The Eternity Project

50

5TH PRECINCT POLICE DEPARTMENT, NEW YORK CITY



‘Are you sure about this?’

Joanna stood with Ethan on the sidewalk outside the precinct, her hand on his forearm as she hesitated at the steps.

‘The police are not the enemy,’ Ethan replied, ‘at least, not all of them.’

‘That’s not very reassuring.’

Ethan offered her a smile. ‘We’re here under the jurisdiction of the DIA. Nobody’s looking for you, least of all in this station, okay?’

Joanna sighed and followed Ethan into the building. They made their way up to the offices and Ethan showed his identification to an officer before requesting access to the archivist’s files he had previously viewed.

‘What are we looking for?’ Joanna asked as they waited.

‘Evidence,’ Ethan replied in a whisper. ‘I’m not quite sure what, exactly, but there’s got to be something on the tapes we’re about to see that will expose corruption within this department. Trouble is, I can’t admit to anybody here that that’s what I’m looking for.’

An officer approached them with a disc. Ethan took it and walked across to the small room nearby that contained chairs, a table and a television with built-in DVD player. He shut the door as soon as Joanna was inside and then set up the disc to play.

Joanna watched as a fuzzy black-and-white image of a traffic intersection appeared.

‘Fill me in,’ she suggested.

‘Armoured car robbery,’ Ethan replied. ‘The vehicle outside the Pay-Go on the corner of the intersection will get hit by a truck, busting it open. There’ll be a gunfight between cops staking out the Pay-Go and the thieves, who will then escape in a pickup onto Williamsburg Bridge. That truck will then crash on the bridge and ultimately cause a pile-up that claimed several innocent civilian victims, including the wife and daughter of one Tom Ross.’

Joanna nodded as she watched the screen. ‘The guy I’ve been searching for.’

‘The same,’ Ethan replied.

A huge Kenworth appeared on the screen and plowed into the armoured car. Ethan watched as the armoured car was split open and spun sideways across the sidewalk as the Kenworth smashed into the Pay-Go store. The armoured car then hit a fire hydrant and launched a pillar of white foaming water into the air.

‘The hydrant leak’s blocking the view,’ Joanna said.

‘Which is what’s bothering me,’ Ethan replied. ‘Look, there are the cops moving in. Now, watch the big guy.’

Ethan followed the movements of Donovan as he ran across the intersection, his pistol raised and pointed at the crashed vehicles. Moments later, he vanished behind the pillar of water and the crashed armoured car.

‘He can’t be using that water as a shield,’ Joanna said. ‘There will be other cameras and he couldn’t have known that the hydrant would blow.’

‘I don’t think that he’s hiding,’ Ethan replied. ‘But look how he’s sent all of his colleagues toward the Pay-Go. He’s separated himself from his team.’

‘Why?’ Joanna asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Ethan said. ‘It bothered me when I first viewed the footage, but I couldn’t think why. My problem is that there’s no tactical advantage in doing so. In fact, with one gun where he is and the other three officers approaching the Pay-Go from the front, it means that he’s almost forcing the thieves to move toward him.’

Joanna shrugged. ‘Maybe that’s what he wants?’ What if he’s covering them instead of attacking them? You said that this is about corruption – is it him you think is up to something?’

‘Maybe,’ Ethan replied, ‘but I just can’t figure out what.’

They watched as the thieves dashed for the pickup truck that appeared nearby, the cops’ heads all down under blasts of automatic fire. The truck’s tires spewed smoke as it accelerated away toward the Williamsburg Bridge, and Joanna pointed to a pile of boxes in the back.


‘That the money?’ she asked.

Ethan nodded. ‘Aluminum cases, about a quarter million in each.’

Joanna leaned back in her chair. ‘It’s possible the driver and one other could have pulled up and loaded the cases in just a few seconds, but they would have been right in your man’s line of sight.’

Ethan nodded. ‘They could have fired in his direction, kept his head down. He’s only got the wreckage of the armoured car for cover.’

‘Too close,’ Joanna replied. ‘They’d be unloading it just feet away from where he’s standing and couldn’t fail to miss.’

The images switched to the traffic cameras high on the bridge as the truck swerved between other vehicles. A police sedan, its hazard lights just visible flashing through a grill above the front fender, pursued them.

‘Here comes the crash,’ Ethan said.

They watched as the truck was hit by the pursuit vehicle, lost control and crashed violently. The police sedan screeched to a halt nearby, the cops tumbling from it with their weapons aimed as the truck, its rear hanging precariously out over the bridge’s ruined railings, spilled the money cases to fall out of shot toward the East River.

Then the fuel truck plowed into the stationary traffic in a tangled mass of crushed metal and burgeoning flames.

‘Jesus,’ Joanna uttered.

The cops apprehended two of the dazed thieves on camera.

‘Where’d the other two go?’ Joanna asked.

‘Escaped,’ Ethan replied. ‘Maybe had another vehicle on the bridge, we thought, but nothing got picked up at the blockade on the east side of the bridge.’

Joanna sat staring at the screen for a long moment.

‘Wind it back to the crash,’ she said. ‘When the flatbed lost control and busted the railings.’

Ethan used a remote to wind the footage back, and then advanced it at half-speed. Joanna leaned forward, watching closely as the vehicle hit the railings, careered into the other side and then finally spun out of control, before smashing through the railings and coming to an abrupt halt, side-on to the flow of traffic.

The silver cases tumbled from the rear of the flatbed.

‘You said they grabbed twelve cases,’ Joanna said.

