The Chimera Secret Read online

  ‘You two were close?’

  ‘Not as close as she was to my brother, Ethan,’ Natalie replied. ‘They were together for four years and worked as investigative journalists, exposing corruption in countries all over the world.’

  Anderson slapped his thigh in apparent delight.

  ‘Good old Jo,’ he said. ‘And good old Harry. He brought her up to continue his work, and, hell, she went and did just that.’

  ‘And got herself abducted,’ Natalie continued. ‘Now my brother has vanished along with his work partner. My own colleague was killed this afternoon in a hit-and-run automobile wreck, and the car that hit him spent much of this morning tailing me around DC. To cap it all, I’ve been conveniently fired from my position by my boss just as I’ve collated enough evidence to expose the CIA’s interference in our investigation and a possible homicide.’

  Anderson thought for a moment.

  ‘You think your boss is working for the CIA?’

  Natalie inclined her head but said nothing.

  Anderson raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you want me for?’

  ‘I want you to tell a Congressional committee and the CIA’s Inspector General what happened to you when you were a part of MK-ULTRA, and to give them your best estimate of what such a program would be doing today if it were still active.’

  Anderson chuckled, then the chuckle turned into a deep, rattling cough. He managed to bring himself back under control and looked at her with his rheumy old eyes.

  ‘I’m dying, Miss Warner,’ he said finally. ‘Government’s got nothing on me so I’ve nothing to fear from them. I’ll testify if that’s what you need, but I wouldn’t have a clue what they might be up to right now if MK-ULTRA is still active.’

  ‘You must have some idea,’ Natalie pressed. ‘You were there. You saw what happened.’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ Anderson agreed, ‘but these are different times. The technology is so much more advanced. It makes what they were doing in the 1970s look remedial. They can track brainwaves and use magnetic fields to influence what a person is thinking. They can do things with a single microchip now that an entire division of scientists could not have achieved forty years ago.’

  Natalie thought for a moment.

  ‘That may be true, but the technology is only the means to an end. What was the purpose of MK-ULTRA? What was the ultimate goal?’

  Anderson sighed and stared at his hands as he spoke.

  ‘The mission objective was to create assassins who would undertake their work without the slightest hint of emotion. The purpose was to develop a means to temporarily, via hypnosis or drugs or whatever, entirely erase an individual’s personality so that nothing remained but their pre-programmed mission: they would become like a robot, utterly devoted to their cause. A terminator, if you like.’

  Natalie sat in silence for a long moment before she spoke again.

  ‘They wouldn’t know anything of this?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ Anderson said. ‘MK-ULTRA was specifically working toward a method of ensuring that not only would people be purged of any memory of their involvement with the program, but that they would also undertake their assassinations before then taking their own lives. They were the perfect way to commit murder, Miss Warner: a human, programmable suicide bomber who would take all evidence of their crime and their motivation to the grave with them. No person, no country, could ever be held accountable for their actions.’

  Natalie felt a cold chill embrace her as she realized the implications of what MK-ULTRA had set out to achieve. If it had indeed been operating beneath the veil of the Pentagon’s Black Budget, for some forty or more years, then the scope of its operations could be vast.

  ‘And these experiments were conducted on American citizens?’

  Anderson chuckled bitterly.

  ‘On any citizen, of any nation on earth,’ he replied. ‘You have to remember that this was a paramilitary program, designed to ensure that the United States of America had on hand a number of programmed killers living, working, marrying and reproducing in countries all across the globe. At any time, if the need arose, they could be sent into action to do the bidding of the CIA, including murder.’

  Natalie sat in stunned silenced for a long time. ‘They could take down unfavorable world leaders, dissidents or dictators.’

  ‘Or otherwise innocent people whose world view didn’t fit with that of the United States,’ Anderson pointed out.

  ‘How many victims were there of the program?’ Natalie asked.

  Anderson shrugged. ‘Nobody knows.’

  ‘Do you know how many people might have been programmed by MK-ULTRA over forty years?’

