Ethan jumped on board one of them as Lopez grabbed the other and moments later they clattered away, leaving trails of blue exhaust smoke behind them as they accelerated down the hill in pursuit of the Russian vehicles.
Ethan yanked out his cell phone and began dialling, waiting for the signal to pick up. He got Jarvis on the third ring.
‘The Russians have got Hellerman,’ he reported above the sound of the wind rushing past. ‘We’re pursuing them now but we’re unarmed. We need back up!’
‘I’ll send some of Garrett’s people,’ Jarvis promised. ‘They can intercept them when they reach Ratu Bay, or Gardu if they head further south.’
Ethan shut off the cell phone and was tucking it into his pocket when he saw Lopez begin to slow down. Ethan slowed behind her as she rode up alongside something in the road, and as he joined her his heart sank. There, lying in the dust, torn and shredded, were the remains of Hellerman’s shirt.
Lopez said nothing, just stared at the shirt for a long moment and then pulled away and continued down the hill. Ethan followed, and as they travelled he saw a discarded sneaker that had been Hellerman’s, then another, then a belt.
Lopez slowed down ahead of him and pulled her moped up in the center of the road as she climbed off. Ethan pulled in alongside her moped and saw beyond a body lying in the center of the road. Even from thirty yards he could see that it was Hellerman, his body torn to shreds where it had been dragged for several miles down the track.
Lopez was standing over the body and looking down at it, and Ethan knew without a doubt by her posture that Hellerman was already long gone. Slowly, Lopez knelt down alongside the young man’s body and lifted a small envelope that she opened and read. Ethan did not approach her but instead waited until she finally turned and walked toward him, not meeting his gaze as she handed him the piece of paper in her hand and walked silently past.
Ethan looked down at the paper and saw a name and a time written upon it, a location that he knew was down in Ratu Bay on the coast. The brief note was signed with a single name.
Petrov.
***
XXV
Washington DC
Allison Pierce walked out of the hospital and hailed a cab as quickly as she could, making sure that it was a random cab pulling in and not one of those waiting in the ranks nearby that could have been placed there.
‘The Capitol,’ she directed the driver as they pulled away.
The driver eased out into the flow of traffic as Allison pulled out her cell phone and switched it on. There were a handful of messages, most from her former work colleagues updating her on other stories or office gossip that now seemed vacuous and trivial. She skipped past them all and instead accessed her cloud folder, the one that contained all of her files on the DIA case.
The folder opened on the screen, and was completely empty.
Allison felt her heart sink as she realized that she was experiencing something that she had believed only happened in the movies: the complete erasure of evidence and the planting of new evidence used to discredit and deny. She closed the folder and switched back to her messages and one of them caught her eye.
You’re on TV!
Allison opened the message and read it:
Your face was on the news last night, hope you’re okay! Nick.
Allison clicked on a link at the bottom of the message and moments later she saw a television article detailing her car crash of the night before. Even before she got to the end of it she felt nausea rising up inside her.
‘Police were last night called to the scene of a shooting and automobile accident in Bellveue. Local residents reported shots fired and the crash, when a sedan crossed the intersection here in town and hit the local fire department wall before coming to a stop. Police have identified the vehicle as belonging to freelance journalist Allison Pierce, and detectives believe that Ms Pierce was involved in a drug dispute that led to the fatal shooting of a seventeen–year–old youth prior to the automobile accident. Police are now investigating Miss Pierce, a known conspiracy theorist who recently lost her job due to reported inconsistencies in her investigative work that her former employers considered both disturbing and false.”
Allison shut the web page down and stared into the middle distance, aware that her life was coming apart at the seams and that there seemed to be little that she could do to prevent it. She closed her eyes and slumped back in the car seat as the vehicle crossed the 11th Street Bridge over the cold waters of the Anacostia and then eased down the off ramp toward Capitol Hill.
Allison realized that there was nowhere she could go, nowhere she could run to. Her friends would by now be aware that she had been fired, and half of DC and Maryland would have seen the news report and likely would now not trust a word of any investigative journalism she did. To add insult to the injury, she knew damned well that she would be blacklisted by networks across the country keen to distance themselves from the fake news and lies peddled by the administration. The irony of the fact that the lies of the men of power in DC was the reason for the media’s obsession with “alternative facts”, and that it was now being used to silence the truth, was not lost on her. She recalled how the Nazis in Germany had risen to power by undermining public trust in the free press, labelling any negative press as “fake news” while consolidating their power over those same networks and building the foundations of their power base.
That the same thing was happening to America, and to her, was too heartbreaking to even contemplate.
‘Pull over here, please,’ she said to the driver.
The cab pulled into D Street and she paid the driver and got out. The cab pulled away, her cell phone tucked deep beneath the rear seats and still switched on. Allison turned and began walking in the opposite direction, turning onto 10th Street and heading north. She kept to the residential areas, avoiding any buildings that looked like they might have CCTV in operation as she weaved her way toward the Capitol.
