‘Cletus MacCarthy,’ Ethan said softly.
He must have watched the mines and found these passages, then worked out what was happening inside. Jesse had told them that he hated tourists visiting the area and preferred to be alone in the wilderness. Some kind of government operation might have remained concealed from casual hikers, but Cletus would have known all about it. Maybe even witnessed the suffering of the creatures detained in the facility.
He must have sabotaged the operation. But even if he managed to escape the area and the Special Forces soldiers guarding it, he would have left evidence, maybe fingerprints. Local enquiries would have been enough to track him down, along with his brothers. Randy’s mother had said she felt her home had been searched in her absence.
‘They got the wrong brother,’ he muttered bitterly to himself.
They had staged Randy’s suicide, believing him to be the culprit. Yet in a strange twist of fate, Cletus had also died, victim of the enraged sasquatch attack that had claimed the life of ranger Gavin Coltz. That left Jesse, a man the authorities that owned this place would no doubt be happy to see jailed for life.
He looked down at the power junction box and at a digital display on the front that provided timed power cycles, probably meant for internal heating and hot-water supplies. The timer had reset itself to zero when the emergency generators had been started. Ethan looked down at the power cable in his hand and the one still lying on the ground as an insidious idea formed in his mind.
He knelt down in front of the power junction, checked his watch, then set the timer to activate in five minutes.
He reached down and shoved both of the power cables back into position, careful not to touch the exposed metal, and then used strips of his shirt to tie them into place. He stood up, satisfied, and then hurried away toward the living quarters where Lopez, Dana and Proctor were being held.
Kurt Agry was about to get what he deserved.
Payback.
61
Natalie Warner stepped out of the battered house into the night air, her head filled with a thousand revelations that fell like the rain pouring down from the cold dark sky above. As Anderson closed the door behind her, she knew that there was no way the CIA could keep its illegal program covered up if Anderson agreed to testify to the Senate and maybe even the Supreme Court. Burning the papers might have worked in 1973, but now she had hard evidence of CIA intervention in the investigation that would be virtually impossible for any district attorney to ignore.
The CIA would have a hard time stopping the commission now.
The last time the agency had tried to conceal evidence was after video tapes of the CIA ‘waterboarding’ a suspected jihadist after the victim was rendered from the USA into a prison believed to have been in Thailand. The videos, which had shown the victim screaming and vomiting, had been destroyed by the then head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. When the trials of major terrorists began, their defenses hinged on the fact that waterboarding at the hands of CIA interrogators was, in any sensible way, considered to be a form of torture. Along with other known forms of extreme punishment such as sleep deprivation, often for weeks at a time, enforced nakedness, stress positions and suchlike, which the CIA and the US Department of Justice had referred to as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, the defense would argue that under such torture anybody would confess to just about anything in order to gain relief from their suffering. Natalie herself had read of men who had experienced extreme rendition to CIA-run prisons in countries non-signatory to the Geneva Convention, who had confessed afterward that they had become expert liars in order to avoid torture. Their lies had cost the intelligence community millions of taxpayers’ dollars wasted chasing phantom agents and nonexistent cells, all from the imaginations of men who had committed no crime at all.
Now, she finally understood what had happened to Joanna Defoe. She had not been abducted by militants in the Gaza Strip. She had been the victim of rendition by the CIA in order to silence her investigation and prevent a scandal in the White House, the support of the then president for a corrupt arms company called MACE and to prevent her exposing whatever she knew about the still operational MK-ULTRA.
Joanna was still alive. If Natalie could somehow contact her and tell her what she now knew, the evidence she had collated, then she could blow the whole damned thing wide open. The results would no doubt echo through government for decades to come.
Natalie pulled out her cellphone and started to dial a number as she hurried to her car, using her jacket to shroud her head from the rain.
Natalie had no problem with the intelligence community extracting information from the kind of insane bastards who sought to burn Western civilization to the ground for nothing more than imaginary religious ideals. What she did resent was the heavy-handed way in which the CIA sought to do so. There were smarter ways to get results, and she intended to make sure that—
The blast did not register in her mind at first.
For a split second Natalie believed that she had tripped on the sidewalk in the dark as her legs crumpled beneath her and she felt herself in midair. Then something plowed into her from behind and she thought that she’d been hit by a truck as she span through the darkness, the street lights around her flashing crazily past.
Then the heat hit her like a blast furnace, stinging her eyes as they dried out instantly as the heat wave washed over her. Natalie hit the asphalt hard, rolling as the force of the explosion rattled her brain in her skull and caused her vision to blur.
The noise hit her last, a roaring crash of thunder and shattered glass as behind her Anderson’s home suddenly vanished within a snarling fireball. Chunks of scorched clapperboard and twinkling jewels of glass crashed down around Natalie as she sat dazed on the sidewalk, blinking and staring into the crackling flames.
She shivered slightly and then bent over as she coughed and spat a globule of phlegm onto the sidewalk. She felt sick but managed to control herself, sucking in a lungful of night air as doors to other houses opened, people looking out and pointing at the flaming wreckage of Anderson’s home.
Natalie turned and saw her phone on the sidewalk, the screen still glowing and a soft ring tone just audible over the flames and the shouts of alarm. She crawled forward on her hands and knees and picked up the cell. Her voice was croaky and weak as she spoke.
‘Hello?’
‘Natalie? Where are you?’
The voice sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Douglas Jarvis.’
Natalie’s fists clenched on the asphalt beneath her. ‘You son of a bitch. You killed him.’
‘Shut up!’ The voice crackled down the line with enough force and venom to both surprise and silence her. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I’ve been fired. The CIA are coming after all of us, Natalie. Get away from the case as fast as you can.’
Natalie blinked in confusion.
‘My chief witness just got killed in an explosion,’ she said meekly.
‘Natalie,’ Jarvis said. ‘Run. Now!’
Natalie staggered to her feet, one hand reaching out to balance herself on the trunk of her car as she wobbled around to the driver’s door. Her hand, the knuckles scuffed and bleeding, reached into her bag for her keys and she climbed into the seat.
People were emerging from their houses, some of them pointing at her as others stared, cellphones to their ears. Natalie switched on the engine and pulled away in a screech of rubber.