The young detective looked at her and smiled faintly.
‘I was hovering above you all, up on the ceiling. I saw everything.’
Karina withdrew her hand from Tom’s, as though his body had shocked her again, her features horrified as she struggled to comprehend what her friend was saying.
‘What else did you see?’ Lopez pressed.
‘After that, I wasn’t in the room.’
‘Where were you?’ Karina asked, overcoming her shock.
Tom shook his head as he replied.
‘It’s hard to describe, I don’t know where I was. It was dark, totally black, but the blackness seemed huge, infinite. I was rising up, could feel myself going up and up, and then there was a light. It was so bright, brighter than the sun but I could look right into it.’
Lopez moved closer to the bed.
‘The tunnel of light,’ she said. ‘You had a near-death experience, Tom.’
Tom looked at her, but he shook his head.
‘Well, if I did, then the experience is highly overrated,’ he replied.
‘What happened?’ Karina asked.
‘I was floating up this tunnel,’ Tom said, ‘and I felt great. I can’t even begin to describe it. It was as though every bad thing I’d ever done or seen or heard of suddenly was just utterly gone. I had no body but I could feel everything, could see everything, and there were people there waiting for me.’
Lopez shivered again.
‘Friends?’ she managed to ask; and then, more cautiously, ‘Family?’
Tom looked at her and his expression of wonderment and joy faded away.
‘They weren’t there,’ he replied, grief returning to stain his features. ‘I could tell somehow that they weren’t there, and then suddenly I could remember what had happened on the bridge, that I’d lost them, and then everything changed.’
‘What changed, Tom?’ Karina pressed.
‘The tunnel of light faded away and I felt the darkness coming back. It was surging up toward me, cold and black and full of something I’ve never felt before.’
There was a moment’s silence, as Tom sought the word he wanted, and then he looked at them both.
‘Hate,’ he said finally. ‘Pure, undiluted, raw hate, more powerful than anything I can describe. I thought it would swallow me whole but it suddenly disappeared just like the tunnel of light did and, I was back in the apartment watching you all try to resuscitate me.’
Tom shook his head as he looked at Karina.
‘I think I saw a little piece of Heaven,’ he continued, ‘and then a tiny fragment of Hell.’
18
KHAN YUNIS, GAZA CITY, PALESTINE
2 years ago
‘It’s not working.’
The voice came from behind where she sat slumped in the chair, eyes staring blankly at the screen before her. A thin stream of congealed saliva lay drying on her chin. Her eyes were utterly dry and stinging painfully, but she felt removed from the pain as though it were a distant color or sound. She could not feel her arms, and, in her mind’s eye, images flashed past continuously, even though the monitor before her was turned off. Those same images played all day in front of her, accompanied by fearsome jolts of pain delivered at cruelly random moments, and all night in her mind, awakening her as she jerked in expectation of electrical currents searing her body.
‘Pull her out.’
The voices sounded as though they were part of a dream, monotone and indistinct, but, even now, she recognized them as American. From beyond the beam of light, she saw a figure approach, gray-suited. His face was long and sepulchral, his ashen skin matching his suit, as though he had been drained of color, and his expression as devoid of emotion as she was.
They had become more relaxed around her as time had passed, although, even now, she had no idea just how long she had been in captivity. There was no daylight, there were no clocks and the men using her for their bizarre experiments were extremely careful not to expose her to any sense of the outside world, be it through conversation or any other means.
She had lost all sense of her identity, long ago forgetting who she was, where she was, why she was there. Her memories had been scoured from her mind, leaving only the incessant flashing images grinding around the interior of her skull.
It had got worse when they had added video and sound. Her mind had been programmed to flinch at the slightest mention of terrorists, communism, socialism and a hundred other creeds and beliefs that clashed with the American Dream. She felt physical pain at the sight of images of wounded American soldiers or images of 9/11, even when no current was applied to her weary body. Utterly unable to sleep properly and exposed to countless hours of footage over immeasurable periods of time, she was now an empty shell, devoid of soul and spirit.
