The Eternity Project

39

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK SCHOOL OF LAW, LONG ISLAND CITY



The law school was on the corner of Hunter and 25th, a modern-looking building of glass and aluminum ringed by steel bollards. Ethan sat with Lopez and Karina in her car in a parking lot nearby, watching the building from one angle while Donovan and the rest of the team sat on 44th and watched it from another.

‘He’s been in there for over an hour,’ Lopez said.

‘He’s a lecturer as well as a practicing attorney,’ Karina replied. ‘I guess the law is this guy’s life.’

‘The law?’ asked Ethan. ‘Or breaking it?’

‘We don’t know that for sure, yet,’ Karina cautioned him.

A trickle of students were spilling from the main entrance, making their way out into the cold night air, some hugging friends goodnight as others lit cigarettes that flared in the darkness. Most of the lights in the building were out, except those on the third floor, where Ethan guessed the lecture had taken place.

‘We told you what happened in the jail,’ Lopez said to Karina.

‘There were two other convicts in that cell,’ Karina insisted. ‘We can’t rule out that somebody else got to them, maybe offered them huge sums of money to take down Gladstone and Earl. You think you can take the word of two inmates? Their rap sheet was a yard long.’

‘Why bother offering money to take down Gladstone and Earl?’ Ethan asked. ‘Better to let the lawyer do his work and let them get out for free.’

‘They didn’t make anything off the Pay-Go raid, remember? The money went into the river,’ Karina replied. ‘Maybe the man behind it all gets greedy and decides to bump off the remaining two men on his team. Probably cost him less than hiring the goddamned lawyer.’

‘It could have backfired,’ Lopez suggested. ‘If Gladstone and Earl were targeted, they may have been able to convince their attackers that they could lead them to more money than this mysterious mastermind was offering. Not to mention the fact that if their former boss was having them iced in jail, then why should he honor any payment to their killers?’

‘Lopez is right,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘It’s too messy and not in keeping with what these guys have done in the past. Something else got them in their cells, and from what we heard from the two convicts who witnessed the entire attack, I’d say it’s our vengeful spirit.’


Karina snorted.

‘You think that two convicts responsible for the murder of their cellmates are going to just stand up and say, “Hey, yeah, we did it!”’

‘They could barely walk or talk,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘It takes a lot for guys like that to completely lose all thoughts of machismo.’

Ethan nodded. The two men who had survived the attack were known thugs and fraudsters, and, although they weren’t exactly high-ranking criminals, they certainly had spent time in the prison system. They would have had forged into their psyche the knowledge that to show weakness, especially in front of other inmates, was to condemn themselves to a life of misery at the hands of others. Such people were referred to in Rikers Island as ‘food’ for the bigger fish.

Yet the pair of them had been crippled by terror and had both wept openly in front of Ethan, Lopez and the other cops. These were not men covering up one of countless jail-based or gang-related homicides. These were men who had witnessed something terrifying enough to have scoured them of any sense of shame or pride. The last time he and Lopez had witnessed fear like that in men, it had been hunting down an unknown and savage creature in the backwoods of Idaho six months previously.

‘Whatever got them,’ Ethan said, ‘can move at will and has tremendous strength. I don’t think we’re going to be able to protect Eric Muir, no matter where we send him.’

‘If he’s not guilty,’ Lopez said, ‘then we’ve got nothing to worry about.’

Ethan shrugged and was about to reply when up on the third floor of the school the lights began flickering on and off as though the power was going out.

‘You see that?’ Lopez pointed.

‘I see it,’ Ethan replied and went for his door handle. ‘It’s going down.’

‘He could be turning the lights out!’ Karina snapped, as Ethan opened his door and climbed out.

Before he could respond, the radio in Karina’s car crackled.

‘All available units please respond, assault in progress, corner of forty-fourth and Hunter.’

Karina cursed as she grabbed the radio microphone and yelled back. ‘Alpha Team in position, moving now!’

Karina and Lopez leaped from the vehicle and ran with Ethan across the street, as Donovan, Glen and Jackson dashed across from 44th, their weapons already in their hands.

