42
5TH PRECINCT POLICE DEPARTMENT, NEW YORK CITY
Donovan set his phone back down in its cradle and sat back thoughtfully in his seat.
It was late and the station was virtually empty but for the night crew manning the cells and the phone lines. It not being a weekend, evenings were generally quiet, even in New York City. Only the patrol officers would have their work cut out for them, an endless stream of gangland territorial disputes and domestic disturbances to field.
‘What did the CIA say?’
Glen Ryan sat opposite Donovan. The younger man was intelligent, determined and committed to his job, but he was also vulnerable in his affection for Karina Thorne. Donovan was not sure just how much he ought to be telling him. Yet now there was another crisis. Jackson had been sent home a jabbering wreck. The events in the lecture hall had fractured his nerves and Donovan was not sure when he would return to work. Or worse, if he would fold under the pressure.
‘They know about Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez,’ he replied finally. ‘It was strange. I got bounced from one department to the next before I spoke to somebody.’
‘What’s strange about that?’ Glen asked.
‘Because each new office was higher than the last,’ Donovan said. ‘Then, they put me through to another number, and this guy answers. I’d called Langley, but this guy was here in New York.’
‘So?’ Glen said. ‘The CIA has field offices in every city, right?’
Donovan shook his head. ‘This guy was in a car and talking on a cell. Soon as the line opened he asked to meet me.’
Glen frowned. ‘Somebody looking for Warner?’
‘Maybe,’ Donovan confirmed. ‘And right now that suits me just fine.’
‘You’re going to sell them out?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’ Donovan asked. ‘They’re climbing all over our asses right now and we could do without the attention.’
Glen leaned forward on the desk. ‘Right now, it’s the DIA that’s helping us with this investigation and also preventing the media from tearing us to pieces. That guy Jarvis has turned what happened at the law school into a whole big nothing. The media had packed up and gone within an hour of arriving.’
‘They’re digging around too much,’ Donovan insisted. ‘Sooner or later . . .’
‘I don’t give a damn!’ Glen snapped and smashed his fist down on the chief’s desk. ‘You saw what happened. There’s something out there and it’s hunting us down! At least Warner and Lopez seem to know something about it. Without them we’d probably be dead by now.’
Donovan looked at Glen for a long moment before he spoke.
‘Glen, you saw what Karina did in that corridor, didn’t you?’
Glen sighed and sat back, rubbing tired eyes with his fingers. ‘I saw her do something,’ he replied. ‘I heard her say to Warner that she was calling for back-up.’
Donovan shook his head. ‘I don’t buy that. She could have called for back-up any time and she’d have used her radio not her cell.’
‘Our radios were down,’ Glen said. ‘So were our cellphones for that matter, while we were stuck in that elevator.’
Donovan nodded.
‘Seems like whatever the hell that wraith thing is, it only affects an area immediately around it. The lights flicker, batteries drain, shit like that. Maybe Karina was far enough away that her cell was working.’
‘It fits,’ Glen agreed. ‘The lights were on outside the building and on other floors. Did you feel that cold, too? But that also figures if what Ethan said is right, that it gets its juice from something but that it can run out, too.’
Donovan thought hard. Karina had still used her cellphone and not her radio, which meant that she wasn’t calling for back-up. Something nagged at him but he couldn’t put his finger on it. With Jackson down for the moment, there was nobody else he could ask. At least, he figured, he’d get to know where Glen’s loyalties truly lay.
‘Glen, I need you to pull Karina’s cell. We need to know who she was calling.’
Glen stared blankly back at Donovan. ‘What the hell for? What does it matter who she was calling?’
‘She’s up to something, Glen,’ Donovan replied. ‘I don’t know what, but whatever it is it’s important enough that she would make a call whilst we were under attack from some godforsaken homicidal ghoul.’
Glen shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It was a panicked situation, she probably just grabbed the first thing that came to her mind and—’
‘Glen,’ Donovan interrupted him. ‘If you’re worried about upsetting her now, imagine what will happen if she, Warner, Lopez or Jarvis manage to figure out what really happened on Williamsburg Bridge.’
