The Chimera Secret (6 page)

‘I’ll get it done,’ Steel said finally.

There was no other option. The danger of seeing the CIA shut down was simply too great. Steel knew that threats to disband the agency dated back to the Kennedy administration. As recently as
2004, senators had repeated a need to end the agency and see it broken up into smaller departments overseen more closely by Congress and other intelligence agencies. With public concern about the
lack of information regarding CIA policies and activities, a $44 billion per year budget and the potential for the abuse of unchecked executive power, a scandal now could bring the agency down
around General Steel, an outcome he intended to prevent with all of that unchecked power.

Wilson stood and looked down at the director.

‘Focus on the outsourced investigators at the DIA,’ he advised. ‘That’s the weak link in their investigation and the easiest way to trip them up. We need controllable
government agents up there in Idaho, not freelancers.’

Steel nodded. Both the CIA and the DIA employed contractors that accounted for almost 50 per cent of the total workforce. The travesty of the situation meant that civilians were exposed to
classified information which could then be leaked to the media, and the only retaliation the agency could mount would be expensive and complex court battles instead of more discreet internal
investigations and punishments.

‘I’ll arrange a meeting with the Director DIA, Director NSA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff,’ Steel confirmed. ‘With luck I might be able to get this back under our
control.’

‘It’s already too late for that,’ Wilson replied coolly. ‘This is damage limitation. The Idaho site needs to be removed from play entirely and anybody up there eradicated
along with it.’

Steel sighed heavily but he knew that Wilson was right. Cutting the head off the Hydra was no longer an option: only total destruction would suffice.

‘What about that
thing
they have up there?’ he asked.

‘That’s your problem,’ Wilson replied. ‘I’ll take care of this end. I know for a fact that we’ve had at least one Congressional official under surveillance
for some time. They’ll come in handy right now.’

Steel stared at Wilson in amazement.

‘Who?’

The zoology department was a gothic-looking building located on East 57th Street. Ethan looked out of the window as the sedan pulled in alongside an ornate archway called Hull
Gate. Jarvis climbed out and led Ethan and Lopez into the complex. Tree-lined residential halls were filled with students hurrying from one lecture to another or catching the last warmth of the
fall on the neat gardens.

‘What are we doing back at school?’ Lopez asked.

‘There’s been an incident, way up in Idaho. You need some background training before you head up there.’

They turned left along a path that led to the entrance of the compound’s zoology building. Ethan followed Jarvis inside, the old man apparently knowing exactly where he was going, and
reached an office within. Ethan glimpsed a nameplate on the door as he walked in: Professor Giles Middleton.

The office was in part a laboratory, but one that looked as though it had been built sometime during the previous century. To Ethan it looked like a cross between Hogwarts and
Frankenstein’s dining room. Tall glass cabinets lined an entire wall, filled with glass jars containing the remains of bizarre creatures the likes of which Ethan had never seen.

‘Jesus,’ Lopez muttered. ‘It’s like
Pan’s Labyrinth
in here.’

Ethan leaned close to one of the glass jars, peering in at what looked like a cross between a baby hippo and an alligator, suspended in some kind of embalming fluid. Small, black eyes squinted
vacantly back at him from within the jar, which had a yellowing label affixed to one side.

Lopez peered in at the strange foetus. ‘Whatever the hell that is, I’m glad it didn’t get the chance to grow up.’

Ethan glanced around the laboratory, dust motes glinting in the sunlight beaming through the windows. The beams hit a painting on one wall that depicted what looked like a Spanish galleon being
crushed in the grip of an immense octopus, terrified sailors hurling themselves from the ship’s rigging into a tumultuous sea.

To his left were row upon row of specimen jars that held a thousand different species, all of them looking as though they had come from another planet. The darkest recesses at the back of the
laboratory harboured shadowy forms like demons sheltering from the light, deformed skeletons and grotesque skulls peering as though from the gates of Hades.

Then Ethan looked up.

‘Holy crap,’ he uttered out loud.

