The Eternity Project

by Dean Crawford

  But the smart man who carried off a decent take from a heist or fraud and ensured that their life changed as little as possible, at least on the outside, held a crucial advantage. Sure, you might still have to hold down a day-job to cover your tracks, but, if a successful heist netted a man a couple of hundred thousand bucks and he was smart enough to use it for all of his cash purchases, things like gasoline, food shopping, household goods and such like, then even if he spent a thousand bucks a month that cash would last him more than fifteen years. And that didn’t even take into consideration the extra salary that would build up in his bank account, money that would otherwise have been spent on those same goods that could now be legally spent on the cars and casinos without attracting unnecessary attention. A wise man could double his available annual income for the majority of his working life off the back of a single successful heist.

  ‘We follow the lawyer, Eric Muir,’ Ethan said. ‘If he’s attacked by somebody, then maybe we get to catch our killer. If he isn’t but evidence is found of him doing deals to get these convicts off the hook for a price, then we still win. Either way, I’d be surprised if this guy’s completely clean: somebody had to hire him as the defense for this case.’

  Donovan nodded. ‘Agreed, we’ll do it. You guys keep searching for evidence of this mysterious mastermind.’

  Ethan shook his head. ‘We’ll all take part in the stakeout.’

  ‘What for?’ Donovan asked. ‘It only takes two officers to keep an eye on one man.’

  Ethan thought fast. He wanted to be on site, because, if the mysterious photographer showed up again, he absolutely intended to corner them once and for all.

  ‘We don’t know if he’ll lead us directly to the main man,’ he said. ‘The more people we have on this the better, as it’s our only lead. Besides, putting cops on it costs money. We’re not on the department’s clock, remember?’

  Donovan shrugged and nodded, and Ethan turned away and walked out of the office with Lopez and Jarvis.

  ‘This is getting in the way of things for us,’ Lopez pointed out as they walked. ‘Nothing’s being done about MK-ULTRA or our friends at the CIA.’

  ‘One thing at a time,’ Jarvis cut in. ‘Let’s get this case solved first.’

  ‘Nicola’s right,’ Ethan insisted. ‘Have you got anything from Major Greene’s list of names?’

  ‘The team’s on the case,’ Jarvis replied, ‘but these things take time. There’s a hundred years to work through, much of it from time periods when documentation wasn’t as prevalent as it is today. If there’s anybody here in the city descended from people on that list, they’ll find them eventually.’

  ‘The CIA were tracking Joanna toward New York,’ Ethan said, ‘and are likely here already. Just because we’re not under threat, doesn’t mean they’ll stop their mission. If we don’t find her fast, they will, and everything we’re trying to achieve will be over.’

  ‘I’ll stay on it,’ Jarvis promised.

  Karina jogged up behind them as they walked. ‘Nice work back there. You want to tell me what you’re going to do if this wraith thing of yours turns up and kills that lawyer?’

  ‘We haven’t figured that part out yet,’ Ethan admitted.

  ‘Well, you might want to start thinking about it,’ she said, ‘because, sooner or later, Donovan is going to realize what’s happening here and, if he thinks you guys are crazies, he’ll have justification for claiming back jurisdiction of the case. Just sayin’.’

  Ethan looked at Lopez.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘or he sees what we saw. Then he’ll want us here.’

  Jarvis stopped them both.

  ‘Look, before we go see Eric Muir, why don’t we take this to the people that we know for sure are involved?’

  ‘Earl and Gladstone?’ Lopez asked. ‘I doubt we can do that without further compromising the case. If that lawyer is crooked and we lean on his clients, he’ll use it against us in any trial and, besides, we already know that they’re not talking. Identifying Hicks and Reece probably won’t be enough to get them to sing for us.’

  ‘This is DIA business, nothing to do with the police department, so we keep it quiet,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Why don’t you pay them a visit and tell them straight that one by one their colleagues are being picked off by a crazed serial killer? Show them a few photographs of what’s left of Hicks and Reece? Maybe that, along with the fact that the money all went into the East River, will be enough to tip them over the edge and finger whoever is actually behind all of this.’

