Jarvis turned to one of the men sitting nearby.
‘Can you access the Idaho Army National Guard database? I need the dates and locations of all call-outs regarding missing persons in the Nez Perce National Forest area.’
The technician’s fingers rattled across his keyboard as he accessed a search engine and tapped in the search strings. Jarvis moved around to his workstation as his computer flashed up a response.
‘Okay,’ the technician said, ‘fifty-six call-outs over the past thirty-eight years, mostly involving the 116th Cavalry and associated aviation units out of Gowen Field, Boise.’
Jarvis nodded.
‘Right, now can you cross reference those searches with matching missing-persons reports from either Grangeville Sheriff’s Office or Riggins.’
The keys rattled and the computer screen blinked as a new, refined search appeared.
‘Thirty-nine of the call-outs match,’ the technician said.
Jarvis looked at the list on the screen.
‘Okay, can you locate the approximate locations where the missing persons vanished, if the information was available at the time?’
Jarvis watched as the technician transposed the various latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the disappearances. The process took several minutes as the handwritten reports naming the locations were found and then placed on the map.
When he had finished, Jarvis looked at the final image.
‘They’re all within about five miles of each other,’ he said.
The disappearances were clustered around a deep valley and mountain complex near the very heart of the Nez Perce National Forest, north of a place called Moore’s Lake.
‘Wild country,’ the technician said, ‘I’m seeing gorges here that are some of the deepest in the country. Anybody suffers an injury or gets stranded in any way out there, they’re in for a rough ride.’
Jarvis glanced at a second monitor, where the names and personal details of the missing people that had vanished over the past three or four decades were listed. He saw immediately that the technician was right: apart from one or two hardy survivalists, almost all of the missing persons were local guides and hunters, people who knew the area.
He looked back at the image of the forest where the people had disappeared.
‘Can you blow this up to high resolution, get it up on a bigger screen?’
‘Sure,’ the technician said, and gestured across the laboratory to a pair of plasma screens. ‘I’ll send it to the workstation there.’
Jarvis made his way across the lab, the image beating him to the screen as it flashed up ten times as large as the original and with the tags marking the last known locations of the vanished people still visible. Jarvis leaned in close.
In the very heart of the forest was a deep, winding gorge that twisted its way west and then north to a spot where several valleys converged on a single point buried deep in the forest. All of the disappearances seemed to be centered close to the middle of the gorge, within about a kilometre of each other and with a slight bias to the west, where high mountains soared up from the valleys around Fox Creek.
‘There,’ Jarvis tapped the screen. ‘Those mountains. They were all close to something up there when they vanished.’
The technician joined him, squinted at the screen and shrugged.
‘Looks like virgin forest to me,’ he said. ‘At this resolution, anything there much bigger than a camp fire would be visible.’
Jarvis could almost make out individual trees amid the vast swathes of dense forest, and in fact on part of the hillside he could actually identify where large patches of forest gave way to gray rock and what looked like shale.
‘What are those?’ he asked the technician, pointing to the rocky outcrops.
The technician called across the lab to one of his colleagues, who jogged over and peered at the screen.
‘Joe here has a degree in geology,’ the technician said by way of an explanation.
Joe looked at the image for no more than a few seconds before he spoke.
‘It’s caused by runoff from mining operations,’ he said. ‘The hills in Idaho were hugely popular for hard-rock mining, but the work often poisoned the soil around the mine entrances or the trees were cleared to make space for equipment, leaving these patches of bare earth.’
Jarvis examined the image again and turned to the technician.
‘Can you put locations to any of these mines on this image?’
The technician hurried back to his workstation, as Joe looked at Jarvis.
‘What are you thinking? That Randy MacCarthy found something up there?’
‘Maybe,’ Jarvis said, not willing to commit himself until he had further evidence.
The image blinked and three tags appeared, each over a patch of earth but all within about a kilometre of the central gorge.
‘Three mines,’ the technician said, ‘all abandoned, the last in 1915, and get this: the National Forest Service banned access to the area two decades ago due to rock falls and unstable ground in the area of the mines. Public access to these peaks is denied, which is why only the National Guard is allowed to conduct searches in the area.’
Jarvis stood up from examining the image. Fact was, the National Guard wouldn’t get out of bed on such a regular basis looking for wandering tourists out in the Idaho hills. They would, however, be mobilised if something had to be protected, even if the guard itself was not informed of what that something was. Being a force derived from militia, the guard was subordinate to the fully deployable military and would obey orders from higher authority without question. Given the unlikely story of tiny mines causing unstable ground on mountains that weighed billions of tons, Jarvis felt almost certain that whatever was up there was the reason for the disappearances.
And it made Randy MacCarthy’s encrypted files all the more interesting.
‘Keep on this,’ he said to the technician, ‘but stay quiet about it. Let me know if there are any further movements in the area, either by local law enforcement or the National Guard.’
The technician nodded, and Jarvis left them to their work as he walked out of the laboratory and caught an elevator down to the ground floor. His mind was working overtime as he strode out of the security buffer and into the pale sunshine of the parking lot. He got into his pool car and drove out of the DIA complex, heading for the Capitol.
Fact was, he had no business in the district and should have been at his desk. But what Natalie Warner had said about the surveillance on her family had bothered him immensely, and now the sudden loss of communication with Ethan was another blow to his operation. Images of the grilling by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and William Steel flashed through his mind, and he checked his mirror.
It only took about three minutes of driving and careful observation before he knew what he was looking at. His instincts spoke to him despite his disbelief screaming that it simply could not be true.
A silver GMC followed him, cruising three cars back. Jarvis had been in the business long enough to know how to get a tail to show his colors. He hit his turn signal and changed lanes. The GMC didn’t signal or turn but it drifted subtly out to the edge of its lane, as the driver subconsciously reacted to the movement of Jarvis’s vehicle on the road.
No doubt then. He was under surveillance too.
39
‘Project MK-ULTRA,’ Ben Consiglio said finally as they climbed out of the car.
They had agreed not to talk about what they’d discovered during the journey back, just in case the car had been bugged. Although Natalie felt stupid about it, as though she were being excessively paranoid and was acting the part of a suspect in a hammy police show, there was still the remote possibility that she was a target both because of the Congressional investigation and because of her digging into Joanna Defoe’s past.