The Eternity Project

by Dean Crawford

  Ryan took a deep breath and gestured over his shoulder with a jab of his thumb. ‘Jackson took a dive.’

  Donovan hesitated on the sidewalk and then craned his head up to the soaring apartment blocks high above. There, several stories up, he saw a shattered window with bright yellow police-cordon tapes criss-crossing the gaping hole.

  ‘From up there?’ Donovan uttered.

  ‘Yeah.’ Ryan nodded. ‘If a job’s worth doing . . .’

  Donovan started walking again, toward the white tent, Ryan alongside him.

  ‘He didn’t jump, boss,’ Ryan said.

  Donovan tried not to betray a response but he shook his head involuntarily. It wasn’t worth the effort of even trying to deny the obvious. Jackson was head-over-heels for his girlfriend, loved his job and had no history of depression. All that Donovan knew for sure was that their encounter with that damned thing the previous night had shaken Jackson up far more than any of the gruesome, countless homicides they had dealt with over the years.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Donovan replied finally, as they reached the tent. ‘But it wouldn’t have been like him.’

  ‘Not like him,’ Ryan replied flatly. ‘No shit.’ Donovan turned for the tent, but Ryan grabbed his arm. ‘He didn’t jump. Forensics will tell you.’

  Donovan frowned and pulled the tent flap aside as he ducked in.

  A lone forensics officer was taking samples from Jackson’s body. Donovan swallowed a dense bolus of vomit that lodged briefly in his throat. Jackson was sprawled on his back, his skull flattened against the asphalt and his eyes vanished from their sockets. Thick blood had leaked from his shattered skull and from deep lesions in his skin, soaking his clothes where his body had burst like a balloon. His form seemed oddly shapeless and deflated, as though the skeleton within had simply crumpled, and a lake of fluids stained the sidewalk.

  Donovan looked at the forensics guy, who was staring up at him.

  ‘Anything?’

  The officer shook his head. ‘We’ve got trace samples from at least thirty different people, but as he’s a cop that’s not surprising. Can’t make any comment about who might have done this but they sure as hell gave him a shove.’

  Donovan looked at Jackson’s ruined body. ‘How do you mean?’

  The officer gestured to the body.

  ‘We found glass embedded in what’s left of his skull. We’ll have to confirm but it seems to match the glass in his apartment windows, which means he went straight through them at some velocity. People who are intending to commit suicide through a fall would normally bother to open the window first.’

  Donovan thought for a moment. ‘Maybe he just lost it, had a severe breakdown and hurled himself straight through the glass.’

  The forensics guy chuckled bitterly. ‘Maybe at a stretch, except that he could not have just thrown himself out of that window. In free-fall the human body attains a maximum velocity of about a hundred twenty miles per hour. But the injuries this guy has sustained are consistent with an impact at more like twice that speed.’

  Donovan stared at Jackson’s corpse. ‘You mean he accelerated?’

  The forensics man stood. ‘Beats the hell out of me, but this guy dropped out of that window like he had a motor on him. Last body I saw that looked like this was in the front seat of an airplane that went into the ground vertically. There wasn’t much left to look at.’

  ‘How fast was Jackson going when he hit the sidewalk?’

  ‘Best guess,’ the forensics officer hazarded, ‘about two hundred miles per hour.’

  ‘Physically impossible then,’ Donovan replied.

  The forensics man nodded. ‘Don’t envy you solving this one, guys. Either this guy was Clark Kent on a bad day or he was murdered.’

  Donovan walked out of the tent with Ryan close behind him.

  ‘It got him,’ Ryan insisted. ‘Whatever this thing is, it got him and it’ll be after us next.’

  Donovan sucked in a deep lungful of cold air and looked about him thoughtfully.

  ‘All of the victims have been iced at night,’ he said.

  ‘Great,’ Ryan replied, ‘that gives us a few hours to get packed and get a flight the hell out of here.’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere!’ Donovan snapped, and jabbed a thick finger into Ryan’s chest. ‘Running won’t achieve anything, except to expose us even more.’

  ‘I’d rather give it a try than facing that thing!’ Ryan shot back. ‘Jesus, Donovan, it’s killing us!’

  ‘It’s Tom, you asshole!’

