The Eternity Project

by Dean Crawford

‘Go talk to the convicts on that block,’ Lopez cut him off. ‘Couple of hundred hardened criminals stunned silent by what happened in that cell. You’ll get your evidence there. We’re going to keep a watch on Eric Muir. He’s likely to be a target.’

  38

  KHAN YUNIS, GAZA CITY, PALESTINE

  One year ago

  She knew that her ordeal would soon be over.

  Joanna heard little through the door of her cell, the guards more wary after she’d smashed the doctor’s face and check in, but she had managed to overhear snatches of conversation from further away in the building. The Americans visited only rarely now, maybe once a month, and their drawled-English voices were distinctive from the gentle lilt of Arabic.

  Words, important words, had reached her. Old experiments over, new projects, huge discoveries in Israel’s deserts, problems. One word stood out to her, mentioned several times by different individuals: MACE. She knew the acronym from her work in South America with Ethan Warner: Munitions for Advanced Combat Environments, a major arms developer and supplier she had suspected of running an abduction racket in Mexico City, snatching the children of wealthy businessmen and then providing specialist teams to ‘find and rescue’ the unfortunate victims once more. She had almost pinned them down when threats to Ethan’s and her lives forced her to abandon the chase and them both to flee the city.

  Now, the name of the company boiled through her mind.

  Somehow, they were responsible for what had happened to her, she knew. The CEO of the company, an unpleasantly mercenary man by the name of Byron Stone, possessed close ties to the Pentagon and perhaps enough influence to persuade the CIA to pluck her off the streets of Gaza and help her to disappear for good.

  Now, the snatched conversations and disconnected dialogue she overheard was sending her a warning loud and clear. Whatever was being worked on now did not involve her and that made her an inconvenience that would soon be removed, permanently.

  The return of Doctor Sheviz a few days later confirmed her worst fears. His face had appeared at her door, smiling in at her with a look of smug satisfaction on his features.

  ‘How’s the nose?’ she had murmured.

  Sheviz’s nasal bridge was even more hooked now than it once had been. The doctor’s smile did not slip as his icy little eyes looked her up and down.

  ‘Better now, thank you,’ he said. ‘But my condition will soon be of no consequence to you, I can assure you.’

  Joanna shook her head, slowly. ‘It’s about time. I was getting bored. What’s it to be now? Thumb-screws? Waterboarding?’

  Sheviz’s features glittered with malice.

  ‘Oh, nothing so barbaric, my dear,’ he replied. ‘I have found a new use for my procedures, one where the outcome is not dependent upon your willingness to convey your experiences.’

  Joanna managed not to betray the deep chill of fear that sank inside her.

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on that.’

  ‘I would,’ Sheviz had replied cheerfully, ‘because you’re not supposed to survive. Only the condition of your blood is important to me now, Joanna. You’re to be a mere test subject.’

  The doctor had smiled at her and slammed the observation slot closed. Joanna had wrapped her arms around her shoulders to fend off the chill that seemed to have enveloped her, and she resolved to find a way out of the building while she still had the chance.

  That chance came just a few days later, when, to her surprise, she heard a rattle of gunfire from outside and the deep, reverberating thump of a rocket-propelled grenade that slammed into nearby buildings. A chorus of alarmed shouts and the sound of running boots echoed through the building, and, within moments, keys were rattling in the locks of her cell door.

  Two men barged in, a third training a Kalashnikov on her as she was dragged out of the cell and hurried down the corridor outside. One of the men moved in behind her and grabbed her arms, forcing them together as he hurriedly bound her wrists with coarse rope as they rushed down the corridor.

  Joanna pressed her clenched fists together for him, but angled them slightly apart and tensed her arms to produce a small gap between her wrists. The guard, concentrating on running and focused on the sound of gunfire outside, was either too busy to notice what she had done or more concerned with what was going on outside. Crucially, they did not make any effort to blindfold her.

