The Eternity Project

47



The wintry morning air outside the cathedral seemed colder as Ethan jogged down the steps, with Lopez and Karina close behind.

‘We should have thought of that,’ Lopez said. ‘Professor Bowen told us about that poltergeist case in Rosenheim, Germany, where the source was a girl who was alive.’

‘I think we’re out of our depth here,’ Ethan replied.

‘These crisis-apparitions appear when people have just died,’ Karina said. ‘Maybe somebody injured in the accident is in intensive care, slipping in and out of consciousness?’

Ethan looked at Karina. ‘I think that you know more than that about what’s happening.’

Lopez glared at Ethan angrily but he ignored her, staring at Karina until she let out a frustrated sigh and swiped a strand of hair from her face. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘It was just a gut instinct after what happened in my apartment the other night.’

‘In the kitchen?’ Lopez asked. ‘What did you see?’

‘I didn’t exactly see anything,’ Karina replied. ‘I thought I saw a man standing there in the shadows, watching me, but it wasn’t what I saw that mattered. It was a feeling.’

‘You recognized the person,’ Ethan said with a clairvoyant flash.

‘I don’t know,’ Karina said, ‘but it just felt like Tom was there. After what had happened that day, I got paranoid and decided to check him out. You know the rest.’

Lopez looked up at Ethan. ‘He died on the floor of his apartment.’

‘And then got resuscitated,’ Ethan said. ‘You think it’s worth checking out the times of his cardiac arrest and the murders of the two guys out on Hell Gate Field, see if they match?’

Lopez nodded immediately, but Karina shook her head.

‘Even if they do match, what the hell do we do then? We can hardly arrest Tom for the murders, he was dead on his goddamned couch! And what about the rest of the team? If it’s Tom who’s somehow behind all of this, then he’s hunting them down, too.’

‘For which there must be a reason,’ Ethan said. ‘Karina, we can’t afford to just dismiss this, however crazy it might seem. If we can’t rule out the possibility that Tom is somehow conjuring this wraith up, then we have to assume that, whether he knows it or not, Tom’s our killer. He can’t be prosecuted and the case would be thrown out by any self-respecting judge, so we have to deal with this ourselves. Where has he been the last two days?’

‘Alone at home,’ Karina admitted. ‘But I’ve called him at least twice every day and he’s always picked up. It’s not like he’s tearing around the city killing people. Christ, he’s so depressed he can barely walk most of the time.’

‘Check the times,’ Ethan insisted, ‘and then go and visit Tom, okay? I’ll catch up with you in a while.’

‘Why, where are you going?’ Karina demanded.

‘It’s important,’ Ethan replied. ‘I won’t be long.’

He turned and zipped up his jacket against the cold as he started walking down the sidewalk. He got ten paces when he heard Lopez jog after him and felt her hand on his shoulder.

Lopez looked at him. ‘You want some back-up?’

Ethan shook his head. ‘Probably better if I do this alone. We’ve got a lot to catch up on.’

‘Yeah,’ she replied, ‘that’s what bothers me. It’s been five years, so you don’t know anything about Joanna now, Ethan. She said it herself. Maybe you should take this a bit slower, a bit more cautiously.’

‘Like you would?’ Ethan asked with a smile.


‘Your safety is paramount to me,’ Lopez replied tartly, but there was a twinkle in her eyes. ‘Most all times.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Ethan said. ‘Just find out what you can about Tom Ross, and get Doug in on this. He might be able to match the name to our list.’

Lopez’s eyes widened. ‘You think?’

‘It’s exactly the kind of thing MK-ULTRA will be looking for. If there’s a history of this in Tom’s family, he might be more than just our killer. He might be a target, too. If the assassin that Joanna claims is following her identifies Tom, he’ll be killed. We need Joanna on our side and Tom safe before we can finish this, okay?’

Ethan turned away. He could feel Lopez watching him as he walked, and wondered just what he was doing. Sure, he could hardly avoid meeting with Joanna: he’d been searching for her for five years. But so much had happened in between that maybe Lopez was right and there was nothing left for him to find.

The Metro took him south into downtown. He hopped off on Broadway and walked onto Fulton, the street lined with diners and pizza houses, small businesses tucked out of sight from the main streets. Truth was that in New York City there weren’t very many places that a person could hide for long. Cameras were everywhere, many of them used by law enforcement to track vehicles and people, if the need arose. Joanna would be keeping her face out of sight, probably using a baseball cap and shades or a hood, maybe even a headscarf. Both he and Lopez had become fairly adept at avoiding cameras, using simple disguises over the past six months. Joanna would by now have perfected the technique.

As he walked he saw roadworks cordoning off part of Fulton, builders and street technicians digging holes and fiddling with scaffolding equipment. The large metal storage containers, each as big as an SUV, provided excellent shielding from the shops, bars and cameras on the opposite side of the street.

Ethan took the sidewalk behind the works, and soon found the diner that Joanna had mentioned, a small affair with maybe a dozen tables. This early in the morning, it wasn’t easy to get a space, but he saw Joanna the moment he walked in. She was sitting facing the door deep inside the diner, far enough to avoid detection by any cameras outside, and to her back was the counter entry hatch: a quick escape route through the kitchen if anybody unfriendly tried to corner her inside.

