The Eternity Project

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Do you know where they are?’ Mr. Wilson asked.

  ‘Right now, no,’ Donovan admitted. ‘But their boss has gained jurisdiction of a case we’ve been working on, a guy called Jarvis. Seems they’re real interested in it.’

  ‘What case?’ Wilson asked sharply. ‘How long have they had jurisdiction?’

  ‘Twelve hours,’ Donovan replied, ‘and they’re goddamned welcome to it. You wouldn’t believe what’s been happening.’

  Wilson’s expression did not flicker. ‘Try me.’

  Donovan shrugged as they walked and spilled the details of the case and of the bizarre nature of the killings. He refrained, however, from mentioning the fact that the killer may possibly be targeting members of his own team.

  ‘Damn thing nearly killed us all,’ he said as he finished. ‘Sooner it’s gone, the better.’

  ‘Do you know the source?’ Mr. Wilson asked.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The source of the anomaly?’ Wilson snapped. ‘Do you know who’s causing it?’

  Donovan shook his head, wondering just what this man was pursuing. ‘No. It was suggested that it could be the spirit of people killed on Williamsburg Bridge a couple of days ago. The murders didn’t start until after that event.’

  Wilson nodded as they turned the corner of the block. He kept walking and seemed to Donovan to be deep in thought.

  ‘What do you want, exactly?’ Donovan asked.

  Wilson emerged from his reverie and looked at the police chief.

  ‘You will keep me informed at all times of how the investigation is progressing. As soon as you know Ethan Warner’s location, you will contact me immediately.’

  Donovan considered the man beside him. Normally, if he had been spoken to in such a way, he would not have hesitated to pin the offender to the wall and remind them in no uncertain terms of their place in the pecking order. But now he hesitated. There was something about Mr. Wilson that suggested restrained violence, a man more than capable of defending himself. Donovan could not afford to take the risk that he would come off worse in a fight, not with everything else that was happening. The less attention he attracted, the better.

  ‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘And what do I get for my efforts?’

  ‘The gratitude of your country,’ Mr. Wilson replied without emotion.

  Donovan let a cold smile creep across his features. ‘I’ve been serving the New York Police Department since I was twenty-two years old, pal, and I’ve had about my fill of my country’s gratitude.’

  Mr. Wilson stopped in the street and turned to confront Donovan. Wilson still had his hands in his pockets but he was also still wearing the same uncompromising expression.

  ‘This is not a debate.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Donovan corrected him. ‘Whatever’s going on down here, I can tell from a lifetime’s experience that it’s off the record. You’re not here to apprehend anybody, are you?’

  Mr. Wilson did not respond, but he looked up and down the silent street as though checking for witnesses.

  ‘I’ve got my people watching the cameras,’ Donovan lied, and glanced across at the nearest intersection maybe fifty yards away. ‘You pull anything here, it’ll be on the news before dawn.’

  Mr. Wilson looked back at Donovan, and his angular features cracked into a grin that was entirely devoid of warmth. A blade flashed in the pale streetlight as Mr. Wilson whipped the weapon up toward Donovan’s belly, the serrated tip pushing against his jacket as he was propelled backwards against iron railings.

  Donovan raised his hands in surprise, unprepared for the speed of Wilson’s attack. The agent stared at him as though he were an insect caught between finger and thumb, only the application of a little extra pressure between Donovan’s life and death.

  ‘I know more about what you’ve been up to than you realize,’ Wilson hissed. ‘Whatever you’ve done, chief, will come out eventually, if I decide it should.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing,’ Donovan replied, managing to mask his fear. ‘Empty threats aren’t going to win you any friends here in the NYPD.’

  ‘I don’t make threats!’ Wilson snapped back. ‘I state facts. We already know about the discrepancies in the reports from Williamsburg Bridge, about how the robbery went down.’

  Donovan’s eyes widened as he looked at Wilson. ‘How could you know about . . .?’