Suspended from the ceiling beams was a skeleton of bleached bones that Ethan reckoned must be at least fifty feet long, its remains looping back and forth across the ceiling in order to fit it
all in. There was no mistaking what it looked like. Yet the only problem for him was that what it looked like was a creature from the fantasies of science-fiction authors, the long and undulating
body of a fish tipped with the head of some kind of shark.

‘It looks like a sea serpent,’ Lopez said as she gazed up at the remains.

The reply came from the doorway behind them. ‘That’s because it
is
a sea serpent.’

Ethan turned to see a small man with a wizened face and short gray hair smiling at him from behind half-moon spectacles. Professor Middleton stepped into the laboratory, taking off his
spectacles and polishing the lenses on his shirt as he examined the monstrosity looming above them.

‘It’s a
Regalecus glesne,
otherwise known as the giant oarfish,’ he explained. ‘This one was caught in the nets of a trawler off the coast of California in 1996
and acquired by me for the university. They can grow twice as large, although none that size have been captured. Yet.’

Jarvis introduced Middleton to Ethan and Lopez. The professor was a world-recognized expert in the subject of cryptozoology.

‘I thought that cryptozoology wasn’t considered a valid scientific discipline,’ Ethan said. ‘Pseudo-science, I think biologists call it.’

Middleton smiled ruefully as he replaced his spectacles and pointed up at the enormous oarfish above them.

‘Do you think that’s pseudo-science?’ he challenged, but his blue eyes were bright with delight. ‘Mr. Warner, throughout history people have recorded sightings of
creatures so bizarre that the witnesses were dismissed as hoaxers or drunks. It has become common discipline to dismiss anything considered too out of the ordinary by science. Solid,
incontrovertible evidence is required before any self-respecting researcher will even begin to consider the existence of a new species that defies conventional description.’

Jarvis took up Middleton’s line.

‘Over the past couple of decades there have been some studies conducted into the existence of creatures that used to be the stuff of myth. The reason that the scientific community has
begun to embrace the possibility of these animals being real is the ubiquity of video cameras on cellphones. For the first time in history, people can actually prove that what they said they saw
was real.’

‘Or not,’ Middleton cautioned. ‘Many honest people have been genuinely fooled by natural phenomena or misidentification of ordinary creatures under unusual lighting conditions
or at great distance. That said, sometimes what they see is truly terrifying even when it’s not a new species.’

‘Such as?’ Lopez asked, intrigued.

‘Well,’ Middleton shrugged, ‘a few years back somebody claimed to have footage of a giant black beast running across the wilderness in Dartmoor, England. The footage was
analyzed by experts and was confirmed to be a rare black lion, an adult male and a big one at that. Obviously it’s not a species native to that island, but you’re still talking about a
four-hundred-pound killing machine running wild out there. You can understand where the legends of a beast roaming the moors came from. It’s not hard to imagine people being hunted down and
killed by a giant African cat.’

‘But how could it have gotten there?’ Ethan asked.

‘The Kings of England often kept big cats in the Tower of London as spectator attractions and symbols of wealth and power,’ Jarvis said. ‘Many of them escaped over the years.
There was also a craze in the seventies for keeping exotic big cats as pets. When the government there changed the laws to prevent people owning dangerous animals, the owners turned their animals
loose into the wild. Of course there weren’t enough of them to maintain a true breeding population else they’d have been documented by now. But individual animals within huge tracts of
wilderness and with an ample food supply could survive for years.’

Ethan glanced uncertainly at Jarvis. ‘Why are you telling us about this?’

‘You’re being sent to Idaho to interview a man named Jesse MacCarthy, who is currently being held by the Sheriff’s Department on suspicion of homicide.’

‘Who did he kill?’ Lopez asked.

‘Well, that’s the question: did he actually kill anyone?’ Jarvis said. ‘Jesse MacCarthy’s case was picked up by the FBI because Jesse claimed his brother Cletus had
been killed in the forests outside of Riggins, Idaho, along with a Ranger by the name of Coltz. Because Riggins sits near the border of Oregon, Montana and Washington State, and Jesse was so
incoherent when he was found, the sheriff couldn’t figure out for sure where Cletus was when he died. They had to assume the case might have crossed borders so they called the Bureau
in.’

