The Chimera Secret (49 page)

Mitchell’s thick hand whipped across the desk and grabbed Steel’s collar. He hauled the DCIA across his desk, the smaller man gagging as his shirt crushed his throat. Mitchell glared
deep into Steel’s eyes.

‘If my people are killed I’ll blow the whistle on this.’

‘They’re not your people,’ Steel coughed. ‘They’re just two-bit losers out of Chicago, they’re nothing.’

Mitchell dropped Steel face down onto his desk, pinning the back of his head with a forearm as he leaned down close.

‘They’re also patriots,’ he rumbled, ‘a word that you’re clearly no longer familiar with. They die, so does your career, your reputation and your future.’

Steel’s voice squeaked back at Mitchell.

‘I’d be careful if I were you. I’m not the only one with something to lose.’

‘Like hell,’ Mitchell snapped. ‘This stops at your door.’

‘Not if Mr. Wilson is going off the range. He could target anybody.’

Mitchell considered this for a moment and then tightened his grip.

‘Not before you’re sunk,’ he replied. ‘Jarvis told me that there must be a plant in the Government Accountability Office in the district, a CIA mole. Give me the
name.’

‘Or what?’ Steel coughed.

‘Or I’ll drag you down to Congress myself, right now, and tell them in advance about the air strike that hasn’t happened yet. Our own National Guard using live weapons on
American citizens on American soil under CIA control? That alone will be enough to finish you, and start a much more interesting investigation into CIA programs.’

Steel strained against Mitchell’s iron grip.

‘How do I know you won’t squeal anyway?’

‘You don’t,’ Mitchell said as he twisted Steel’s neck further. ‘The mole, who is it?’

Over his pain, Steel coughed a name loudly enough for Mitchell to hear.

‘This is it.’

Guy Rikard held aloft a piece of paper from Natalie Warner’s collection of files. The piece of paper was filled with scribbled notes that she had made during the day, and one of the notes
caught his eye.

‘MK-ULTRA,’ Larry Levinson read from the notes. ‘She’s been talking about that all day.’

‘CIA program from the seventies,’ Rikard confirmed. ‘Was cancelled after a congressional investigation. Natalie claimed that some or all of the program is probably still
active, perhaps under a different name, and that she had the evidence to prove it.’

‘Can’t be that easy,’ Larry pointed out reasonably. ‘Something like that would be buried deep.’

‘She’s been to the archives office,’ Rikard noted, flicking through pages of recently printed documents tagged with the NARA logo. ‘What if she managed to find some piece
of evidence, something forgotten in the original cover-up? It might have generated new leads, uncovered new information. Natalie was willing to punch me in the face and lose her job rather than
lose this investigation. Whatever she found it must have been colossal.’

‘Huge enough to get Ben Consiglio killed,’ Larry replied softly.

Rikard nodded, and looked up at Larry. ‘Enough to get
us
killed. You can go home if you want, Larry. I can find Natalie from here.’

Larry shook his head. ‘I’m in, all the way. Let’s finish this. How will you figure out where Natalie’s gone?’

Rikard grinned and stood up. He grabbed a pad from Natalie’s desk and a pen.

‘She wrote down a series of names on this pad,’ he said, ‘then took it with her. Child’s play to reveal what she wrote.’

Rikard rubbed the pen over the blank page on top of the pad, and instantly revealed the impressions from Natalie’s scribbles on the now missing page. He was about to read it out when his
cell rang in his pocket. He pulled it out and answered. Doug Jarvis’s voice sounded muted and distant on the line.

‘
It’s Jarvis, you got anything yet?
’

‘She’s gone to an address in Coral Hills. That’s a housing project just north of Edwards Air Force Base. There’s a name: Anderson.’

‘
Excellent work. Get out of there now, both of you. We’ll go after Natalie.
’

The line went dead, and Larry stood up from the desk.

‘You think we should do that?’ Larry asked. ‘Surely we’re not in any danger?’

‘That a chance you’re willing to take?’ Rikard challenged. ‘No, this goes to the Capitol. I’d better call the Investigator General, let them know we’re
bringing this data in.’

Rikard fished out his cellphone and hit a quick-dial number.

He frowned as his phone buzzed in his ear, and looked down at it in confusion.

‘Line’s out,’ he said, and pocketed the phone.

