The Eternity Project

by Dean Crawford

  Jarvis looked at Wilson and saw there in his granite-hewn features an absolute resolve, entirely devoid of emotion. He smiled. ‘I doubt that very much.’

  Wilson’s pistol was in his hand with ferocious speed and in utter silence, the barrel pressed against Jarvis’s temple.

  ‘Local mugging gone wrong,’ the agent whispered, ‘bullet to the head. No witnesses.’

  Jarvis nodded slowly, still smiling.

  ‘White man in a rough black neighbourhood,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t stand a chance. The CIA would have to work carefully to cover up your identity.’

  Wilson’s eyes narrowed, and then his right eye flickered slightly as a tiny red light played across his face. Wilson’s gaze flicked to the right, out of the windshield and into the darkness beyond. Jarvis held the smile on his face as he spoke.

  ‘I know very well what you’re capable of, Mr. Wilson,’ he said. ‘So you won’t be surprised that I’ve taken every precaution and will continue to do so. I’m wired. Vest or no vest, just one little word will end this conversation badly, for you. You even look at me in a way that displeases me and you’ll find yourself with an air-conditioned brain.’

  Wilson glared back at Jarvis for a long moment and then slowly withdrew the pistol. It vanished beneath his coat.

  ‘There,’ Jarvis murmured cheerfully, ‘that’s much better. Shall we play nicely now?’

  ‘You will deliver Joanna Defoe to me,’ Wilson snapped.

  ‘I will do no such thing,’ Jarvis replied, enjoying himself immensely as he watched the infra-red beam of the sniper rifle playing across Wilson’s chest. ‘If she can be found I will lead her to you, but apprehending her will be your own responsibility. Fail, and you’ll carry the can for it, not me.’

  Wilson smiled bitterly.

  ‘The deal was relayed to me in complete detail. Ethan Warner, Nicola Lopez and their families would remain unharmed, in return for Joanna Defoe. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘All there is to it?’ Jarvis echoed. ‘Your people held Joanna Defoe for three years. She then escaped, and, despite the best efforts of the entire CIA, you’ve been unable to even locate her, much less apprehend her. The DIA isn’t going to be able to just magic her into your hands. What the hell makes you think that she’s in the city, anyway?’

  ‘I have my resources.’

  ‘They haven’t done you much good then, have they?’

  Wilson turned his head to look at Jarvis.

  ‘I’ve spent the last two months tracking former members of MK-ULTRA and ensuring that they will not be testifying at any level their knowledge of CIA-sponsored paramilitary programs. Most of them were low-level players, not really worth hitting at all.’

  Jarvis frowned. ‘Then why take them down?’

  ‘To leave a trail.’ Wilson smiled coldly. ‘Not one that Joanna Defoe would follow, but one that she could get ahead of.’

  Jarvis felt a creeping sense of dread run cold through his veins. ‘You killed them just to lure her in?’

  ‘Like you say,’ Wilson replied, ‘nothing else was working. I silenced former MK-ULTRA assets in Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana and Pennsylvania before coming here. If Joanna really is trying to track these people down, she will have seen the killings and immediately understood that the only way to stop them is to get ahead of them.’

  Jarvis shook his head in horror. The whole charade by William Steel back in DC was an act. He had known that he was in no danger, happy to let Wilson kill former CIA agents and let either Ethan Warner or Joanna Defoe carry the can.

  ‘You really are a product of something rotten in the CIA,’ he said in disgust. ‘You’re like a disease, a boil that should have been lanced decades ago.’

  ‘Sticks and stones, Mr. Jarvis,’ Wilson said. ‘Needs must, and whatever I have to do will remain out of the public record. Likewise, your knowledge of these events will also remain unknown as long as you want Warner and Lopez to remain alive.’

  Jarvis gestured to the red light still hovering on Wilson’s chest.

  ‘Maybe I should have you finished off, just for the hell of it.’