  Anderson stared at the grimy carpet beneath his feet for a long time before he replied, his voice softer as though he himself had not considered the question before. Natalie heard his words cross the room to her as though from another world.

  ‘Hundreds,’ the old man whispered. ‘Thousands.’

  55

  DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY ANALYSIS CENTER, WASHINGTON DC

  Doug Jarvis drove back into the parking lot at the DIAC just over an hour after he’d left the district. He’d used every trick in the book to ensure that his tail was clear, and had taken the final, paranoid step of parking his pool car in a side street in Anacostia before renting a Ford Taurus to drive back across the border.

  If his vehicle had been tagged with a GPS tracker, it would be useless to the CIA now.

  Jarvis hurried into the building and took an elevator up to the fourth floor, hoping against hope that his team had managed to crack the decryption on Randy MacCarthy’s flash drive. He walked into the laboratory and was greeted by his lead technician, who leapt to his feet with a bright toothy smile bent across his beard.

  ‘We did it,’ Hellerman said. ‘And, man, are you gonna want to see this.’

  Jarvis felt a wave of relief flush through his body.

  ‘Tell me everything.’

  Hellerman waved him across to a plasma screen that showed a blown-up image of the technician’s monitor. Jarvis instantly saw a file folder that he had not seen before.

  ‘Photographs,’ Hellerman identified them for Jarvis, ‘and get this – they were all taken around mountains in the heart of the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho, right where we found those hard-rock mines and right where most of the missing persons have been reported.’

  Jarvis watched as Hellerman opened the folder. Two more folders were within: one named ‘EVIDENCE’ and the other named ‘ACTIVITY’. The technician opened the evidence folder, revealing a huge mass of photographs. He double-clicked on one and then began scrolling through them.

  Jarvis saw endless images of enormous five-toed footprints, with a ruler set alongside to give scale to them.

  ‘I’ve never seen so many images like these,’ Hellerman said. ‘Absolutely incredible, unassailable evidence of Bigfoot.’

  ‘Absolutely incredible, unassailable evidence of big feet,’ Jarvis corrected him. ‘This isn’t what we’re looking for.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ the technician asked. He looked at Jarvis, and then tapped to the next image.

  Jarvis glanced up at the screen and froze. There, captured in broad daylight, was the image of a pair of footprint casts that had been taken in situ alongside the actual prints, part of a track running along the floor of a dry creek bed. Judging by the sunlight and foliage in the image, it had been shot in summer.

  What was striking was that one foot was deformed, the toes splayed and twisted.

  ‘It’s caused by gout,’ the technician said, ‘or perhaps a bad case of club-foot. Point is, this is a record of a sasquatch suffering from a disease that affects humans. You think that a faker would bother to think to do something like this?’

  Jarvis shook his head. Even the most determined of fakers would probably not be able to create a convincing example of such a track, especially not one that carried on for tens of metres along the creek bed.

  ‘
The strides are almost two metres apart, much too large for any human to fake and convince even amateur trackers. And look at the roll pattern in the dried mud,’ Hellerman said, ‘caused by the ball of the foot digging in as the creature walked. This thing was real. Even using stilts, no human could produce enough weight and momentum to produce a set of tracks like these.’

  Jarvis gestured to the other file.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  The technician closed the evidence file, and opened the activity file.

  ‘This one you’re really going to have to see to believe.’

  Jarvis watched as the file opened and he saw images of what looked like an old abandoned mine set into the steep hillside of a mountain high in the forest. Hellerman flipped across a couple of images and then paused on one.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Jarvis said.

  From the mine a group of men were walking out, dressed in civilian clothes. The technician moved on to images of a jet-black, unmarked helicopter landing near the mine and picking up the men before flying away into the distance.

  ‘You got an ID on that helicopter?’ Jarvis asked.

  ‘Not a thing,’ Hellerman said. ‘No identifying marks whatsoever. All I can tell you is that we matched the date and time of the image to air traffic records from Boise, Idaho. That helicopter flew from there to Mountain Home Air Force Base.’

