The Eternity Project

by Dean Crawford

  Staying off the grid, away from any kind of observation or transaction that would allow those in power to locate and apprehend him, was harder than Ethan could ever have imagined. He had once read that many thousands of people disappear every year in America, simply vanishing from existence. Although some were probably the victims of crimes such as homicide, the majority just got up and left their homes, lives, jobs and families, never to return. To do so wasn’t necessarily the hardest part: staying hidden was what tested even the most determined of absconders. The majority of runaways turned up sooner or later; sometimes living in different states or even different countries and having made errors that exposed them: habits and hobbies, loose talk or even just the mention of a hometown or friend that placed them elsewhere in the country. Others were spotted as a result of campaigns by concerned relatives. Some just couldn’t stay away and returned of their own accord. But a small minority vanished and managed to maintain entirely new lives, never once returning to those they left behind.

  Insider knowledge helped, but common sense was also a valuable weapon and Ethan knew how to hide in plain sight. Wearing a hoodie would attract attention from innocent civilians fearing a mugging and suspicious cops sensing the chance of an arrest, so attempting to conceal his face was out of bounds. This would normally expose him to the ever-watching eye of government agencies. His eyes flicked up to myriad watching cameras that scanned the crowds, but he knew that any facial-recognition software being run by the NSA or the CIA would be unable to identify him beneath his simple but effective disguise.

  Most of the high-tech facial-recognition programs used anchor-points, features on the face like eye and eyebrow position, the shape of the ear, width of the jaw and so on. Ethan had donned sunglasses with light-sensitive lenses that obscured his eyes. He had grown his hair longer, letting it cover his ears. He shaved rarely, thick stubble concealing his jawline and chin, and he had used a dye to speckle his hair with streaks of gray that aged him by a decade. He wore faded jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of some rock band he’d never heard of and a jacket that was a size too large, concealing his physique.

  In short, he looked like a middle-aged, slightly overweight dropout: anonymous.

  Ethan had accumulated extensive knowledge of what it took to remain hidden in the modern world, not through his own experience but through his search for a woman who quite likely lived as he did now: off the grid, anonymous. Joanna Defoe, his fiancée, had vanished from Gaza City, Palestine, four years previously. Ethan had believed her dead, but just a year ago had seen a remarkable piece of footage captured by an Israeli drone showing her alive, escaping an attack on Palestinian militants by Israeli forces. That footage, now almost two years old, had started him on a new mission to locate her, much to the chagrin of his family and friends. He had been making some progress when everything had gone to hell and he’d found himself on the run with his partner.

  A young man weaved his way toward Ethan through the crowds. He wore a Yankees baseball cap over dark hair, a long winter coat with a high collar and carried a large backpack slung over his shoulder that further concealed his shape. He held a cellphone to his ear, shielding his features from the cameras high above as he moved to stand next to Ethan. A faint five-o’clock shadow was visible against the dark skin of his jaw as Ethan looked down at him.

  ‘You need a shave, son.’

  A pair of dark, exotic almond eyes peered up at him from beneath the cap, going purposefully boss-eyed as the young man spoke with a remarkably feminine accent into the cellphone.

  ‘We’ll be there.’

  Ethan heard a tinny sounding reply from the cell, and then the young man shut it off and slipped it into a pocket before looking up at him.

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ Nicola Lopez uttered. ‘Start acting like a good parent and take my bag.’

  Lopez let her backpack fall from her shoulder and thump down onto Ethan’s foot. He smiled as he picked the bag up. ‘Insolent juvenile. I’ll send you to bed with no dinner.’

  ‘I’d rather go hungry than eat your cooking. How much longer are we going to keep this crap up? You should have seen the ticket man’s face when he got a good look at me. Probably thought I was a lady-boy.’

  ‘It’s enough to fool the cameras,’ Ethan replied evenly. ‘That’s what they’ll be using to search for us, narrowing our location down before moving agents in, and the resolution won’t be enough to expose you. We keep this up, we stay off their radar. Once Jarvis gets in touch, we’ll hopefully be able to quit with the disguises.’

