The Eternity Project

11



‘What’s a crisis-apparition?’ Lopez asked.

Major Greene looked uncomfortable, leaning back in his chair as though to distance himself from the conversation. Jarvis took his cue.

‘It’s a sort of ghost,’ Jarvis replied. ‘They’ve turned up throughout history when people have died, usually appearing to close family or loved ones as an apparently solid embodiment at the moment of death, which then fades away.’

‘What the hell would the CIA be doing with a piece of paper like that?’ Ethan asked. ‘It belongs in a museum.’

Jarvis laid the delicate sheet down on the table as he spoke.

‘It turns out that when the CIA started MK-ULTRA, they weren’t just looking for strategically placed military personnel who were susceptible to things like hypnosis and such like. They were actively seeking out evidence of families who had a strong history of what we would call paranormal activity. The idea seems that they felt that anybody who might inherit a strong propensity for paranormal events would also be an ideal candidate for experiments probing things that MK-ULTRA was designed to look into, like remote-viewing.’

‘What’s remote-viewing?’ Lopez asked.

‘A failed surveillance technique,’ Major Greene replied. ‘The CIA started Project Stargate in the early 1970s and it ran until 1995, investigating the ability of people who claimed to be able to view places and objects thousands of miles away just by mentally focusing on them.’

‘But it failed,’ Ethan said.

‘The project was deemed a failure,’ Jarvis replied for the major, ‘but not because the technique did not work. Individuals were able to view Russian missile silos and even objects in space. It’s recorded in documents that have since become part of the public domain that one man identified that the planet Uranus had faint rings long before passing space probes were able to prove it.’

‘So what went wrong?’ Lopez asked.

‘The intelligence received was reliable,’ Greene replied, ‘but the translation of that intelligence by the viewers was highly unpredictable. One remote-viewer gave an extremely detailed account of what was believed to be a missile silo being built in Russia, making drawings and such-like. The CIA devoted millions of dollars into physical surveillance of the site, until they realized that it was in fact a power station. The viewer felt that he was looking at large missiles; in fact, they were power conduits and ventilation shafts. That mistake revealed the flaw in using psychically adept civilians to visualize uniquely complex locations – they just couldn’t be relied upon to accurately decipher what they were seeing.’

‘So how does this tie in with us?’ Ethan pressed.

Jarvis gestured to the list of names.

‘All of these families independently reported experiencing crisis-apparitions during the First World War,’ he replied. ‘The CIA used this list and tracked down the families in the 1950s, targeting them as potentially viable subjects for experiments like Stargate and MK-ULTRA. This is the source document, the real-world evidence that set them on their course. It’s likely that any family on this list may have descendants that were either hired by or experimented on by MK-ULTRA.’


Ethan carefully lifted the list off the table and scanned down the names. All of them were written in a flowing yet precise script. Given the time that the document was written and the location of most of the fighting in the First World War, it wasn’t surprising that many of the names were British and French.

‘Did we have troops fighting in the First World War?’ Lopez asked.

‘We did,’ Major Greene confirmed. ‘American Expeditionary Forces fought alongside British and French troops in the last year of the war.’

‘However,’ Jarvis cautioned, ‘we can’t use nationality to refine our search. Families have moved around, marriages have confused the lineage of inherited names. We could just as likely pursue an American on this list and end up with a descendant who has lived in Norway all their lives. A century has passed since the Great War.’

Ethan sat back for a long moment.

‘So these crisis-apparitions,’ he said, thinking out loud, ‘are used as a marker to identify individuals or families susceptible to paranormal events. Then what? They haul them in and start some kind of weird brain reprogramming?’

‘The MK-ULTRA and Stargate programs were many and varied,’ Jarvis explained, ‘covering every possible facet of extrasensory perception and mental manipulation, depending on what part of the program was being experimented on. Most of the cerebral programming was via hypnosis and forms of electroshock therapy, rumored to have been designed to create these unwitting assassins. Certainly, the actions of otherwise entirely sane and patriotic individuals suggests that they were under some kind of influence, whether by drugs or therapy.’

‘You think that Joanna was a part of this, that she underwent some kind of programming?’ Ethan asked outright. ‘You think that because it worked on her father, the CIA might have assumed that it would work on her?’

‘Perhaps,’ Jarvis said nodding. ‘She could even have been placed back into the population as a sleeper agent herself, primed to cause who-knows-what chaos when activated. But it’s not for that reason that I’ve brought you here.’

Ethan instinctively looked across to Major Greene, who spoke quietly.

‘My work with the CIA continued right up to my retirement, two years ago,’ Greene said. ‘As well as commanding an infantry battalion, I would often be asked to act as oversight for covert operations with the 24th Special Tactics Squadron, a paramilitary outfit that . . .’

‘. . . supports the CIA,’ Lopez finished the sentence for him. ‘We know all about those guys. Bumped into some of them in Idaho a few months back.’

Greene looked at Jarvis in surprise, who nodded.

‘Ethan and Lopez got into this whole mess when they were tracking down evidence of some kind of monster up in the forests of central Idaho. Turns out that the CIA’s work in MK-ULTRA had extended well beyond anything we could have imagined. They barely got out of there with their lives.’

Greene looked across at Ethan and Lopez, and continued. ‘Then you’ll know that the STS are elite troops, highly specialized in both conventional and urban combat. You might also like to know that a small unit was inserted into Palestine five years ago, with a briefing to maintain surveillance on a pair of journalists who had been stirring up trouble in South America and who had recently arrived in Gaza City.’