  She was hustled down a dusty stairwell that doubled back on itself twice before reaching a small foyer. Like many buildings in Gaza, the foyer was devoid of furniture or decoration, a shell of a building buried amidst so many others. More shouts from outside echoed through open windows, chattering machine-gun fire replying from nearby.

  One of the guards reached a door and held onto the handle with one hand as he readied his weapon with the other. Joanna was jostled to the door, and all at once it was thrown open.

  A brilliant-blue sky and blazing sun greeted her as she was shoved out into the heat, the searing air as fresh as roses to her and the caress of the sun as warm on her skin as her mother’s touch had once been. Her captors shoved her to the right, circling the outside of the building as the gunfire nearby increased. Joanna stumbled along with them, loosening her bonds as she went.

  A car awaited, a dusty dark blue sedan.

  The men shoved her toward it, and then one of them broke free and rushed across the street, reaching out for a door. Joanna felt her bonds slip past her knuckles as she ran amongst her captors, and she looked sideways at the man carrying a Kalashnikov beside her.

  A terrific impact thumped into her chest, and, in a flash of light and heat, she saw a white trail of smoke pointing directly at the sedan as it vanished into a fireball. The man holding the door was torn from it and hurled through the air to hit the side of the building, his arm still hanging from the car door as it was consumed by flames and smoke.

  Joanna hit the ground on her back as thick black smoke filled the street. She rolled sideways and saw Israeli troops advancing down the street toward her, shifting from cover to cover and firing as they went.

  Veils of smoke obscured them from her vision as she struggled to her feet.

  The hard muzzle of an AK-47 jabbed her in the ribs and she turned to see one of her captors lying on the dust beside her, blood spilling across one of his eyes as he tried to force her to her feet. Joanna scrambled upright and, as the gunman stood, she shifted position into his blind spot and pushed the rifle aside with one hand as she stepped in and slammed her knee up into the gunman’s groin with all the fury she had harbored for so many long years.

  The gunman doubled over as a great rush of air blasted from his lungs. Joanna turned and rammed her knee up into the man’s throat, collapsing it as he toppled onto his side in the dust. She grabbed the rifle’s barrel, holding it to one side as she lifted one foot and smashed it down repeatedly across the man’s face until the rifle dropped away and he lay silent and still before her on the ground.

  Clouds of drifting smoke and the heat of the nearby flames spilled across her as she backed away from the body.

  Then she turned and fled into the warren of Gaza’s alleys and streets before the Israeli troops burst onto the scene. It was possible that they were her saviours, sent to liberate her, but, as her own government had to have had a hand in her imprisonment, so another government could not be trusted to have her best interests at heart.

  Joanna kept running until she could no longer hear the sound of gunfire behind her.

  39

  CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK SCHOOL OF LAW, LONG ISLAND CITY

  The law school was on the corner of Hunter and 25th, a modern-looking building of glass and aluminum ringed by steel bollards. Ethan sat with Lopez and Karina in her car in a parking lot nearby, watching the building from one angle while Donovan and the rest of the team sat on 44th and watched it from another.

  ‘He’s been in there for over an hour,’ Lopez said.

  ‘He’s a lecturer as well as a practicing attorney,’ Karina rep
lied. ‘I guess the law is this guy’s life.’

  ‘The law?’ asked Ethan. ‘Or breaking it?’

  ‘We don’t know that for sure, yet,’ Karina cautioned him.

  A trickle of students were spilling from the main entrance, making their way out into the cold night air, some hugging friends goodnight as others lit cigarettes that flared in the darkness. Most of the lights in the building were out, except those on the third floor, where Ethan guessed the lecture had taken place.

  ‘We told you what happened in the jail,’ Lopez said to Karina.

  ‘There were two other convicts in that cell,’ Karina insisted. ‘We can’t rule out that somebody else got to them, maybe offered them huge sums of money to take down Gladstone and Earl. You think you can take the word of two inmates? Their rap sheet was a yard long.’

  ‘Why bother offering money to take down Gladstone and Earl?’ Ethan asked. ‘Better to let the lawyer do his work and let them get out for free.’

