The Eternity Project

by Dean Crawford

  ‘What about cameras in Manhattan and Williamsburg, coming off the bridges, and private security cameras?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can get,’ Jarvis promised, ‘but it’ll take time. A lot of camera systems run a twenty-four-hour recording loop, deleting as they go. If you don’t access the footage within that time window, it’s lost.’

  ‘And we’re already forty-eight hours down the road,’ Lopez muttered. ‘That’s sloppy. They could have pulled something by now.’

  Ethan stared at the screen and rewound the images, playing them again. Something about the footage seemed off, somehow, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  ‘You know, these guys must have had some other way off the bridge,’ he said. ‘Police were already moving to block the exits on the Williamsburg side of the bridge into Queens, so traffic would have been stopped and searched.’

  ‘The bridge was closed after the incident for over twelve hours,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘Caused havoc around Brooklyn.’

  ‘Maybe they went into the water?’ Lopez guessed. ‘It’s a hell of a drop and swim, but it’s not impossible.’

  ‘In winter?’ Jarvis replied. ‘I doubt they’d have made the shore before succumbing to the cold, and the currents would have dragged them far downstream.’

  Ethan looked up. ‘But if they’d planned for it? They might have got beneath the bridge, maybe stashed something there in case of the police blocking them on the bridge during their escape?’

  Jarvis frowned. ‘Seems a long way to go, and high risk, too.’

  Ethan shook his head slowly. ‘Something’s just not right,’ he said as he played the footage back: the chase, the crash, the confrontation, the truck spilling the cases from the rear and then the tanker hitting the parked vehicles as the thieves disappeared out of shot.

  ‘Wait one,’ Lopez said, and pointed at the screen. ‘Wind that back a little.’

  Ethan spun the footage back slowly and Lopez jabbed her finger at the flatbed’s open passenger door.

  ‘Stop there!’

  Ethan froze the image. The two unidentified thieves were backing toward the camera around the front of the vehicle, their weapons aimed at the cops. Lopez pointed at the glass of the open passenger door. ‘That enough to get a clear image?’ she asked Jarvis.

  Ethan smiled as he saw a vague reflection of the driver in the glass, the angle of the door reflecting his face.

  ‘It might just be,’ Jarvis said. ‘Copy that image and send it to this address,’ he said as he handed Ethan a card with an email address on it. ‘They’ll sharpen it up in no time and send it back here.’

  Ethan tapped out a quick email and then sent the image as he looked up at Lopez. ‘Not just a pretty face, then?’

  Lopez smiled back at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Was that a compliment, kind sir?’

  Ethan looked at Jarvis. ‘If this does link the murders, then it changes everything. If we do have some kind of spectral murderer hunting down these individuals, it suggests that there’s something much bigger going on here.’

  ‘And that links it to the trial,’ Jarvis agreed.

  A few minutes later, the computer in front of Ethan pinged and an email notification appeared. Ethan opened the link and an image appeared.

  The reflection in the car door taken by the traffic camera had been blown up to full screen and programs with complex algorithms used to enhance the pixelated image into something approaching clarity.

  It only took a moment of observation for them all to nod together.

  ‘That’s Wesley Hicks,’ Lopez said. ‘Tom was right.’

  Jarvis pulled out his cellphone. ‘It still doesn’t help the case against the two men in custody,’ he said. ‘They didn’t fire at anybody and can still claim their truck was hijacked by Hicks and his accomplice.’

  ‘True,’ Ethan replied, ‘but it gives us a lead to follow and it means we have leverage against Gladstone and Thomas, maybe enough to get them sweating a little because they won’t know that Hicks and Reece are dead. How about we start searching the clerk’s background and try to figure out why she’d be helping these losers.

  ‘You think she’d need a reason?’ Lopez asked. ‘There were five of them in on this. That’s close to a million each.’

  ‘Of illegally obtained cash,’ Jarvis replied for Ethan as he dialed a number. ‘Come on, let’s figure out why a law-abiding legal clerk would risk life without parole for these two assholes.’

  ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Ethan said.

