The Eternity Project

32



Ethan sat down behind a monitor that showed a grayscale image of traffic flowing across the Williamsburg Bridge on the day of the Pay-Go heist, Jarvis and Lopez standing behind him in an interview room.

‘Quality’s not great,’ Lopez observed.

‘Doesn’t need to be for traffic observation,’ Jarvis said, ‘but, if we can place our two suspects in the morgue at the scene, then at least we’re a little closer to solving this. I can get the guys in the labs at the DIA to clean up anything we find, enough for it to be admissible in court.’

Ethan spun the footage through, accelerating time to the moment of the auto wreck.


‘We could do with Project Watchman right now,’ he suggested.

Jarvis shook his head. Watchman was a covert government-funded surveillance program that Ethan and Lopez had encountered during a previous investigation in Florida, a series of KH-11 ‘Keyhole’ spy-satellites providing a high-resolution three-dimensional virtual replay of the entire globe that a viewer could walk through. Essentially, the government could look into the past at any location on Earth or follow any individual, anywhere.

‘My clearance is no longer sufficient to access Watchman,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Besides, we got control of this case because I asked for it through the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Our agency doesn’t have any stake in these homicides, so we wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway.’

‘Clearance,’ Lopez echoed his words. ‘Stakes. People have died and your agencies don’t give a damn unless there’s something in it for them.’

‘They’re concerned with national security, Nicola,’ Jarvis replied, ‘not one-upmanship.’

‘You expect us to believe that?’ Lopez challenged. ‘After what they pulled in Idaho and DC?’

Jarvis pointed at the screen. ‘There, that’s the flatbed, right?’

Ethan had already spotted the flatbed truck swerving violently through traffic on the outside section of the bridge. They watched as the truck raced beneath one camera and was picked up on the next as the image switched.

The pursuing police vehicle closest to the flatbed accelerated, and its front fender smashed into the truck’s tail lights.

Ethan watched as the truck swerved, lost control and then crashed against the barriers guarding traffic against the long fall into the East River. It rolled violently, the two men in the rear tumbling out, and then it slid to a halt, balanced on the barrier.

‘There’s Karina and Tom,’ Lopez identified the officers as they jumped from their vehicles.

The doors to the truck flew open as the two men in the cab leaped out, leaving their two accomplices lying comatose in the road behind them. Several shots were fired at the police, but the men had their backs to the camera as they retreated, their faces obscured. The truck lay with its chassis hanging over the precipitous drop and the balance altered as the men jumped free. Slowly, the truck tilted backward as the cases of money spilled out and tumbled away toward the river below.

‘There goes the cash,’ Lopez said wistfully. ‘A few million bucks turned into fish food.’

‘Come on,’ Ethan snapped at the camera in frustration as the armed robbers disappeared from view, ‘there must be a better angle than this.’

The cops whirled as, behind their vehicle, a huge tanker swerved as it tried to brake and avoid the suddenly stationary traffic, but then hit the cars in an explosion of shattered glass, smashed plastic and rending metal. The cops hurled themselves clear of the wreckage.

Ethan stared at the monitor in disbelief. ‘Where’s the next camera’s shot? The one of them running down the bridge?’

‘There aren’t that many cameras on the bridge,’ Jarvis said. ‘There’s this one on the overhead, plus the one that captured the first images, which is a surveillance camera on the north side of the pedestrian-and-pushbike path.’

Ethan sat back, feeling a sense of dismay as he saw the flames burning around the stricken tanker and the police struggling to both apprehend the two men lying in the road and free crash victims trapped in their vehicles.

‘What about cameras in Manhattan and Williamsburg, coming off the bridges, and private security cameras?’

‘I’ll see what I can get,’ Jarvis promised, ‘but it’ll take time. A lot of camera systems run a twenty-four-hour recording loop, deleting as they go. If you don’t access the footage within that time window, it’s lost.’

‘And we’re already forty-eight hours down the road,’ Lopez muttered. ‘That’s sloppy. They could have pulled something by now.’

Ethan stared at the screen and rewound the images, playing them again. Something about the footage seemed off, somehow, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

‘You know, these guys must have had some other way off the bridge,’ he said. ‘Police were already moving to block the exits on the Williamsburg side of the bridge into Queens, so traffic would have been stopped and searched.’

‘The bridge was closed after the incident for over twelve hours,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘Caused havoc around Brooklyn.’

‘Maybe they went into the water?’ Lopez guessed. ‘It’s a hell of a drop and swim, but it’s not impossible.’

‘In winter?’ Jarvis replied. ‘I doubt they’d have made the shore before succumbing to the cold, and the currents would have dragged them far downstream.’

Ethan looked up. ‘But if they’d planned for it? They might have got beneath the bridge, maybe stashed something there in case of the police blocking them on the bridge during their escape?’

Jarvis frowned. ‘Seems a long way to go, and high risk, too.’

Ethan shook his head slowly. ‘Something’s just not right,’ he said as he played the footage back: the chase, the crash, the confrontation, the truck spilling the cases from the rear and then the tanker hitting the parked vehicles as the thieves disappeared out of shot.

‘Wait one,’ Lopez said, and pointed at the screen. ‘Wind that back a little.’

Ethan spun the footage back slowly and Lopez jabbed her finger at the flatbed’s open passenger door.

‘Stop there!’

Ethan froze the image. The two unidentified thieves were backing toward the camera around the front of the vehicle, their weapons aimed at the cops. Lopez pointed at the glass of the open passenger door. ‘That enough to get a clear image?’ she asked Jarvis.

Ethan smiled as he saw a vague reflection of the driver in the glass, the angle of the door reflecting his face.

‘It might just be,’ Jarvis said. ‘Copy that image and send it to this address,’ he said as he handed Ethan a card with an email address on it. ‘They’ll sharpen it up in no time and send it back here.’

Ethan tapped out a quick email and then sent the image as he looked up at Lopez. ‘Not just a pretty face, then?’

Lopez smiled back at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Was that a compliment, kind sir?’

Ethan looked at Jarvis. ‘If this does link the murders, then it changes everything. If we do have some kind of spectral murderer hunting down these individuals, it suggests that there’s something much bigger going on here.’

‘And that links it to the trial,’ Jarvis agreed.

A few minutes later, the computer in front of Ethan pinged and an email notification appeared. Ethan opened the link and an image appeared.

The reflection in the car door taken by the traffic camera had been blown up to full screen and programs with complex algorithms used to enhance the pixelated image into something approaching clarity.

It only took a moment of observation for them all to nod together.

‘That’s Wesley Hicks,’ Lopez said. ‘Tom was right.’

Jarvis pulled out his cellphone. ‘It still doesn’t help the case against the two men in custody,’ he said. ‘They didn’t fire at anybody and can still claim their truck was hijacked by Hicks and his accomplice.’

‘True,’ Ethan replied, ‘but it gives us a lead to follow and it means we have leverage against Gladstone and Thomas, maybe enough to get them sweating a little because they won’t know that Hicks and Reece are dead. How about we start searching the clerk’s background and try to figure out why she’d be helping these losers.


‘You think she’d need a reason?’ Lopez asked. ‘There were five of them in on this. That’s close to a million each.’

‘Of illegally obtained cash,’ Jarvis replied for Ethan as he dialed a number. ‘Come on, let’s figure out why a law-abiding legal clerk would risk life without parole for these two a*sholes.’

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Ethan said.