  Ryan stared at him for a moment in blank disbelief. ‘Tom? What the hell are you talking about? Most of the time, he can barely walk and talk. Jackson would have pulverized him.’

  ‘He’s not doing it himself exactly,’ Donovan growled. ‘I don’t know how, but he knows what happened and he’s bringing us down one at a time. We stop Tom, and this ends.’

  Ryan’s gaze flickered as he digested what Donovan was suggesting.

  ‘What do you mean, stop him?’

  Donovan shoved one big arm across Ryan’s shoulders and steered him out of earshot of the nearby police and forensics team. ‘Tom knows, Glen. He knows what happened and he knows that we’re implicated.’

  Ryan shook his head in disbelief. ‘But how? How could he know and how the hell could he be doing this? All of the victims have died in ways that no human being could achieve. And what about Karina? How come she hasn’t been attacked?’

  Donovan slowed as he considered that fact, and the answer came quickly.

  ‘Because she wasn’t in on it, Glen. We knew we couldn’t trust her. Did you check her cell, find out who she called when we were in the law school?’

  Ryan swallowed thickly, ran his hand across his face again as he nodded. ‘She called Tom Ross,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know if he answered or not but somehow the call stopped the attack. Jesus, Donovan, we can’t fight this.’

  ‘We can fight this, because we can fight Tom. Without him, this all goes away.’

  ‘You sure?’ Ryan snapped, facing Donovan. ‘You sure that this goes away? If Tom’s got somebody else pulling the strings for him, then how do we know that it won’t get even worse when we’ve arrested Tom?’

  Donovan’s rugged features creased into a smile that matched the bitter wind blustering down the street around them.

  ‘Because whatever Tom’s doing, it doesn’t involve another person. Nothing else makes sense, Glen. Somehow, God knows how, Tom’s doing this himself. Karina’s call to him must have interrupted whatever the crazy asshole’s doing. We’ve got to stop him before the sun sets tonight because it’s just you and me now.’

  Ryan glanced up at the morning sky and Donovan could tell that to the kid the rest of the day now looked impossibly short.

  ‘But how do we stop him?’ Ryan asked. Donovan did not reply, simply staring at him until the kid finally got it.

  Ryan gasped and turned away. He shook his head.

  ‘It’s the only way,’ Donovan insisted.

  ‘We didn’t mean for this to happen!’ Ryan whispered. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be this way! It’s not our fault his damned kid and wife turned up on the bridge, not our fault that it all went sour!’

  Donovan’s expression remained stony and impassive. ‘I don’t think that Tom sees it that way, Glen. Would you have, if Karina had been killed?’

  ‘Oh, God, Karina,’ Ryan said. ‘How the hell are we going to explain this to her?’

  ‘We’re not,’ Donovan growled. ‘Nobody knows now and nobody knows ever. We deal with Tom and then we bury it, understood?’

  Ryan’s face collapsed into a tortured rigor of dismay and torn loyalty. ‘She’ll see through it, Donovan. She won’t stop until she gets to the bottom of it all.’

  The line of Donovan’s jaw hardened. ‘Then she’ll have to be silenced along with Tom.’

  Ryan stared at Donovan in horror, but he did not move from the spot. Donovan knew that despite what he was suggesting, Ryan
just did not have the guts to come clean to Karina or hand himself in. He was a puppet, dancing to Donovan’s touch.

  ‘Get in the car,’ Donovan ordered him. ‘We need to find Karina, and where we’ll find her, we’ll most likely find Tom.’

  Ryan stared at Donovan for a long moment, and then, like an automaton, he walked to Donovan’s car and climbed in.

  50

  5TH PRECINCT POLICE DEPARTMENT, NEW YORK CITY

  ‘Are you sure about this?’

  Joanna stood with Ethan on the sidewalk outside the precinct, her hand on his forearm as she hesitated at the steps.

  ‘The police are not the enemy,’ Ethan replied, ‘at least, not all of them.’

  ‘That’s not very reassuring.’

  Ethan offered her a smile. ‘We’re here under the jurisdiction of the DIA. Nobody’s looking for you, least of all in this station, okay?’

  Joanna sighed and followed Ethan into the building. They made their way up to the offices and Ethan showed his identification to an officer before requesting access to the archivist’s files he had previously viewed.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Joanna asked as they waited.