  33

  KHAN YUNIS, GAZA CITY, PALESTINE

  1 year ago

  She awoke, but it was as though she were somehow still dreaming.

  Joanna wanted to blink her eyes, but there was no means by which she could do so. From a milieu of colors and light, she focused on the scene before her, even though that scene was physically impossible.

  She felt no fear. She felt no pain.

  Joanna looked down at her own body as it lay far below her on a metal gurney surrounded by tubes and wires and electrodes and monitors. Her first instinct was to look at her face. She was shocked at how much weight she had lost, her eyes sunken into darkened orbits and her cheekbones visible beneath pale skin. Her hair looked lank and had been hacked short, but her expression was entirely calm, her lips relaxed and her eyes closed as though gently resting.

  There was no sound, as though she were watching a silent movie in full color. Doctor Sheviz stood nearby, watching a monitor that was attached to electrodes placed on her temples that she guessed were recording brainwaves. All four lines were straight, registering no activity. She looked at the heart monitors, and saw no rhythm.

  With a start of realization, she knew that she was dead.

  And yet she was not dead.

  The heart-bypass machine was filtering its chilled saline solution through her veins as she watched and she felt a mild sense of disgust at how her body was being violated by the insane man in the room with her. But rage would not come.

  She saw Sheviz turn from the monitor to look at her body, saw him smile as he ran a hand through his thick white hair. As he dropped his hand, he knocked a pencil from the top of a desk to land on the floor. He bent down and picked the pencil up, then tossed it to one side on the desk.

  Joanna felt something change around her. She looked down but she had no body of her own as she hovered above herself, as though she were a single point of light. The room around her seemed to lose focus slightly and then it began to draw away from her, as though she were climbing up into the night sky. She looked for the city lights but saw nothing but a darkness as deep as the universe.

  She felt as though she were being watched, and turned.

  Far away, in the darkness, she saw a pinprick of light that glowed with the hue of a rainbow, a pearlescent sphere that began to grow as though sunbeams were reaching out to her. She felt warmth permeate her soul and the endless interminable suffering that she had endured fell away like discarded clothes.

  A thousand worries and concerns, the coalesced pressure of years of life, tumbled from her mind and spiraled away into the darkness behind her as the light grew stronger. It folded around her in a glowing blanket of warmth as every emotion that she had ever felt faded away into insignificance before a light filled with completely unconditional love. She felt herself smiling, felt unable and unwilling to resist the light as it grew brighter and brighter, blazing with the strength of a billion suns and yet as gentle as an angel’s touch.

  Through the brilliant light, she began to discern shapes, moving slowly and subtly. She could not identify them but, somehow, she knew that they were familiar to her, like long-lost memories plucked from obscurity. The figures became closer, as the light wrapped around her, and she felt as though she were as light as air, not a single concern or conflicting thought entering her mind.

  The light softened and yet pulsed at the same time, as though it too were alive, a conscious being wrapping itself protectively around her. From t
he diffuse glow, one of the figures approached her, both solid and diaphanous at the same time, as though existing simultaneously on different planes. She could not distinguish any features in the figure, and yet she knew without a shadow of doubt that it was her father standing before her. Behind him was her mother, the knowledge of her identity a bond that nothing could break, not even death.

  There were no words and yet she heard her father as clearly as if he had whispered directly into her ear.

  ‘It is not yet your time.’

  Joanna knew that he was right, knew that she would not argue nor struggle against his word, for he of all people knew what was right for her. But there was no denying the fact that she did not want to leave, did not want to abandon the peace that surrounded her. She could think of nothing in the world behind her that she wanted, nothing that she craved or yearned for. The callous nature of humanity had scoured her of the desire to live, and she wondered why on earth she had fought so hard to survive her incarceration at the hands of madmen like Damon Sheviz when she could simply have given up and come here just the same.

  ‘Because it is worth it, to remain.’

  The words, or the sense of them that reached her soundlessly, shocked her only because her very thoughts had been heard. Her silent yearning to remain, found its own answer.

  ‘You will return, and we will be waiting for you.’