Ethan felt his blood run cold as he sat bolt upright in his chair and glared at the major.

‘You were watching us, even back then?’ he asked in disbelief.

‘We were watching,’ Greene replied. ‘And when Joanna got a little too close to uncovering the actions of a private arms company, Munitions for Advanced Combat Environments, our team was ordered to apprehend her.’

The rest of the room blurred in Ethan’s vision, only the major’s features and icy-gray eyes piercing his from across the table. Greene’s words traveled toward him as though from down a long-distance telephone line.

‘Our team abducted Joanna Defoe from a hotel in Gaza City. The CIA held onto her via militant groups paid to hold hostage Westerners who were considered “troublesome” by intelligence agencies here in the States.’

The major made no attempt to apologize for what he had done, his features calm and his hands folded before him on the table.

He was completely unprepared for Ethan.

The confined, imprisoned rage of thousands of days of not knowing swept up and through Ethan’s body as though it had never left, as he lunged across the table and hauled the major out of his seat as though he were a rag doll. He didn’t hear Lopez or Jarvis shouting at him as he dragged the major across the table and pinned the back of his neck against the edge, the older man’s head hanging over it as Ethan drove his forearm down against the major’s jaw.

Greene gagged as the back of his neck came under unbearable strain, his vertebrae cracking and his eyes swimming with panic as he realized that he was utterly defenseless against the sheer force and speed of Ethan’s attack.

Jarvis stepped forward to free the major, but Ethan swiped the old man aside with his free arm as though he were barely there. Jarvis staggered backwards in surprise.

Ethan glared down at the major. ‘Who ordered the abduction?’

Greene, barely able to speak and with his neck on the verge of being broken, struggled to reply.

‘I don’t know.’

Ethan leaned in harder and the major screamed and grasped at his hands. ‘For God’s sake, I don’t know!’

Ethan leaned forward again, driven by something inside of him that was utterly devoid of emotion, of empathy and regret. The major’s eyes widened in pain and the sudden realization of impending death.

A hand touched Ethan’s face.

Softly, without force and yet a thousand times more powerful for it. It stayed there, unmoving, until Ethan turned his head. Lopez looked down at him, her hand cupping his face, and shook her head.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘This isn’t the way and you know it.’

Ethan stared up at Lopez for a long moment and then he whirled away and released the major’s head. He ran his hands through his hair as the older man rolled off the table and thumped down onto the thick carpet. Ethan desperately sought a vent for his anger, but found nothing. He couldn’t even smash the place up, because some part of his mind remained annoyingly, stupidly sane and told him that it would achieve nothing. That grabbing the major had achieved nothing. The man had been here to help.

Ethan ran his hands down his face. In the five years since Joanna had vanished, he had believed that the raw fury, the sheer rage, that had festered within him due to being powerless to find her, had somehow abated. He had really believed that the corrosive anger was gone but now he realized that it had remained all along, just waiting for the catalyst it needed to unleash itself on the world around him.

‘Ethan.’

He turned to see the major on his knees with his hands clasping his throat as Jarvis helped him to breathe. Lopez was watching him and perhaps for the first time since they’d met, he saw a shadow of fear in her eyes. She took a pace toward him, rested her hands on his forearms.

‘Ethan, this is what I was afraid of. You’ve got to keep yourself under control because you can’t finish this from a prison cell, okay?’

Ethan looked up. Jarvis was also watching him with a look of genuine caution on his features, as though Ethan were no longer an ally but more an enemy kept close.


‘You done?’ Jarvis asked.

Ethan looked at the major. Greene got to his feet, leaning against the table and recovering his breathing as he looked at Ethan.

‘I suppose, in some way, I probably deserved that,’ he managed to utter. ‘We were abducting US citizens.’

‘You didn’t know that,’ Lopez said. ‘You thought that they were sleeper agents, right?’

‘We had our doubts about the cover story,’ Greene rasped. ‘It bothered us all, but there was no real way of getting word out about the abductions without us all being thrown into military prisons.’

Some of the rage flared once more inside Ethan. ‘So you let Joanna get thrown into one instead?’

‘We had no idea what happened to her after she was picked up by the STS grab team,’ Greene insisted. ‘It was only when Doug contacted me and told me about his search for Joanna Defoe and that she was known to have escaped, that I felt it was worth telling all. But it’s not without risk. I’m still bound by non-disclosure protocols and could be court-martialed if they find out I’m talking about this, especially to you.’

Ethan managed to get his anger under control and his brain back into gear.

‘What did they do to her, for all of those years?’ he asked.

‘That much we don’t know,’ Jarvis said. ‘But given the connections with the CIA, her father’s presence in the MK-ULTRA program and Joanna’s history of exposing governmental corruption, it’s quite likely that the CIA would have at the very least tried to dissuade her from any further investigations upon her release.’

‘Dissuade?’ Lopez murmured bitterly. ‘That mean what I think it does?’

Jarvis nodded.

‘They’d have likely used any of MK-ULTRA’s methods to alter Joanna’s personality, to make her more pliable. That’s why they’re so keen to find her. Since she escaped, whatever they did to her she could now be using against them. She’s walking evidence of everything they’ve ever done and she’s on the loose.’

A cellphone trilled faintly and Jarvis reached into his pocket and answered. Moments later, he looked across at Ethan.

‘Something’s happened,’ he said. ‘We need to get back to the city.’