The Eternity Project

48



‘They tried to program you?’ Ethan asked.

‘For two years.’ Joanna nodded, sipping her coffee. ‘The reason they picked me up is because of my father’s connection to MK-ULTRA and because I was researching MACE, who were running an abduction-and-ransom scam beneath a veneer of military contracts.’

‘I know,’ Ethan replied, ‘we busted them open in Israel three years after you vanished. The CEO, Byron Stone, died before he could be brought to justice.’

‘Death isn’t justice enough for that a*shole,’ Joanna snapped with uncharacteristic vehemence. ‘I only wish I could have killed him myself.’

Ethan and Joanna, as well as being engaged to marry, had once worked together as journalists in South America for some years, exposing government corruption. While there, Ethan knew that Joanna had come close to exposing a major corporation’s involvement in the ‘abductions-for-ransom business’ that had infected countries like Mexico and Colombia, but they had been chased away by death threats and the danger of arrest by local law enforcement. In Gaza, she had again come close to exposing MACE for deliberately organizing abductions, but this time their retaliation had been more definitive.

‘So what was the CIA’s connection to MACE?’ Ethan asked.

‘Covert,’ Joanna replied simply. ‘MACE was contracted through the Pentagon, but whatever Byron Stone arranged with the CIA was kept under the table. I never found any paperwork or evidence of CIA collusion until long after I’d actually been grabbed. But what I saw could blow the CIA wide open, even have it shut down.’

Ethan glanced around the diner as he spoke, as alert for eavesdropping as Joanna was.

‘You saw what, exactly?’

‘Saw and heard. They spent two years running all kinds of weird tests on me. Hypnosis, brain scans, stress tests, electroshock therapy, extrasensory perception analysis, psychokinesis, pyrokinesis, you name it. I really began to think that the people who’d picked me up were out of their minds. Sure, I knew about MK-ULTRA already, but this was totally insane.’

‘They find anything?’ Ethan asked.

‘Wish they had,’ she replied. ‘If it had turned out I’d been able to set things alight without touching them, I’d have torched every one of the f*ckers right there and then.’

‘Electroshock therapy?’ Ethan echoed as he digested what Joanna had said.

‘They show videos,’ Joanna replied, and she seemed to shiver slightly despite the warmth in the diner. ‘Alternating images, some patriotic, others less so. The patriotic images turn up and they flush you with a bit of morphine, makes you feel all warm and fluffy. All’s good. The others, they send a couple hundred volts through you.’

Ethan’s throat swelled and he could no longer look at her as he averted his eyes and stared down into his coffee. ‘How long?’

‘About six months,’ came the reply. ‘Nine hours a day.’

Ethan wiped a sleeve angrily across his face, kept his head down. Joanna’s voice reached him gently across the table. ‘Stopped me from sleeping a lot, made me fear even seeing anything that wasn’t American.’ Her hand touched his again, and he looked up to see her smile faintly. ‘Put it this way, I can’t watch a Vietnam movie anymore without hitting the ceiling every couple of minutes.’

Ethan forced a crooked grin onto his face and tried to ignore the rage seething like acid through his veins. ‘What else.’

‘You don’t want to know,’ Joanna replied. ‘I’ve moved on from . . .’

Ethan grabbed her forearm. ‘What else?’

Joanna stared at him for a few seconds, and then replied as though she were talking about the weather.

‘They killed me,’ she said. ‘Drained the blood from my body and replaced it with chilled saline. Kept me in stasis for an hour and then reversed the process. When I came to, they asked me what I saw. They were looking for evidence of the afterlife, Ethan. They called it the Eternity Project. They wanted to know the face of God.’

Ethan could barely speak as he looked at her. ‘How many times?’

Joanna sighed. ‘Thirty-seven, I think.’

Ethan kept hold of her arm. ‘Jesus, I’m sorry.’

‘There’s nothing for you to be sorry about,’ she insisted, and averted her eyes. ‘Moving on.’

Suddenly, the creases marring Joanna’s once, flawless skin appeared ominous. Ethan wondered at the terrors she had endured in that room buried deep in the volatile streets of Gaza City, but he knew better than to pry further. ‘So you heard some stuff, later on?’

Joanna nodded. ‘After a couple of years of doing these tests, they gave up. I suppose that, after seven hundred days, they’d finally realized they were pissing into the wind. I got moved back to my little cell without windows, while they figured out what to do with me.’

‘MACE must have been long busted by then,’ Ethan said, ‘or at least on their way out.’

