The Eternity Project

35

KHAN YUNIS, GAZA CITY, PALESTINE



One year ago

The experiments ceased, finally.

She had known they would, after the last had almost resulted in her dying for good.

The tunnel of light had not reappeared. Instead, Joanna had found herself sucked down into a gruesome, black, cold, timeless place, where every step was hindered by dense tangles of writhing undergrowth. Cruel, threatening creatures tracked her from the darkness, loud noises shocked her or ground interminably through her skull like a thousand fingernails dragged down endless chalkboards. There, in that seemingly endless pit of despair, she had felt something new and terrifying that had haunted her thoughts ever since.

Evil.

Like most adults, she no longer believed in monsters under the bed or ghosts haunting the darkened corners of lonely houses, but now she had a new appreciation of what evil truly was: the construct of our wildest and yet darkest fantasies, lived for real through the actions of those unable to contain them. Monsters, ghosts, gargoyles – all were the inventions of men designed to avoid facing the truth of what evil really was: their own actions.

Joanna had seen the evil lurking within her in her last voyage into her own soul, a beast of indescribable fury and strength that if unleashed would destroy the world just to see the sparks it made going up. There was no Satan but that which lived within her, and all other people, too.

For the first time, Joanna was relieved to have found herself lying on the cold gurney as her body was dragged back from the brink of oblivion once again.


Joanna Defoe remained in captivity, in the tiny cell in the darkness, although now she no longer wore the blindfold: only her hands remained bound. She sat on her mattress as the voice of Doctor Sheviz reached out for her through the hatch in the door.

‘Tell me, Joanna. What did you see?’

Joanna remained silent. She ignored the question just as she had ignored it hundreds of times before. Doctor Sheviz had gone through alternating paroxysms of hatred, rage and desperation, but Joanna had never once faltered. Finally, after months of repeated experiments, the men who were funding the doctor’s insane Eternity Project had demanded that he either obtain verifiable results or abandon the work.

To Sheviz’s dismay and Joanna’s veiled delight, he had failed. He had already made a fatal mistake and now deep within Joanna was forged a core of cold iron, hard and without flaws, impervious.

‘Please, Joanna,’ Sheviz whined through the hatch. ‘Tell me what you saw. I know that you saw something, Joanna. I could tell, by your features, by your eyes. You saw things, tell me what they were!’

Joanna remained silent. Since Sheviz’s failure, the men who she assumed were responsible for her abduction had gradually become more relaxed. The men in the gray suits, and there were several over the months that had passed, had spoken more openly around her. Sometimes, they had exchanged entire conversations right outside the door to her cell, their American accents and terminology as plain as the day was long.

Then, as now, Joanna had simply listened, all the while playing the part of a catatonic waif divested of both resistance and interest in the world around her. It had become surprisingly easy to adjust, to recover the spark of hope, ever since she had laid eyes on Doctor Sheviz months before on the gurney. What she had read there had provided her with the vital link to reality that she so desperately craved, the anchor they had tried to take from her. After all of the painstaking care they had taken to break her down into an emotional and physical blank slate, the insane doctor had eradicated all of it with one simple error.

The digital watch on his wrist displayed the time, the date and the year. As he had leaned over her, the sleeve of his white coat had ridden up his wrist and exposed the face of the watch to her at close range.

In an instant, Joanna had known how long she had been incarcerated, what month and day it was, what year it was. In a rush of awareness like the first stars igniting in a new-born universe, she had regained that which had been so brutally taken from her. Despite the crushing emotional trauma that she had endured since at the hands of Sheviz, she had looked forward to each and every visit, because each strengthened her awareness and her ability to maintain her fragile grip on the notion that she was still a part of a larger world and that there was still a future for her.

For the first time in years, she was able to think of escape. Three years, two months and seventeen days, to be precise.

‘Please, Joanna. One last time: tell me what you saw.’

Joanna sat silent for a moment longer and then slowly turned her head. The desire to take immediate action, to escape this shadowy prison and simply breathe fresh air again was overwhelming, but that time was not now.

Sheviz’s fanatically blazing eyes peered through the hatch as she turned to look at him and silently opened her mouth. Joanna croaked something unintelligible from her lips, tried to speak. No sound came forth.

Sheviz’s face vanished from the hatch as he shrieked frantically at the guards outside. ‘Open the door!’