She was half way there when a sedan pulled in alongside her and the window wound down to reveal Mitchell. Allison cursed and refused to meet his eye.
‘How the hell did you find me?’
‘I’ve been watching you the whole time,’ he replied in his sombre, gravelly voice, ‘in case they tried to take you out again. Get in.’
‘Go to hell.’
Allison kept walking.
‘Where are you going?’
‘The Capitol. I know people there, people who can help me.’
‘Nobody is going to help you. If you try to trust the system, they’ll use it to chew you up and spit you out. You’re already being discredited on national news, how long before you wind up in jail on a murder or drugs charge?’
Allison stopped walking, staring straight ahead but struggling to see through the tears blurring her eyes. Mitchell’s car stopped alongside her and he spoke somewhat more softly as he realized the depth of her distress.
‘Have you ever noticed that when a political scandal breaks it always ends up growing larger as more and more details are revealed and the accused finds themselves on the end of further charges? The media whips up a storm, not because they’re lying but because they’re being fed information all the time to inflame the situation.’ Allison sucked in a ragged breath as she listened. ‘This is what they do. This is how they get what they want and how they suppress resistance. They lie, and make liars out of honest people. If you walk into the Capitol they will make damned sure they bring down anybody who tries to help you.’
Allison said nothing, but she turned and walked around to the passenger door and climbed into the vehicle. She sat for a long moment before she spoke.
‘They’re going to charge me with murder, aren’t they?’
Mitchell shook his head.
‘I actually doubt that. They have you right where they want you. Anytime they feel the need they can leverage you with the threat of arrest. You’re vulnerable, weak and devoid of options and right now all that you want
is for your life to return to normal, right?’
Allison blinked, shocked at Mitchell’s insight into her tangled state of mind. She realized that she would give anything to roll back the clock by just a few days and go back to her job and carry on as though nothing had ever happened. Mitchell noted the wistful look in her eyes.
‘Then they have done their job well,’ he rumbled as he pulled away from the sidewalk and swung around to head south, away from the Capitol. ‘Now ask yourself: what did you do wrong?’
‘I opened my goddamned mouth,’ she uttered, her words thick with self–loathing.
‘That’s true,’ Mitchell conceded. ‘But what did you actually do wrong, to deserve everything that’s happened since?’
Allison thought for a moment. She had merely been trying to find out about the result of a closed session congressional hearing on the loss of billions of dollars of public money after a political scandal that had been swept under the carpet by the administration.
‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ she said finally. ‘I was doing my job.’
‘That’s right,’ Mitchell agreed. ‘So tell me, do you want to go build a new life knowing that at any time these people could destroy it again just to get what they want? Do you want to be looking over your shoulder every day wondering if some detective is going to arrest you for homicide? Do you, an innocent person, want to do time in jail for the crimes of politicians?’
Allison’s fists clenched into tight balls and she shook her head.
‘No, but I don’t have any way to fight back and they’ve told me that if I leave the country that I’ll be considered a homicide suspect, and they’ve emptied all of my files! I have nothing left to work with!’
Mitchell looked across at her. ‘Then you have nothing left to lose. Toss your cell phone, right now.’
‘I’ve already done it,’ Allison uttered.
For the first time, she saw a bright smile appear on Mitchell’s face as he handed her an SSD Memory stick. ‘Now you’re learning.’
‘What’s this?’
‘Your files,’ Mitchell replied. ‘I hacked your cloud account and backed the folders up once every hour until the folder was emptied, while you were in the hospital.’
Allison stared in surprise at the memory stick as she felt a rush of delight. ‘I’ll be damned.’
‘If you want your life back and your reputation returned, you’re going to have to do what we do to beat the system.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Get ahead of the game,’ Mitchell replied. ‘You need to assume that everything and anything that you do could be compromised. You need to be certain that somebody is always following you, and you need to put your trust in me and the people I work for because we’re the only people on earth right now who know what you’re trying to do and want you to succeed. Everybody else wants you to either spend the rest of your life afraid to speak out or to be silenced, preferably permanently.’
Allison said nothing for a moment as she considered her options and realized that they really were few and far between.
‘What happens next?’ she asked.
‘If you’re in, you’re catching that plane out of the country.’
‘They’ll put out a warrant for my arrest!’
‘They’ll do that anyway, one day,’ Mitchell promised her, ‘but if you leave this too long I might not be around to help and then you’ll really be on your own. It’s your call.’
‘I only have your word to take for all of this. You’re asking me to risk the rest of my life on what you say is the truth, when you could be the enemy yourself! How do I know that I can trust you?’
Mitchell smiled as he drove.
‘You can’t,’ he replied, ‘but I know someone who you can. You can meet them, listen to what they have to say, and then you can decide.’
***
XXVI
‘It’s a trap.’
Ethan stood with Lopez on the deck of Garrett’s yacht, the sea around them sparkling in the bright sunshine, but somehow the idyllic scenery and warm wind seemed colder and darker now in the wake of Hellerman’s murder.
