Lopez stopped straining. Ethan released her and watched as she stepped past him and reached out for Sedgewick’s paperwork. Her dark eyes glowered at Jarvis as she snatched the papers out of his hand.
‘Whatever you’re here for,’ she growled, ‘you better make damned sure it doesn’t get anybody else killed on our watch.’
With that, Lopez turned and stormed out of the office, reaching out with one hand to yank Sedgewick to his feet and haul him out of the room like a giant recalcitrant teddy bear. The office fell silent in her wake as Ethan turned to Jarvis.
‘You really should keep your pet under control, Ethan,’ the old man murmured.
Ethan hooked one boot behind the office door and kicked it shut.
‘You think? You got any idea what she went through?’
‘Of course I do,’ Jarvis shot back. ‘I don’t go out of my way to get civilians killed, Ethan. It’s what we’re here to prevent. But Nicola has a serious attitude problem and you need to make sure she keeps a lid on it. The DIA won’t hesitate to take their work somewhere else if they find out what she can be like. Discretion is what we’re about, Ethan. Perhaps you should go it alone, it’s how you worked best in the marines.’
Ethan ground his teeth in his jaw. ‘I had a platoon behind me in the marines, Doug. I’d much rather be with Lopez than without her, no matter what you think. You here on business?’
‘Not entirely. How are things? Any news on Joanna’s whereabouts?’
A shadow descended upon Ethan even as the name fell from Jarvis’s lips. The things that should have remained buried.
‘No,’ he uttered. ‘I don’t know where to start looking for her, or even if I should.’
Jarvis stood up.
‘We can talk about that on the way,’ he said.
‘On the way to where?’
‘The University of Chicago’s zoology department,’ Jarvis replied. ‘We’ll pick Lopez up en route. I’m sending you both up north, but you’ll need to hear from an expert what’s happened first, otherwise you won’t believe it.’
6
To say that the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, General William Steel, was in deep shit was something of an understatement and nobody knew it more than he. Sitting in his office in the brand new headquarters in Fairfax County, he was the commander of perhaps the most famous of all America’s many clandestine intelligence agencies.
And it was that fame that was ruining both his day and his career.
He had just received a call from the President of the United States, who that morning had received, as he always did, a daily briefing from the CIA. Within that report, compiled by analysts to give the President a broad-strokes picture of the current state of affairs around the world, was a single paragraph detailing a covert program that had been running for six years. William Steel had not authorized the program; it had been initiated during the tenure of his predecessor. The President also had not authorized the program, it had been created by his predecessor. Both men had inherited it, and it had blown up spectacularly in their faces to become a problem that could end both their careers.
Thus, the phone call had not been especially cordial.
The President rarely swore. He shouted profanities even less. The message had been clear: make the problem go away. Right now.
The problem with making the other problem go away was that it was a covert operation conducted not on the dusty plains of Iraq, the bitter mountains of Afghanistan or in the dangerous alleys of Pakistan, but in the picturesque hills of Idaho. Worse, the problem was compounded by a further issue: the program was one department within a larger CIA-funded and controlled program that had been running covertly for no less than forty-eight years.
William Steel sat in his leather chair, his thick hands folded on the desk in front of him and his eyes vacant as he mulled over the complex dilemma he faced, his craggy and graying features creased with the burden of responsibility.
A sharp knock at his office door snapped him out of his reverie, and he sat up straight as a tall, sepulchral-looking man strode in and closed the door behind him. The man walked across to a seat opposite Steel and sat down before regarding the director with frosty blue eyes set into an emotionless face.
‘How bad?’
The man’s voice was disarmingly soft, more like a doctor than an experienced field agent. Truth was, Steel did not like Mr. Wilson at all. A product of the agency’s darker years after the political and military fallout of the Vietnam War, Wilson was a lethally capable trained assassin.
‘You’re here, aren’t you?’ Steel replied.
‘What would you have me do?’
No hesitation. No emotions. No concern, hubris or doubt that Steel could detect. Wilson was all business. Christ, the man didn’t even seem to blink. It was like sitting in front of a goddamned waxwork.
‘Congress has started another investigation into CIA-sponsored paramilitary programs,’ Steel said. ‘After what happened in 2009, when one of our counterterrorism programs was busted open and terminated by Congressional meddling, we want to shut down some of our more sensitive operations until the dust settles.’
‘I’m not an administrator,’ Wilson replied without rancour.
‘One of the programs is almost a half-century old,’ Steel explained. ‘You of course know about it.’
Wilson’s eyes narrowed. ‘Project MK-ULTRA.’
‘The same,’ Steel confirmed. ‘The other is a subsidiary of the same program being run out in Idaho. That’s where the big problem is. We’ve lost all contact with the team on site.’
Wilson leaned forward in his seat. ‘You know what they’ve got up there,’ he said, revealing for the first time a hint of concern. ‘What they’ve been doing.’
‘I do,’ Steel confirmed, ‘and if word gets out about it, it won’t just be the end of my career or the President’s. It’ll probably see the end of this agency. We’ll lose our independent status and with it protection from Congressional control. With the bleeding-heart liberals running operations our ability to protect the United States from our enemies, to do the things required to maintain security, will be totally compromised.’
Wilson nodded, his icy gaze never leaving Steel’s.
‘You didn’t bring me here to send me to Idaho,’ he said. ‘You can use a paramilitary team to clear up the mess there and—’
‘We already sent two teams,’ Steel cut him off. ‘We lost contact with the first of them last night. A second team is in the field at the moment and have tied up some loose ends, but they’re under strict orders not to let anybody approach the site.’
Wilson stared at Steel for a long beat. His frosty eyes finally flickered as though a ray of sunlight had penetrated their glacial depths.
‘It’s escaped,’ he said. Steel nodded but said nothing. ‘Has the second team you sent maintained security?’
Steel bit his lip before replying.
‘They removed one player who had obtained information regarding the site, a civilian. But the Defense Intelligence Agency got to the paperwork before we could intervene,’ he said. ‘It appears they’ve got some kind of outsourced team that investigates events passed over by the FBI.’
Mr. Wilson glanced out of the office windows.
‘So they killed a civilian, and now we’ve got independent investigators crawling around out there?’
‘Nobody’s on site as far as we can tell,’ Steel said, ‘at least, not yet. They’re probably trying to put the pieces together as we speak. If the DIA sends anybody, they can be dealt with. I’m more concerned about the possibility that Congress picks up the trail too. If the committee assigned to investigate projects that have been withheld from Congress lays its hands on hard evidence of what’s been going on, we’re screwed. It’ll all be over.’