The Chimera Secret (30 page)

And it made Randy MacCarthy’s encrypted files all the more interesting.

‘Keep on this,’ he said to the technician, ‘but stay quiet about it. Let me know if there are any further movements in the area, either by local law enforcement or the National
Guard.’

The technician nodded, and Jarvis left them to their work as he walked out of the laboratory and caught an elevator down to the ground floor. His mind was working overtime as he strode out of
the security buffer and into the pale sunshine of the parking lot. He got into his pool car and drove out of the DIA complex, heading for the Capitol.

Fact was, he had no business in the district and should have been at his desk. But what Natalie Warner had said about the surveillance on her family had bothered him immensely, and now the
sudden loss of communication with Ethan was another blow to his operation. Images of the grilling by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and William Steel flashed through his mind, and he checked his
mirror.

It only took about three minutes of driving and careful observation before he knew what he was looking at. His instincts spoke to him despite his disbelief screaming that it simply could not be
true.

A silver GMC followed him, cruising three cars back. Jarvis had been in the business long enough to know how to get a tail to show his colors. He hit his turn signal and changed lanes. The GMC
didn’t signal or turn but it drifted subtly out to the edge of its lane, as the driver subconsciously reacted to the movement of Jarvis’s vehicle on the road.

No doubt then. He was under surveillance too.

‘Project MK-ULTRA,’ Ben Consiglio said finally as they climbed out of the car.

They had agreed not to talk about what they’d discovered during the journey back, just in case the car had been bugged. Although Natalie felt stupid about it, as though she were being
excessively paranoid and was acting the part of a suspect in a hammy police show, there was still the remote possibility that she was a target both because of the Congressional investigation and
because of her digging into Joanna Defoe’s past.

‘What was it?’ Natalie asked as they walked toward the main rotunda.

‘It was a nightmare,’ Ben replied. ‘It’s the codename for a covert program run by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Scientific Intelligence back in the
1950s and 1960s. They used American and Canadian citizens as subjects for batteries of illegal tests, often without the knowledge or consent of the subjects involved.’

Natalie stared across at him.

‘Are you kidding?’ she uttered. ‘The CIA was experimenting on people without consent?’

‘For as long as twenty years,’ Ben nodded. ‘They spiked drinks with drugs and other chemicals to induce altered states in subjects, used hypnosis and isolation, sensory
deprivation, all kinds of abuses and even torture. The idea was to test the limits of how people could be manipulated in order to carry out tasks for government agents, and they killed several
people in the process. The most famous was Harold Blauer, the American tennis player who died as a result of injections of Methylene-dioxyamphetamine. Blauer knew nothing of the experiment being
performed on him, and after his death the involvement of Project MK-ULTRA was covered up by New York State, the government and the CIA for more than two decades.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Natalie said, ‘and the CIA wonders why people are suspicious of it.’

‘Well, if the agency wasn’t paranoid before, they will be now,’ Ben said as they walked inside the building. ‘MKULTRA was exposed by Congress through investigations by
the Church Committee and the presidential Rockefeller Commission.’

‘This gets better by the minute,’ Natalie said. ‘So you think that maybe they’re doing the surveillance now because they fear we’re onto something?’

‘I doubt that,’ Ben said. ‘MK-ULTRA was shut down somewhere in the late 1970s by the director of the agency himself.’

‘Where’s the evidence from the program?’ Natalie asked. ‘I didn’t see any other references to it in the archives.’

‘That’s because the same director had all of the files burned in 1973 to prevent the Congressional and presidential committees from learning too much about what went on. There were a
few Freedom of Information Act requests that uncovered caches of documents, but despite a Senate investigation nothing much came to light.’

Natalie led the way to their office. Guy Rikard was nowhere to be seen but Larry Levinson spotted them immediately and hurried over.

‘Guy’s in a meeting,’ he informed them, ‘but he won’t be gone for long. Did you manage to find out anything useful?’

Larry joined them as they huddled down at her desk and sifted through what they’d discovered.

