The Chimera Secret (17 page)

‘Here we go again,’ Lopez said as the aircraft’s engine spluttered to a stop.

The pilot helped them unpack their gear from the rear of the aircraft then bade them farewell and good hunting. He climbed back aboard and within a couple of minutes the Cessna soared back into
the air, giving them a quick wiggle of the wings before turning and departing to the west.

Within sixty seconds it was out of sight and the forest was deathly silent around them.

‘Supposed to be very scenic out here,’ Ethan said to Lopez as they stood alone beside the airstrip.

‘Jeez, forgot my camera,’ she uttered in reply. ‘What the hell are we doing out here, Ethan? Look at this place. It’s bigger than God’s garden and we don’t
have a damned clue where to start looking for Cletus MacCarthy’s body. Plus there’s nobody here to meet us.’

‘Fox Creek,’ he replied, unpacking a map from the back of his heavy bergen and unfolding it. ‘That was where Jesse said the attack happened. And our scientist friends will be
here soon.’

‘Yeah,’ Lopez agreed, ‘and I’m sure our big-footed killer left us a signposted trail to follow. This is the outdoors, Ethan. Horrible creatures live and die here,
decompose and then get eaten by other horrible creatures. We’ll be lucky to find bones.’

‘You don’t like the outdoors much, do you?’ he smiled as he studied the map.

‘Not when it’s full of bad-mannered, head-smashing giants, no.’

‘Could just be a wounded animal of some kind.’

‘Thank God for that. Five hundred pounds of enraged grizzly makes me feel a lot better.’

‘It’s out that way,’ Ethan said, pointing to the northeast, ‘about five miles along this trail.’

‘What is?’ Lopez grumbled as she hauled her bergen onto her back.

‘Dixie,’ Ethan said. ‘The scientists are probably already there, so we’ll meet them on the way and then head into the forest to rendezvous with the escort
team.’

Lopez made a disapproving sound but said nothing as they set out along the track.

Ethan could see that there were tire marks in the dusty sand of the track. Dixie was a small settlement nestled deep into the hills, mostly farmsteads and smallholdings. It had taken him a
moment to find it on the map, so small was it amid the immense wilderness, but the people who lived there needed access to the highway in their trucks. That meant that if the scientists used their
no doubt prodigious intellect, they would drive out to meet Ethan and Lopez and save them the trek.

‘You ever think about the places that your friend Jarvis keeps sending us?’ Lopez asked as they walked, her voice sounding strangely loud in the silence.

Ethan shrugged. ‘Not so much. He’s our employer, we just do what he asks.’

‘I guess,’ she replied. ‘Just it seems that with time we’re getting put up against ever more dangerous odds and in ever more remote locations. It’s like he’s
trying
to get us killed.’

‘You don’t trust him.’

‘Nope,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘He’s got his own agenda, Ethan, and we’re not high up on his list of priorities.’

Ethan stared at his boots as they walked, Natalie’s recent revelation ringing in his ears. They, and their family, had been kept under observation by at least one government agency in an
operation running for years. The implications were too great for him to even begin considering, the questions far too many. That Doug Jarvis was behind it seemed remote, but then how could he be
sure?

‘My sister and family have been under surveillance,’ he said finally. ‘Natalie found out during her work at the Capitol.’

Lopez looked at him as her jaw dropped open. ‘When did you find that out?’

‘Yesterday,’ Ethan admitted.

‘And you didn’t figure on telling me about it then?’

‘I’m telling you about it now.’

‘Honored, I’m sure,’ Lopez muttered.

‘It’s not Jarvis doing the surveillance,’ Ethan said.

‘And you know that how?’

Ethan found himself stumped. Between serving as his lieutenant in the Marine Corps to working for him at the DIA was a six-year gap where they’d had no contact. Who knew what the old man
might have gotten involved with during the intervening years?

Then he remembered all that Jarvis had done for him, what he had now compared to when the old man had first approached him years before when he had been barely scraping through life, living in a
battered apartment in downtown Chicago.

‘He gave me my life back,’ Ethan said finally. ‘Doesn’t mean much to you, I know, but when we need him to he goes the distance for us. He damned near got himself killed
in New York last year trying to help us.’

