The Eternity Project

3

GRAND CENTRAL STATION, EAST 42ND STREET, NEW YORK CITY



Crowds.

Thousands of people rushed to and fro in a miasma of coats, hats, legs and commingled voices that rose up into the soaring ceiling of the station amid shafts of sunlight beaming down through the iconic windows far above. Countless footfalls hammered out a symphony of mankind on the move on the vast polished flags, all on their own personal journey and yet surrounded.

Ethan Warner had never in his life felt so alone.

He leaned against a towering pillar on one side of the central atrium, watching the milling crowds. It was a strange sensation, to be a citizen in one’s home country and yet feeling like an imposter no matter where he traveled. Ethan felt as though he were standing in a stranger’s house or in a foreign country without a passport, not inside the main station of one of America’s largest cities.

Staying off the grid, away from any kind of observation or transaction that would allow those in power to locate and apprehend him, was harder than Ethan could ever have imagined. He had once read that many thousands of people disappear every year in America, simply vanishing from existence. Although some were probably the victims of crimes such as homicide, the majority just got up and left their homes, lives, jobs and families, never to return. To do so wasn’t necessarily the hardest part: staying hidden was what tested even the most determined of absconders. The majority of runaways turned up sooner or later; sometimes living in different states or even different countries and having made errors that exposed them: habits and hobbies, loose talk or even just the mention of a hometown or friend that placed them elsewhere in the country. Others were spotted as a result of campaigns by concerned relatives. Some just couldn’t stay away and returned of their own accord. But a small minority vanished and managed to maintain entirely new lives, never once returning to those they left behind.

Insider knowledge helped, but common sense was also a valuable weapon and Ethan knew how to hide in plain sight. Wearing a hoodie would attract attention from innocent civilians fearing a mugging and suspicious cops sensing the chance of an arrest, so attempting to conceal his face was out of bounds. This would normally expose him to the ever-watching eye of government agencies. His eyes flicked up to myriad watching cameras that scanned the crowds, but he knew that any facial-recognition software being run by the NSA or the CIA would be unable to identify him beneath his simple but effective disguise.

Most of the high-tech facial-recognition programs used anchor-points, features on the face like eye and eyebrow position, the shape of the ear, width of the jaw and so on. Ethan had donned sunglasses with light-sensitive lenses that obscured his eyes. He had grown his hair longer, letting it cover his ears. He shaved rarely, thick stubble concealing his jawline and chin, and he had used a dye to speckle his hair with streaks of gray that aged him by a decade. He wore faded jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of some rock band he’d never heard of and a jacket that was a size too large, concealing his physique.

In short, he looked like a middle-aged, slightly overweight dropout: anonymous.

Ethan had accumulated extensive knowledge of what it took to remain hidden in the modern world, not through his own experience but through his search for a woman who quite likely lived as he did now: off the grid, anonymous. Joanna Defoe, his fiancée, had vanished from Gaza City, Palestine, four years previously. Ethan had believed her dead, but just a year ago had seen a remarkable piece of footage captured by an Israeli drone showing her alive, escaping an attack on Palestinian militants by Israeli forces. That footage, now almost two years old, had started him on a new mission to locate her, much to the chagrin of his family and friends. He had been making some progress when everything had gone to hell and he’d found himself on the run with his partner.

A young man weaved his way toward Ethan through the crowds. He wore a Yankees baseball cap over dark hair, a long winter coat with a high collar and carried a large backpack slung over his shoulder that further concealed his shape. He held a cellphone to his ear, shielding his features from the cameras high above as he moved to stand next to Ethan. A faint five-o’clock shadow was visible against the dark skin of his jaw as Ethan looked down at him.

‘You need a shave, son.’

A pair of dark, exotic almond eyes peered up at him from beneath the cap, going purposefully boss-eyed as the young man spoke with a remarkably feminine accent into the cellphone.

‘We’ll be there.’

Ethan heard a tinny sounding reply from the cell, and then the young man shut it off and slipped it into a pocket before looking up at him.

‘Thanks, Dad,’ Nicola Lopez uttered. ‘Start acting like a good parent and take my bag.’