The students huddling around cellphones and cigarettes near the entrance leaped out of the way as the police team dashed through.

‘Any other students in here?’ Lopez asked as they ran past.

One of the young guys shook his head. ‘We were the last out, except for the lecturer.’

Ethan dashed inside as a member of staff rushed toward them in the foyer with a phone clasped in her hand. She looked like a cleaner, gloves on her hands and a waft of something clinical surrounding her as she pointed back the way she had come, her face wracked with fear as she spoke in a foreign accent.

‘Third floor!’ she yelled. ‘Something bad happen!’

‘You see anything?’ Donovan asked as he ran past.

‘Mr. Muir, he screaming for help!’

The team dashed past her and ran for the elevator nearby.

‘Don’t use the elevators!’ Lopez shouted.

Neither Donovan, Jackson nor Glen listened to her as they piled into the elevator and Donovan hit the button for the third floor. Karina dashed past the second available elevator and crashed through the stairwell door.

Ethan followed Lopez through the same door and they turned, leaping up the steps two at a time. Ethan dug in, his fitness now getting somewhere close to where it had been when he had served in the Marines, but he was still no match for Lopez. Several years younger and just as driven, she flew up the stairs and passed Karina.

Ethan sucked in a huge lungful of air and fought to keep Lopez in sight as he caught up with Karina. They turned the corner of the stairwell on the second floor and raced up the steps.

‘She do this often?’ Karina gasped as she struggled to keep up with Lopez.

‘Sure, if there’s a pay check at the other end,’ Ethan wheezed.

As they reached the third floor, Ethan saw the lights flickering, the fluorescent tubes clicking as they fluttered on and off. Lopez hurried to the stairwell exit as Karina approached, her pistol drawn. Lopez grabbed the door handle and swung the door open as Karina rushed through and aimed down a corridor that flickered in the intermittent light.

Ethan followed Karina through as Lopez slipped into the corridor and quietly shut the door behind them.

The corridor led to a series of what were probably classrooms or lecture halls. Karina crept forward through the flickering pools of light toward a door that was open as though recently vacated. Most of the other doors were closed, nothing but inky blackness visible through the windows, but the open one cast a dim light from within.

A movement ahead in the darkness caught Ethan’s eye and he momentarily froze. Karina hesitated, but then moved on as she recognized Donovan edging his way toward the shaft of pale light. The shaft flickered on and off like the lights in the corridor. Donovan pointed silently at the open door and Karina nodded.

Glen and Jackson fanned out in the corridor, ready to charge into the room as Donovan counted down on his fingers.

Three. Jackson raised his rifle.

Two. Glen Ryan crept up to the edge of the door, pistol in hand.

One. Karina aimed to cover Glen.

Donovan pointed into the room and Glen charged in first, followed by Karina, Jackson and then the rest of them.

Ethan and Lopez dashed into the room to see a lecture hall before them, quite large with a vaulted ceiling, a dais and lectern on one side and ranks of chairs on the other. The lights flickered ominously and the air felt bitterly cold as they all saw clouds of their breath condensing in the stuttering light.

But the room was empty.

‘I don’t see anything!’ Glen snapped, sweeping the room with his pistol.

‘Clear,’ Jackson said, lowering his weapon.

Donovan slowed and looked at Ethan, who glanced at Lopez.

‘Maybe he took off ?’ she suggested. ‘Heard us coming?’

Ethan felt the hairs on the back of his arms stand on end and he shook his head.

‘It’s too cold,’ he said. ‘It’s here.’

‘What’s here?’ Jackson uttered. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Ethan was about to answer when something dropped onto the carpet a few inches from where he stood. He looked down and in the flickering light saw a glistening droplet of fluid.

Donovan, Glen, Jackson, Karina and Lopez all looked down at the droplet at the same moment, and then all of them looked up into the lecture hall’s vaulted ceiling.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Karina whispered.

In the inky blackness above was the body of the lawyer, Eric Muir. He was spread-eagled across the ceiling, his body trembling as though in some kind of seizure. It took a moment for Ethan to realize what he was actually looking at.

The body was suspended in mid-air fifteen feet above the dais, hovering as though on a pillar of air.