  Ethan looked at Lopez, who shrugged. ‘I guess it’s worth a shot.’

  *

  ‘What have you managed to dig up?’

  Donovan looked Glen Ryan in the eye. The kid shrugged as he replied.

  ‘Nothing. Out-of-towners, nothing to suggest they’re up to no good here. Karina’s not hiding anything as far as I can tell but we’re not on great terms right now.’

  Donovan turned his gaze to Jackson. ‘You?’

  ‘Plenty,’ Jackson replied. ‘They took off out of Chicago a few months back and somebody’s been housekeeping for them, that much we knew. I checked the local rags for information around the time they cleared out, and guess what I found?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It was all over the news,’ Jackson said, ‘a major congressional investigation into corruption at the Central Intelligence Agency. A big government department in DC was running the show when suddenly two staff members were killed in suspected homicides. The investigation is shut down, the media goes quiet and everything’s forgotten.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with Warner and Lopez?’ Glen Ryan asked.

  ‘Only the fact that Warner’s sister was on the team that got hit,’ Jackson replied. ‘Natalie Warner. She too goes off the radar for a few weeks, but then turns up again after an internal investigation clears her of any wrong-doing. Point is, there was no need for her to disappear at all, seeing as she wasn’t ever a suspect in the murders.’

  Donovan stared thoughtfully out of his office door. ‘Their man Jarvis works for the DIA,’ he mused out loud. ‘Maybe some kind of inter-agency-rivalry thing? The CIA tying up loose ends in some kind of cover-up?’

  Jackson shrugged. ‘Beats me. They’re up to their necks in something, but, as it involves government agencies, there’s never quite enough evidence to tie them down. You want me to call Langley and see what they say?’

  Donovan thought for a moment, then shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’ll do it.’

  35

  KHAN YUNIS, GAZA CITY, PALESTINE

  One year ago

  The experiments ceased, finally.

  She had known they would, after the last had almost resulted in her dying for good.

  The tunnel of light had not reappeared. Instead, Joanna had found herself sucked down into a gruesome, black, cold, timeless place, where every step was hindered by dense tangles of writhing undergrowth. Cruel, threatening creatures tracked her from the darkness, loud noises shocked her or ground interminably through her skull like a thousand fingernails dragged down endless chalkboards. There, in that seemingly endless pit of despair, she had felt something new and terrifying that had haunted her thoughts ever since.

  Evil.

  Like most adults, she no longer believed in monsters under the bed or ghosts haunting the darkened corners of lonely houses, but now she had a new appreciation of what evil truly was: the construct of our wildest and yet darkest fantasies, lived for real through the actions of those unable to contain them. Monsters, ghosts, gargoyles – all were the inventions of men designed to avoid facing the truth of what evil really was: their own actions.

  Joanna had seen the evil lurking within her in her last voyage into her own soul, a beast of indescribable fury and strength that if unleashed would destroy the world just to see the sparks it made going up. There was no Satan but that which lived within her, and all other people, too.

  For the first
time, Joanna was relieved to have found herself lying on the cold gurney as her body was dragged back from the brink of oblivion once again.

  Joanna Defoe remained in captivity, in the tiny cell in the darkness, although now she no longer wore the blindfold: only her hands remained bound. She sat on her mattress as the voice of Doctor Sheviz reached out for her through the hatch in the door.

  ‘Tell me, Joanna. What did you see?’

  Joanna remained silent. She ignored the question just as she had ignored it hundreds of times before. Doctor Sheviz had gone through alternating paroxysms of hatred, rage and desperation, but Joanna had never once faltered. Finally, after months of repeated experiments, the men who were funding the doctor’s insane Eternity Project had demanded that he either obtain verifiable results or abandon the work.

  To Sheviz’s dismay and Joanna’s veiled delight, he had failed. He had already made a fatal mistake and now deep within Joanna was forged a core of cold iron, hard and without flaws, impervious.