‘So Joanna Defoe’s father is a former subject of this MKULTRA program?’ Larry asked after they had filled him in.

‘He testified before the Senate in 1973,’ Ben confirmed. ‘After the incriminating evidence was ordered burned by the DCIA, all the investigating parties had left to go on was
the sworn testimony of the victims of the MK-ULTRA program. It was enough to build a picture of the scope of the operation but not enough to bring charges against anyone involved, which was almost
certainly the motivation behind the destruction of the files.’

Ben slid one of the papers that they had printed out at the archive to Natalie.

‘Harrison Defoe testified in 1973 and gave a detailed account of how, in 1967, he had been a serving officer in the United States Army, working as a translator in Singapore.’

‘He wasn’t a military man,’ Natalie noted, reading the file. ‘He was a languages expert.’

‘And spoke fluent Cantonese as well as Vietnamese,’ Ben said. ‘He was part of an electronic intelligence outfit tasked with monitoring Viet Cong communications with sympathetic
communist parties in the Malay Peninsula. They worked on tracking funding and weapons smuggling that came up into Vietnam from the south, instead of the more normal route down from the communist
north and Russia.’

‘What was Singapore’s role in all of this?’ Natalie asked.

Larry Levinson replied immediately. Natalie knew him to have an encyclopaedic understanding of world affairs, but even she was surprised at the depth of his knowledge.

‘Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, was a staunch anti-communist,’ he explained. ‘In an economic sense the Vietnam War benefited Singapore. It had just gained its
independence from Britain and was able to build immense infrastructure to act as a staging post for the war effort in Vietnam. When the US military moved into South Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and
the Philippines were facing armed communist insurgents and a communist underground was still festering in Singapore. Indonesia was in the throes of a failed communist coup and was waging
konfrontasi
against Singapore, an underground conflict. America’s presence gave Prime Minister Yew the reason and opportunity to rebuild his country’s economy on a war footing
and create the nation that it has since become. Harrison Defoe’s presence there would have been a tiny but pivotal role in the unfolding drama of the conflict.’

‘Why would they hit somebody in such a vital role?’ Natalie wondered out loud.

‘Probably because of his language expertise and his service location,’ Larry answered. ‘Harrison could talk to local people and so get information from the ground, which is the
best way to find things out. But the people he was tasked with watching were largely well-known civilian figures who were discreetly supporting the communists. Popular with people in the region, if
the American military had arrested them or the CIA had arranged for accidents to occur, then somebody, somewhere, would probably know about it and expose them, losing the United States respect and
support in the region.’

Natalie realized what Larry was saying.

‘So they start using Harrison Defoe as some sort of programmable assassin or something?’

Ben laughed.

‘Probably not quite like that,’ he said. ‘Harrison testified that he was asked by the CIA if he would like to use newly developed hypnosis techniques to expand his knowledge of
Malaysian dialects. He agreed, of course, as language was his passion. Over the next three months he underwent numerous, extensive hypnotherapy sessions. His testimony says that he did indeed learn
a great deal about various dialects but that also he began to develop an inexplicably strong sense of outrage toward communist businessmen in Singapore, especially those whom he knew had links to
the Viet Cong.’

Natalie smiled bitterly.

‘The Viet Cong were effectively winning the war by the late sixties,’ she said. ‘We were relying on carpet bombing and Agent Orange, and our boys in the jungles were in a
living hell of combat. Harrison was a patriot and a pacifist, which could explain some of his mounting anger.’

‘He must have hated the sight of so many body-bags coming back from Da Nang and Saigon,’ Ben agreed. ‘Couple that with some deeply induced hypnotic suggestions about how evil
his friends in Singapore were and you’ve got a time-bomb waiting to explode.’

‘Nineteen sixty-eight,’ Natalie read from the sheet, ‘and Harrison Defoe is arrested after the murder of four Malaysian businessmen outside a downtown restaurant. Tried and
convicted, he served the next three years in a Singapore jail. Christ, they burned him.’

