The Chimera Secret (36 page)

‘Who knew where Ben Consiglio was going?’ he asked Rikard.

‘Me, and anybody who overheard the conversation, I guess,’ he replied.

Jarvis nodded. The office had emptied almost immediately. Jarvis had flashed a DIA identity badge in front of all of them, which meant that any CIA mole would most likely have hotfooted it out
of the office with the rest of the team for fear of being spotted.

All that was left was Rikard and Larry.

‘Listen to me very carefully,’ Jarvis said to them. ‘Nothing that I tell you can ever be heard by anybody else, understood?’

The two men nodded in understanding.

‘Good,’ Jarvis said. ‘Then this is what we’re going to do. Natalie is in great danger and may need protection. I’ll call the police and have her taken into custody
in the nearest station to the car wreck. I want you both to stay here and search through Natalie’s work – try to figure out exactly what she was doing and how far she got. Rikard, you
gather together everything the pair of you find out and take it to the Congressional committee, Congress, the Investigator General of the CIA – anybody, and tell them what’s happened,
understood?’

Rikard nodded as his bad attitude suddenly evaporated in the face of a true crisis. Larry whirled and headed toward Natalie’s desk and the piles of paperwork still sitting there.

‘Give me Natalie’s cell number,’ Jarvis ordered Rikard, who quickly dictated the number from memory.

Jarvis turned and strode out of the office, taking the elevator back down to the ground floor and walking out of the Capitol. He made no effort to conceal his presence as he walked across the
street to the lot and scanned for the silver GMC that had followed him into the district. He spotted it within just a few moments of entering the lot, parked discreetly some fifty yards down from
his own vehicle.

Jarvis strode brazenly down the lot toward the GMC and fixed his gaze on the shadowy form of the driver inside. He got no closer than thirty yards before he saw the driver’s head turn in
apparent panic as he started the engine, and then faced a dilemma.

Traffic was flowing through the parking lot toward Jarvis, who had picked his point of entry deliberately as far to the right of his own vehicle as possible, giving any watching spooks little
opportunity to get away without being identified. The GMC pulled out. The driver clearly wanted to turn left away from Jarvis but was forced by the cars moving through the lot to join the flow
toward the nearest exit.

Jarvis waited until the GMC was almost level with him before he leapt out into the center of the road, his cellphone in his hand with the video function running. The driver ducked his head aside
and tried to hide his features, but it did him little good as the GMC lurched to a halt in front of Jarvis.

The old man scanned down to record the vehicle’s plates, although he knew that by the evening the GMC would have been dismantled into spare parts and sold to merchants across the breadth
of the country. The CIA was nothing these days if not thorough.

Jarvis leaned against the hood of the vehicle and smiled in at the driver.

‘You’ve been made, son, because you’re an amateur,’ he said to the man, who refused to make eye contact. ‘I’m guessing that your boss back at the CIA will be
seriously pissed about it, so I’ll make this easy on you. You drive around the lot here and park somewhere else, sit there for three hours, and I’ll make sure that this film never makes
it back to the CIA, okay?’

The driver peeked at him sideways, suspicious.

‘I’m not the main mark of this observation cell,’ Jarvis said, and waved his cellphone at him. ‘All you tell them on the radio is that I’m still in the Capitol. If
you tell them that I’ve left I’ll broadcast this across the entire intelligence community. You’ll be assigned to an administration desk in an Alabama backwater by tomorrow
morning. Catch my drift?’

The driver looked at Jarvis for a moment longer and then nodded once.

Jarvis pushed off the GMC’s hood and walked to his car.

As he drove out of the lot, he saw the GMC parked way back in the distance behind him, and that was where it stayed.

Natalie saw the pillar of oily black smoke smeared across the afternoon sky five miles before she reached the scene of the wreck.

Two fire trucks and an ambulance were parked by the side of the road, which was shut off to traffic by two patrol vehicles on either side. Natalie had managed with a quick telephone call to her
Capitol office to gain access to the accident itself, the state troopers reluctantly waving her through. Rikard had obviously not yet managed to have her name wiped from the system, although she
felt certain that before sundown any authority she had would be erased from existence.