  ‘It’s been six months,’ Lopez grumbled, rubbing at the make-up she’d used to mimic stubble. ‘He’s been retired off the DIA, there’s nothing he can do for us.’

  ‘He’ll come through,’ Ethan insisted. ‘He always has.’

  ‘With conditions,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘There’ll be something that he wants in return. There always is.’

  Ethan didn’t reply. Fact was, Lopez was right, but, as they stood, almost anything was better than living the way they were now: endless nights spent in run-down motels; eating in crumbling diners on the edge of obscure towns; and running with no clear idea of where they needed to go. Maybe living that way worked for crime-fighting loners in novels, but in real life it was an impossible existence. After six months of following dead-end leads and struggling to find money and digs as they wandered aimlessly across the United States, finally a solid lead had presented itself.

  In rural Wisconsin, a thirty-six-year-old man had been murdered in an apparent robbery gone-wrong. Stripped of his possessions, the man’s unfortunate demise might have remained a footnote in the records of county police if not for one major factor: the man was identified as a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  The murder hit the news state-wide, having gotten out before the CIA could close the lid on what had happened. Before the familiar veil of silence had settled on the case, Ethan and Lopez had seen it on the news and thus been alerted to a possible thread that they could follow in what felt like an endless and equally hopeless quest to clear their names.

  ‘You got a rent?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s a motel across the river in Williamsburg,’ she replied. ‘Not perfect, but we’re not going to get anything we can afford on the Lower East Side or Manhattan.’

  Ethan shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it; right now, the more anonymous our accommodation is, the better.’

  Ethan followed Lopez out of the station and onto the crowded streets of the city. Heavy traffic, swathes of pedestrians and a wall of noise filled the air as Ethan craned his neck back and looked up at the buildings soaring up toward the cold sky above.

  Lopez turned to him on the crowded sidewalk. ‘You think we can track her down here in New York?’

  Ethan nodded as an image of his long-vanished fiancée drifted like a ghost haunting the deepest recesses of his mind.

  ‘The trail led here,’ he said. ‘If she’s following the same information that we are, New York’s a great place to disappear and get some work done at the same time. Nothing like eight or nine million people to make it easy to hide in plain sight.’

  Fact was, the leads that Ethan was following were tenuous in the extreme.

  Six months previously, he had approached his sister, Natalie, after learning that Joanna Defoe was alive. Asking her if she would be willing to use her influence within the Government Accountability Office during a congressional investigation into CIA corruption, Natalie had gone on to uncover evidence of an immense covert operation named MK-ULTRA, used to abuse unwitting American citizens both within homeland borders and abroad. Whatever it was, MK-ULTRA was definitely illegal and represented the core issue that had landed Ethan and Lopez in their current mess.

  Joanna Defoe’s name had been connected with the program, as had her long deceased father. Harrison Defoe had worked in the Far East as a translator during the Vietnam War and had suddenly gone on the rampage in Singapore, shooting dead s
everal leading opponents to the US intervention in the conflict. Her father had served time in a Singapore jail for his crime and had become a vocal opponent and critic of the CIA afterward. He represented the likely source of Joanna’s determination to root out corruption at government level as a journalist.

  That same determination, it now seemed, was what had gotten her abducted. If they could find Joanna, she might possess enough evidence to expose MK-ULTRA and clear all of their names.

  ‘What’s the next move?’ Lopez asked, as they walked.

  Ethan scanned the thousands of faces and the dense city skyline.

  ‘We start digging and hope that we get lucky.’

  4

  LOWER EAST SIDE, MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY

  ‘If it’s going down, it’ll be within the next ten minutes.’

  The car in which Detective Karina Thorne sat was parked by the sidewalk on the corner of Broadway and Pike, looking across the intersection toward a Pay-Go cash-checking store where a trickle of customers were filing in and out, many of them with envelopes in their hands.