Rikard got up and picked up the hefty stacks of paperwork from Natalie’s desk, then dumped them into his briefcase.

‘Maybe we should finish collating everything else she’s worked on first,’ Larry suggested. ‘We need a solid case before we take this further.’

‘There’s too much paperwork here,’ Rikard said. ‘By the time we get through it all and figure out what’s really been going on, it could all be over. I’ll take
this to the Investigator General right now, get his people on it.’

Larry stood up. ‘You sure that’s the right thing to do?’

‘It’s the
only
thing to do,’ Rikard said. ‘That’s what this department is for. Too much has happened to risk keeping this under the carpet now and
we’re out of our depth. Jarvis virtually said it himself: we need to blow it open before Natalie or anybody else gets hurt.’

‘You mean like Ben did?’ Larry said.

‘Exactly like that,’ Rikard replied and closed the briefcase. ‘Somebody in this office was watching what was going on. We need to get this data out of the office and into safe
hands.’

Larry stood up, his features taut.

‘And what if you’re the mole?’ he suggested. ‘You could take all of that and disappear. Whoever killed Ben must have been informed of his location from this office and it
was you who sent him out to Virginia.’

Rikard stared down at Larry and grimaced.

‘Seriously?’ he uttered. ‘I’ve worked for the GAO for twenty years. If I was in the business of selling out I’d have done it long before now, believe me.’

Rikard turned for the office door. Larry shifted position and blocked his way.

‘I can’t let you do that, Guy,’ he said.

Rikard glared at the little man in his way. ‘Natalie could be in danger, Larry. The longer we leave this the greater the chance she’ll get iced just like Ben.’

‘And if you’re the mole,’ Larry countered, ‘then you’ll ensure that everything Natalie and Ben have done and sacrificed will be for nothing.’

‘Jesus, Larry, that’s crap and you know it!’ Rikard snapped. ‘Whatever Natalie’s onto here has been running for decades. This could be bigger than Watergate. God
knows how many people in this office might have been under observation since the investigation started. Even you might have been watched.’

Larry grinned. ‘Yeah, just in case I go all Julian Assange on them.’

Rikard laughed out loud and clapped a hand on Larry’s shoulder. ‘Yeah, something like that. Come on, let’s go together: that way, nobody’s in danger of losing
anything.’

Larry grabbed his jacket and an expensive pair of Ray-Bans as he turned to follow Rikard for the office door. They were halfway there when Rikard slowed down, his brow furrowed.

‘What?’ Larry asked.

‘Something I just said,’ Rikard replied. ‘Anybody could have been watched in this office. Ben drove out to Virginia, so his killer must have been informed. But how could the
killer have known when Ben would leave the orphanage in Aden, to hit him like he did on the road?’

‘Maybe he didn’t,’ Larry suggested. ‘Maybe the killer was lying in wait somewhere along the road?’

‘But then why not hit Ben’s car before he got to the orphanage and remove any chance of his making any discoveries?’ Rikard persisted. ‘Unless the killer wasn’t
informed of Ben’s visit until later and had to hurry to make the—’

Rikard stopped walking. Larry took another pace before stopping between Rikard and the office door. Rikard stared down at Larry.

‘You were working with me in the office for almost an hour after Ben left,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t make the call. You wanted to leave to make a call but I kept you
here.’

Larry shook his head. ‘That’s ridiculous, Guy. You’re getting paranoid now.’

Rikard’s features hardened.

‘Get out of my way or I swear I’ll put you on your ass.’

Larry, his features twitching nervously, stood his ground.

Rikard snarled and swung the briefcase in his hand around at Larry’s head.

To Rikard’s surprise, Larry didn’t flinch. The little man hopped inside the swing of the briefcase, then jammed his right arm under Rikard’s and whirled. Rikard felt his body
flip over Larry’s as he was hurled over the smaller man’s shoulder and slammed down onto the carpeted office floor.

The hard surface knocked the wind out of Rikard’s lungs. He saw Larry grab his wrist with terrific speed and yank it around on itself. White pain bolted through Rikard’s arm and
shoulder as the tendons were strained within. His hand flexed open as he cried out in agony and the briefcase toppled from his grasp.

Larry’s right shoe slammed sideways into Rikard’s face, the cartilage in his nose crunching beneath the impact as blood spilled into his mouth. The back of Rikard’s head
smacked into the floor and stars sparkled before his eyes as he felt the pressure on his arm vanish.