Lopez said nothing for a while, but Ethan could see that she was mulling it all over, and he could hardly blame her for questioning the risks they were taking. Six months ago they’d almost
died 2,000 feet beneath the surface of the Florida Straits. The year before that they’d almost been buried alive in New Mexico, and prior to that Ethan had almost lost his life in Israel.
Now, they were strolling out into immense wilderness to search for a wild creature that had already killed at least two people.

Bail jumpers, by comparison, seemed tame foes.

‘I just wonder when the money we earn from doing this is outweighed by the likelihood of, y’know, dying,’ Lopez said. ‘I’ve got my family to think about.’

‘We’ve been here before,’ Ethan said. ‘We agreed it was worth it. Besides, it was your idea to work for the DIA.’

‘That was then,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘This is now, a lot further down the line. I thought we’d be apprehending high-profile criminals, not running around in the woods
looking for man-eating monsters.’

‘We’re well paid,’ Ethan answered her.

Lopez smiled, her neat white teeth contrasting with her olive-brown skin.

‘And you get access to all kinds of technical wizardry so you can keep searching for Joanna,’ she said demurely.

Ethan stopped on the trail and looked at her. ‘You think that’s all this is about?’

‘Is it?’ Lopez challenged. ‘You’re a risk-taker, Ethan, just like me. But is what we’re doing for the DIA
too
much of a risk? What good are you to Joanna
if you get your head ripped off by the homicidal long-lost relative of the gorilla?’

‘Finding her means a lot to me,’ Ethan replied, and was surprised by how easily it came out. Once upon a time, he would not have found the words.

Lopez sighed and nodded, took a pace closer to him.

‘I know it is,’ she said. ‘And I also know that Doug Jarvis keeps dangling a damned carrot in your face to keep you hoping that you can find her.’

‘He doesn’t do it like that.’

‘No?’ Lopez asked. ‘Like the fact that he let you see the footage that proves she’s still alive, then refuses to let you use the same intelligence information to track
her movements?’

‘He said that national security would not allow me to—’

‘Bullshit!’ Lopez almost shouted, loud enough to scare a nearby bird into flight. The flapping wings chased the echo of her voice into the distance. ‘He had us inside what was
probably the most secret installation in the entire United States’ secret arsenal of secret places, lets you have a quick glimpse of her, then suddenly you’re not allowed to see any
more? Jesus, Ethan, wake up and smell the beans.’

Ethan felt momentarily deflated as he looked into her angry eyes and realized that she was right. He hadn’t even noticed, so focused was he on the chance that Joanna might still be
found.

‘If it’s all so bad,’ he said finally, ‘then why do you stick with me?’

Her eyes flickered and she blinked.

‘Because . . . we’re partners; that’s what we do.’

Lopez had lost her previous partner, a DC homicide detective, years before during an investigation in the city that eventually led her to Ethan. Lucas Tyrell had died a hero, and Ethan knew that
Lopez still blamed herself for leaving his side.

Ethan swallowed thickly. Words tumbled out of him as though he were listening to a recording of his own voice.

‘I’m not leaving you,’ he said. ‘If you’re done with this, I’ll follow you.’

Lopez stared at him and he saw a smile blossom across her features that she tried, and failed miserably, to hide.

‘Asshole,’ she muttered. ‘Got a goddamned answer for everything.’

Her smile was infectious and he found himself grinning back at her. He took a deep breath.

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got your back, Nicola, whatever happens.’

Lopez stared at him for a moment longer, then took a pace closer.

‘Okay,’ she said, almost a whisper. ‘We got that settled. What happens if you find Joanna?’

‘What happens?’ Ethan echoed.

‘To us?’

Ethan had never really seen Lopez as closely as he was looking at her now. Her dark eyes were staring up into his as though she had opened a window to her soul.

‘I haven’t figured that out, yet.’

‘You wanna start thinking about it?’ she asked.

He was about to reply when a shout hollered across the canyon toward them.

‘There you are!’

Ethan turned his head to see a small man in khaki shorts, sneakers and a blue T-shirt emblazoned with a
Superman
logo walking toward them, a map in his hand as he waved. Ethan bit his
lip and looked down at Lopez, who was also staring at the newcomer. She shot Ethan a wry glance.

‘Saved by Superman, huh?’ she murmured.

Ethan grinned, relieved. ‘The caped crusader’s got my back too, it would seem.’