  Jarvis’s mind began racing.

  ‘Where the National Guard are based.’

  ‘And that’s not all,’ Hellerman said, flicking across to another set of images.

  The new pictures were not taken near the mine, and were shot a couple of days prior to those of the helicopter. Jarvis squinted for a moment before he realized what he was looking at.

  Dense forest cloaked with thick foliage, a mass of greenery that seemed devoid of anything interesting until his mind had spent a few seconds processing the image and doing what it did best: looking for patterns. Moments later, as though appearing by magic, a pair of eyes stared out past Jarvis, focused on some distant target over the barrel of a rifle.

  ‘M-16,’ Jarvis uttered to himself, ‘under-slung 203 launcher, and that guy’s not wearing standard-issue disruptive-pattern material. Looks like foreign stuff, maybe German.’

  ‘Special Forces soldier,’ Hellerman confirmed. ‘We can’t confirm the location from this image but it’s likely that it was taken in the same region, maybe even the same mountain. Point is, whatever’s going on up there is important and it’s off the record because that area is not military owned.’

  ‘That everything?’

  ‘No,’ the technician said, and flicked to the next image.

  Jarvis looked at the screen and saw that the soldier with the rifle had fired, the muzzle of the M-16 aflame as a high-velocity round was released. The technician’s voice was heavy as he spoke.

  ‘Next image is not a good one.’

  Jarvis watched as the image flipped. This time, it was of a man in hiking gear lying flat on his back, his face turned toward the camera. A bloodied red hole was punched through the side of his face just below the right eye, and his hair on the opposite side of his head was a matted mess of blood and bone.

  Jarvis took a pace toward the screen as Hellerman flicked across the images.

  The man’s ruined face, close up.

  Then more men standing around the body, heavily armed and camouflaged.

  The body being hoisted into a large black bag and being carried away by the soldiers into the forest. The fourth image showed them vanishing into the woods somewhere just below the mountain peak that was obviously the same one that contained the supposedly abandoned mine.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Jarvis said.

  Hellerman’s voice was somber as he replied.

  ‘We used a basic facial recognition program on the close-up shot of the photograph that Randy, or his brother Cletus, must have taken. The victim’s name was Aaron Hall, forty-two, out of Michigan. A keen hiker, he was reported missing in the Nez Perce National Forest two months ago.’

  Jarvis turned slowly to face the technician as he went on.

  ‘National Guard conducted the search and it was reported that they found Hall’s jacket and a few belongings high in the mountains. They concluded that he was attacked and killed by a bear. His body was never found.’

  Jarvis turned back to the screen.

  ‘They’re killing anybody who gets too close to the mountain,’ he said in disbelief, then shook himself from his stupor. ‘Get me Earl Carpenter at the Riggins Sheriff ’s Office on the line, right now.’

  The technician called up the office details, and moments later he put the phone down as he looked up at Jarvis. ‘Sheriff Earl Carpenter was retired this afternoon on a full pension,’ he said. ‘He’s no longer available for duty.’

  Jarvis felt the blood in his veins run cold. Everything had been planned. Everything had been done at once.

  The whole thing was a trap.

  ‘Make copies of the files and send them to each other,’ he snapped to Hellerman. ‘Do it now before anybody can stop you.’

  ‘Who would want to stop us from—’

  ‘Do it, now!’

  The technician flinched as Jarvis shouted, then hurried away. Jarvis called after him.

  ‘Then make hard copies and send them via the postal service to yourselves. You’ll need them, keep them safe and tell nobody about any of this, okay?’

  The technicians in the office all nodded, their features creased with concern as Jarvis stormed out of the laboratory and across to the elevators. He was on the seventh floor a few minutes later as he charged down the corridor and burst into the director’s office before his secretary could even get up out of her seat to stop him.

  ‘You’ve burned them!’ Jarvis shouted.

