The Eternity Project

15

BROADWAY, NEW YORK



‘We really appreciate this, Karina.’

Ethan watched as Karina handed them both a drink before flopping down onto a tired-looking couch. Her apartment was cramped and sparsely decorated, her salary as a detective probably only just allowing her to cover the rent. New York City was densely populated and the price of property was totally off the scale. Unless you were a celebrity or the Bronx and Harlem was your thing, everybody rented. People only went for mortgages when they were too old to live in the city, and then they bought places out to the north or over New Jersey way. New York City was a playground for the young, the successful and those who wanted to be. For the rest, it was just damned hard work.

‘No big deal,’ Karina replied. ‘Not like I get many visitors, anyway.’

‘Glen doesn’t live here with you?’ Lopez asked.

Ethan stared at her in surprise. ‘How do you know that Glen’s with Karina?’

‘It’s a woman thing.’ Lopez smiled at Karina, who grinned conspiratorially back at her as she noticed Ethan’s apparent discomfort.

Karina shrugged. ‘Glen’s as busy as I am, and he doesn’t want us to move in together yet, anyway. Says it’s too much commitment too soon.’ Ethan noticed Lopez roll her eyes and glance in his direction, but he said nothing. ‘And, on my own, I can’t afford to do much but sleep and eat. Been here two years and all I’ve done is paint the walls.’

‘Same for me back home,’ Lopez said. ‘I feel like I’ve only been out of the force for a few months.’

Karina nursed her drink as she eyed them both curiously.

‘Yeah, what was the deal with that anyway?’ she asked. ‘I heard you were up for promotion after busting open some kind of big thing in DC, like Donovan said. Your name was big news for a week or two.’

‘It’s a long story,’ Ethan replied for Lopez.

‘Good,’ Karina replied without hesitation and looked at Lopez. ‘I like epics. Begin.’

‘It’s complicated,’ Lopez replied. ‘My partner and I in DC got involved in an investigation that was much bigger than we thought. Ethan here came in close to the end, but, by then, my partner had been killed.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Karina said. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘A lot of the details were kept fairly quiet outside of local media,’ Lopez said. ‘I was offered promotion but turned it down and left the force. Ethan and I teamed up and we’re private investigators, technically.’

‘Technically?’ Karina pressed.

‘We work for the government,’ Ethan said. ‘We’re subcontracted to a department within the Defense Intelligence Agency, which picks up criminal investigations that are passed over by other agencies as unworkable.’

Karina raised an eyebrow. ‘Very Men in Black. So what brought you here? And don’t tell me it was the Hell Gate case. You must have been in town before then, if you’re from DC?’

‘We’re from Illinois,’ Ethan informed her. ‘Our work for the DIA takes us across the country.’

‘You follow the news a few months back?’ Lopez asked her. ‘A Democrat Congressman sanctioned a congressional investigation into corruption within the intelligence community.’

Karina frowned. ‘Sure, got shut down after a couple of months. Some poor guy died or something.’

‘Quite a few people died,’ Ethan replied for Lopez. ‘We’re investigating what happened.’

The decision to lie to Karina was one that Ethan and Lopez had debated on the way over. Ethan feared that exposing her to what was really happening could possibly make her a target. Lopez had admitted that was something she wished to avoid but at the same time was loathe to risk lying to a potential ally only for those lies to later be exposed. Ultimately, it came down to a practical requirement of their work with the DIA that they were already used to: tell as much of the truth as possible, in order to cover the lie.

‘You’re investigating your own people?’

Lopez nodded. ‘But quietly. There’s not much more we can say right now as this may lead to nothing but, because we need to be able to work without raising suspicions, we’ve had to travel incognito. We’re subcontracted, so it’s a little easier for us to investigate than putting actual government employees on the case.’

‘So nobody knows that you’re here?’

‘Officially, we’re on vacation from the DIA,’ Lopez replied smoothly. ‘Nobody knows we’re in New York.’

Karina appeared to be wavering between excitement and disappointment. ‘Jesus, I get to investigate drug-homicides and domestic assaults and you guys are going all Jack Bauer. There’s no justice.’

‘Believe me,’ Lopez replied, ‘it’s not all satellites and car chases. Most of the time it’s dead boring.’

‘Sounds like it,’ Karina said demurely. ‘So you’re here for how long?’

‘We’re not sure,’ Ethan said. ‘We did some work up in Idaho a few months ago that exposed an operation that was off the books. We’re down here doing follow-up research to see if anybody else knows about their experiments.’

‘Their experiments?’ Karina echoed.

‘It’s not as exotic as it sounds,’ Lopez lied. ‘The trail led us to New York and we’ve got to do some digging around here. It’s better that we don’t broadcast our presence too widely.’

Karina looked at them both closely for a moment. ‘You think that people might come after you? The same people that killed Aaron Lymes?’

‘No, it’s not like that,’ Lopez reassured her. ‘After what happened in DC, they’re as keen to resolve this discreetly as anybody else, and Lymes is a separate case.’

‘And yet you’re hiding,’ Karina said suspiciously.

‘The CIA has burned evidence of previous covert operations before now in order to avoid public outcry and congressional investigations,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘Our job is to grab evidence before they have the chance to do that again. It’s not us they’ll target, but paper trails and safe-houses, stuff like that.’

Karina rubbed her forehead as though trying to clear her thoughts. ‘So what’s my role in all of this?’

‘We need access to the police,’ Lopez replied. ‘Not personal access but an ear to the ground.’

‘Are you looking for people?’ Karina asked.