Jarvis and Garrett stood near the laptop that Hellerman had been using before he had joined Ethan and Nicola ashore. Garrett had already begun the search for someone with the necessary skills to replace Hellerman, but none of them expected the billionaire to find anyone quite up to the task. Hellerman had been unique, his skills honed over the years he had worked for the DIA, and his loyalty had been unquestionable.
‘We know it’s a trap,’ Lopez replied to Garrett. ‘That’s why I’m going.’
Jarvis sat down and dragged his hands down his face as he stared at the deck of the yacht. Garrett was also subdued and distracted, as though suddenly the danger that they now faced was becoming a reality for him, the threat to life no longer something discussed in whispers but bare for all to see.
Garrett’s men had been sent to recover Hellerman’s body before local law enforcement got to it. Hellerman was technically out of work and still back in DC so his body showing up in Indonesia would immediately connect him to Garrett’s yacht and risked exposing their location for all to see. Hellerman was now at rest below decks while they worked out a way to get him home and arrange for a private burial, not to mention a way to explain what had happened to his family.
Ethan leaned against the wall of the yacht’s bridge and folded his arms, more focussed now on Lopez than any of the others. She had remained unusually silent and subdued, and Ethan knew that wasn’t a good sign. Despite her diminutive stature, her fiery temperament was capable of provoking a self–destructive instinct and now that Hellerman had been killed by the Russians she would likely charge headlong into any possible avenue of retribution with little or no regard for her own safety.
‘What do we know about this Petrov?’ he asked Jarvis.
The old man looked up blankly at Ethan for a moment, and Ethan realized that Hellerman’s death had affected even his normally resilient determination to get the job done. Jarvis sighed and gestured to the laptop.
‘I did a search for him but I’m not as good with these things as Jo was,’ he replied. ‘The only Russian who fits the bill is a Konstantin Petrov, assigned to the SVR in Moscow and likely also secretly aligned with the Mat’ Zemlya unit modelled on our own at the DIA. He showed up in Indonesia right after we did, on a private jet that I was able to trace through a couple of shell companies Jo had identified, right back to Moscow itself. He’s travelling light but in company, and the same jet landed in India the day after you two arrived in Dwarka.’
Ethan nodded as he moved across to the laptop and accessed the page Jarvis had mentioned. The stern, angular face of a Russian officer stared back at him, the image taken as the officer climbed out of a vehicle somewhere in Moscow. Petrov had a squat, muscular frame and a small goatee beard and his expression was one of stoic servitude to Mother Russia.
Ethan turned and saw Lopez glaring in silence at the image.
‘Maybe I should go,’ he suggested.
‘Like hell,’ Lopez uttered. ‘I want to look that guy in the eye when I perforate him.’
‘Killing Petrov won’t get us any closer to Atlantis,’ Garrett pointed out.
‘To hell with Atlantis,’ Lopez snapped, the cauldron of seething rage inside her starting to bubble over, spitting and scalding. ‘This is what’s going to happen: I’m going to meet with Petrov and let him talk. Once he’s done talking, I’m going to make sure he tells us everything we want to know. Then, I’m going to tie him to the back of this yacht and have him towed out to sea at the head of a chump line and watch him get chewed on by whatever takes the bait.’
Before Ethan could reply Lopez turned and stalked away into the yacht. Ethan watched her go and then looked at Jarvis.
‘This has gone far enough,’ he said finally. ‘You knew this day would come. We’ve lost people before, but not one of the people we’ve worked with since the first days at the DIA.�
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Jarvis nodded, his reply soft.
‘It was easier when we were up against Majestic Twelve. At least we knew our enemy and were fighting for the right side. Now, I don’t know who we can trust.’
Ethan looked across at Garrett. ‘Do you have people who can keep safe the money that we took from MJ–12, and prevent either the Russians or the administration from getting their hands on it?’
‘The money I can keep safe,’ Garrett confirmed. ‘But the rest of us I’m not so sure. Hellerman kept our movements concealed, helped veil where we were and what we were doing so that third parties couldn’t link us together. We won’t be able to continue that work for long and with the Russians here it’s only a matter of time before they expose us, and when that happens…’
Ethan nodded, well aware of what would happen next.
‘International arrest warrants, Interpol notices, the works. The government will have the whole world looking for us and we won’t be able to use your yacht as a place to hide any more.’
‘And they’ll locate the MJ–12 hoard,’ Jarvis added. ‘Right now that’s all they’re interested in. I think that it’s time to initiate the Distribution Protocol.’
‘The what?’ Ethan asked.
‘It’s a virus that Jo created,’ Garrett explained, ‘that will take the various accounts holding the assets of Majestic Twelve and scatter them in small amounts to charities across the world. That scattering will be so wide and complex that it would take centuries to track it all down. Besides, if the Russians or the American government went after them it would be soon noticed and the seizing of assets from charities across the globe would be the kind of negative press that neither government can afford right now.’
The Atlantis Codex (Warner & Lopez Book 7) Page 17