  ‘Please, Joanna,’ Sheviz whined through the hatch. ‘Tell me what you saw. I know that you saw something, Joanna. I could tell, by your features, by your eyes. You saw things, tell me what they were!’

  Joanna remained silent. Since Sheviz’s failure, the men who she assumed were responsible for her abduction had gradually become more relaxed. The men in the gray suits, and there were several over the months that had passed, had spoken more openly around her. Sometimes, they had exchanged entire conversations right outside the door to her cell, their American accents and terminology as plain as the day was long.

  Then, as now, Joanna had simply listened, all the while playing the part of a catatonic waif divested of both resistance and interest in the world around her. It had become surprisingly easy to adjust, to recover the spark of hope, ever since she had laid eyes on Doctor Sheviz months before on the gurney. What she had read there had provided her with the vital link to reality that she so desperately craved, the anchor they had tried to take from her. After all of the painstaking care they had taken to break her down into an emotional and physical blank slate, the insane doctor had eradicated all of it with one simple error.

  The digital watch on his wrist displayed the time, the date and the year. As he had leaned over her, the sleeve of his white coat had ridden up his wrist and exposed the face of the watch to her at close range.

  In an instant, Joanna had known how long she had been incarcerated, what month and day it was, what year it was. In a rush of awareness like the first stars igniting in a new-born universe, she had regained that which had been so brutally taken from her. Despite the crushing emotional trauma that she had endured since at the hands of Sheviz, she had looked forward to each and every visit, because each strengthened her awareness and her ability to maintain her fragile grip on the notion that she was still a part of a larger world and that there was still a future for her.

  For the first time in years, she was able to think of escape. Three years, two months and seventeen days, to be precise.

  ‘Please, Joanna. One last time: tell me what you saw.’

  Joanna sat silent for a moment longer and then slowly turned her head. The desire to take immediate action, to escape this shadowy prison and simply breathe fresh air again was overwhelming, but that time was not now.

  Sheviz’s fanatically blazing eyes peered through the hatch as she turned to look at him and silently opened her mouth. Joanna croaked something unintelligible from her lips, tried to speak. No sound came forth.

  Sheviz’s face vanished from the hatch as he shrieked frantically at the guards outside. ‘Open the door!’

  The Palestinian gunmen, hired hands who were being paid to stand watch over the building in which she had been held for so long, hurried forward. She heard the jingling of keys, the heavy clank of the locking mechanism in the doors grinding around.

  Joanna had been a pliant and comatose prisoner for many long, long years. The guards and the doctor had no fear of her. She liked that. The iron ball deep inside her pulsed into life as the door opened and Sheviz burst in, dropped to his knees in front of her and grasped one of her hands in his.

  ‘Joanna, please tell me. What did you see?’

  Joanna looked into his eyes but her awareness was directed at the two guards lingering just outside the room. Both looked young, fit and well fed. Both carried the ubiquitous AK-47 rifles clasped across their chests. At this close range, even the inaccurate Kalashnikov could not fail to miss her.

  ‘What did you see?’ Sheviz repeated in desperation.

  Joanna focused on him again and a smile dragged itself onto her face, born of sweet and yet poisonous revenge. A word fell from her lips as soft as a whisper.

  ‘Justice.’

  Joanna sucked her stomach in as she flipped her head forward, her entire body jerking in a whiplash motion that smashed her forehead across Sheviz’s face like a club. The doctor let out a strangled gasp of pain as he tumbled backwards and sprawled across the floor of the cell.

  Joanna leaped up from the bed and jumped into the air, lifting both feet high as she plunged down and landed directly onto Sheviz’s ribcage. She felt his ribs crack like dried twigs beneath her, just as the two guards raced into the cell and smashed her aside.

  Joanna hit the wall hard, stars dancing in front of her eyes as her legs crumpled beneath her. She slumped down as she glared at the doctor with a savage smile plastered across her face.