The gray-suited figure lifted off the headphones and unclipped the electrodes from her temples. As he removed the support pads, her head fell forward and her chin dug into her chest. Thick, lank hair spilled either side of her face.
‘She’s had it,’ said another American voice. ‘It was too much. I told you so.’
‘Plenty more where she came from,’ came the monotone reply. ‘Give her to the doctor. There’s nothing left of her for us to work with.’
‘He won’t be happy about that,’ said the nearer of the two men as he lifted her unresisting body out of the chair and dumped it unceremoniously onto a gurney, strapping her in.
‘Who cares?’
She was wheeled out of the room, back toward her cell. But this time, the two men pushed her past the cell door and on through the building to another room. Her eyes, dry and unseeing, could not focus properly on her surroundings. She was wheeled into the new room and heard the door close behind her.
A rhythmic beeping sound, that of a heart monitor, echoed slightly as though she was in a much larger room. Another figure, dressed in white, moved around her as she slowly focused.
‘She’ll see us.’
The voice came from her right and she swiveled her eyes to see the blurred images of the two men, both dressed in gray suits.
‘It will take hours for her eyes to recover,’ said the white figure as he moved to stand by her gurney. ‘You have nothing to fear. I take it that she has been unresponsive to the programming?’
She felt a tiny pain in her right arm as a needle was slipped into a vein, and, within moments, she felt a strange surge of energy pulsing through her body.
‘We completed the memory flush some time ago,’ came the response. ‘Cerebral reprogramming has proved positive but she has demonstrated no evidence of any ability to perform remote-viewing, precognition or any other extrasensory-perception tasks beyond those associated with chance. We’re done with her.’
‘And you’ve left her barely alive!’ the white figure snapped. ‘What use is she like this?’
‘You’re going to kill her anyway,’ one of the gray suits said, shrugging.
‘Temporarily,’ replied the white figure.
‘Whatever.’
The energy in her system flushed her senses, making her hyper-alert, and, as her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she saw the men come slowly into perfect focus. The adrenaline sharpened her thoughts and she did not look directly into the eyes of the two men, letting her gaze wander as though she were still blind.
One of them had dark, short hair, maybe late twenties, military-looking. A small scar on his left cheek, maybe a shrapnel wound from service in Iraq or Afghanistan. The second man in a gray suit was a taller and older. It was hard to avoid his cold gaze, but she managed to focus on his tie instead. His voice was utterly without emotion.
‘Be sure that she is removed from play as soon as you’re finished with her. We preserve security before any other considerations, including your insane little project. Is that understood, Doctor?’
The voice from beyond her line of sight replied calmly.
‘It is understood. And it gets her out from under your skin, does it not?’
She tr
ied to speak but her throat was utterly dry and nothing came out. She worked her jaw, trying to formulate words, but they would not come.
The white-coated figure emerged into view, and she saw a bright halo of white hair draped across an elderly face. The figure reached down and touched her arm. More pain, as another needle slid beneath her skin. She gasped, but no sound came out.
‘Ssshhh,’ the figure said to her, and touched a cold, dry finger to her lips. ‘Save your strength. You’re about to go on a journey you’ll never forget.’
‘Make it fast,’ snapped the older gray suit. ‘You’re not done within six months, I’ll ice her myself.’
The doctor glanced over his shoulder in irritation, but he nodded before he looked down at her and a chilling smile crept across his face.
‘Now then, Joanna. I hope you’ve never experienced LSD before. I’d like this to be a uniquely maiden voyage for you into another world. Or, more accurately, somewhere else in this world.’
Joanna struggled to speak but her voice remained impotent. She felt the world around her begin to lose coherence as a warmth began tingling through her body, as though the doctor had injected her with a serious overdose of morphine.
The pain and the discomfort vanished as the last of her feeble resistance collapsed in the face of the drugs coursing through her system. With the last vestiges of her awareness, she saw the doctor loom over her.