The Palestinian gunmen, hired hands who were being paid to stand watch over the building in which she had been held for so long, hurried forward. She heard the jingling of keys, the heavy clank of the locking mechanism in the doors grinding around.

Joanna had been a pliant and comatose prisoner for many long, long years. The guards and the doctor had no fear of her. She liked that. The iron ball deep inside her pulsed into life as the door opened and Sheviz burst in, dropped to his knees in front of her and grasped one of her hands in his.

‘Joanna, please tell me. What did you see?’

Joanna looked into his eyes but her awareness was directed at the two guards lingering just outside the room. Both looked young, fit and well fed. Both carried the ubiquitous AK-47 rifles clasped across their chests. At this close range, even the inaccurate Kalashnikov could not fail to miss her.

‘What did you see?’ Sheviz repeated in desperation.

Joanna focused on him again and a smile dragged itself onto her face, born of sweet and yet poisonous revenge. A word fell from her lips as soft as a whisper.

‘Justice.’

Joanna sucked her stomach in as she flipped her head forward, her entire body jerking in a whiplash motion that smashed her forehead across Sheviz’s face like a club. The doctor let out a strangled gasp of pain as he tumbled backwards and sprawled across the floor of the cell.

Joanna leaped up from the bed and jumped into the air, lifting both feet high as she plunged down and landed directly onto Sheviz’s ribcage. She felt his ribs crack like dried twigs beneath her, just as the two guards raced into the cell and smashed her aside.

Joanna hit the wall hard, stars dancing in front of her eyes as her legs crumpled beneath her. She slumped down as she glared at the doctor with a savage smile plastered across her face.

Sheviz lay curled up into a foetal ball, weeping as thick blood spilled from his ruined face to pool in scarlet smears across the floor of the cell. Joanna watched as the doctor was dragged screaming in pain from the cell by the two guards and the door was locked behind them, sealing her in once more.

She got up, still reveling in the first act of defiance for years, and sat on her mattress. Her heart was pounding so hard inside her chest that she felt as though it were shaking her entire body. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps that she fought to bring under control.

Sheviz was finished with her, that much she knew. The men outside her room had spoken loudly enough that she knew the doctor had failed in his experiments and that her fate now lay in the hands of the CIA.

The CIA, she had deduced from months of overheard conversations, were working in conjunction with a powerful arms company called MACE, whom she had been investigating over claims of rigged ransom abductions, first in South America and now here in Gaza. When she got too close, they had decided to use a CIA grab-team loosely disguised as militants to abduct her. The CIA then took over, running its bizarre experiments on her and no doubt others. The family connection she had heard described long ago was her father, who had unwittingly been caught up in a program she had often researched: MK-ULTRA.

Her father, Harrison, had responded well to the experiments, which used drugs and other forms of mental suggestion, ending up in a jail in Singapore for three years for his efforts after he had abruptly shot four prominent Communist sympathisers during the Vietnam War. Joanna had guessed that the experiments were all an effort to try to ‘program’ her in the same way, and she didn’t doubt that it would have worked were it not for Doctor Sheviz’s sloppy mistake.

Joanna’s resolve, strengthened since seeing the doctor’s watch, had prevented her from slipping fully into a mental state entirely open to suggestion. But that did not mean that the doctor’s experiments had failed entirely.

She curled up on the mattress, her mind filled with vivid imagery, sights that had changed her notion of what it meant to be alive. She had died during the experiments, and had seen a tunnel of light that had drawn her up into a place that was beyond imagination, beyond words, beyond anything that she could ever have conceived until she witnessed it herself. The darkness of her final visit was not enough to deter her, for she knew now that it was her own damaged soul that she was witnessing, not some place of suffering for the damned.


In no less than thirty-seven separate experiments, she had witnessed the afterlife. The very thing that Doctor Sheviz had sought confirmation of had been the very thing that had strengthened Joanna’s resolve to the point that nothing could break her. Joanna Defoe no longer feared death and, in life, she had resolved to pursue one thing above all others: revenge. The cold iron ball in her belly pulsed again, fueled by the memory and the knowledge of the cruel resolve that lay within her, just waiting to be unleashed.

Damon Sheviz would not be fit enough to return for some time, due to the pain he would be suffering from his multiple fractured ribs. That meant that the CIA would probably seek to move or perhaps even terminate her.

Whatever they decided, when the time came, she would be ready.