  Sheviz lay curled up into a foetal ball, weeping as thick blood spilled from his ruined face to pool in scarlet smears across the floor of the cell. Joanna watched as the doctor was dragged screaming in pain from the cell by the two guards and the door was locked behind them, sealing her in once more.

  She got up, still reveling in the first act of defiance for years, and sat on her mattress. Her heart was pounding so hard inside her chest that she felt as though it were shaking her entire body. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps that she fought to bring under control.

  Sheviz was finished with her, that much she knew. The men outside her room had spoken loudly enough that she knew the doctor had failed in his experiments and that her fate now lay in the hands of the CIA.

  The CIA, she had deduced from months of overheard conversations, were working in conjunction with a powerful arms company called MACE, whom she had been investigating over claims of rigged ransom abductions, first in South America and now here in Gaza. When she got too close, they had decided to use a CIA grab-team loosely disguised as militants to abduct her. The CIA then took over, running its bizarre experiments on her and no doubt others. The family connection she had heard described long ago was her father, who had unwittingly been caught up in a program she had often researched: MK-ULTRA.

  Her father, Harrison, had responded well to the experiments, which used drugs and other forms of mental suggestion, ending up in a jail in Singapore for three years for his efforts after he had abruptly shot four prominent Communist sympathisers during the Vietnam War. Joanna had guessed that the experiments were all an effort to try to ‘program’ her in the same way, and she didn’t doubt that it would have worked were it not for Doctor Sheviz’s sloppy mistake.

  Joanna’s resolve, strengthened since seeing the doctor’s watch, had prevented her from slipping fully into a mental state entirely open to suggestion. But that did not mean that the doctor’s experiments had failed entirely.

  She curled up on the mattress, her mind filled with vivid imagery, sights that had changed her notion of what it meant to be alive. She had died during the experiments, and had seen a tunnel of light that had drawn her up into a place that was beyond imagination, beyond words, beyond anything that she could ever have conceived until she witnessed it herself. The darkness of her final visit was not enough to deter her, for she knew now that it was her own damaged soul that she was witnessing, not some place of suffering for the damned.

  In no less than thirty-seven separate experiments, she had witnessed the afterlife. The very thing
that Doctor Sheviz had sought confirmation of had been the very thing that had strengthened Joanna’s resolve to the point that nothing could break her. Joanna Defoe no longer feared death and, in life, she had resolved to pursue one thing above all others: revenge. The cold iron ball in her belly pulsed again, fueled by the memory and the knowledge of the cruel resolve that lay within her, just waiting to be unleashed.

  Damon Sheviz would not be fit enough to return for some time, due to the pain he would be suffering from his multiple fractured ribs. That meant that the CIA would probably seek to move or perhaps even terminate her.

  Whatever they decided, when the time came, she would be ready.

  36

  RIKERS ISLAND, NEW YORK CITY

  ‘Ain’t no talkin’ me down!’

  The bars of the cell were too solid to rattle as James Gladstone tried to shake them in fury, the guards nearby taking no notice as they patrolled the block.

  ‘You’re wastin’ your time, man,’ said Earl Thomas from behind him. ‘We’ll be walkin’ from here soon enough, but those dudes –’ he pointed to the guards with a cynical smile – ‘they’re the ones doin’ life.’

  Gladstone turned away from the bars to face back into their eight-by-twelve-foot cell. White-washed cinderblock walls, two bunk beds with reed-thin mattresses, a shared sink and latrine stared back at him.

  ‘Man, I hate this shit.’

  They had been incarcerated in the federal jail for little more than twenty-four hours, but Gladstone was already pacing up and down like an enraged, cornered bull. Six foot three and two-hundred forty pounds, he wasn’t good with confined spaces. His glossy black face was bunched up like a prune, predatory eyes searching for someone, or something, to take out his frustrations upon. Earl, on the other hand, was half Gladstone’s weight and barely five-nine. He rested back on his bunk and shrugged.