  ‘You think that this makes a difference to anything?’ Wilson said, pointing at the light. ‘You’re going to either lose your two little puppy dogs or you’re going to lose Joanna Defoe. That’s the deal for your safety. You kill me, you’re all done.’ Wilson leaned closer to Jarvis. ‘You think it isn’t so, just tell your man to pull the trigger.’

  Jarvis sat still for a moment before speaking.

  ‘If Joanna Defoe turns up, I’ll make contact. You’ll need to tell me how.’

  Mr. Wilson reached into his jacket pocket, producing a slip of paper. Upon it, Jarvis glimpsed a series of numbers, and at the top a New York Mega Millions lottery logo.

  Several of the numbers were ringed in felt pen.

  ‘Your lottery ticket,’ Wilson said. ‘The ringed numbers are a burner cell. I’ll only take a single call from you on it before it’s destroyed. Make sure it doesn’t waste my time. You fail to deliver Defoe, I’ll assume you’ve reneged on the deal and I’ll take you down, understood?’

  Jarvis didn’t reply. Wilson tossed the ticket into the foot well and climbed out of the car. Jarvis waited until the door was slammed shut before he picked up the ticket. A disembodied voice spoke into a microphone tucked into his ear.

  ‘You want me to take him down?’

  Jarvis glanced up at a nearby tower block, where his man had installed himself an hour before the meeting.

  ‘Yes, but, unfortunately, we can’t. Yet. Stand down.’

  Jarvis folded the ticket into his pocket, started the engine and drove away.

  24

  NEW YORK COUNTY SUPREME COURTHOUSE, NEW YORK CITY

  Maria Coltrane was not used to working alone late at night, but the unusually busy day and the extra workload it had entailed had forced her to stay inside the building long after most of her colleagues had left for home.

  The usually busy halls, corridors and court rooms were silent and still, half of the lights extinguished. Those that still burned cast pools of light that glowed like enclaves in a dark universe as she walked down a corridor to a study on the fourth floor.

  The footfalls of her heels on the tiles sounded hollow as she strode with a thick set of files clasped against her chest. Paperwork was not Maria’s strong suit, and it had taken her an hour longer than usual to go through every single page of the day’s transcripts and clerks’ notes, scanning them into digital back-up files and storing them in a national database.

  Maria pushed open the door of the study and walked inside. A large room with a long, central table, it was most often used by clerks to collate trial case files for attorneys as they prepared to prosecute or defend the legions of convicts churning endlessly through the legal system. The door whispered shut behind her, then clicked as the latch caught.

  The windows looked out onto a darkened plaza between the court and Pearl Street, streetlights glowing and traffic lights flowing silently below. Maria watched the traffic for a few moments, feeling slightly more comfortable at the sight of so many people so close by, and then turned away.

  She sat down at the table with the files in front of her and opened the first. All that remained for her to do was stamp each file as having been electronically archived, and then she could file them for recycling and leave the building. She methodically began marking each file and was halfway through when out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed somebody peek in through the door’s window as though to wave to her or say goodnight. Maria glanced up and the stamp froze in motion.

  The window was empty. Maria frowned, uncertain. Above her head she saw the lights flicker briefly. A splatter of rain hammered on the windows to her left, and she could just make out gusts of wind driving sheets of rain through nearby trees in the plaza.

  Suddenly anxious that she might find herself in the building during a power-outage, Maria hurriedly stamped the rest of the files and then piled the
m up in a stack ready to carry down to the archive. She was busy piling them up when the lights flickered again. Maria hesitated, looking at the stack of files. The archive was in the basement and it would take her several minutes to travel down there, place the files for the archivist, return to the rotunda and exit the building. A long walk, alone through the building.

  Rain drummed on the study windows again as though trying to beat its way inside. Maria decided that she would come in early in the morning and take the files downstairs then, when there were other people about. Although the court was not somewhere renowned for being spooky, something was already gnawing away at her nerves as she slipped her coat on and turned for the study door. The atmosphere had changed, as though suddenly charged. She could feel it somewhere on the periphery of her senses, like the feeling of being watched – tangible but somehow ephemeral, too.