‘Left him to rot,’ Larry noted. ‘His own country abandoned him despite his loyalty and patriotism. Essentially, the CIA programmed him to murder enemies of the state and then
melted away when he was arrested and tried.’

Natalie shook her head, a shiver running down her spine as she realized with sudden clarity that in the world of international politics and espionage the value of the individual was always
outweighed by the importance of winning a war. No matter how patriotic the subject, no matter how hard-working, they would be sacrificed in an instant for political or military gain. The
sugar-coated ideal of American cinema, of no man left behind or of presidents risking their careers and lives to protect individual citizens, was a fallacy as fanciful as it was ridiculous.

‘He survived his incarceration,’ she said, gesturing to further pages of files.

‘Was released in 1971 and repatriated to America,’ Ben nodded. ‘Looks like the government had an attack of guilt over his suffering, or more likely it feared that he would
expose what had happened. Harrison receives a government pension and a Purple Heart, and is offered a position at

Harvard teaching languages to students.’

Natalie picked up the trail.

‘He takes the offer, settles in, marries. His wife dies in childbirth, delivering Joanna.’

‘Leaving Harrison to raise his daughter on his own,’ Ben said. ‘Looks like the trials of life got him down. It says here that Harrison became somewhat embittered by the
hardship and tragedy that he’d endured, and spent much of his time wailing to anybody who would listen about how corrupt the government was.’

‘Something that his daughter would not have failed to notice,’ Natalie guessed.

‘Harrison became involved in all manner of anti-capitalist ventures,’ Ben said, ‘and made quite a name for himself talking about MK-ULTRA and other alleged government-sponsored
programs by the CIA that affected ordinary US citizens. He was preparing a court case against the government when he died unexpectedly at his home.’

‘The heart attack,’ Natalie said.

‘There were no suspicious circumstances, although the coroner noted that his heart was perfectly healthy and strong and that cardiac arrest was a highly unfortunate way for someone in his
physical condition to have died.’

‘Young, too,’ Natalie noted, ‘forty-eight years old.’

‘People do die of cardiac arrest sometimes,’ Larry pointed out, ‘often for no apparent reason. If the coroner didn’t find anything it’s likely a dead end, a
coincidence.’

‘I don’t like coincidences,’ Natalie replied, ‘especially when politics and the military are involved.’

She looked at the pages for a moment and then had an idea.

‘Is there anybody still alive who was involved in MKULTRA?’ she asked.

Ben chuckled bitterly.

‘About a hundred thousand people, if you count all the conspiracy theorists and lunatics claiming to have been involved in government tests, alien abductions and God knows what else. It
would take years to sift through them and locate the genuine players, if they even know who they actually are. The available files are so vague that they don’t reveal if many of the subjects
of the experiments actually knew they were being experimented upon.’

‘There must be some,’ Natalie said. ‘If the program was shut down then they can’t have simply killed off everybody who was involved. The people who testified in 1973,
what about them?’

‘The ones who knew about MK-ULTRA at the time would almost certainly be genuine subjects because they were invited to testify. That wouldn’t have happened if there was any doubt
about their involvement among the investigating committees.’ Ben looked at her. ‘Why would you want to talk to anybody from back then?’

‘Because I’m beginning to suspect that this may have something to do with Joanna Defoe,’ she said.

Ben frowned.

‘Joanna was raised in an orphanage after her father died,’ he said. ‘It’s all on paper here. When she turned eighteen she was given the money her father left her, which
she used to pay for college. Looks like she inherited some of her father’s distrust of government and authority because she spent pretty much her entire career as a journalist exposing
government corruption around the world.’

‘And here,’ Natalie said, ‘when she hunted down connections between MACE and our government.’

‘So?’ Larry asked her. ‘There are plenty of journalists doing the same thing on any given day. No reason for the CIA to single her out for special attention.’

‘Do we know which orphanage she was sent to?’ Natalie asked.

‘Yeah,’ Ben said, and shuffled through some papers until he found what he was looking for. ‘Benedictine School for Girls,’ he said. ‘Virginia. Spent ten years there
in the care of the state system before getting her father’s payout and heading for college.’