‘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.’
35
‘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.’