direction. His head flicked uncontrollably back the other way and smashed into the side window with a dull thud that sent a bolt of nausea bowling through his stomach. The car shuddered to a halt in the center of the road, the engine stalled. His vision was blurred and his neck throbbed painfully as he squinted out to his right and saw the sedan slumped by the shoulder, s
moke pouring from under the hood.

  Ben reached down and popped his seatbelt as he pushed his door open. His arms felt weak and his balance was shot away as he staggered out of the car and promptly jackknifed forward and vomited. He shoved one hand out for balance against the hood as he coughed up an acidic stream of bile, then wiped one sleeve across his mouth and tried to focus.

  The sedan was still smoldering by the shoulder but the driver’s door hung open. Ben stood upright and turned as a man approached him from behind. He got a brief glimpse of a long, sepulchral face and cold, gray eyes.

  ‘You okay, man?’ the stranger asked in a monotone voice.

  Ben was about to answer when he saw the pistol in the man’s right hand, held close to his side behind the lapel of his jacket. Ben lunged for the weapon on an impulse, but the man leapt aside with incredible speed and cracked his knuckles across Ben’s temple. Ben staggered off balance and stumbled onto his hands and knees on the asphalt.

  A heavy boot slammed into his guts with enough force to drive him into the side of his car, the air blasting from his lungs as he gagged and slumped forward, sprawled across the cold surface of the road.

  A pair of immensely strong hands hauled him up onto his knees and then dragged him into the driver’s seat. Ben struggled against his assailant’s grip, but his vision was starring and swimming with nausea and his limbs felt weak and feeble.

  The tall man with the long face strapped him into the seat and squatted down next to him. Ben peered sideways at him into those emotionless eyes. The man’s voice was monotone, strangely devoid of presence as though he were a phantom without a soul.

  ‘One question, only one correct answer,’ the man said. ‘What have you and Natalie Warner uncovered about the whereabouts of Joanna Defoe?’

  Ben, slumped in the seat of the car and with the pistol pressed to his stomach, managed a weak smile.

  ‘Natalie who?’

  The tall man regarded Ben only for a brief instant. Then he stood and with a vicious swipe of the pistol struck Ben across the head. Ben’s already battered skull flicked sideways and he slumped into unconsciousness.