In an instant, just before her senses disconnected from each other, she saw something that changed everything. In a flash that momentarily overpowered all of the suffering and all of the pain she had endured, Joanna knew how long she had been in captivity and knew how long it was that she had been experimented on. For a brief instant, that felt like the first ray of sunlight after an interminable darkness, Joanna remembered who she was again.
The doctor spoke.
‘Joanna, my name is Doctor Damon Sheviz, and I’m going to take you to another plain of existence. You, my dear, are about to visit and return from the grave.’
Joanna’s eyes flared in horror as the doctor went on.
‘First, you will be anesthetized. Then, I will wire you up to a heart-bypass machine and you will receive heparin, which is made from cow’s gut, to prevent blood clotting. Your heart will then be stopped via intravenously administered potassium chloride. Your body will be cooled over a period of about one hour to a temperature of around sixteen degrees Celsius, essentially as cold as a corpse. I will then drain the blood from your body and replace it with a chilled saline solution. By this time, you will be clinically dead, with no heartbeat, no blood and no brain activity. I will leave you in stasis in this condition for two hours, before reversing the process, returning your blood to your body, warming it and applying a small electrical charge to your heart to initiate rhythm.’
Joanna gasped but her throat was too dry and her muscles too weak to form words.
Damon Sheviz looked down at her and smiled.
‘I expect that you have never had a near-death experience before,’ he said. ‘Trust me, by the time we’re done here, you’re going to have had many. You’re going to meet God, Joanna, and I want to know what He looks like.’
The doctor’s features swirled into a kaleidoscope of hazy colors, as Joanna Defoe finally lost consciousness, his words distant in her mind.
‘Welcome to my Eternity Project.’
19
ERIC M. TAYLOR CENTER, RIKERS ISLAND, NEW YORK CITY
‘They ain’t the talkin’ kind.’
Ethan stood in a service corridor alongside Lopez as a duty sergeant signed them in and signaled a colleague sitting nearby in a small booth surrounded by bullet-proof glass. An electronic motor hummed as mechanical locks disengaged and a huge steel-barred door rolled open.
Located on an island in the East River between Queens and the Bronx, Rikers was a city of jails, with the Taylor Center, or ‘6 Building’ as it was known, housing all adult and adolescent sentenced males. It was one section of a total population of fourteen thousand inmates, all awaiting trial. As new arrivals, the two men they had come to see were housed in the New Admissions cells, where they were kept in a sort of quarantine until the results of tests for tuberculosis and other diseases came back from dedicated labs.
Ethan walked with Lopez onto D-Block, a high-security wing of the center dedicated to holding high-profile inmates. The block was deserted, the steel tables and benches bolted to the floor devoid of prisoners. All of them had been locked-down as Ethan and Lopez were brought onto the block.
‘We’re wasting our time here,’ Lopez whispered to Ethan as they followed the sergeant onto the block. ‘We should be looking for Joanna, not visiting deadbeats in jail. Jarvis is stalling.’
‘For what?’ Ethan challenged. ‘Keeping us out of the way won’t help our cause or his.’
‘That all depends on what his cause really is,’ she pointed out, and then looked at the sergeant. ‘They had any visitors?’ Lopez asked.
‘Nope,’ the sergeant replied, a burly man with a neck so squat and thick it looked like he’d dropped from between his mother’s thighs and landed straight onto his head. ‘No calls, no letters, no nothin’. They might be communicatin’ with their cellmates for instance, but we don’t see much of that in here as most cellies are strangers. Happens more in the prison population.’
Ethan looked at Lopez as they followed the sergeant across the block.
‘That’s unusual,’ he said. ‘Most all convicts would want to make a call or receive one.’
‘Unless they’re not expecting to stay long,’ Lopez suggested.
‘You kiddin’?’ the sergeant asked over his broad shoulder as they walked. ‘These two dudes were busted out on the Williamsburg Bridge, right? Caught red-handed. Ain’t no jury in town gonna bail them.’