  Karina kept her hands in her lap, preventing herself from checking her sidearm for the twentieth time. Anxiety twisted her stomach muscles and her gaze flicked back and forth from the store to her wing mirrors, catching a glimpse of her long dark hair pinned back in a ponytail. Her features were a little too stern to be called attractive, the line of her mouth thin and her jaw a little too wide.

  ‘Relax,’ came a voice from beside her. ‘No need to get twitchy until something happens.’

  Jake Donovan, a twenty-year veteran of the New York Police Department, glanced sideways at her with a wink and a smile. Donovan was in his mid-fifties but could still bench-press two-fifty for five and was surrounded by an aura of competence that commanded complete loyalty from his team. Karina let some of her tension out in a long sigh.

  ‘It’s a big deal if it goes down, is all,’ she replied.

  ‘They’re all a big deal,’ Donovan said, ‘especially when we catch them in the act.’

  Karina nodded but did not share her boss’s confidence.

  Over the past two months, several major bank heists had rocked the east coast from Pennsylvania right up to Maine. It was considered almost impossible to hit a major bank successfully these days: accounts at all American banks were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, bringing such heists under federal jurisdiction and involving the FBI. Federal Sentencing Guidelines mandated long prison terms and there was no parole in the federal prison system. Coupled with biometric markers on bank cases – dye-emitting sensors that rendered stolen cash useless – the massive resources of law enforcement and the involvement of the media in pursuing and catching violent gangs ensured that few such criminal enterprises succeeded for long.

  But the gang that had hit four armoured trucks in New Hampshire and Connecticut were a different breed. Wily, patient and yet supremely violent, their genius was a blend of deception and simplicity. They wore disguises, but not just clothes. Instead, they wore complex, expensive latex headpieces and gloves most often seen in movies, that completely altered their features and even their skin color. Using these skillfully crafted latex masks, no law-enforcement agency yet had been able to identify any of the gang members. All of the men were of similar height and build and conducted themselves in a manner that seemed to suggest a military background. But with the United States having been on a war footing for over a decade and with the heists occurring across several states, the number of disgruntled former infantrymen who could be suspects ran into the tens of thousands.

  In short, it had been the perfect crime. No evidence. No leads.

  Until now. An informant had tipped Donovan off a week previously that the gang was rumored to have moved even farther south, losing themselves in New York’s population with a plan to hit one of the countless cash-checking centers located all over the city. A further tip put the target as the Pay-Go on Broadway. It was a good target, sitting on a broad intersection with multiple egress routes across to New Jersey, up into Midtown and Harlem or out across the East River to Queens and Long Island. If the gang hit either the Pay-Go or the armoured truck due to make its daily collection and were able to give police the slip, then they would have multiple opportunities to transfer vehicles, split up on foot or just hunker down somewhere and wait for the dust to settle.

  A car pulled in ahead of them, a dark blue Prius with three occupants: one woman, one man and a young girl in a child seat. The man got out and kissed both the woman and the child goodbye. The Prius pulled away and the man walked to Karina’s car, opened the rear door and climbed in.

  ‘We need more units,’ he said as he closed the door.

  Tom Ross was a young but dedicated service officer who had joined the department in his late teens and was now Karina’s partner. A firearms and forensics officer, he’d made detective by his twenty-sixth birthday, an extraordinary achievement by any standards. In the rear seat alongside Tom sat Glen Ryan, Karina’s boyfriend of the past five years. Glen was a former soldier who had joined the NYPD two years previously, all buzz-cut hair and square-jawed efficiency. It was like dating the Terminator, minus the sense of humor. Iraq and Afghanistan had drained Glen of his zest for life and he viewed most of humanity with a disappointed disdain.

  ‘We haven’t got the resources,’ Donovan replied to Tom, ‘not with the presidential debates going on.’