  ‘Evidence,’ Ethan replied in a whisper. ‘I’m not quite sure what, exactly, but there’s got to be something on the tapes we’re about to see that will expose corruption within this department. Trouble is, I can’t admit to anybody here that that’s what I’m looking for.’

  An officer approached them with a disc. Ethan took it and walked across to the small room nearby that contained chairs, a table and a television with built-in DVD player. He shut the door as soon as Joanna was inside and then set up the disc to play.

  Joanna watched as a fuzzy black-and-white image of a traffic intersection appeared.

  ‘Fill me in,’ she suggested.

  ‘Armoured car robbery,’ Ethan replied. ‘The vehicle outside the Pay-Go on the corner of the intersection will get hit by a truck, busting it open. There’ll be a gunfight between cops staking out the Pay-Go and the thieves, who will then escape in a pickup onto Williamsburg Bridge. That truck will then crash on the bridge and ultimately cause a pile-up that claimed several innocent civilian victims, including the wife and daughter of one Tom Ross.’

  Joanna nodded as she watched the screen. ‘The guy I’ve been searching for.’

  ‘The same,’ Ethan replied.

  A huge Kenworth appeared on the screen and plowed into the armoured car. Ethan watched as the armoured car was split open and spun sideways across the sidewalk as the Kenworth smashed into the Pay-Go store. The armoured car then hit a fire hydrant and launched a pillar of white foaming water into the air.

  ‘The hydrant leak’s blocking the view,’ Joanna said.

  ‘Which is what’s bothering me,’ Ethan replied. ‘Look, there are the cops moving in. Now, watch the big guy.’

  Ethan followed the movements of Donovan as he ran across the intersection, his pistol raised and pointed at the crashed vehicles. Moments later, he vanished behind the pillar of water and the crashed armoured car.

  ‘He can’t be using that water as a shield,’ Joanna said. ‘There will be other cameras and he couldn’t have known that the hydrant would blow.’

  ‘I don’t think that he’s hiding,’ Ethan replied. ‘But look how he’s sent all of his colleagues toward the Pay-Go. He’s separated himself from his team.’

  ‘Why?’ Joanna asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ethan said. ‘It bothered me when I first viewed the footage, but I couldn’t think why. My problem is that there’s no tactical advantage in doing so. In fact, with one gun where he is and the other three officers approaching the Pay-Go from the front, it means that he’s almost forcing the thieves to move toward him.’

  Joanna shrugged. ‘Maybe that’s what he wants?’ What if he’s covering them instead of attacking them? You said that this is about corruption – is it him you think is up to something?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ethan replied, ‘but I just can’t figure out what.’

  They watched as the thieves dashed for the pickup truck that appeared nearby, the cops’ heads all down under blasts of automatic fire. The truck’s tires spewed smoke as it accelerated away toward the Williamsburg Bridge, and Joanna pointed to a pile of boxes in the back.

  ‘That the money?’ she asked.

  Ethan nodded. ‘Aluminum cases, about a quarter million in each.’

  Joanna leaned back in her chair. ‘It’s possible the driver and one other could have pulled up and loaded the cases in just a few seconds, but they would have been right in your man’s line of sight.’

  Ethan nodded. ‘They could have fired in his direction, kept his head down. He’s only got the wreckage of the armoured car for cover.’

  ‘Too close,’ Joanna replied. ‘They’d be unloading it just feet away from where he’s standing and couldn’t fail to miss.’

  The images switched to the traffic cameras high on the bridge as the truck swerved between other vehicles. A police sedan, its hazard lights just visible flashing through a grill above the front fender, pursued them.

  ‘Here comes the crash,’ Ethan said.

  They watched as the truck was hit by the pursuit vehicle, lost control and crashed violently. The police sedan screeched to a halt nearby, the cops tumbling from it with their weapons aimed as the truck, its rear hanging precariously out over the bridge’s ruined railings, spilled the money cases to fall out of shot toward the East River.

  Then the fuel truck plowed into the stationary traffic in a tangled mass of crushed metal and burgeoning flames.

  ‘Jesus,’ Joanna uttered.

  The cops apprehended two of the dazed thieves on camera.