A crescendo of whoops and catcalls rose from the tiers nearby as the population caught sight of Lopez striding through the block below. Ethan glanced up and saw ranks of dark faces appearing at barred cell doors, all stained teeth, jaundiced eyes and orange correctional jumpsuits.
‘C’mon up here, mama!’ shouted one. ‘I’ll let you cuff me, honey!’
‘Show us that touché, babe!’
Lopez glanced up at the incarcerated ranks above them, but she showed no indication of interest as she followed the sergeant through a door at the end of the block that led to a small corridor with three heavy security doors along one wall.
‘Are our guys held alone?’ Ethan asked, as the sergeant locked the door shut behind them.
‘No,’ he replied, and gestured to the farthest of the three doors. ‘They’re held in four-man cells, but your guy’s tests aren’t due back until this afternoon. They’ll go on the block overnight, then they’ll be on Twelve Main after that.’
Twelve Main was the high-security wing, where cells were walled with stainless steel to prevent the prisoners from ripping the toilets and sinks out to use as weapons. The sergeant walked to the farthest door and unlocked it, pushing it open as he led them inside.
Cuffed to a table inside were two men. One was a fairly mild-looking Caucasian of about forty years of age with shrewd, pinched features and quick eyes. The other was an enormous African-American with thick sideburns that lined his jaw like black scimitars and a shaved head and muscles that bulged from his orange correctional jumpsuit like brown footballs. Both men looked up at Ethan without interest, and then their eyes flicked to Lopez and stayed there.
The sergeant gestured to them.
‘James Gladstone and Earl Thomas,’ he introduced the two inmates. ‘Gladstone’s the big one, Earl’s the brains. Ain’t that right, fellas?’
Neither man responded, both still watching Lopez with hooded eyes. Ethan stepped forward, deliberately blocking their view of her as he leaned on the table. ‘Get a good look, boys, because it’s as close as you’re gonna get.’
Gladstone turned his dark eyes onto Ethan and spoke in a voice so deep it sounded as though it came from the under
world. ‘Un-cuff me, boy, and I’ll rip your head off your shoulders and shit down your neck.’
Ethan smiled. ‘Play nicely and you won’t get a month in solitary. Understood, asshole?’
Gladstone strained against the steel cuffs, the metal cracking as it snapped taut. ‘Only thing keepin’ you alive is these chains. I’ll see you when I get out.’
‘Sure you will,’ Ethan said, nodding. ‘In about forty years, if you’re lucky. You’ll be able to throw your daddy diaper at me.’
Lopez walked up to the table, pulled out a chair and sat down. Ethan slid into the chair beside her and looked at the two men as Lopez spoke.
‘Everybody can have their dreams,’ she murmured to Gladstone, ‘but we’re here on business.’
Earl Thomas spoke for the first time, his voice soft compared to Gladstone’s.
‘We don’t have any business with you.’
‘That right?’ Lopez asked. ‘Strange, seeing as you’re both looking at twenty-to-life without parole in a federal prison. In a couple of hours, your pre-trial arraignment will be the last chance you have to avoid that fate.’
‘Even stranger,’ Ethan added, ‘considering you don’t know who the hell we are.’
Earl smiled. ‘Cops, or at least you are,’ he said to Lopez and then turned back to Ethan. ‘You, you’re military, probably been out a few years.’
Ethan raised an eyebrow of genuine surprise. ‘You’re a smart man. Makes me wonder how you wound up in a place like this, being so clever.’
Earl said nothing in response, sitting with his arms folded in his lap, utterly unreadable. Ethan guessed that his big friend was considerably less well endowed with intelligence, and wondered briefly if they would be better served by splitting the pair of them up.
‘How’d you make us?’ Lopez asked conversationally.
‘This guy’s got army written all over him,’ Earl uttered. ‘Still fit, despite his age, and there’s something about the way you assholes walk, like some drill sergeant’s still got his boot up yo’ ass, ’mongst other things. As for you, honey –’ he smiled at Lopez – ‘I can smell a cop just as easy as I can smell a rotting corpse. They’re much alike.’
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