  Maria reached the door of the study and swung it open.

  It wasn’t a noise that caught her attention, more a soft fluttering of air pressure in the room as though somebody had opened a window. The change in pressure caused the small hairs on the back of her neck to stand proud and a tingling sensation to crawl like icy water trickling down her spine.

  Maria turned to look back into the room as her chest seemed to suddenly freeze solid within her.

  The files were lying open, scattered across the table in disarray, and the thousands of individual pages were fluttering upward toward the ceiling in a swirling vortex as though a tornado had swept into the room from outside. The countless pages spiraled upward and spilled out across the ceiling as Maria felt her legs quiver beneath her. She saw her breath condensing on the suddenly cold air and felt blind, primal terror cripple her limbs.

  Maria staggered backwards out of the study and saw the door close in front of her, and then she turned and ran.

  She dashed down the corridor, following it as it turned toward a pair of elevators, the doors open and inviting. Maria ran harder as the light around her in the corridor seemed to change. She looked back over her shoulder and saw the ceiling lights going out one after the other, accelerating toward her as though something was draining the power from them as it moved. In the flickering light, she saw air condensing into clouds of vapor that raced toward her, like the shockwave of an aircraft breaking the sound barrier. She felt her hair rise up as a static charge built up around her and the air froze.

  Maria shrieked, the sound that came out of her throat sounding alien to her as she plunged into the elevator and hit the button for the ground floor. The doors slid shut as she watched the lights flickering out, the darkness and the demonic cloud racing toward her at impossible speed as the doors finally closed.

  Maria stood inside the elevator, holding her face with her hands and listening to the sound of her heart hammering against the walls of her chest and her breath rasping through her throat. The elevator remained silent, the light still glowing in the roof, but it did not move.

  ‘Come on,’ she whispered, hitting the button again. ‘Come on, move!’

  She hit the GROUND FLOOR button hard a third time and suddenly the elevator groaned as it shifted, but the movement was violent and caused Maria to stagger sideways. The lights flickered above her like strobes in a tiny, hellish nightclub as the elevator shrieked, a deafening cacophony of metal on metal. A wall panel beside her head burst inward as though something of unspeakable strength was trying to bludgeon its way in.

  Maria screamed and hurled herself to the opposite side of the elevator, only for the panels there to jolt inward. She whirled and saw the rear wall crumple as the entire elevator suddenly began pushing in toward her, the floor beneath her feet crunching as the tiles split. She fell sideways and hit the elevator wall as it smashed inward, and in blind panic she began hitting the walls back.

  ‘Help me! Somebody please help me!’

  The walls crushed inward to the screech of rending metal as the translucent plastic light panel above her head shattered and crashed down upon her. The light sparked violently and shattered, spilling particles of searing-hot phosphor that rained down upon her hair and face and hands, scorching her skin.

  In the pitch-black of the writhing elevator, Maria heard the doors buckle and warp as they were crushed inward. A faint glow of light spilled into the elevator from the corridor outside, the ceiling lights flickering wildly.

  Maria launched herself toward the light and screamed at the top of her lungs for help, battering the immovable metal doors with her bare hands. Some distant, cowering part of her awareness saw the blood smearing the doors with each blow of her fists as the skin was flayed from her knuckles, smelled the acrid stench of scorched hair and skin that filled the elevator.

  The entire elevator car crushed down around her, forcing her to her knees on the uneven floor as it jerked upward, and she cried out with the last of her will as the twisted, warped ceiling pushed down on her head, the jagged metal shards crushing down unbearably hard against her body and forcing her into an awkward crouch.

  With her hands she gripped the doors and tried one last time to force them open, and managed to force her head through the gap.

  ‘Help me!’

  A pyramid of warped metal crushed down into her back and pierced the skin, driving her pelvis down onto the jagged elevator floor as shards of torn metal drove down between her ribs. Maria shrieked in agony and then something plunged through her skull with immense force and her world vanished into blackness.