‘MACE was only responsible for the team that grabbed me,’ Joanna explained. ‘The CIA took over from that point. Once they’d given up on the experiments, they relaxed a bit. The building I was kept in was secure enough, but the walls carried sound and the door wasn’t sealed at the jamb. Sometimes the daft a*sholes had chats with each other right outside.’

‘About what?’

‘About Langley,’ she said, ‘about being back home, their wives, kids, that sort of stuff. They were as American as you and I, and any mention of Langley pretty much points the way. We were in the middle of Gaza, for Christ’s sake. Who the hell else would be running a safe house there?’

Ethan nodded. ‘Must have had people on the inside, though. Field agents would have stood out too much.’

‘Probably. I saw these guys often enough, so they may have had their own way in and out of Gaza, probably at night. Point is, they were getting lax and eventually they screwed up enough that they got hit by Israel just as they were trying to move me to a new location. They hadn’t bothered to liaise with Mossad or the Knesset, I suppose, and they also hadn’t bothered to blindfold me.’

Ethan nodded. ‘I know, I saw the hit.’

Joanna’s eyes flared wide open. ‘You were there?’

‘No,’ Ethan replied quickly. ‘I saw footage of the raid, saw you on foot. You were gone before we could track you, but it was the first evidence I had that you were alive.’ Joanna stared at her coffee as she digested this new information. Ethan looked up at her. ‘What happened next?’

‘Assan Muhammad happened next.’

‘Assan?’ Ethan finally laughed as an image of the rotund, cheery-faced trader they’d met in Gaza so many years before filled his mind. ‘Is that old bastard still ripping people off out there?’


‘Just like he’s been doing since the time of the Prophet.’ Joanna nodded, smiling. ‘I found him where he always was and he got me out of there real fast. I was in a smuggling tunnel beneath Rafah and over the border into Egypt before nightfall and out of Cairo forty-eight hours later. I headed for Europe, and stayed in the United Kingdom for three weeks to get myself sorted.’

‘Then what? You came home?’

‘Right,’ she replied. ‘Started looking for you again and for the bastards who’d kept me locked up all that time. I knew there’d be a shit-storm brewing at Langley after I got away from them, so I just started listening in. Got myself a job in the kitchens of an out-of-town diner during unsociable hours, a small rent in DC, and kept watching and waiting. Sure enough, the spooks started hanging around our old house near Anacostia.’

‘We were only there for six months,’ Ethan said in surprise.

‘Shows how desperate they were to find me. I guess they figured I’d come looking for you in all the old places.’

Ethan chuckled. ‘Thought that maybe you’d left something tucked away there,’ he guessed, ‘buried evidence and all that?’

Joanna nodded. ‘Dumb asses, the lot of them. I started shooting reels of them hanging around, identified the pool cars they were using, that kind of thing. They were maintaining low-level surveillance, using rookie agents, I guess, because they didn’t have the manpower, so they were making a few mistakes here and there. Now and again, bigger fish would come visit them, and I recognized one or two faces from Gaza. It wasn’t hard to link them all up and start putting together a piece on what was happening.’

‘You publish it,’ Ethan asked, ‘under a different name? Or send it to England?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I had a better idea: just stay under the radar and keep collating evidence until there’s so much of it that it could never be denied. Especially, as I, the author, had effectively come back from the dead and could identify half of the men who had worked for the CIA out in Gaza. Those were the more experienced men but, of course, they always end up on home turf eventually, retired or whatever. I got a few of them on film.’

Ethan marveled at her tenacity and determination. ‘So you’ve been doing this for over a year now?’

‘Fourteen months,’ she replied. ‘But it’s getting harder. They’re cracking down, and the number of survivors of the original MK-ULTRA is getting less and less. We need to find one alive and get them to do a disappearing act all of their own, or everything I’ve achieved so far will be for nothing.’

‘How many CIA agents have you leaned on?’ Ethan asked.

‘Five,’ Joanna replied. ‘Some broke quicker than others, but they all spilled their guts when I got the power tools out.’

Ethan blinked. ‘Literally?’

Joanna’s gaze was hard and steady. ‘Just like they taught me all that time in Gaza, it’s the threat that’s more effective than the action. I gave each of them a good beating, enough that they didn’t doubt I’d go all the way. Once I got the tools out, they blubbered like little children and told me everything.’

‘Enough to hold a case in court?’ Ethan asked.

‘I doubt it,’ she replied. ‘Evidence obtained under duress and all that, but I know far more than I should about it all. The director must be quivering in his boots.’

‘He is,’ Ethan confirmed.

‘You’ve spoken to him?’