  ‘We make it our business to know, because we have the technology to find out,’ Wilson said as he pushed the blade a little harder against Donovan’s belly. ‘It’s remarkable what a spy satellite can see. You fail to comply with our demands, then your little indiscretion will find its way to local media and from there to the courts.’

  Donovan refused to cower. ‘Then we have a bargain,’ he replied. ‘I’ll bring you Warner and Lopez. You ensure that nothing, ever, gets exposed that shouldn’t.’

  Wilson did not withdraw the blade, as though sizing Donovan up. Fact was, Donovan figured that a compromise would likely be more convenient for the agent than icing a police chief and having to find somebody else inside the department to pressure.

  ‘I see no need to disrupt the status quo,’ Wilson replied finally as the blade vanished ghost-like into his sleeve. ‘If you discover who the source of these . . . disturbances, is, inform me immediately. And I want you to keep your eyes open for a person by the name of Joanna Defoe. The FBI’s missing-persons database will contain an image of her. If she should surface at any moment, contact me immediately.’

  Wilson turned his back and stalked away, leaving Donovan against the railings.

  ‘It’s a person?’ Donovan asked.

  Wilson did not respond, but Donovan did not really need a reply. Although his common sense wailed to him that it could not be possible, somehow he knew that Mr. Wilson would not have asked if he did not believe it so. The CIA agent had listened to the description of everything that had happened in the case with complete attention.

  Donovan realized that there was only one person alive who had a motive for the killings.

  He started walking and pulled out his cellphone.

  45

  EAST 79TH STREET, NEW YORK

  Neville Jackson strode into his apartment block and headed straight for the stairwell, pursued by a deep sense of unease.

  He wasn’t the kind of guy who scared easily. He’d worked the streets of Harlem in uniform for years, then been assigned to vice and then worked as a detective. He was a born-and-bred New Yorker and took shit from no man. But what he had seen in the last twenty-four hours had ripped the gusto from his body and cast it to the wind.

  He had spent the last hour just down the block in St. Monica’s Church. First time in his life he’d walked inside the building and the first time in his life that he’d prayed. He wasn’t religious, he just knew that whatever they were facing was not of this earth and he couldn’t stand the haunting feeling that it was coming after all of them. Donovan. Glen. Him.

  ‘Jesus.’

  His voice echoed up the stairwell as he jogged the steps two at a time, making his way up to the sixth floor, where he shared an apartment with his girlfriend, Jenna. They’d been together for three years. He’d never figured himself as the type to settle down, especially as they didn’t have enough money to start a family and could barely afford to live on the Upper East Side at all. But Jenna was all heart and he was making a little more money than she knew about, which was what haunted him as he walked toward their apartment door. The temptation to come clean was overwhelming, and he braced himself for whatever shit storm she would unleash when he’d finished explaining to her what had happened over the last two days. If his impromptu visit to the church had gained him anything, it was the knowledge that what they had done simply was not worth it. Crime did not pay.

  It certainly wasn’t now. No fortune was worth this.

  Jackson felt his cellphone vibrate in his jacket pocket. He slipped it out and saw the screen glowing with an incoming call. Donovan’s number. He finge
red the answer button thoughtfully for a moment, then shook his head and shut the phone off. This was something that could not wait and he did not want to let Donovan have the chance to talk him out of it. Donovan was his boss, but Jenna was his life.

  He slipped his key into the door and pushed it open.

  The apartment, like most in New York, was compact. He walked down a short corridor, flanked by a bathroom and the bedroom, and then out into the living room.

  ‘Jenna?’

  A small hand-written note was waiting for him on a coffee table in the middle of the room. He picked it up as he felt a breeze coming in from the nearby windows, heavy curtains drawn across them. Jenna had gone across the block to a friend’s place. Would be back in half an hour. Jackson shook his head and smiled. The fact that she could have left the note four hours ago obviously hadn’t crossed her mind when she’d set off for Harriet’s.

  The breeze wafted cold air across him again and he looked up to see the curtains billowing in the breeze from the open window.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Jenna, how many more times?’