Rikard squinted up and saw Larry standing over him with the briefcase in his hand, blocking the way to the office door. The nervous, twitchy expression was gone. The small man looked down at
Rikard with a face devoid of emotion as though examining a small insect, his eyes hidden behind the Ray-Bans. In his other hand, he held a cellphone to his ear. He began speaking as Rikard hauled
himself away toward the opposite wall.

‘It’s me,’ Larry intoned into the cell. ‘I’m still at GAO, one hostage. I’ve got the files.’

Rikard stared in disbelief for a moment as Larry listened to the reply on his cell and nodded.

‘It will be done. What about this asshole?’

Larry listened to the response, nodded once, then shut off the cell. He slipped it into his pocket and put the briefcase down.

‘You?’ Rikard uttered.

Larry did not reply. He simply walked toward Rikard without fear, without compromise, without hesitation. No weapon, and yet Rikard somehow knew without a doubt that Larry, if that was even his
real name, would be able to kill him without using one.

Rikard scrambled to his feet as his back hit the water cooler in the corner of the office. His hand rested on a desk beside him, nudged a thick ballpoint pen. He grabbed at it as Larry came
within arm’s reach and swung it wildly toward the small man’s face.

Larry swatted the blow aside with one iron-hard forearm and then smashed his own forehead into Rikard’s mouth. Pain seared his jaw as his teeth crumpled backward in his mouth under the
force of the blow. He felt his elbow being pinched hard and his legs and arms jangled and twitched in response as he collapsed onto his back on the desk.

Larry’s elbow slammed into Rikard’s solar plexus, driving the air from his lungs and smearing his vision into a blur of hazy light as he gagged and folded up.

Larry turned, one hand still pinching the nerves in Rikard’s elbow. He reached out and grabbed a Styrofoam cup from the stack alongside the water cooler, filled it with water and promptly
poured half of it across Rikard’s chest and half of it across his shoes.

Rikard, blinded and almost entirely helpless, spat a spray of blood as he cried out.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

Larry did not reply. He grabbed a nearby desk fan, dumped it on the desk and pinned it with one foot before he grasped the power cord and yanked hard. The cord snapped from the fan’s base,
two copper wires glinting in the overhead lights.

Rikard’s vision sharpened as his body twitched beneath Larry’s grip. He saw the exposed wires plunge toward his chest.

‘No!’

The last thought that went through Rikard’s mind was that the office used 110-volt electricity. He’d once read that it was not strong enough to kill from a touch, unless it went
straight through the chest. Electricity always traveled along the route of least resistance to the ground.

Larry hauled him off the desk and onto his feet as the wires touched Rikard high on his chest, just to the left of center. Rikard felt a tremendous surge of pain sear through his ribcage as the
current plunged through him, his limbs trembling as he collapsed to the floor in a quivering mass.

Larry followed him down with the exposed wire, pressing the live copper against his chest until Rikard’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and foamy white saliva spilled from his mouth.
Rikard twitched and quivered for several long seconds, and then slumped. Larry pulled the wires away and stared down at Rikard’s motionless corpse for a brief moment.

Then he turned and unplugged the desk fan cord from the socket, rolled it up and put it in his pocket. He grabbed Rikard’s briefcase and then strode from the office without looking
back.

Ethan dropped the M1le and raised his hands, watching as Kurt advanced a pace alongside Jenkins, who still lay sprawled on the floor, gasping for breath.

‘Start talking,’ Kurt snapped at Ethan. ‘How did you get out of the store room and into the living quarters?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ethan replied. ‘There’s no way out of here other than the mine entrance.’

‘You expect me to believe that?’ Kurt sneered. ‘Where the hell are Duran and Mary?’

Ethan shrugged.

‘Hiding out in the tunnels, maybe,’ he said. ‘Waiting for you and your little bunch of assholes to blow yourself sky-high.’

‘We’re not assholes,’ Jenkins spluttered. ‘We didn’t want this to happen!’

Kurt ignored Jenkins and raised the pistol to point at Ethan’s head.

‘Spill it, Warner, all of it, or I’ll blow your head clean off.’

Ethan glanced down at Jenkins and saw his opportunity. If you can’t defeat the enemy by pure force or guile, then turn your enemy against himself. He let a grim smile curl from his
lips.