Glen sat silently for a moment and then dragged a hand down his face.
‘If I try to pull the records, it’ll show up,’ he said. ‘Easiest way to do this is for me to just take a look at her call list on the cell itself.’
‘However you do it,’ Donovan muttered, ‘do it soon. We don’t figure out a way to stop all this before they do, then everything we’ve achieved is for nothing.’
Glen stared at Donovan. His features paled slightly. ‘You really think that this thing that’s hunting us is the ghost of Tom Ross’s wife?’
‘I don’t give a damn what it is!’ Donovan snapped. ‘Right now, all that matters is stopping it, understood?’
Glen got up out of his seat and looked down at the chief. ‘What about this CIA guy? What are you going to say to him?’
Donovan grabbed his jacket as he stood and slipped it over his shoulders.
‘I’m going to offer a trade,’ he replied. ‘I’ll hand Warner and Lopez over to them provided that they get the DIA off our case here. Everybody wins.’
‘But that doesn’t remove our problem,’ Glen insisted. ‘Christ’s sake, Donovan, we’re being haunted!’
‘Everything dies,’ Donovan snapped, and jabbed his finger into Glen’s chest. ‘We use our brains to figure out how to kill it. It’s not invulnerable – we’ve just got to figure out where it gets its juice from, okay? We solve that, then we finish this.’
Glen exhaled noisily, then turned and walked out of Donovan’s office.
The chief looked at his desk for a moment and then rested one hand instinctively on his sidearm. He had no idea why a CIA agent would want to meet him in secret in the middle of the night way up in Harlem, but, after what Jackson had found out about the killings in DC, he sure as hell wasn’t going unarmed.
43
Ethan stood on legs that felt as though the strength had been drained from them.
His heart fluttered in his chest as though unsure of whether or not to keep beating, and he reached out for something to steady himself as he released his grip on Joanna’s neck. The chain-link fence rattled as he leaned on it.
‘Hello, Ethan.’
Her voice reached him as though from another dimension, a voice that he had not heard for five years. Strange, how her face had been burned into his conscience over time but he had forgotten how she spoke, the slight southern lilt to her accent, the perfect pronunciation that had always eluded him.
He sought for something to say but he felt as though somebody had stuffed a sock into his mouth.
‘Joanna?’ was all he finally managed to utter.
Idiot. It wasn’t like she could be anybody else. Joanna did not mock him, however. She nodded.
‘You must have a lot of questions,’ she said.
Ethan was about to reply when a figure vaulted over the chain-link fence and landed cat-like in the shadows. Lopez stormed straight toward Joanna. ‘Okay, who’s the asshole?’
Ethan raised a hand to hold Lopez back, but it was still as if somebody had anesthetized his jaw. He couldn’t speak. Lopez caught the atmosphere between them and slowed of her own accord, watching the blonde woman warily. ‘Ethan?’
Joanna took a pace forward. ‘I’m Joanna Defoe,’ she said.
Lopez’s dark eyes widened slightly and she gl
anced at Ethan before looking back at Joanna. ‘Oh.’
Ethan managed to re-inflate his lungs and gain control of his wildly swinging emotions.
‘Why are you here in New York?’ he gasped, unable to think of anything more profound to say.
Joanna, keeping one curious eye on Lopez, answered: ‘It’s a long story.’
Finally, some of the emotions swirling in a silent maelstrom in Ethan’s mind found their voice through anger as he broke through the shock and surprise.
‘No shit,’ he said. ‘You’re alive. You’ve been free for at least a year and you never made contact.’ Joanna opened her mouth to reply but Ethan kept going. ‘I spent years searching for you across half the goddamned planet and you show up here in New York with a camera and start shooting holiday pictures like nothing’s happened? Where the hell have you been? What happened in Gaza? How did you get out of there and back home? Why didn’t you call or make contact or . . .?’
‘Because I couldn’t!’ Joanna snapped. ‘I couldn’t make contact, or call anybody or be seen wandering around. You don’t know what’s been happening, so don’t judge me.’