Ben Consiglio’s pool car was a smoldering black wreck of tortured metal that sat on the rims of its wheels amid a sea of white foam sprayed by the emergency crews when they’d arrived
on the scene.

Natalie felt a plug of nausea lodge in her throat as she detected the acrid stench of burning chemicals, molten plastic and rubber. A dull gray haze hung in the air around the vehicle like a
chemical halo.

Natalie approached a group of paramedics clustered nearby, sipping coffee from a thermos flask. They saw her approaching and quietened down as the senior man among them stepped forward.

‘Natalie Warner,’ she said, ‘I’m a friend of the driver of the vehicle. Is he . . .?’

The paramedic’s features were strained.

‘We found the remains of some clothing in and around the vehicle, ma’am,’ he said softly. ‘They’ve been bagged for forensics, but if you could identify them for
us?’

Natalie nodded, not able to find the strength to say anything as she followed the paramedic to the rear of the ambulance, where a number of scorched items of clothing were laying in clear
plastic bags. In an instant she recognized part of Ben’s jacket, and what was clearly a scorched and tattered white shirt.

Natalie sucked in a deep breath of air and turned away as the nausea swilling in her stomach intensified. Hot tears scalded the corners of her eyes as she put her hand to her mouth and struggled
to keep her breathing under control.

‘That’s his shirt and jacket,’ she confirmed in a whisper.

The paramedic nodded and gestured to one of his men.

‘We’ve got an identification, Ben Consiglio, works in DC,’ he said. ‘Soon as the vehicle cools down we’ll find him and get him out.’

Natalie blinked her tears away and turned to the paramedics.

‘He’s still in there?’

‘I believe so, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘The vehicle burned with extreme ferocity, much more than I’ve ever encountered before in a vehicle wreck. Our hoses
weren’t having much of an effect, so standard procedure is to drench the surrounding area to prevent the fire spreading and then let it burn itself out.’

Despite herself, Natalie’s eyes flicked across to the burning wreck.

‘Jesus,’ she muttered to herself. ‘It was supposed to be me coming out here.’

‘Ma’am?’ the paramedic said. ‘It’s normal for people to find a way to blame themselves for the loss of life, but believe me this happens every day somewhere in
every county. It’s a hit-and-run wreck, and there’s absolutely nothing that you or anybody else could have done about it.’

Natalie blinked away some of her tears, knowing that he was right.

‘Did anybody get an ID on the other vehicle?’

‘Sure did, ma’am,’ he replied, and gestured across the road. ‘It’s against the shoulder, right over there. Weird, though – we can’t get identification
for the driver. The vehicle’s not in our database or on the police files.’

Natalie turned away and walked around the wide patch of churning foam surrounding the burning pool car. She was halfway around when she caught sight of the abandoned sedan on the shoulder
opposite. Her heart skipped a beat as she laid eyes on it.

A blue Cadillac Catera.

Natalie began walking quickly toward it as she fished her cellphone out of her pocket. She flipped through a series of images, selected one of them and zoomed in. She read the license plate of
the blue sedan that had followed her earlier the day before over the Potomac, and then looked at the abandoned sedan before her.

Same plate. Same vehicle.

Natalie slowly turned around and looked again at the burning pool vehicle and the tire marks on the road that betrayed where the accident had taken place. She walked across to them and then
turned toward the scene of the accident.

She saw the marks left by Ben Consiglio’s car as it had suddenly locked up and skidded hard left. Ahead of her, the asphalt glittered where thousands of tiny pieces of glass had scattered
when the windows in Ben’s car had imploded under the impact. A few scattered chunks of fender plastic and chrome trim littered the side of the road.

‘Ben travels along here,’ she murmured to herself as she walked the course of his car, ‘then suddenly brakes and swerves left toward the opposite lane.’

She looked up. Ben’s burning car was facing her on the opposite side of the road, and although the foam blocked some of her view she could see enough of the tire marks to tell that it had
spun through a hundred-eighty degrees and come to rest where it was.

The sedan, on the other hand, was sitting nose-first into the shoulder, its passenger-side front fender mangled and warped but otherwise undamaged.

