The Chimera Secret (52 page)

Natalie had insisted on staying by his bedside until he was released.

Jarvis had likewise insisted that she accompany him to his home rather than return alone to her apartment in the district. Fact was, she wasn’t safe and there was nobody that she could
turn to except Jarvis for protection.

‘They haven’t found him?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Jarvis replied. ‘And I don’t believe that they will.’

Wilson had been gone by the time the emergency services converged on the crime scene. Most probably Wilson, a long-service agent with enormous experience, would have worn a protective vest. The
bullet would have knocked him out cold but would have caused nothing more serious than bruising on his chest. Had Jarvis been quicker he would have taken the head shot, but Natalie was not
experienced with firearms and had done the right thing: aimed for the biggest target, the torso.

Guy Rikard’s homicide was being investigated by the Metropolitan Police Department, who would be unlikely to find themselves making connections to the CIA. The murder would most likely
become a cold case, maybe the victim of a random freak accident or a crude suicide bid. Rikard was split from his wife and had financial difficulties, was a known drinker and womaniser and
suchlike. His past would be trawled by the detectives on his case but the extinguishing of his life would be forgotten by all but those closest to him by the following morning.

‘You think he’ll come here for us?’ Natalie asked him.

Jarvis looked out of the window for a moment and then shook his head. ‘No. Too obvious. He’ll lie low for a while, avoid attracting any more attention to what’s happened. The
death of one Congressional investigator can be put down to bad luck: another one and everybody will start to take notice. It would defeat the object.’

‘Which is what?’ Natalie asked. ‘He was going to kill me.’

‘He almost certainly was not,’ Jarvis said.

‘The CIA had Guy Rikard killed,’ Natalie snapped.

‘Larry Levinson was a CIA agent, that much is for sure, but there’s no way he’ll be traced back to them,’ Jarvis said. ‘The name will be an alias, his entire
history forged: it’s unlikely he’ll even be on the CIA’s payroll: the kind of units Mr. Wilson and Larry Levinson work for are funded through the Pentagon’s Black Budget,
which is protected from Congressional scrutiny.’

Natalie stared down at the floor for a moment.

‘So what happens now?’

Jarvis stared at the news channel and then leaned forward and turned up the volume as a newscaster read a report. Behind her on the screen was a large image of a forested mountain range.

Natalie’s hand flew to her mouth as the newsreader went on.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Natalie gasped, and whirled away out of the conservatory.

Jarvis muted the television and sighed as he leaned back into his chair.

A cleaning team would be put into the mine now that a suitably convincing cover story had been put in place. They would remove any last pieces of evidence of whatever existed there and then seal
the mine shut.

Nobody would ever get in there again.

Jarvis wanted to hope that Ethan and Lopez had gotten out of the mine before the blast, but he had no idea who the remains that had been found belonged to. The admission that any fatalities had
occurred meant that the CIA most likely would be forced to hand over the bodies at some point, perhaps due to the inevitable pressure that would be applied to the Sheriff’s Office and the
National Guard by concerned families of people missing in the Idaho wilderness. But nobody would ever be informed of exactly who had died, or what they were actually doing there.

He stood up from his chair and stared out of the window for a moment longer.

Mr. Wilson had done his work well, and now there was nothing left and nothing that Jarvis could do to change it.

It was over.

He turned and walked out of the conservatory. As he did so his cellphone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out and glanced at the screen before answering the call. An unidentified number waited
for him. He punched the answer button and lifted the cell to his ear.

‘Doug Jarvis.’

The answer was brief.

‘
Doug, it’s Ethan. We’re on the run and dark until further notice. Whoever did this to us is going to pay.
’

The line clicked off and the dead-line tone buzzed in Jarvis’s ear.

He slipped the cell into his pocket and walked through to the kitchen, where Natalie sat at a table with her head in her hands.

‘You’d better write down everything you found out about MK-ULTRA,’ he said. ‘Your brother’s alive, and he’s on the warpath.’

As more and more books in the Ethan Warner series are published I’ve come to realise that writing novels is no longer a solitary pursuit, and the knowledge that I have so
many people supporting my efforts is a huge comfort when staring at a computer monitor and wondering where the story should go next. As ever, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my literary agent
Luigi Bonomi and his team at LBA, to the publishing team at Simon & Schuster who all work so hard to develop and promote my work, and to my family and friends who all champion my work so
enthusiastically. There cannot be many people who feel that they have the best job in the world, so I am very fortunate to count myself as one of them.

The history of mankind is filled with stories of monsters, some real and others imagined. The origin of werewolf legends have been traced to medieval cases of lycanthropy in
Eastern Europe, the origin of vampires found within the deity myths of ancient cultures around the world. But while most such stories are legends, others remain tantalisingly within the realms of
possibility. Separating the fact from the fiction is often difficult, but today’s proliferation of video cameras on mobile phones and explorers willing to traverse the harshest terrain in
search of the impossible have vastly increased our knowledge of life upon this planet.

The vast majority of the creatures described within these pages are real. This might surprise some readers, but one only has to consider the dinosaurs to realise that it is possible for species
to reach truly terrifying proportions without being considered either supernatural or the product of pure human imagination. From the magnificent silver serpent
Regalecus glesne
to the
extinct ape
Gigantopithecus
; from dragonflies with wingspans equal to that of eagles to giant squid large enough to bring down sailing vessels: all were once considered fantastical legends
yet all have now been documented either by direct observation or through the study of their fossilised remains.

Sasquatch
remains to this day an enigma. No solid evidence of its existence has ever been presented, yet credible and knowledgeable witnesses continue to encounter some kind of ape-like
creature in high mountain regions across the entire globe. Our species has endured enormous catastrophes throughout its history, from meteorite strikes to super-volcano eruptions to tsunamis and
Ice Ages, and has prevailed. Is it so ridiculous to consider that another bipedal species of ape might have likewise prevailed in deep forests and mountains, far from human contact?

It is said that we know more about the moon than about our own oceans. Over three quarters of our planet is covered by water, little of the ocean’s mysterious depths explored by humans.
Somewhere out there something lives that is unlike anything we have ever seen, because the sounds recorded by the United States Navy’s SOSUS network in the deep sound channel of the Pacific
Ocean are also real. A creature with a mass some five times that of a blue whale would be an incredible sight to behold, and one that I hope will be found and documented someday along with so many
others that might be waiting out there in the farthest reaches of our planet.

Dean Crawford

London 2013