‘Don’t judge you?’ Ethan uttered in disbelief. ‘I’m not judging anyone – I just want to know what the hell happened. You’ve been gone for five years, Jo, and you don’t know what’s been happening to me either.’
Joanna fixed him with a serious gaze. ‘I’ve had other things on my mind.’
‘So did we,’ Lopez cut in. ‘You can’t expect Ethan to not be surprised when you show up with a camera having spent the last couple of days spying on us.’
‘And who’s we?’ Joanna glared at her.
‘Nicola Lopez,’ she shot back, ‘of Warner and Lopez Incorporated.’
‘River Forest, Illinois,’ Joanna replied with surprising speed. ‘Former detective, Washington, DC, left the force after your partner was killed. Joined forces with Ethan afterward and set up as bail-bondsmen.’
Ethan’s eyes widened with every passing word. ‘How long have you been tailing us?’
‘I haven’t been tailing you,’ Joanna insisted. ‘You showed up here in the city just after I arrived.’
Lopez frowned. ‘What brought you here?’
‘Like I said, long story,’ Joanna replied, ‘and not for your ears, honey.’
‘How about I tear your ears off ? ’ Lopez growled.
Ethan stepped in between them. ‘Easy,’ he said, and turned to Joanna. ‘Anything you tell me, you can tell Nicola.’
Joanna looked at Lopez for a moment. ‘I see. Like that, is it?’
‘Like what?’ Lopez snapped and glanced at Ethan as she waved a thumb in Joanna’s direction. ‘You nearly had a breakdown over her?’
Joanna’s features seemed to soften slightly as she looked at him. ‘Seriously?’
‘That’s my long story,’ Ethan shot back. ‘Why are you here?’
Ethan and Lopez stood side by side, both of them wearing uncompromising expressions. Joanna stared at them both and then sighed.
‘There are still people looking for me,’ she replied. ‘I’ve been tracking down what scraps of evidence I can find of a CIA project, looking for survivors.’
‘MK-ULTRA,’ Lopez said.
‘How do you know about that?’ Joanna asked in surprise.
‘We know all about it,’ Ethan replied. ‘We know about your father’s involvement in the project, the time he spent in a Singapore jail because of it, and that it’s still going on. My sister nearly lost her life to the CIA because of it when they targeted members of a congressional investigation into “black projects” at the agency. Nicola and I have stayed off the grid for the last six months because of it, too.’
‘I know,’ Joanna replied. ‘I lost track of you when you traveled to Idaho. I had to stay in DC.’
‘You were there?’ Lopez uttered with contempt.
‘Of course I was there,’ she snapped. ‘A major congressional investigation into the same project that ruined my father’s life and almost took mine? Where the hell else would I have been?’
‘What?’ Ethan asked. ‘What do you mean almost took your life?’
Joanna glanced over her shoulder at the occasional car drifting past on the road, as though nervous of anybody and anything in the city.
‘We can’t talk here,’ she said. ‘There’s too much ground to cover.’
‘You think we’re letting you go now?’ Lopez almost laughed.
‘It’s not about letting me go,’ Joanna insisted. ‘I came here because there is at least one CIA assassin searching for me, and the only way I can expose the operation is to find people who were involved in it.’
‘That’s not surprising,’ Ethan replied, ‘considering how many former agents you’ve taken down in the last couple of weeks.’
Joanna scowled at Ethan. ‘I haven’t taken anyone down!’ she snapped. ‘Damned right, I cornered each and every one of them, forced them to talk and recorded their confessions on video. Sure, it might not be admissible as evidence in court and I sure as hell enjoyed scaring the life out of those bastards, but I didn’t kill any of them.’
‘You let them go?’ Ethan asked, and was rewarded with a nod.
‘I didn’t want them dead,’ Joanna replied. ‘What kind of punishment is that? I wanted them alive, so that they could be tried and sent to prison for what they did. Somebody else has other ideas and has killed every agent I’ve spoken to.’
‘But why would they do that?’ Lopez asked. ‘Killing off so many people associated with a single program would leave a pattern behind that law enforcement could easily track. It would bring them right back to the CIA, exposing them anyway.’