  ‘Where’d the other two go?’ Joanna asked.

  ‘Escaped,’ Ethan replied. ‘Maybe had another vehicle on the bridge, we thought, but nothing got picked up at the blockade on the east side of the bridge.’

  Joanna sat staring at the screen for a long moment.

  ‘Wind it back to the crash,’ she said. ‘When the flatbed lost control and busted the railings.’

  Ethan used a remote to wind the footage back, and then advanced it at half-speed. Joanna leaned forward, watching closely as the vehicle hit the railings, careered into the other side and then finally spun out of control, before smashing through the railings and coming to an abrupt halt, side-on to the flow of traffic.

  The silver cases tumbled from the rear of the flatbed.

  ‘You said they grabbed twelve cases,’ Joanna said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ethan agreed, ‘twelve were taken from the armoured car. Two were recovered from the flatbed, and one more from the shore of the East River a couple of hours later. The other nine were lost in the river.’

  Joanna shook her head.

  ‘What if they never made it into the truck?’ she said. ‘What if the truck was a deliberate diversion? Wind the footage back to the Pay-Go attack.’

  Ethan wound the footage back and watched as the Freightliner was hit and the fire hydrant blew. The flatbed pulled away and raced off camera. Joanna grabbed the remote and paused the footage before re-winding a frame at a time. The flatbed inched back into view, two of the thieves sprawled in the back.

  Joanna froze the image and pointed at the screen.

  ‘There’s the answer to your mystery,’ she said.

  Ethan leaned forward and peered at the pixelated image of the truck. There, the two thieves were lying on top of no more than three or four cases.

  ‘The majority of the cash never made it onto the flatbed,’ Joanna said. ‘And the big cop you pointed out didn’t join the pursuit on the bridge. So what was he doing?’

  Ethan sat back in his chair and cursed himself for not realizing it sooner.

  ‘He loads up the remaining cases into another vehicle, maybe even his own, and then controls the scene before other police arrive. The entire stake-out, Karina said, was based on a tip-off from an anonymous informer who approached Donovan. Maybe there w
as no informer, and the whole thing was set up so that Donovan could take the cash himself. He’s a cop and could have gained access to the codes necessary to break into the cases and bypass the security devices, if required.’

  Joanna frowned thoughtfully.

  ‘But what about the fall-guys in the truck? If they were involved, they wouldn’t just let themselves get caught like that?’

  Ethan shook his head in wonderment.

  ‘Nearly four million bucks is a lot of cash, if you know what to do with it. Four thieves, three cops, a lawyer and a bank clerk. That’s nearly half a million dollars each, split evenly, in hard cash. Sure, the identity numbers on every note would be black-marked by the Federal Reserve, but with three billion notes passing through the system every day, the chances of them being picked up are tiny.’

  ‘They could also be laundered,’ Joanna suggested, ‘passed on and generally mixed up in the system. If everybody involved was smart enough, the money would never be traced to individual owners.’

  Ethan turned to Joanna.

  ‘Maybe Donovan’s original tip-off was genuine, but instead of locating and arresting the gang as they fled south, he instead manages to contact them and offers them a deal. A sure hit on a bank or armoured truck, in return for the police failing to arrest or charge them.’

  ‘Half a million bucks a piece or near enough, plus what the gang had already accrued,’ Joanna said thoughtfully. ‘They could high-tail it out of America and never need to worry about money again.’

  Ethan nodded, warming to the idea. ‘They organize the hit, and all goes well enough until the auto wreck and two thieves get caught.’

  ‘Donovan employs a crooked lawyer and a cash-strapped clerk to help in return for a slice of the profits,’ Joanna added. ‘Donovan probably worked out how to hit the armoured car himself – they’re incredibly tough and only a high-speed impact by something as large as that rig, hitting it dead center, would do the job.’

  ‘Spilling the contents out into the road,’ Ethan said.

  ‘Which was why he chose that Pay-Go,’ Joanna agreed. ‘It faces the intersection and the armoured car parks right outside, side-on to traffic coming off the Williamsburg Bridge. The rig hits the armoured car, and Donovan uses the chaos and pursuit to conceal the thieves loading cases onto his car as well as the flatbed. ‘But what does Donovan do with the cases?’