  Jackson tossed the note down and walked across to the window. Jenna had left them open a hundred times, preferring the fresh air, which was fine in summer but in the middle of November it was goddamned freezing.

  Jackson reached up to pull the curtains aside, and even as he did so a tiny part of his brain registered that although the window was open, he could not hear the traffic down on the block seventy feet below.

  His arms whipped the curtains aside and went numb as they did so. The window was firmly closed, sealed shut. Double-glazed panes blocked almost all noise but sirens from the city outside. His heart fluttered in his chest as he felt his guts sinking inside of him.

  ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘Please, no.’

  The hairs on Jackson’s neck stood on end as he felt the temperature in the apartment plummet, his breath condensing before him on the air. In the reflection of the room in the window before him, he saw the lights flicker and fade like distant lightning.

  Jackson reached down for the pistol at his shoulder-holster but he knew that it was useless. There was only one possible way to save himself and that was to get out of the apartment. His legs quivered beneath him and he felt his stomach loosen.

  In his reflection he saw the lampshade hanging from the ceiling begin swinging gently as though something had brushed past it toward him. The cold became bitter and sharp as though it was biting into his skin, and with a sudden and complete certainty he knew that the wraith was not just in the room with him, but was directly behind him.

  As terror constricted his breathing and threatened to paralyze his limbs, Jackson whispered a final prayer and then whirled.

  He dashed forwards and hurdled the coffee table in a single bound, charging for the entrance hall and the front door. He was halfway there when something plowed into his chest as though he had been hit by a car.

  Jackson’s lungs convulsed as he was hurled backwards, his chin slamming into his breastbone as the impact threw him across the back of the couch to land hard on the floor. He rolled and hit the wall beneath the window, cracking the back of his head hard enough that stars danced in pulses of light before his eyes.

  He staggered to his feet with his back to the window and raised his hands, looking uselessly across the apartment.

  ‘Please, I didn’t mean to do it!’ The room remained silent but bitterly cold. His eyes searched desperately left and right, seeking a glimpse of his tormentor. ‘I came here to put it right!’

  His breath puffed in thick clouds before him as he hyperventilated, his heart pounding in his chest. Suddenly, the clouds of condensing vapor swirled before him and for a brief but horrific instant a terrifying visage glared back at him, a face both human and yet twisted with demonic rage, as though it had crawled from the darkest bowels of Hell itself.

  Jackson let out a howl of terror and tried to run past the fearsome image. Something immensely powerful thumped into his guts and lifted him off the ground, his terrified scream cut short as the blow blasted the air from his lungs.

  Jackson flew backwards and smashed through the glazed windows, shards of glass slicing through his body like scalpels as his head cracked against the window frame and shattered under the impact as he plowed through the window and out into the chill night air.

  His body arced outward into the void amid a cloud of sparkling particles of glass and plummeted seventy feet down toward the brightly lit street below, before hitting the asphalt hard enough to shatter every single bone in his body and burst his skull like an exploding melon.

  Cars tires screeched and several pedestrians screamed as the traffic crawled to a halt either side of the ruined corpse.

  46

  ST PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL, MANHATTAN

  ‘I don’t know how this is going to help, Karina.’

  Karina Thorne reached up and grabbed a solid iron door knocker, slamming it three times on the tremendous, ancient wooden doors. To Ethan, everything about the cathedral seemed to dominate the street before it. The doors themselves were probably forty feet high, ornately decorated, and the cathedral’s facade and twin spires climbed high into the morning sky. Standing with Jarvis, Lopez and Karina, he felt entirely dwarfed by the building.

  Karina looked across at Lopez. ‘We need help, Nicola. We can’t fight this thing on our own. It’s not of this world.’

  ‘Sure,’ Ethan agreed, ‘but the people that run these places don’t have any answers either.’

  ‘Monsignor Thomas is not your average priest,’ Karina assured him.

  The huge doors clicked loudly, and Ethan heard what sounded like a heavy iron bolt being dragged through its mounts, before a smaller door was heaved open by a young man inside.