Ethan unzipped his jacket and shouldered his way past truck drivers and construction workers tucking into breakfast, finally sitting down opposite her. She smiled and pushed a coffee toward him.

‘Still two up and white?’ she asked.

Ethan nodded, feeling a strange pang of nostalgia seep through his veins as he sipped from the cup.

He was seeing Joanna properly for the first time in five years, and he realized that the previous night had revealed only her identity and not her condition. While he could not doubt that she was superbly physical fit, her face now bore the weight of her years of incarceration. Gone was her smooth complexion. Her skin was creased around her lips and at the corners of her eyes, their once clear green appearance tinged with shadows. She was thinner than he remembered, the line of her lips harder and her cheekbones sharper. Her hair seemed more wiry than he remembered.

‘You’re staring at me,’ she said.

Ethan blinked. ‘Sorry, it’s been a long time.’

‘For me, too,’ she replied. ‘You’re looking good, Ethan.’

He couldn’t help the smile that broke across his face. ‘You, too.’

‘Bullshit,’ she replied. ‘I’ve aged ten years in five and it’s not all down to bad coffee.’

There was a ghost of a smile on her lips as she replied, but it was muted by a flinty light of radicalism that glittered like distant lightning in her eyes. Whatever was going on behind them was vastly different to what Ethan remembered, and he chose his words with care.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Just tell me from the beginning what happened. I nearly drove myself into an early grave searching for you, Jo – it was like you disappeared into thin air.’

Joanna nodded slowly and set her cup down.

‘I got jumped outside the hotel we were staying at in Gaza,’ she began, ‘if you could call it a hotel, what with the bare walls and that damned donkey outside.’

Ethan smiled involuntarily. ‘The one owned by the guy hawking the mugs?’

‘I heart Gaza City.’ Joanna nodded, a smile breaking through like a ray of sunlight on a bleak winter’s day. ‘Never did ask him which part of that open prison he hearted. Anyway, four guys, real fast. I didn’t even have chance to put up a fight before I was bundled into a blue sedan and whisked away.’

‘Away where?’ Ethan pressed.

‘Not far,’ she replied, and her features became sympathetic. ‘It took a couple of hours to get there but they were just driving around in circles, and I was only ever moved once or twice in the whole three years, always ending up back in the same building. Truth is, I don’t think I was ever more than a couple of miles from the hotel.’

Ethan felt tears pinch at his eyes but he refused to let her see them. ‘I left you behind.’

‘You did all that you could,’ Joanna assured him. Her hand reached out and touched his, squeezed it briefly. Her skin was cool and dry, not soft and warm as it had once been. ‘After I got away I started looking for you. It didn’t take long to find the articles you’d written, the money you’d spent, everything. I know how hard you tried, Ethan.’

Ethan blinked hard, fighting off the grief that was swelling like a storm inside him.

‘Then for Christ’s sakes, why didn’t you contact me?’

Joanna’s expression changed to one of determination. The hand retreated back across the table.

‘A lot happened, Ethan. There’s still a lot that I don’t understand, don’t know. I couldn’t trust anybody.’

‘Anybody?’ Ethan echoed in amazement. ‘You couldn’t trust me, even after all I’d done?’

‘It wasn’t you,’ she insisted. ‘It was everything, everyone, people connected to other people and on and on. By the time I actually tracked you down, I knew you were working for the enemy.’

Ethan frowned. ‘The enemy? What are you talking about?’

‘You’re contracted to the Defense Intelligence Agency, right?’ she asked, and, when Ethan nodded, she raised her hands palms up from the table. ‘It was the CIA that pulled me off the street, Ethan. They’ve been looking for me ever since.’

‘But why?’ Ethan demanded. ‘Why target you?’

Joanna glanced over Ethan’s shoulder, around the diner, as though searching for prying eyes and ears.

‘Because they were looking for survivors and relatives of MK-ULTRA, trying to remove evidence. They’re doing it all the time, Ethan, right now, and whoever is responsible is likely to be close behind me because I’m a walking example of their experiments and I can identify those involved.’

*

‘Positive ID, repeat, I’ve got her visual. She’s in a diner, on Fulton.’

Jarvis sat in his vehicle parked almost a mile away from where his agent was walking. A small screen in the rear of the vehicle held a GPS indicator that flashed periodically as it moved down Fulton Street.

‘Is Ethan with her?’

The voice in Jarvis’s microphone was clear: ‘Affirmative, Warner is with her. Positive identification as Joanna Defoe. You want me to stay on them?’


Jarvis thought for a moment. The tracker he’d placed in the burner cell he’d given to Ethan was enough to ensure that he would remain under observation. Fact was, now that he had found Joanna, he would be unlikely to want to part company with her again. Considering their separate and yet closely tied missions, it was almost certain that they would work together.

‘No,’ Jarvis said. ‘I don’t want to risk one of them identifying you. Pull back now.’

‘Roger that.’

Jarvis clicked off the microphone and watched the tracker’s marker on the screen. Then he looked down to his side, at the burner phone he had been given by Mr. Wilson.