‘Dr. William Proctor,’ the man said breathlessly as he hurried up to them, flashing a smile of big white teeth that clashed with a frizzy mass of wiry black hair. ‘Great to
meet you both, really great.’

Proctor was a carnival of enthusiasm, his eyes ablaze with excitement.

‘You’re assigned to our expedition?’ Lopez asked quizzically as she looked him up and down. ‘You know we’re going to be out in the forest for several days,
right?’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Proctor replied with another big smile and a short burst of chortling laughter. ‘I once spent three weeks in the Amazon jungle searching for specimens
of beetle larvae. I’m used to being outdoors.’

Lopez nodded slowly. ‘But you still don’t get out enough, right?’

Proctor hesitated, and then honked another laugh and nodded. ‘Got it, right, yeah. Good one.’

‘Where’s your colleague?’

‘Back at Dixie,’ Proctor said. ‘We’ll meet up with her and then head out. C’mon, there’s a lot we need to talk about. We’ve already found some
interesting tracks.’

‘How old is it?’

Ethan crouched alongside Dana Ford as she indicated a row of 17-inch-long depressions in loose soil climbing a hillside less than a mile out of Dixie. The trail crossed a canyon wash where
runoff from the hills swept down toward a creek a quarter-mile behind them. The long, slender prints were capped with toe marks and what might have been three or four nail-prints where the toes had
dug into the soft earth.

‘Three days, maybe four,’ Dana replied. ‘There hasn’t been any heavy rain for the last week or so, so the prints have held up. But they’re too faint now to
cast.’

Lopez and Proctor looked on as Dana traced the outline of the print with the tip of a pen in her right hand. Her long mousy hair was pinned back in a ponytail tucked beneath the hood of her
waterproof jacket. Tall and slender, she wore fashionable square-lensed glasses that made her look a bit like Sarah Palin. The big difference was her Ph.D. and the excitement sparkling in her eyes
as she pointed with the pen.

‘Look at this,’ she said in wonderment. ‘Seems like a huge human print, right?’

Ethan nodded. Dana smiled at him.

‘Well, it isn’t,’ she explained. ‘This was made by a three-hundred-pound bear.’

‘How do you know?’ Lopez asked, glancing furtively around them at the soaring hills wreathed in thick banks of swirling cloud.

‘Because we see this all the time,’ Dana replied. ‘People take photographs like this and pin them up on Internet sites claiming them to be evidence of bipedal creatures
wandering the woods, but it’s nothing of the sort.’ She gestured to the depressions. ‘There’s only four toes, for a start, which kind of gives it away. The toe scratches are
caused by claws, and the length of the print is caused by the bear’s paw sliding backward in the soil as it climbed out of the creek, probably foraging for fish.’

Ethan pictured the scene for a moment and figured it out.

‘The creek was flowing at the time, enough that the bear was sliding slightly on the surface soil under the water.’

‘Bingo,’ Dana grinned. ‘Mystery solved.’

Proctor gestured to the hills as they stood up from examining the prints.

‘History is full of these kinds of genuine mistaken identities,’ he explained. ‘You ever see all those photographs taken by climbers in the Himalayan Mountains, with the trails
of huge footprints crossing snowy valleys?’

‘Sure,’ Lopez agreed. ‘The climbers always lay their pickaxes alongside the prints for scale.’

‘The same,’ Proctor confirmed. ‘Thing is, those shots are always made at dawn, when the climbers wake up and come outside. It took investigators years to realize that the
prints were made by wonderful but normal animals like snow leopards when they had walked past at night. As the sun rises it strikes the tops of the prints in the deep snow, melting the edges and
expanding them to gigantic proportions. When somebody tracked the trail into the shadow of another mountain, the prints returned to their normal size, betraying the illusion. Of course, that
inconvenient fact never makes it into the reports.’

Ethan hefted his bergen onto his back as they set off again, heading north into the wilderness.

‘So you guys are sceptics?’ Lopez asked Dana, confused.

‘
All
scientists are sceptics,’ Dana replied. ‘That’s our job, to not take things at face value but to test them to ensure that they are real. A lot of people
talk about having faith, about believing. Scientists don’t want to believe, they want to
know
, so the criteria for evidence that has to be met is much more demanding.’