Lopez let her backpack fall from her shoulder and thump down onto Ethan’s foot. He smiled as he picked the bag up. ‘Insolent juvenile. I’ll send you to bed with no dinner.’

‘I’d rather go hungry than eat your cooking. How much longer are we going to keep this crap up? You should have seen the ticket man’s face when he got a good look at me. Probably thought I was a lady-boy.’

‘It’s enough to fool the cameras,’ Ethan replied evenly. ‘That’s what they’ll be using to search for us, narrowing our location down before moving agents in, and the resolution won’t be enough to expose you. We keep this up, we stay off their radar. Once Jarvis gets in touch, we’ll hopefully be able to quit with the disguises.’

‘It’s been six months,’ Lopez grumbled, rubbing at the make-up she’d used to mimic stubble. ‘He’s been retired off the DIA, there’s nothing he can do for us.’

‘He’ll come through,’ Ethan insisted. ‘He always has.’

‘With conditions,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘There’ll be something that he wants in return. There always is.’

Ethan didn’t reply. Fact was, Lopez was right, but, as they stood, almost anything was better than living the way they were now: endless nights spent in run-down motels; eating in crumbling diners on the edge of obscure towns; and running with no clear idea of where they needed to go. Maybe living that way worked for crime-fighting loners in novels, but in real life it was an impossible existence. After six months of following dead-end leads and struggling to find money and digs as they wandered aimlessly across the United States, finally a solid lead had presented itself.

In rural Wisconsin, a thirty-six-year-old man had been murdered in an apparent robbery gone-wrong. Stripped of his possessions, the man’s unfortunate demise might have remained a footnote in the records of county police if not for one major factor: the man was identified as a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The murder hit the news state-wide, having gotten out before the CIA could close the lid on what had happened. Before the familiar veil of silence had settled on the case, Ethan and Lopez had seen it on the news and thus been alerted to a possible thread that they could follow in what felt like an endless and equally hopeless quest to clear their names.

‘You got a rent?’ he asked her.

‘It’s a motel across the river in Williamsburg,’ she replied. ‘Not perfect, but we’re not going to get anything we can afford on the Lower East Side or Manhattan.’

Ethan shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it; right now, the more anonymous our accommodation is, the better.’

Ethan followed Lopez out of the station and onto the crowded streets of the city. Heavy traffic, swathes of pedestrians and a wall of noise filled the air as Ethan craned his neck back and looked up at the buildings soaring up toward the cold sky above.

Lopez turned to him on the crowded sidewalk. ‘You think we can track her down here in New York?’

Ethan nodded as an image of his long-vanished fiancée drifted like a ghost haunting the deepest recesses of his mind.

‘The trail led here,’ he said. ‘If she’s following the same information that we are, New York’s a great place to disappear and get some work done at the same time. Nothing like eight or nine million people to make it easy to hide in plain sight.’

Fact was, the leads that Ethan was following were tenuous in the extreme.

Six months previously, he had approached his sister, Natalie, after learning that Joanna Defoe was alive. Asking her if she would be willing to use her influence within the Government Accountability Office during a congressional investigation into CIA corruption, Natalie had gone on to uncover evidence of an immense covert operation named MK-ULTRA, used to abuse unwitting American citizens both within homeland borders and abroad. Whatever it was, MK-ULTRA was definitely illegal and represented the core issue that had landed Ethan and Lopez in their current mess.

Joanna Defoe’s name had been connected with the program, as had her long deceased father. Harrison Defoe had worked in the Far East as a translator during the Vietnam War and had suddenly gone on the rampage in Singapore, shooting dead several leading opponents to the US intervention in the conflict. Her father had served time in a Singapore jail for his crime and had become a vocal opponent and critic of the CIA afterward. He represented the likely source of Joanna’s determination to root out corruption at government level as a journalist.

That same determination, it now seemed, was what had gotten her abducted. If they could find Joanna, she might possess enough evidence to expose MK-ULTRA and clear all of their names.

‘What’s the next move?’ Lopez asked, as they walked.

Ethan scanned the thousands of faces and the dense city skyline.

‘We start digging and hope that we get lucky.’