  ‘They didn’t make anything off the Pay-Go raid, remember? The money went into the river,’ Karina replied. ‘Maybe the man behind it all gets greedy and decides to bump off the remaining two men on his team. Probably cost him less than hiring the goddamned lawyer.’

  ‘It could have backfired,’ Lopez suggested. ‘If Gladstone and Earl were targeted, they may have been able to convince their attackers that they could lead them to more money than this mysterious mastermind was offering. Not to mention the fact that if their former boss was having them iced in jail, then why should he honor any payment to their killers?’

  ‘Lopez is right,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘It’s too messy and not in keeping with what these guys have done in the past. Something else got them in their cells, and from what we heard from the two convicts who witnessed the entire attack, I’d say it’s our vengeful spirit.’

  Karina snorted.

  ‘You think that two convicts responsible for the murder of their cellmates are going to just stand up and say, “Hey, yeah, we did it!”’

  ‘They could barely walk or talk,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘It takes a lot for guys like that to completely lose all thoughts of machismo.’

  Ethan nodded. The two men who had survived the attack were known thugs and fraudsters, and, although they weren’t exactly high-ranking criminals, they certainly had spent time in the prison system. They would have had forged into their psyche the knowledge that to show weakness, especially in front of other inmates, was to condemn themselves to a life of misery at the hands of others. Such people were referred to in Rikers Island as ‘food’ for the bigger fish.

  Yet the pair of them had been crippled by terror and had both wept openly in front of Ethan, Lopez and the other cops. These were not men covering up one of countless jail-based or gang-related homicides. These were men who had witnessed something terrifying enough to have scoured them of any sense of shame or pride. The last time he and Lopez had witnessed fear like that in men, it had been hunting down an unknown and savage creature in the backwoods of Idaho six months previously.

  ‘Whatever got them,’ Ethan said, ‘can move at will and has tremendous strength. I don’t think we’re going to be able to protect Eric Muir, no matter where we send him.’

  ‘If he’s not guilty,’ Lopez said, ‘then we’ve got nothing to worry about.’

  Ethan shrugged and was about to reply when up on the third floor of the school the lights began flickering on and off as though the power was going out.

  ‘You see that?’ Lopez pointed.

  ‘I see it,’ Ethan replied and went for his door handle. ‘It’s going down.’

  ‘He could be turning the lights out!’ Karina snapped, as Ethan opened his door and climbed out.

  Before he could respond, the radio in Karina’s car crackled.

  ‘All available units please respond, assault in progress, corner of forty-fourth and Hunter.’

  Karina cursed as she grabbed the radio microphone and yelled back. ‘Alpha Team in position, moving now!’

  Karina and Lopez leaped from the vehicle and ran with Ethan across the street, as Donovan, Glen and Jackson dashed across from 44th, their weapons already in their hands.

  The students huddling around cellphones and cigarettes near the entrance leaped out of the way as the police team dashed through.

  ‘Any other students in here?’ Lopez asked as they ran past.

  One of the young guys shook his head. ‘We were the last out, except for the lecturer.’

  Ethan dashed inside as a member of staff rushed toward them in the foyer with a phone clasped in her hand. She looked like a cleaner, gloves on her hands and a waft of something clinical surrounding her as she pointed back the way she had come, her face wracked with fear as she spoke in a foreign accent.

  ‘Third floor!’ she yelled. ‘Something bad happen!’

  ‘You see anything?’ Donovan asked as he ran past.

  ‘Mr. Muir, he screaming for help!’

  The team dashed past her and ran for the elevator nearby.

  ‘Don’t use the elevators!’ Lopez shouted.

  Neither Donovan, Jackson nor Glen listened to her as they piled into the elevator and Donovan hit the button for the third floor. Karina dashed past the second available elevator and crashed through the stairwell door.

  Ethan followed Lopez through the same door and they turned, leaping up the steps two at a time. Ethan dug in, his fitness now getting somewhere close to where it had been when he had served in the Marines, but he was still no match for Lopez. Several years younger and just as driven, she flew up the stairs and passed Karina.

