The Chimera Secret (26 page)

‘Different species of animals show signs of stress in different ways,’ Proctor replied. ‘Cats lick their fur or excessively mark their territory, for instance. These creatures,
whatever they are, seem to twist and bend branches. There’s no other explanation for it, as they would not expend energy like this without good reason.’

Ethan looked around them at the forest.

‘It knew what it was doing enough to plan an attack.’

‘We’re in its territory,’ Lopez guessed. ‘You don’t get a lot of humans this far off the trails, so maybe it got upset?’

Dana Ford shook her head slowly.

‘The stress relief here I can understand, but the attack last night doesn’t make any sense. If it wanted us to move on, surely it would have remained silent and just let us go on our
merry way. That seems to have been what these creatures have done in the past. Either that or they’ve left the area, because human encounters out here are so rare.’

‘Rare for us,’ Duran Wilkes said quietly. ‘Just because we don’t see them, doesn’t mean they don’t see us. Humans aren’t that good at living in the wild
anymore because so few of us do it for any length of time. We’ve lost the ability to sense what’s around us. These sasquatch live out here permanently and probably have done for tens of
thousands of years. They’re about as in tune with their environment as it’s possible to get and probably are stumbling over noisy, stupid humans almost every day. That might be
stressful for such a quiet, solitary creature.’

Kurt Agry shoved his way to the front of the group.

‘Getting your skull crushed is stressful, in case you hadn’t noticed. I don’t give a damn what these things are out here, what they want or what you all think we should give
them. Right now I’ve got to get one of my men off this mountain and then finish what we came here to do. Now you can all either stand here and sing your happy fucking songs about how at one
with the world these creatures are, or we can all get on with our jobs. What’s it going to be?’

Dana Ford stepped forward. ‘If we want to survive this, we need to understand what we’re up against. Isn’t that what you soldiers are taught? Know your enemy?’

‘If my enemy,’ Agry snarled, ‘is a nine-foot-tall bear then that’s all I need to know. Thing that big, it’s a wonder hunters haven’t shot dozens of them by
now, so excuse me if I don’t believe your ape-man stories.’

Duran’s aged features creased into a crooked smile.

‘Oldest excuse in the book,’ he said. ‘How come hunters haven’t shot one of these before now. You want answers to that? People think that the forests here are crawling
with hunters and poachers, but that’s dead wrong. The wilderness is far too big, and unless you’re walking the forests in-season you won’t see one. Hunters are also under all
kinds of restrictions: where they can hunt, when they can hunt, what weapons they can use and so on. Even those that do spot a Bigfoot say their first reaction is not to shoot because the damned
things look so human, despite their size.’

‘Ninety eight per cent of hunters don’t poach,’ Proctor added. ‘Most observe all local laws, which means that most of the time they’re out in the forests
they’re poorly equipped to take down something as large as sasquatch. The hunting dogs that often accompany them are trained to track certain scents like elk or whatever and ignore all
others, not track
any
scent they encounter. Besides, a creature like sasquatch would likely see them coming long before they got a decent shot off: they seem to avoid humans wherever
possible and move off silently at high speed, too quick to track down.’

‘Sure,’ Agry muttered, ‘like I’d not take a shot at something as big and famous. Take one of these things down and it’s fortune city.’

‘Maybe,’ Dana Ford said. ‘Except if you killed a nine-hundred-pound primate miles from anywhere, how would you get it home? A body will decay rapidly, and photographs are
always open to interpretation. Only thing that would guarantee you fame and fortune is a live specimen or excellent footage of one.’ Dana smiled at the sergeant. ‘Virtually every person
who has set out to shoot and kill a sasquatch has ended up bringing only a camera with them, because a dead sasquatch would be close to useless in every respect, financially or otherwise, not to
mention the social and moral disgust you’d eventually receive. Would you shoot a chimpanzee in cold blood?’

Agry turned away from them with a sneer. ‘If it had just killed two of my men, you’re damned right I would.’

Dana Ford and Proctor looked at each other before they turned and headed back toward the camp. Kurt Agry ignored the apprehensive looks on the faces of his men.