Joanna shook her head.
‘Their murders could never be linked that way because all of the evidence from the original project burned in 1973; there’s nothing physical left. Whoever is hitting the former agents is clearing up afterward, leaving no trace. There’s only been a single murder that made the news and that was covered up real fast.’
‘Wisconsin,’ Ethan agreed, and then raised an eyebrow. ‘So how could you be tracking survivors down?’
Joanna smiled faintly. ‘Because my father told me their names,’ she replied simply, ‘made me memorize them over and over again when I was a child. He used something called mnemonics, a memory trick that enabled me to memorize over a hundred names just like card sharks memorize an entire deck.’
‘He took evidence with him?’ Lopez asked. ‘Before the papers were burned?’
‘Memorized them in the same way,’ Joanna replied. ‘Kept them with him all that time he spent in jail in Singapore, and all the years afterward, until he passed them on to me before he died. He knew they’d come in useful if things went sour at the CIA. Just as damned well he did.’
Ethan struggled to keep up with the revelations.
‘Then how come you’re on their case now, hunting them down? What can you possibly do to help them?’
‘I decided to start by hunting down every CIA agent I recognized from Gaza,’ she said. ‘Last agent but one is a man named Aaron Lymes, now retired. He lives somewhere in . . .’
‘He’s dead,’ Ethan said. ‘Murdered two days ago here in the city.’
Joanna looked crestfallen. ‘They got to him first.’
‘Who’s the other agent on your list?’ Ethan asked.
‘I can’t explain everything here,’ Joanna insisted. ‘Meet me in the morning, downtown. I’ll tell you everything, okay?’
‘We’re going to need more than that!’ Lopez snapped. ‘Why were you following us?’
‘Like I said,’ Joanna replied, and then whirled and clambered up the chain-link fence before dropping down the other side. ‘I’m not following you. I’m following the case you’re on.’
‘Why?’ Ethan asked, deciding not to pursue her.
Joanna looked back over her shoulder as she walked away.
‘Because one of the names on my list is serving on your team.’
> Ethan took a pace forward. ‘Tell us who!’
Joanna shook her head. ‘No, not until I know I can trust you both. I’ll meet you tomorrow morning at eleven at Bourne’s Diner on Fulton Street. Don’t be late.’
44
HARLEM, NEW YORK
Donovan strode across the intersection between 7th Avenue and 112th and onto the boulevard, using a row of trees as a shield against surveillance cameras watching traffic behind him. His collar was up against the cold night air, and he wore a cap pulled down over his eyes as he walked.
The caller from the CIA had requested a meet in a vehicle, but Donovan had refused. He preferred to be on his feet with room to move. Although he did not expect the agent to suddenly turn and attack him, the speed with which the meet had been arranged and its covert nature had alerted his suspicions. Whatever he had stumbled on with Warner and Lopez was important enough to the agency that they were following up fast.
Donovan spotted a non-descript sedan parked beneath the trees, and, as he approached, a man climbed out from the driver’s side onto the sidewalk and looked at him. The agent made no attempt to conceal himself, a shock of gray hair framing sepulchral features and cold gray eyes.
‘Detective,’ he greeted Donovan without preamble. ‘Mr. Wilson. This way, please.’
The agent shoved his hands in his pockets as they walked, presumably to show Donovan that he was not going to attack him.
‘Why the cloak-and-dagger routine?’ Donovan asked outright.
‘There’s no threat to security in our meeting,’ Mr. Wilson said. ‘But I always prefer caution to carelessness.’
‘Can’t argue with that,’ Donovan agreed and then cut to the chase. ‘You’re interested in Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez.’
‘I am,’ Wilson replied. ‘They are a thorn in the side of the CIA. I have been authorized to apprehend them for detention in a military prison.’
Donovan raised an eyebrow. ‘Seriously? What did they do?’
Wilson’s cold gaze turned to meet Donovan’s as they walked. ‘They got too curious.’
Donovan took the hint and refrained from asking what had attracted Warner’s curiosity, figuring that whatever it was it was probably better that he didn’t know.
The Eternity Project Page 25