  The city was host to the incumbent president and his challenger’s first live television debate in the run-up to the elections, and half of the goddamned force was on high alert at the Hofstra University on Long Island. The fact that the most wanted gang of thieves on the east coast had possibly chosen today to hit a target in Manhattan, during a period of reduced police activity and after a massive reduction in law-enforcement manpower, wasn’t hard to understand.

  ‘And it’s based on a tip-off and a hunch,’ Glen added, ‘not exactly rock-solid grounds for deploying the entire department, Tom.’

  Tom Ross shrugged and checked his firearm. ‘These aren’t Boy Scouts we’re up against. Five cops against four psychopathic thieves isn’t my kind of odds.’

  ‘You should’ve seen Basra,’ Glen began, ‘you’d have—’

  ‘All right, Glen,’ Donovan cut him off, ‘we’ve heard it all before.’ The old man looked across at Karina. ‘Is Neville in position?’

  Karina keyed a microphone concealed low under the dashboard. ‘You ready, Nev?’

  The voice of Neville Jackson, an African-American cop and the team’s fifth member, came back over the radio loud and clear. ‘I’m on Grand. If they run north, I’ll pick them up.’

  Karina scanned the Pay-Go one more time, and then Glen tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Here comes the armoured truck.’

  Karina resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder at the traffic flowing down Broadway, instead looking down at her wing mirror to see a brief glimpse of a dark blue Freightliner easing its way toward the intersection.

  ‘We got any lookers?’ Karina asked.

  All three men shook their heads. Nobody had been seen acting suspiciously, no lingerers on the intersection watching the Pay-Go. Karina searched for parked vehicles or motorcycles running up as the cash truck approached, but nothing untoward was happening.

  ‘Maybe they got wise to us and took off , ’ Tom hazarded.

  It was possible, Karina reflected. A gang as methodical and experienced as the one they sought might have found a way to discreetly observe the Pay-Go and noticed the unremarkable gray sedan parked a hundred yards up from the intersection. At the least, they would have monitored the Pay-Go’s daily pickups. Most all armoured cash vehicles these days ran varying routes to avoid having regular daily collection times, all of which helped to confuse potential heists, but, with Pay-Go stores, there had to be at least one daily collection to avoid the vaults overfilling. A patient gang would wait for the right moment to strike.

  ‘That’s a big truck,’ Tom sa
id.

  The Freightliner pulled into the sidewalk alongside the Pay-Go and one of the armed personnel aboard climbed out, methodically locking the door behind him as the driver waited with the vehicle.

  ‘What’s the truck’s position on the round?’ Glen asked.

  ‘Fourteenth pickup,’ Donovan replied without hesitation. ‘Average pickup is worth about a quarter million bucks.’

  ‘Three and a half million,’ Karina said. ‘Well worth hitting, if you’ve got a plan.’

  ‘They’ll have to hurry up,’ Glen said. ‘Courier will be out of the store real quick, and, once he’s back aboard, there’s no way they can reach the cash.’

  Armoured trucks were notoriously tough, and the drivers never had access to the money inside. They simply transferred the aluminum bank-cases into the vehicle. The cases were later retrieved at a secure depot.

  Karina watched as the door to the Pay-Go opened and the armed man walked back out with a steel-gray cash box handcuffed to his left wrist. He strode into the cold, bright sunshine, toward the Freightliner’s side door, as the driver leaned forward to press a button to unlock the external cash-box door.

  Karina knew the drill. The door would unlock. The guard would open it and insert the case into a locking mechanism, half in and half out of the vehicle. Secured, he would then uncuff himself and push the steel case fully inside, before shutting the door and climbing aboard.

  There was no access to the cash from the vehicle cab.

  There were no other access doors, no other way to get inside.

  ‘It’s not going down,’ Tom said. ‘He’s already at the door.’

  Karina saw the guard disappear from sight as he reached the armoured truck, but she could see his reflection in the windows of the Pay-Go as he reached out for the door and slid it back to reveal a steel cage. He reached down, lifted the case and inserted it into the dock.