‘Let’s move out!’

Ethan watched as the soldiers marched away back toward the camp until he, Lopez, Duran and Mary stood alone by the prints and the fallen cedar trunk.

‘What’s his rush?’ Lopez asked. ‘Only time limit we’ve got is between now and the Sheriff’s Department charging Jesse with homicide. Sure, we need to get
Simmons off the mountain, but Kurt and his little army are only supposed to be here to watch our backs.’

‘They’re here for more than that,’ Ethan said.

‘How do you know?’ Duran Wilkes asked.

Ethan watched the elite troops disappear through the woods.

‘Kurt Agry said it himself, this was a milk-run for them. That’s the whole problem for me. Doug called in back-up for us out here, and the DIA sent in elite troops when an ordinary
squad of infantry would have been just fine.’

‘Elite troops?’ Duran asked. ‘I thought they were local guard units from down at Gowen Field?’

‘Too fit, too composed,’ Ethan replied. ‘The troopers are young but they’re too well trained to be reservists. They wouldn’t have had enough time to become so
professional.’

‘That’s thin, Ethan,’ Lopez said. ‘Not nearly enough to get me worried about them.’

‘I know,’ Ethan replied. ‘How about a hundred-twenty pounds of C-4 explosive then?’

Lopez’s dark eyes flared with alarm. ‘You’re kidding?’

‘They’re tooled for demolitions work,’ Ethan said. ‘I spotted the charges in Simmons’s kit last night when the camp got raided.’

‘You think they’re up to something else?’ Lopez asked. ‘Earl Carpenter said that whenever people have gone missing up here, the search and rescue element has come from
the National Guard and not locally. Maybe there’s something up here in the mountains that they don’t want hikers to stumble across.’

‘Makes sense,’ Ethan admitted. ‘But if the military had an outpost up here surely they’d just secure it? They’ve got Mountain Home Air Force Base not so far from
here, plenty of space there for installations.’

‘Maybe they’re not military?’ Lopez suggested. ‘But paramilitary?’

Ethan knew that paramilitary units were often attached to government agencies like the DIA to act as instructors to foreign armies or as security to heads of state. Putting them out in the
middle of Idaho on what was effectively a state police case was not standard procedure by any means. Jarvis would not have bothered using such units as back-up to their mission. He would have known
that firepower was their main requirement, not explosives.

‘We need to watch our backs,’ he said to Lopez and Duran. ‘Until we figure out for sure what’s going on here.’

‘You think that we’re a target?’ Lopez asked. ‘The surveillance on your family? You think it’s Doug Jarvis after all?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

Duran Wilkes stepped forward.

‘Whatever this is about, your man Kurt has his own agenda and I’m not sure I want to be a part of it. This was supposed to be a search for a missing woodsman. Now we’re without
communication, one man dead and another who’s severely injured and we’re being attacked by a wild animal that clearly doesn’t want us here.’

Ethan pulled his jacket tighter about him to fend off the cold.

‘You saying you want more money to be here?’

‘No,’ Duran said, and glanced at his granddaughter. ‘I’m saying that I want to get off this mountain alive.’

‘This is a long shot, even for you.’

Ben Consiglio walked alongside Natalie up the steps toward the administration building’s entrance.

‘If this thing is as big as I think it is,’ Natalie replied, ‘then long shots are all that we’ll have. Everything else will have been classified way out of our
reach.’

The Rotunda entrance to the NARA on Constitution Avenue held the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, along with other major historical documents like the
Louisiana Purchase Treaty and the Emancipation Proclamation. However, Natalie and Ben were climbing the steps to the research entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue, well away from the tourist crowds.

An agency independent of the United States Government, NARA existed to preserve and document historical records as well as publish acts of Congress, executive orders and various federal
regulations. The archives included vast records of once sensitive documents declassified after periods of time determined by the administration that created them. Natalie knew that within were
documents over fifty years old yet only recently released into the public domain.

‘You’re not going to find everything you need in here,’ Ben warned her as they walked inside toward the public desk. ‘The administration reclassified many documents back
in 2006.’