  Joanna’s heart filled with joy at such simple words, any fear of death long since evaporated and cast away by the light and the warmth. She was still reveling in its comfort when the light suddenly flickered and weakened, paling and running like a watercolor sketch in the rain.

  Joanna felt something terrible wrenched from within her, as though a cold and dark hand had reached into her soul and ripped it bodily away. The warmth and comfort of the light vanished as a cold darkness swelled and overwhelmed her. She heard what she thought were her own cries echo bleakly through her mind, mingling with deep voices and strange noises that infiltrated and violated it.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  The voice sounded deafening after the blissful silence.

  Joanna blinked and harsh white light painfully pierced her eyes. Her skin felt cold, her body ached and felt as heavy as all the earth, as all the emotions she had left so far behind dragged her down with a weighty, lethargic gravity. She felt as though she was being drowned by her own existence and, before she had even realized it, tears were streaming from her face. Pain from the intravenous lines ached through her arms and her head began to throb from dehydration as she coughed a thin stream of bile that dribbled weakly across her lips.

  Damon Sheviz leaned over her and dabbed away the saliva, his head blocking the light as he held her face in his cold, dry hands.

  ‘Tell me, Joanna, what did you see?’

  Joanna managed to focus on him, and through her tears rose a terrible rage that swelled through her weakened limbs and surged through her belly like fire.

  Joanna snapped her head sideways, latched her teeth onto Sheviz’s left hand and bit down with every ounce of the fury that had been locked away inside for so long. Sheviz’s screams echoed out around her like wailing banshees, as her teeth sank through his flesh and tore a chunk of his hand away in a bloodied mess that spilled onto the tiled floor beneath her.

  Joanna spat gruesome, metallic-tasting blood out of her mouth as she laughed manically through her tears.

  ‘Go to hell!’

  Sheviz hopped up and down as he cradled the tattered wound on his hand, tears flooding from his eyes as he glared at her.

  ‘You first!’ he shouted. ‘This was just the first experiment, Joanna! I’ll keep working on you until there’s nothing left. I’ll keep sending you to the edge of death until you tell me what you saw! Mark my words, your days are numbered!’

  Joanna, her mouth still dripping Sheviz’s blood, smiled through her grief.

  ‘Do it!’ she spat. ‘I have nothing to fear.’

  Sheviz stared at her for a long moment, his pain forgotten. ‘What did you see?’ he gasped.

  Joanna held the smile on her face and, without a word, lay back on her gurney. Sheviz rushed to her side, his blue eyes wide and frantic, and then he scowled at her.

  ‘You’re lying!’ he spat.

  Joanna closed her eyes. ‘You knocked a pencil off the desk while I was dead, picked it up and tossed it onto the counter, then ran a hand through your hair as you watched me.’

  Sheviz’s face plunged in shock and wonder as he grabbed her shoulders, his bleeding hand forgotten as he shook her.

  ‘Please, Joanna, tell me what you saw!’

  Joanna lay still and did not open her eyes as she replied.

  ‘I really will die, before I tell you,’ she whispered softly.

  34

  MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY

  ‘Seriously?’

  Jake Donovan stood in his office with Glen Ryan, Neville Jackson and Karina Thorne, as Jarvis laid out what they had discovered.

  ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense,’ he explained. ‘Whoever is responsible for the murders is systematically targeting the people that they believe were involved, however indirectly, in the auto wreck on the Williamsburg Bridge.’

  The lie wasn’t a big one, but Ethan still marveled at Jarvis’s ability to deceive with a conviction that was utterly convincing. The auto wreck wasn’t their main area of concern, but Donovan didn’t need to know that. Many times in the past, Jarvis had, in effect, deceived Ethan, although never with malice in mind. Lopez seemed less inclined to believe the old man right off the bat, but then she too was capable of the same kind of deception. Takes one to know one, Ethan reflected. He wondered just what else Jarvis might keep buried up there in his head, what secrets he may harbor.

  ‘You want us to start digging into the clerk’s private records?’ Jackson asked them. ‘She’s just a bit player. How will that bring the men responsible for this to justice?’