‘Which is where you come in, right?’ Lopez suggested.

‘The DIA picked up the case after the FBI rejected it. Turns out that not only did Cletus MacCarthy die in the woods, but a third brother, Randy, was found hanged in his garage the
following morning. The Bureau’s agents on site decided that Jesse must have killed both of his brothers in some catastrophic mental breakdown. Apparently he was suffering panic attacks for
about twenty-four hours after he was found, so the mental instability figures.’

‘Why would the FBI drop it so quickly?’ Ethan puzzled. ‘Two deaths in twenty-four hours in the same family is suspicious, but I take it there’s no smoking gun tying Jesse
to the killings otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

‘Not exactly a smoking gun,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Jesse has claimed repeatedly to local law enforcement and the Bureau that he knew nothing of Randy’s death. But he also
insisted that his other brother, Cletus, whose body has not yet been found, was killed by a monster in the forests.’

The room remained silent for a moment.

‘A monster,’ Lopez echoed flatly.

‘His exact words,’ Jarvis confirmed.

Ethan thought for a moment. ‘There’s got to be more to it than that.’

‘Not for the Bureau,’ Jarvis said. ‘But when I got the case I took a better look at it. There are several things that don’t add up. Randy’s estimated time of death
is stated as being the same time that Jesse was supposedly out in the forests. Of course he could have lied about where he was, killing both brothers in the same time frame, except that when he was
found his clothes were torn to shreds and he was on the verge of cardiac arrest. The doctors who treated him diagnosed extreme dehydration and exhaustion, which backed up his story.’

‘Which was?’

‘That Cletus was killed somewhere near a place called Fox Creek in the mountains to the east of Riggins. It’s almost twenty miles away from the town through severe terrain, and Jesse
swears his brother was killed the previous evening.’

Ethan got it immediately.

‘He ran twenty miles, at night, through the mountains?’

‘Non-stop,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘Whatever he saw, it scared him enough to flee so far and so fast that it almost killed him.’

In his time with the United States Marines, Ethan had been put through some severe physical challenges that had tested the limits of his endurance. That was just part of a
soldier’s life, accepted by all who served. But for a civilian with no prior history of extreme physical endurance to run for twelve hours across wild ground was an almost superhuman
feat.

‘So Jesse gets back to civilization,’ Ethan said, ‘finds somebody and tells them a monster killed his brother.’

Jarvis nodded.

‘He’s taken to hospital, but after a few hours the Sheriff’s Office arrests him in connection with his brother’s death. No motive had been found but Jesse won’t
shift from his story, which has been digging him further into trouble.’

‘You want us to go in and figure it out,’ Lopez guessed. ‘You really sure this guy’s worth all the trouble? What’s that scientific rule – Occam’s Razor?
You don’t introduce one mystery to explain another. It’s more likely that Jesse killed his brothers and concocted a crazy story to throw the police off the scent.’

Ethan’s gaze drifted up to the writhing skeletal coils above his head.

‘True,’ he agreed, ‘but Idaho is big bear country. Why invent a story about a monster when he could just have said a bear got his brother? And if Jesse did murder them both
then why come back at all? Why not stay out in the woods a while, then come back as if nothing’s happened?’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Professor Middleton said. ‘There is no good reason for Jesse MacCarthy to falsely claim a monster killed his brother. Nor could he possibly have
faked the damage done to his body in his flight from those mountains. The simplest explanation, Miss Lopez, is that he saw something that terrified him almost to death.’

‘Couldn’t he have seen a bear though?’ Lopez suggested. ‘Been mistaken?’

Jarvis shook his head.

‘Two of the three MacCarthy brothers were experienced woodsmen and hunters, taught by their father. Jesse was the youngest but he knew the region like the back of his hand: well enough, if
we assume he’s told the truth, to find his way home in the dead of night while in a state of blind panic. These guys knew what bears looked like. But that’s not what intrigues us the
most.’

Middleton pushed his spectacles further up onto his nose as he took his cue. ‘This has happened before.’