‘My boss has,’ Ethan said, nodding. ‘He thought that William Steel was afraid of being hit by an assassin. Seems like his biggest fear is you managing to drag him into a courtroom: he must have ordered the hits on the CIA agents you targeted, and must also have allowed you to be subjected to these experiments. That gets out, he’s done, totally. He’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars.’

‘That’s the plan,’ Joanna replied. ‘What have you been up to here?’

‘We’ve been doing something similar,’ he replied. ‘MK-ULTRA has been largely shut down but its legacy is right across the country. There could be hundreds of American citizens out there who have no idea that they’ve been experimented on, living here and in foreign countries. Just because the CIA has finally mothballed the program doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have the capacity to now use the assets created by it.’ Ethan looked up at Joanna. ‘Maybe even you.’

Joanna smiled bitterly and shook her head.

‘They tried cerebral reprogramming,’ she said, ‘spent weeks showing me those hours of images and footage, trying to desensitise me to violence or provoke outrage by showing me images of corruption and police brutality in the Middle East and using those damned electrodes.’

‘It didn’t work?’ Ethan asked.

‘Not even close,’ Joanna replied. ‘The thing was, I’d already seen it all and knew about it. It’s not like my father, who went straight from college and linguistics school into the army and off to Singapore. Times are different now. People have much better knowledge of life overseas: we have twenty-four-hour news, a free media. My father probably fell for these experiments because his knowledge of the world was not as extensive as mine. All that I got from it was a better idea of how to shoot dramatic photographs.’ She smirked. ‘Would have cost me a couple of thousand bucks for a course like that back home.’

Ethan gave a rueful shake of his head. ‘You’ve handled everything that’s happened better than I thought possible,’ he admitted.

‘Maybe, but otherwise, they were doing their job well, almost totally ruined me through isolation and sleep deprivation, until their idiot doctor showed up to run the experiments. He wore a watch and I caught sight of the date and time. Gave me the anchor I needed to hold out.’

‘You get a name?’ Ethan asked, his fists clenched on the table.

‘Sheviz,’ Joanna spat. ‘Damon Sheviz.’

Ethan looked at her for a long time and then a grim smile crept across his face. ‘Well, I can tell you that Damon Sheviz met a prolonged and painful demise at the hands of Bedouin tribesmen out in the deserts of Israel a couple of years ago.’

Joanna’s eyes flared in amazement as she looked at him. ‘You knew him?’

‘Found him on my first case for the DIA,’ Ethan explained. ‘He was by then using a similar experiment that he used on you, to try to clone the blood of another species to create hybrid embryos.’

‘He said something about that,’ Joanna said, thoughtfully. ‘That he’d only need my blood and that I no longer needed to survive the experiments. What species was he trying to clone?’

‘You don’t want to know.’ Ethan said as he leaned close. ‘Did you learn anything that we could use to bring them down?’

Joanna shook her head. ‘They weren’t that slack,’ she admitted, ‘but I do have my secret weapon.’

‘The names you memorized?’

Joanna nodded. ‘Not all of the names were tracked down by MK-ULTRA, due to the age of the list they were using from the First World War. I’ve managed to follow a trail out here, which tied in nicely with my search for Aaron Lymes.’

‘You found somebody?’ Ethan asked in amazement.

‘Not yet,’ Joanna cautioned. ‘The list of names refers to people who have been dead for many years. It’s tracking down their descendants, the ones who were experimented on, that’s hard.’


Ethan nodded. ‘You have the same list as we do, compiled from the experiences of families during the First World War.’

‘Crisis-apparitions,’ Joanna confirmed. ‘But I may have gotten a little further than you in identifying living descendants. I managed to track a family name from England in the early 1900s through family trees and records. Their name was originally Barraclough, but only the daughter of the family survived.’

‘Yeah, that’s the name we foud. You tracked them all the way here, to New York?’ Ethan asked.

‘Sure did,’ she acknowledged. ‘The daughter married a wealthy businessman by the name of Wilbur Thompson and they had three children, two of them girls. One girl married but died of pneumonia in her early thirties, without having had children.’

‘And the other?’ Ethan asked.

‘The other was a Mary Thompson, who moved to New York at the age of fifteen with her parents, just before the first shots of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, after France fell to the Nazis in the Second World War. It seems her folks feared that the United Kingdom would fall, too, and decided to get out of dodge. They settled in Manhattan and the daughter married in 1965.’

‘Who did she marry?’

‘A New York police sergeant by the name of Harold Ross. I’ve been tracking his family down.’

The name bounced around the inside of Ethan’s mind and finally he had confirmation of his worst fears.

‘My God, it’s Tom.’

‘Who’s Tom?’ Joanna asked. ‘You’ve already found the family?’

Ethan got up from the table. ‘We need to leave, now.’