  ‘You’ve already found the four men responsible for the robbery,’ Ethan reminded them as he tossed the black-and-white photograph of Wesley Hicks onto the table before them. ‘Two are dead and two are in jail right now. This is Hicks, caught by the security camera on the Williamsburg Bridge.’

  ‘There wasn’t any footage of them up there,’ Jackson uttered.

  ‘Computer-enhanced reflection in the window of the flatbed,’ Lopez replied with a bright smile. ‘Having the DIA on the case helps enormously, don’t you think?’

  ‘So they’re linked,’ Donovan said. ‘You think we might be able to dig something up on the clerk, maybe some kind of payment?’

  ‘That was my next move,’ Ethan said. ‘Problem is, if the money all went into the East River, then it’s possible that she won’t have received any payment. It would all have depended on the robbery going down without a hitch or, at least, one of the robbers making it out with the cash.’

  ‘Then what use is any of this?’ Glen Ryan asked. ‘Sure, it’s good procedure to have the clerk checked out, but I don’t see much chance of there being a paper trail. Dudes like the ones who hit the Pay-Go work with cash. It’s not like they’d have sent her a check.’

  Ethan shook his head.

  ‘We don’t make the clerk our priority,’ he explained. ‘The bank heist is effectively solved. What we do now is start thinking about who else could have been involved on the inside and whether or not they might be targeted by the same person who killed Hicks, Reece and the clerk.’

  ‘You think there’ll be more killings?’ Karina asked.

  ‘There’s been no justice,’ Lopez explained. ‘The killings seem to be motivated by revenge. If it’s gone down the way we think, then the four thieves would have hired the clerk to alter, falsify or just plain lose the statements, rendering them inadmissible in court. That would have created the first big stumbling block for a prosecution. The whole set-up would be there ready just in case any of the men were captured, slowing judicial procedure and perhaps, ultimately, getting the
m off the hook.’

  ‘We’re thinking that maybe this is the gang that have been hitting banks all down the east coast,’ Ethan said. ‘Just that the brains behind the Pay-Go heist isn’t one of the actual robbers.’

  Donovan raised an eyebrow. ‘A sort of mastermind, staying out of the limelight?’ he speculated.

  ‘It fits,’ Ethan said. ‘The heists are meticulously planned and go off without a hitch. It was only bad luck that the flatbed lost control on the bridge, but Hicks and Reece got away even then, suggesting they’d planned for every eventuality that they could. The latex masks, the waiting perhaps for days for the armoured truck to turn up because they run deliberately changed routes each day – all of it suggests that somebody must be behind the team actually hitting the banks.’

  ‘Okay,’ Karina agreed. ‘I can buy that. Question is. What do you want to do about it?’

  Ethan looked again at the picture board in one corner of the office.

  ‘My thinking is that the chain of corruption might be bigger than just the clerk. What if the whole team had been captured on the bridge, before the money cases could be opened? The organizer of this little masquerade would need a guarantee that the thieves wouldn’t sell them out to avoid prison time. The mastermind would need a second line of defense, somebody who could keep his team of thieves out of the prison system.’

  Jackson got it first. ‘The lawyer.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Lopez agreed. ‘His name was Eric Muir and he wasn’t a state attorney, he was privately hired and likely not cheap. Where did the money come from?’

  ‘The other bank heists?’ Glen Ryan hazarded.

  ‘Too soon,’ Ethan said. ‘They wouldn’t have had time to launder the money. Unless, of course, the attorney was willing to consider cash.’

  ‘If he’s crooked then cash is the best way because the notes are so hard to trace,’ Donovan agreed. ‘Anything else, there would be a trail to follow.’

  Ethan nodded in agreement. Fact was, so many criminals were too damned stupid to realize that keeping cash tucked in a safety box or similar was by far the best way to commit the perfect crime. Whether by fraud or outright robbery, thieves too often splashed their ill-gotten gains in ways that made them conspicuous and easy to trace: fast cars, casinos, drug deals that brought them to the attention of other police forces and so on.