‘Yes,’ Ethan said. ‘Right now, we’re just trying to identify leads from older cases handled by our agency.’

Karina inclined her head. ‘Okay, I get it. You can’t go to the FBI or anything because that might result in your investigation getting noticed.’

‘That’s pretty much it,’ Lopez said, nodding. ‘Everything needs to be covert so that we don’t spook anybody into closing up shop.’

‘Why not just go public with what you’ve got?’ Karina asked. ‘It worked for WikiLeaks.’

‘All sorts of reasons,’ Lopez said, ‘and look what happened to the founder of WikiLeaks when they went too far. Sure, we could go public with what’s happened, and that might make it difficult for those responsible to cover their tracks without attracting attention and drawing suspicion down on themselves. But how many people have you seen die in the papers who claimed they were the victim of intelligence conspiracies or political hits, whose stories then vanished without trace? It happens all the time, but nobody really believes it.’


Karina’s features paled as she looked at Lopez. ‘You’re talking about assassinations?’

‘That’s right,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘There’s the former KGB spy in London, Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered by an assassin using polonium-210, a lethal dose of which killed him via radiation poisoning. The Russians were undoubtedly behind it but nobody was convicted or faced charges and it’s largely been forgotten.’

‘Then there’s Viktor Yushchenko, the former Ukrainian president,’ Lopez added, ‘who was the victim of an assassination attempt using TCDD, a potent dioxin used in Agent Orange. He survived but was permanently disfigured as a result.’

‘Sure,’ Karina admitted, ‘but they’re both being hit by Russian agencies, not people here in the States. I thought you said you weren’t being targeted?’

‘We’re not,’ Lopez said with an easy smile, ‘and nor would anybody around us. But others might be, which is why we need to collate evidence and present it to the Pentagon before anything goes pear-shaped.’

‘Look,’ Ethan said, ‘right now, we’re trying to track down people whose families may have been of interest when the CIA’s operations were at their height. There’s hardly any names left on our list but one of them comes from New York City.’

‘Where’d you get this list from?’

‘My sister, Natalie,’ Ethan said. ‘She was working at the Government Accountability Office in DC during the congressional investigation. It was one of her colleagues there who was killed, shutting the whole thing down.’

‘You think that was an assassination?’ Karina gasped.

‘We don’t know,’ Lopez said. ‘Either way, it doesn’t affect us as we’re much removed from those events.’

Karina shook her head slowly. ‘What’s the name you’ve got?’

‘Barraclough.’

Karina chuckled. ‘That name, in a population of about nine million in the city alone and twenty million in the state? Good luck with that.’

‘There’s a narrower criteria,’ Lopez told her. ‘The individual almost certainly will have family members involved with the military, usually around the period 1950 to 1973. The CIA drew upon individuals who had unusual abilities when they were researching things like hypnosis, LSD, mind control and remote-viewing.’

‘I’ve heard about stuff like that,’ Karina murmured cautiously. ‘I thought it was all just a myth, you know, conspiracy theories.’

‘It’s not a myth,’ Ethan assured her. ‘The program was called MK-ULTRA and is well documented by historians. The CIA has even apologized and paid compensation to the families of servicemen suspected to have died as a result of experiments conducted upon them without their knowledge.’

Karina thought about this for a moment and then looked at Ethan. ‘So, how are you going to track this person down?’

Ethan shrugged.

‘I guess we’ll start at a hall of records and see if we can narrow the search down. Maybe, there’ll be something about this Barraclough family that will stand out, something that made the CIA take notice of them in the first place. If we can identify the family then we might be able to track down surviving members, maybe even the person who was involved with MK-ULTRA themselves.’

Karina got to her feet and headed toward the kitchen, her empty glass in her hand.

‘My mother once tried to track down our family heritage, going all the way back to the first colonial settlers,’ she said as she walked past Ethan. ‘Took her fourteen years and she still never managed to . . .’

Karina screamed and leaped backwards, as her glass crashed onto the kitchen floor and shattered into a thousand tiny crystals. Ethan leapt out of his seat in shock, his heart thundering against the wall of his chest as he whirled to see Karina staring into the kitchen, her eyes wide and her hand covering her mouth.

‘What’s wrong?’ Lopez yelled, leaping to her feet.

Karina continued to stare into the kitchen, her face pale despite the warm glow of the lights. Ethan walked across to her side and looked into the kitchen, the room dimly lit by the glow from the lounge.

Something tingled across the base of his neck, raising hairs as though he had felt something unnatural hovering close by. He shivered involuntarily.

‘I saw somebody,’ Karina said. ‘Clear as day, standing right there in front of the window.’

‘Outside?’ Ethan asked, confused. ‘We’re three stories up.’

Karina shook her head. ‘Inside, right there.’

She pointed to the corner of the room. Ethan looked down at her and somehow he knew that she wasn’t lying. But after what they had just been discussing, she could have gotten spooked and started seeing ominous shadows where there were none.

‘You okay?’ Lopez asked, joining Karina. ‘You’re shaking.’

Karina stared vacantly into the middle distance for a long moment, and then she turned and grabbed her cellphone from her pocket. Ethan watched as she speed-dialed a number and listened for it to pick up for ten long seconds.

She dropped the cell from her ear and glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall.

‘I have to go somewhere,’ she announced suddenly and strode toward a set of car keys hanging from a rack near the apartment door.

‘I’m coming with you,’ Lopez said, concern etched into her exotic features.

Ethan, with no real choice left in the matter, followed them out of the apartment.