Natalie knew that certain government agencies had withdrawn from public access many documents considered a threat to national security. In what was described as an ‘understanding’
between the agencies and the Archivist of the United States, those withdrawals would also be conducted in such a way as to prevent researchers from realizing that the documents ever existed. The
public enquiry that revealed the collaboration had provoked an outcry in the media, one that the government of the time had simply ignored.

However, Natalie had a simple way around that.

‘It won’t affect what we’re looking at,’ she replied. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

‘How’d you figure that?’ Ben asked as they collected their identity badges and affixed them to their jacket lapels.

‘Joanna Defoe disappeared after that protocol was enacted,’ she replied as they entered the archives. ‘I’m guessing that the surveillance has been in place sometime since
then.’

Ben frowned as he followed her.

‘Sure, but wouldn’t that mean that any further documents or files wouldn’t have made it into the system here? They’d have been pulled beforehand and never made
public.’

Natalie nodded as she walked.

‘That’s right, but my thinking is that whatever it is about Joanna Defoe that attracted the attention of government agencies occurred long before 2006. I’m here to find out
what I can about her past, see if there’s anything here that might have been overlooked.’

Ben didn’t sound convinced.

‘If the government has a reason for silencing this woman’s history they’re not going to have just missed a couple of things. They’ll have cleared out everything, every
incriminating reference.’

Again, Natalie nodded.

‘Yes, but Joanna Defoe was an investigative journalist. Her work was made public before any agency would have known about it.’

Ben stopped walking and thought about it for a moment. ‘You figure that she did an article on something, maybe dug too deep, and that was where it all started.’

‘Something like that,’ Natalie said. ‘There has to be a catalyst and that something must be in the public domain because Joanna never served in the military or on an
administration. She completed a college degree in photojournalism just like Ethan did, but she then went straight to work as a freelance journalist. There’s nothing to suggest that she did
anything else in her life.’

Natalie worked her way through the halls of the archive and began tracking down the documents she felt would most likely lead to new information on Joanna Defoe. Ben remained by her side as the
hours passed, carefully documenting and filing the papers that she found until they had a stack of documents and printed images of magazine covers and articles that both Joanna and Ethan had
written that had reached the public domain.

Ben leaned back in his chair and examined the pile.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so the picture is simple. Joanna starts work as a journalist and right from the get-go she’s focusing on corruption in political circles, but not in
North America. She travels to Palestine, South Africa, the Malay Peninsula and South America.’

Natalie nodded. ‘It’s like she wanted to get abducted. Most of those places harbor the most dangerous cities on the planet.’

‘Either that or it was a Pulitzer she was after,’ Ben said, a little more cynically than Natalie would have liked. ‘These journos have a habit of putting themselves in the
middle of a shit-storm in the hope of breaking the next big news scoop.’

‘True,’ Natalie conceded, ‘but look at the stories she wrote. Government-sponsored abductions in Colombia; same thing in Palestine and South Africa. Corruption in the aftermath
of the Boxing Day tsunami in Aceh. It’s like she was more interested in hitting government fraud than anything else, and governments have a way of preventing the media from championing their
journalists when it’s not to their advantage.’

‘Maybe she’s got an anarchistic streak?’ Ben mused out loud. ‘That would justify our government keeping one eye on what she was doing.’

Natalie laughed. ‘Even if she was, waving anti-nuclear flags and joining Greenpeace don’t warrant twenty-four-seven surveillance on your family. It’s not enough.’

‘What about after she got together with Ethan?’ Ben asked.

Natalie looked through the papers, flipping forward, and then flipped back again as she realized something.

‘That’s odd.’

‘What is?’ Ben asked.

‘She goes back around and does the whole thing again, same countries, same order,’ Natalie replied. ‘After their work in Iraq and Afghanistan, they pull out and head back to
Colombia.’ Natalie sat back thoughtfully. ‘I remember Ethan saying once that because everybody else was reporting on the War on Terror, they decided to change tack and start covering
smaller, more personal stories.’