  Abraham Mitchell looked up, as did four other men all holding files and wearing surprised expressions. For all Jarvis knew they were high-ranking Pentagon officials but he didn’t care as he growled at them.

  ‘Get out. Now.’

  Whatever they saw in his eyes was enough to kill any notions of pulling rank. The four men stood up and filed silently out of the office. Jarvis kicked the door shut behind them and glared down at Mitchell.

  ‘You’ve burned Ethan and Nicola.’

  ‘I haven’t done any such thing,’ Mitchell snapped back at him. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  Jarvis walked forward and slammed his hands down on the director’s desk.

  ‘The security unit you dispatched is a CIA paramilitary cleaning-team,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got hard evidence of them killing civilian hikers in Idaho to protect some kind of facility the CIA is running up there.’

  Mitchell’s anger flickered out like a candle in the wind as he stared at Jarvis in disbelief.

  ‘I didn’t dispatch the team,’ he said. ‘I handed control of the military request to . . .’

  Jarvis stared at his boss and realized what had happened.

  ‘The Pentagon,’ he finished the sentence for Mitchell. ‘The CIA must have intercepted the request and channelled it through to the 24th STS or similar.’

  ‘William Steel knew that Warner and Lopez were operating in Idaho,’ Mitchell said. ‘But he knew nothing about what they were doing.’

  Jarvis stood up and touched a hand to his head.

  ‘That may not be true, sir,’ he said. ‘The CIA has been mounting surveillance on Ethan and Nicola. They’ve even had me tailed, perhaps even bugged. It’s likely that if they’ve got something to do with what happened to the MacCarthys in Idaho, they know why Ethan and Lopez were sent up there.’

  Abraham Mitchell folded his hands beneath his chin thoughtfully for a moment.

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Get them out of there,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Whatever’s going on just pull them out before they’re captured or killed. Do we have any information on missions being flown by the National Guard out of Gowen Field?’

 
Mitchell turned to his desktop computer and accessed a series of files detailing in real-time the sortie profiles of literally thousands of United States military operations worldwide. Within a few moments, he looked up at Jarvis.

  ‘A pair of A-10 Thunderbolt IIs of the 124th Air National Guard are detailed to perform a low-level night-strike training flight out of Gowen. It says here it’s a weapons-cold sortie, no active ordnance.’

  ‘I bet it does,’ Jarvis said bitterly. ‘When are they due for wheels-up?’

  Mitchell looked at the screen. ‘An hour from now.’

  ‘Christ, Abe, this is a murder plot!’

  ‘We don’t know that, Doug,’ Mitchell shot back. ‘You got any idea what you’re insinuating here? That the CIA is murdering civilians?’

  ‘They’re doing a hell of a lot more than that,’ Jarvis said. ‘In fact, they’ve been doing more than just that for the last forty years. You remember MK-ULTRA?’

  ‘Sure I do,’ Mitchell replied impassively. ‘Shut down in the 1970s.’

  ‘So they said,’ Jarvis replied. ‘What we’ve stumbled upon here is not one but two illegal CIA programs. MK-ULTRA is still active, Abe, and the agency is conducting some kind of experiments on either people or hominid species in Idaho. An agent named Mr. Wilson, whom we’ve encountered in the past, is likely to be behind much of it,’ he explained quickly. ‘A guy called Ben Consiglio was killed this afternoon. He was part of a GAO Congressional investigation into misappropriation of resources by the CIA, who must have had a mole in the GAO to know where Consiglio and his team would be at all times. You see a picture developing yet?’

  Mitchell’s brow furrowed as he struggled to digest the new information.

  ‘Director Steel will be behind all of this,’ he said. ‘This Wilson must be the muscle, an enforcer.’

  ‘Sure he is,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘And if he’s taken his job too far it’ll cost lives. The man’s a friggin’ psychopath, Abe. You need to call the DCIA and have Wilson pulled before anybody else dies.’

  Mitchell reached for his phone just as the door to the office opened, and Jarvis turned to see two armed security personnel burst in, their weapons pointed at Jarvis.