  25

  MANHATTAN

  ‘So how’s he doing?’

  Ethan sat on the edge of a small table as Karina flopped down onto her couch. The tiny apartment glowed from the light of a couple of small lamps set into alcoves in the walls, the blinds drawn against the gusting wind and rain outside.

  ‘Tom looks like death warmed up,’ she replied. ‘He must be exhausted, too. He fell asleep pretty much as soon as I got him back to his apartment.’

  Lopez sat opposite Karina, her legs curled up beneath her on an armchair as she sipped from a coffee mug.

  ‘You thought about putting him under surveillance?’ she asked. ‘After what happened today, he must be a risk again.’

  ‘He’s been a risk since the auto wreck,’ Karina replied. ‘Tom’s usually full of life but the way he looks now I think he’s still in shock. It’s going to be a while before he shakes it off.’

  ‘If he ever does,’ Ethan said. ‘I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but the guy’s just taken the biggest hit of his life. That kind of thing can take decades to get over.’

  Karina nodded thoughtfully but didn’t reply. Ethan was about to ask her about Donovan when Karina’s cell trilled nearby on the table. Ethan reached across and grabbed it, tossing it across the room. Karina caught it deftly in one hand and answered.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Ethan could just about hear the reply buzzing from the cell, a male voice. Although he could not make out the words, there was no mistaking the veil of trepidation that fell across Karina’s features. She clicked the cell off and leaped up off the couch.

  ‘We’ve got a call-out,’ she said.

  Lopez stood up. ‘Your man Donovan isn’t taking kindly to us being here.’

  Karina hauled her jacket on and grabbed her badge and her gun.

  ‘I don’t give a damn what he does or doesn’t like,’ she shot back. ‘We’re better off with your help right now than without it.’

  ‘What’s the call-out?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Don’t know if there’s a crime yet,’ Karina replied as she opened the apartment door. ‘Precinct got a call about screams and possible gunshots from downtown.’

  ‘How come the uniforms aren’t handling it?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Because the call came from the Supreme Court building,’ Karina replied. ‘Same place we were at this afternoon. Want to bet that your mysterious photographer might turn up?’

  Ethan grabbed his jacket and dashed out of the apartment with Lopez.

  *

/>   Karina drove down to the court building through the rain and the flowing rivers of headlights cruising Manhattan’s streets, the occasional blast of her siren and blue grill lights splitting the traffic down Broadway until they turned left and swung into the sidewalk alongside two police cruisers. The flashing lights illuminated the rain spilling from the inky-black sky above in sparkling rainbow halos.

  Ethan and Lopez got out of the car to see Donovan glaring at them, Glen and Jackson alongside him.

  ‘What the hell are they doing here?’ Donovan demanded of Karina as she strode toward the court building. ‘This has nothing to do with the Hell Gate case.’

  ‘They’re with me,’ Karina snapped. ‘What’s the story?’

  Neville Jackson replied as he picked up a carbine from the rear of one of the cruisers. ‘Emergency call from the guy on the front door,’ he said, ‘heard what he thought sounded like gunshots and a lot of screaming from somewhere up on the fourth floor.’

  ‘He heard that from the ground?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Sound echoed down through to the rotunda,’ Glen Ryan explained. ‘The guard thought maybe somebody had broken in and was armed, and didn’t want to play the hero without calling for back-up, in case he was outnumbered.’

  ‘Smart move. He armed?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jackson replied, ‘but only with a pistol.’

  Donovan gripped a compact-looking automatic assault rifle, and gestured to Ethan and Lopez.

  ‘You two stay to the rear. Let’s move.’

  Ethan and Lopez followed Donovan and the team up the steps into the rotunda, the circular hall filled with the sound of thousands of raindrops hammering the roof. A uniformed guard, his elderly face pinched with concern, hurried up to them.

  ‘I haven’t seen or heard anything since I called,’ he said urgently, ‘but I sealed all the exits. Whoever made all that noise is still inside the building. There’s been some kind of electrical disturbance so the elevators are out.’