The Chimera Secret Read Online Free

it?’
    ‘Kind of why I’m here.’
    Natalie sipped some of her wine and set the glass down before replying.
    ‘You’re off the grid for four years, then you turn up when you want something? Ethan, you live in the same city as Mom and Pop yet you’ve barely spoken to them in all that
time.’
    ‘I wasn’t myself,’ Ethan said, keeping his voice even. ‘Things are better now. Kind of.’
    Natalie merely raised a questioning eyebrow and sipped again at her wine. Ethan sighed heavily, not touching his drink.
    ‘Joanna might still be alive,’ he said.
    Natalie froze in motion, her glass touching her lips and her eyes staring into Ethan’s. She set the glass back down.
    ‘And you know this how?’
    ‘Can’t say much about it,’ Ethan replied. ‘Some of the people we’re contracted to have access to high-level intelligence. I did some work for one of them and in
return I got information. They had footage of her, Nat. Not much, but enough.’
    ‘How old was the reel?’ she asked him.
    ‘No more than six months old at the time. Nearly a year now.’
    Natalie stared at her glass for a long moment, and Ethan could tell that the sudden revelation wasn’t provoking the kind of excitement in her that he had hoped to see.
    Joanna Defoe had been Ethan’s fiancée and business partner. Working as investigative journalists in some of the world’s most dangerous places, they had exposed corruption and
in the process saved dozens of victims of abduction and incarceration from lonely, unjust deaths. But their achievements had finally caught up with them in the sinister, sun-scorched alleys of Gaza
City. Joanna Defoe had vanished without trace four years previously, presumed abducted by militants. Ethan’s life had collapsed in the aftermath of her disappearance, all of his money
expended in a futile search for her across the Middle East. Distraught, broke and driven by little more than alcohol and bitterness, Ethan had been given the chance to search for her again in
Israel just a year previously by a friend who had been his commander in the US Marines during Operation Iraqi Freedom. That had led to his work with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the
information that had recently identified Joanna as alive. Among other things.
    ‘What do you want?’ Natalie asked.
    She wasn’t looking at him. Ethan chose his words carefully.
    ‘I need somebody to look into where she might be, do some digging in places that I can’t.’
    Natalie kept her eyes on her wine glass.
    ‘Can’t you just ask your friend? Surely they would know where to begin better than I would?’
    ‘His help was a one-off,’ Ethan explained. ‘I can’t go back to him without having to risk my neck again for the chance of more information.’
    Natalie finally looked up at him. ‘What the hell are you involved in, Ethan?’
    ‘It’s complicated. We’re bail bondsmen by trade, but we also do investigative work for the government.’
    Natalie leaned forward. ‘Who?’
    Ethan paused as he figured that there wasn’t much harm in telling her. Christ, she worked for Congress – she could probably find out herself with a single phone call.
    ‘Defense Intelligence Agency,’ he said. ‘We pick up cases that the other agencies write off as unworkable.’
    ‘Unworkable how?’
    Ethan shrugged. ‘Budgets don’t justify the work, or the manpower’s not available because agencies are focused on counterterrorism. We get called in to investigate in their
place.’
    Natalie was watching him with a steady gaze as though trying to peer through the DIA’s veil of secrecy and uncover the bizarre things that he had seen.
    ‘Who’s
we
?’ she asked him finally.
    ‘Nicola Lopez, my partner. Former DC detective. She’s solid.’
    ‘She’d be solid if she was still a ranked detective,’ Natalie uttered. ‘She fall on hard times too?’
    ‘Partner got killed,’ Ethan replied as he felt his jaw tighten as it so often did when he thought about