And there were no tire marks on the road. No attempt to avoid a collision.

‘It swerved deliberately toward Ben,’ she went on to herself, voicing her thoughts aloud. ‘Hit him, then stopped here.’ She walked to the driver’s side of the
vehicle. ‘The driver gets out, and does what?’

The soft earth of the verge bore a couple of footprints heading back onto the road. Which meant that the driver had gotten out and walked back to Ben’s vehicle, then presumably
vanished.

Natalie didn’t need to think about it anymore. Ben had been the victim of a deliberate attack, one probably meant for her. But for anybody to have known he would be coming out here and
would in fact pass this spot meant that the killer must have been told about it. Natalie felt a chill run down her spine as she realized that only one person could have known about this, the same
person that had been blocking her investigation from the very start.

Guy Rikard.

Natalie rushed across to the Virginia state troopers standing guard near the wreck. Out here, she felt confident enough that they were far enough removed from the Capitol to not be in the thrall
of the CIA or anybody else. She showed them her phone and the pictures of the blue sedan from earlier in the day.

‘This guy followed me for almost an hour this morning, and it was me who was supposed to come out here this afternoon,’ she explained. ‘I work for Congress on a team
investigating illegal activity by the intelligence community, and we’ve learned that we’re being followed day and night by government agencies that presumably want to prevent us from
uncovering too much about their activities.’

The trooper looked at the photograph of the car.

‘I appreciate what you’re saying, ma’am, but that car could have been driving quite innocently across the Potomac earlier in the day. It could have been stolen since.
There’s nothing to link it to this accident.’

‘No there isn’t,’ Natalie agreed, and then flicked to the next picture on her cellphone. ‘But you guys can’t trace the car to a driver.’

Natalie held the picture up to the two troopers, that of the sedan’s driver from the previous day. The long, gaunt face was half in shadow but the features were clearly recognizable.

‘Good enough for you?’ she asked them.

‘Damn straight,’ the trooper said, and pulled out his own cell. ‘Send me the images you have to my cell and we’ll get them distributed.’

Natalie did as she was asked and then looked at Ben’s burning car. Her cellphone started ringing in her pocket. She looked at it, and frowned. It wasn’t a number she recognized. She
looked at the cops: if there was ever a place that she was safe, this was it. She shut off the call.

‘This was a deliberate attack,’ she said to the officers, ‘and I think I know who orchestrated it.’

The troopers looked at her expectantly.

‘Two men,’ she said. ‘Guy Rikard, my boss and the only person who knew that Ben would be here this afternoon, and Douglas Jarvis, a senior security specialist at the Defense
Intelligence Agency. It’s my belief that they’re working together to silence anybody who gets too close to whatever they’re up to.’

The interior of the mine was an inky black void that smelled heavily of mold and dust. Ethan glanced behind him to the last pale light from outside that was visible through the
entrance some fifty yards away.

In front of him, Kurt Agry and the soldiers advanced with their rifle-mounted flashlights cutting through the dank darkness like strobes in a damp, cold nightclub.

‘What would this thing be doing coming in here?’ Lopez wondered out loud.

Her voice sounded hollow and rolled back and forth in the tunnel. Ethan looked up at the roughly hewn walls around them.

‘Shelter, maybe,’ he replied. ‘A nest, some kind of lair?’

Ahead, Kurt Agry’s voice cut through the darkness.

‘We’ve got a door up ahead,’ he said.

Ethan looked up in surprise as the flashlight beams bounced and reflected off a steel panel that blocked the mine ahead. A thick blast door hung on its hinges, the handles smeared with blood
that had dried long ago.

‘It went in there?’ Lopez asked.

Duran Wilkes peered into the gloom within, the flashlight beams reflecting off metallic objects but nothing that appeared to have fur or eyes.

‘I ain’t sure,’ he replied. ‘Lot of tracks comin’ in and out, but nothin’ I can be certain is fresh. No weather underground.’

‘No,’ Ethan agreed, ‘but that doesn’t hide the smell.’

The odor was faint but unmistakeable, the taint of unwashed skin and fur drifting in the darkness.