  ‘Miss Lopez,’ said a young man, ‘Monsignor Thomas is expecting you.’

  Ethan followed Jarvis, Karina and Lopez inside as the man hefted the door closed behind them, the wood hitting the jamb with a dull thud that echoed around the cavernous interior of the cathedral.

  Normally filled with tourists, the nave was empty this early in the morning. Chandeliers hung from lines that ran up into the enormous vaulted stone ceiling high above their heads, illuminating in a gentle glow the endless ranks of pews and the towering fluted columns that supported the roof.

  Giant stained-glass windows set high into the walls glowed blue with the light from the sky outside, and the sheer audacity of the architecture and the complexity of the artwork forged into the stone walls took Ethan’s breath away. He wasn’t by any means a religious person, but the scale of what men could achieve in the pursuit of worship astounded him nonetheless.

  ‘Built by men of power,’ Jarvis said as they walked, ‘when ordinary people were starving all around them. Such are churches. Building libraries would have served the people better.’

  ‘Churches help people when they’re afraid,’ Ethan murmured in reply.

  ‘Do they?’ Jarvis challenged.

  Ethan slowed as he walked, gently pulling Jarvis aside. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’ Jarvis looked at him expectantly. ‘Joanna’s alive, and she’s here in New York.’

  ‘You found her?’ Jarvis asked, surprised.

  ‘No,’ Ethan admitted. ‘She found us.’

  Jarvis stared at him for a moment. ‘When?’

  ‘Hell Gate,’ Ethan replied, ‘and outside the courthouse. She was the reporter following us, Doug.’

  ‘Jesus, Ethan, when did this happen?’

  ‘Last night,’ Ethan replied as they began walking again. ‘Doug, she’s not the killer we’re looking for.’

  Jarvis raised an eyebrow as he fell in step alongside Ethan. ‘She would say that, and you’d believe her, Ethan.’

  ‘She knew all of the CIA agents,’ Ethan explained, ‘cornered them all and gave them a good knocking about for information, but she left them all alive. She didn’t want any of them dead because she wanted them to be put to trial for what t
hey had done.’

  Jarvis slowed, looking at Ethan as he walked. ‘You’re sure? Absolutely sure?’

  ‘One hundred percent,’ Ethan replied. ‘It makes absolute sense, Doug. Her motivation is revenge, but she won’t get that from murder and she knows it. She said that they all died within two days of her finding them.’

  Jarvis stared straight ahead as they walked for a long moment before he spoke again.

  ‘Where is she, Ethan?’

  ‘I’m meeting her tomorrow,’ Ethan said. ‘I’ll get more detail then, hopefully.’

  ‘Karina.’

  The monsignor’s voice carried from the choir gallery at the front of the church all the way to where they were walking. Thomas stepped out into the nave and walked toward them, reaching out a hand for Karina who took it and smiled. Ethan and Jarvis joined her and Lopez as the monsignor looked up at Ethan.

  ‘Thomas, these are friends of mine from out of town, Ethan, Nicola and Doug.’

  The monsignor smiled at them both. ‘Welcome, friends. Your call sounded urgent, Karina. What’s happened?’

  Karina gestured him to one of the pews. ‘You might want to sit down for this,’ she suggested. ‘Ethan and Nicola will explain, because, right now, I don’t know where to start.’

  The monsignor’s features creased with concern as he looked again at Ethan and Lopez. Ethan decided to let Lopez do the talking and leaned against a pew as she laid it all down for the monsignor. Step by step, she explained the course of events that had led them to seek out advice, relating the Pay-Go robbery, the accident and deaths on the bridge, then the murders of the thieves, the clerk, the convicts and the lawyer.

  Ethan watched the monsignor closely as Lopez explained the details of the case. He betrayed no emotion, simply sitting with his hands in the lap of his ornate robes and absorbing everything that Lopez said. When she had finished, he let his head drop for a long moment before seeming to pick his words with care.