The Chimera Secret

17

‘I’ve got something.’

Natalie saw Ben hurrying toward her, a sheaf of papers in his hand. Guy Rikard looked up at him and smirked as he passed.

‘Is it catching?’

Ben ignored him; he grabbed a chair, hauled it across to Natalie’s desk and sat down beside her.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

She saw Ben’s features creased with concern. He was too cool to let Rikard notice it, but now as they huddled at her desk he let some of his tension spill out.

‘I did a bit of extra digging on Joanna Defoe, okay? Disappeared Gaza City four years ago.’ Ben laid down the papers he held on her desk and spread them out before her. ‘I found her in the database right away, no problems. Seems like there was a bit of a diplomatic spat between the administration of the time and the Israeli government, who claimed they had no responsibility for foreign journalists working in Gaza.’

Natalie nodded, recalling all too well those dark days. Ethan should, to all intents and purposes, be something of a non-event in the immense databases of the intelligence community. A former Marine Corps officer, he had served with some distinction in both Iraq and Afghanistan before resigning his commission to pursue a civilian career. Her brother had rarely come home, racing into war zones with the marines and then afterward living and working with Joanna in a succession of volatile countries where violence, abduction and corruption seemed less of a problem and more of a way of life. Columbia, Peru, Gaza, Israel, Somalia and others, each more dangerous and obscure than the last.

Their mother had repeatedly warned Ethan that, sooner or later, his luck would run out.

But it wasn’t his luck that had failed him. It was Joanna’s.

‘Israel kept out of it,’ Natalie said. ‘Ethan started a campaign to try to force Israel to commit resources to locate her and negotiate her release, but nothing came of it. Joanna was just another journalist who had disappeared and after a brief flurry of media interest she was forgotten.’

‘Figures,’ Ben said, ‘the information on her file stops just a few weeks after her disappearance. But that’s what bothered me the most.’

‘How come?’

Ben shifted one of the pieces of paper toward her. ‘Because not only did the department shut down the file on Joanna, which is odd as she was not yet presumed dead, but they opened an entirely new one.’

Natalie looked down at the sheet of paper and her heart skipped a beat.

‘Ethan,’ she whispered.

Ben’s voice reached her ears as though from the opposite side of the world.

‘Your brother has been under surveillance by at least one intelligence agency ever since he was thrown out of Israel several years ago. Ethan spent a year in Israel trying to find Joanna Defoe and harassing the Knesset to assist him in finding out what happened to her. Israel finally had him expelled from the country when he ran out of cash and threatened legal action against the government.’

Natalie leaned back in her chair and stared out of the office window as she considered the implications of what she had just heard. The intelligence community was keeping at the least a watching brief and quite possibly 24/7 surveillance on Ethan. Such endeavours required a significant amount of manpower, equipment and money. In a day and age when there were so many threats to United States security, to devote time and money to watching a former officer and patriot in such a way was highly unusual. Natalie had no doubt that her brother did not harbour any secret desire to blow up Congress or sink a Navy frigate, and was in fact absolutely certain that he was immensely proud to be an American.

‘Maybe it’s a result of what happened in Israel,’ she said, looking at the page. ‘Maybe he got involved in something sensitive enough for them to want to keep an eye on him?’

‘It gets weirder,’ Ben said, tapping a finger on another piece of paper. ‘Your brother is repatriated to the United States, heads home to Chicago and then promptly goes off the radar for almost three years. Doesn’t move much, doesn’t do much. No job, no pay checks, no nothing. Looks like he was renting a small apartment on the Lower East Side and paying for it with menial jobs, cash in hand. He didn’t even have a bank account.’

‘We didn’t hear from him the entire time,’ Natalie replied. ‘I was at college for most of it and would have visited but he refused to reveal his address. He could have been dead for all we knew.’

Ben nodded and slapped down a black-and-white photograph of Ethan stepping out of what looked suspiciously like Cook County Jail, Illinois. His face was bruised as though he’d been in a fight, a cut on his left cheek half-concealed by thick stubble, his clothes tattered and dirty.

‘You didn’t know where he lived but somebody did. Took this shot of him a couple of years ago: I found it on his file. Up until this time there’s not much in the files, just general movements. It seems that the watch got careless, didn’t stick close enough to him. Then, Ethan vanishes into thin air.’

Ben slid another piece of paper in front of her and his features became animated.

‘The CIA goes ape-shit! I’ve never seen so much traffic in such a short space of time around a single individual since Osama Bin Laden started getting big ideas back in the 1990s. They put agents all across Illinois trying to track him down.’

‘Jesus,’ Natalie whispered. ‘What the hell’s so important about Ethan that they’d commit so much to finding him?’

For intelligence agencies to pursue an interest in an individual and commit funds and resources to doing so would have to be justified to the chain of command, probably to field office level if the Bureau was involved. That would leave a record, a series of authorizations that could be traced back to an agent on the ground. And yet here there was nothing, no leads to follow.

‘The orders must have come from the top down,’ Natalie realized out loud. ‘Christ, this isn’t about Ethan, it can’t be. He’s just not important enough to warrant a surveillance operation this large.’

Ben leaned closer to her, his blue eyes wide.

‘It’s not Ethan they’re interested in,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

Ben didn’t take his eyes off of hers, but he slid the final piece of paper across to her. Natalie looked down at it. What she saw there chilled her to the bone.

Natalie backed away from the page on her desk as though it were a poisonous insect. Her heart fluttered briefly in her chest as her eyes cast further down the page.

‘That’s my entire family,’ she uttered, feeling almost sick.