  Ethan sucked in a huge lungful of air and fought to keep Lopez in sight as he caught up with Karina. They turned the corner of the stairwell on the second floor and raced up the steps.

  ‘She do this often?’ Karina gasped as she struggled to keep up with Lopez.

  ‘Sure, if there’s a pay check at the other end,’ Ethan wheezed.

  As they reached the third floor, Ethan saw the lights flickering, the fluorescent tubes clicking as they fluttered on and off. Lopez hurried to the stairwell exit as Karina approached, her pistol drawn. Lopez grabbed the door handle and swung the door open as Karina rushed through and aimed down a corridor that flickered in the intermittent light.

  Ethan followed Karina through as Lopez slipped into the corridor and quietly shut the door behind them.

  The corridor led to a series of what were probably classrooms or lecture halls. Karina crept forward through the flickering pools of light toward a door that was open as though recently vacated. Most of the other doors were closed, nothing but inky blackness visible through the windows, but the open one cast a dim light from within.

  A movement ahead in the darkness caught Ethan’s eye and he momentarily froze. Karina hesitated, but then moved on as she recognized Donovan edging his way toward the shaft of pale light. The shaft flickered on and off like the lights in the corridor. Donovan pointed silently at the open door and Karina nodded.

  Glen and Jackson fanned out in the corridor, ready to charge into the room as Donovan counted down on his fingers.

  Three. Jackson raised his rifle.

  Two. Glen Ryan crept up to the edge of the door, pistol in hand.

  One. Karina aimed to cover Glen.

  Donovan pointed into the room and Glen charged in first, followed by Karina, Jackson and then the rest of them.

  Ethan and Lopez dashed into the room to see a lecture hall before them, quite large with a vaulted ceiling, a dais and lectern on one side and ranks of chairs on the other. The lights flickered ominously and the air felt bitterly cold as they all saw clouds of their breath condensing in the stuttering light.

  But the room was empty.

  ‘I don’t see anything!’ Glen snapped, sweeping the room with his pistol.

  ‘Clear,’ Jackson said, lowering his weapon.

  Donovan slowed and looked at Ethan, who glanced at Lopez.

  ‘Maybe he took off ?’ she suggested. ‘
Heard us coming?’

  Ethan felt the hairs on the back of his arms stand on end and he shook his head.

  ‘It’s too cold,’ he said. ‘It’s here.’

  ‘What’s here?’ Jackson uttered. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  Ethan was about to answer when something dropped onto the carpet a few inches from where he stood. He looked down and in the flickering light saw a glistening droplet of fluid.

  Donovan, Glen, Jackson, Karina and Lopez all looked down at the droplet at the same moment, and then all of them looked up into the lecture hall’s vaulted ceiling.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Karina whispered.

  In the inky blackness above was the body of the lawyer, Eric Muir. He was spread-eagled across the ceiling, his body trembling as though in some kind of seizure. It took a moment for Ethan to realize what he was actually looking at.

  The body was suspended in mid-air fifteen feet above the dais, hovering as though on a pillar of air.

  40

  ‘That’s not possible!’ Jackson snapped, a thin trickle of panic infecting his voice.

  Donovan raised his pistol as a sudden agonized scream echoed out through the hall and Muir quivered with the seizures racking his body.

  ‘Get him down!’ Donovan shouted.

  ‘Jesus,’ Glen uttered. ‘How?’

  Ethan was about to suggest grabbing some of the chairs to help reach the lawyer when a crackling sound like snapping twigs echoed around the hall. Muir’s strained screams were cut abruptly off as his body jerked in violent spasms and then his body shot toward the ground as though he had been fired from a cannon.

  Mr. Muir slammed into the carpeted floor with a deep, reverberating crunch that utterly shattered every bone in his body. Ethan saw his eyeballs plunge into their sockets and fluid burst from the cavities under the impact.

  ‘Sweet Mother of Christ, what the hell is going on?’ Jackson shouted and began backing away toward the door.

  ‘Stand still!’ Ethan snapped, pointing at him. ‘It’s not after us.’