‘Yeah,’ Ethan agreed, ‘twelve were taken from the armoured car. Two were recovered from the flatbed, and one more from the shore of the East River a couple of hours later. The other nine were lost in the river.’

Joanna shook her head.

‘What if they never made it into the truck?’ she said. ‘What if the truck was a deliberate diversion? Wind the footage back to the Pay-Go attack.’

Ethan wound the footage back and watched as the Freightliner was hit and the fire hydrant blew. The flatbed pulled away and raced off camera. Joanna grabbed the remote and paused the footage before re-winding a frame at a time. The flatbed inched back into view, two of the thieves sprawled in the back.

Joanna froze the image and pointed at the screen.

‘There’s the answer to your mystery,’ she said.

Ethan leaned forward and peered at the pixelated image of the truck. There, the two thieves were lying on top of no more than three or four cases.

‘The majority of the cash never made it onto the flatbed,’ Joanna said. ‘And the big cop you pointed out didn’t join the pursuit on the bridge. So what was he doing?’

Ethan sat back in his chair and cursed himself for not realizing it sooner.

‘He loads up the remaining cases into another vehicle, maybe even his own, and then controls the scene before other police arrive. The entire stake-out, Karina said, was based on a tip-off from an anonymous informer who approached Donovan. Maybe there was no informer, and the whole thing was set up so that Donovan could take the cash himself. He’s a cop and could have gained access to the codes necessary to break into the cases and bypass the security devices, if required.’

Joanna frowned thoughtfully.

‘But what about the fall-guys in the truck? If they were involved, they wouldn’t just let themselves get caught like that?’

Ethan shook his head in wonderment.

‘Nearly four million bucks is a lot of cash, if you know what to do with it. Four thieves, three cops, a lawyer and a bank clerk. That’s nearly half a million dollars each, split evenly, in hard cash. Sure, the identity numbers on every note would be black-marked by the Federal Reserve, but with three billion notes passing through the system every day, the chances of them being picked up are tiny.’

‘They could also be laundered,’ Joanna suggested, ‘passed on and generally mixed up in the system. If everybody involved was smart enough, the money would never be traced to individual owners.’

Ethan turned to Joanna.

‘Maybe Donovan’s original tip-off was genuine, but instead of locating and arresting the gang as they fled south, he instead manages to contact them and offers them a deal. A sure hit on a bank or armoured truck, in return for the police failing to arrest or charge them.’

‘Half a million bucks a piece or near enough, plus what the gang had already accrued,’ Joanna said thoughtfully. ‘They could high-tail it out of America and never need to worry about money again.’

Ethan nodded, warming to the idea. ‘They organize the hit, and all goes well enough until the auto wreck and two thieves get caught.’

‘Donovan employs a crooked lawyer and a cash-strapped clerk to help in return for a slice of the profits,’ Joanna added. ‘Donovan probably worked out how to hit the armoured car himself – they’re incredibly tough and only a high-speed impact by something as large as that rig, hitting it dead center, would do the job.’

‘Spilling the contents out into the road,’ Ethan said.

‘Which was why he chose that Pay-Go,’ Joanna agreed. ‘It faces the intersection and the armoured car parks right outside, side-on to traffic coming off the Williamsburg Bridge. The rig hits the armoured car, and Donovan uses the chaos and pursuit to conceal the thieves loading cases onto his car as well as the flatbed. ‘But what does Donovan do with the cases?’

Ethan thought back to the Hell Gate homicide scene.

‘The warehouse out on the docks,’ he said. ‘Donovan must have dumped a few of them there for Reece and Hicks to collect afterward. I found grooves in the floor, like something heavy had been dragged before the two men were killed. Donovan probably found them the next morning, maybe checking to make sure they’d been collected, and removed the cases from the scene when he found the bodies of the thieves. More profit for him and no connection to the incident on the bridge or the Pay-Go hit. That’s why the thieves got into the warehouse without busting the door, but had to break the chains on the gates. Donovan could get a duplicate key made because the locks were an old style, but to leave the gates open would alert the site manager.’

Ethan looked at the screen for a long moment. ‘But all of that still doesn’t explain how the two remaining thieves got off the bridge.’

Joanna stared at the screen before answering.

‘What if Donovan’s not the only one involved?’ she asked. ‘What if the whole team’s in on it?’

Ethan looked around at her. ‘You think it’s possible? The more people in on it, the less cash for each player and the greater the chance of exposure. Besides, Karina seems arrow straight. And why would the wraith be hunting them if . . .?’

Joanna’s green eyes blazed with realization.


‘What if it’s only a couple of them, and your friends Karina and Tom don’t know about it?’

Ethan felt his throat go dry as he considered what Joanna had said and what Karina had told them about the robbery. ‘Jackson was in another vehicle, waiting to cover them if the thieves got away.’

Joanna looked at the screen beside them. ‘What if he wasn’t where he said he was? Anything went wrong, he could just show up and collect anybody forced to flee the scene.’

‘We don’t see him,’ Ethan realized, ‘because he was on the other side of the bridge. He wasn’t waiting to back them up on Delancey, he was in Queens on the east side of the bridge, backing up the thieves. That’s why the escapees never showed up at the roadblock: Jackson got them out and back into Manhattan, heading in the opposite direction.’

‘Donovan obtains the footage of the east side of the bridge,’ Joanna finished for Ethan, ‘and probably conveniently loses it. He covered all of their tracks. But what’s he doing now?’

Ethan stood up urgently.

‘He’s finishing the job,’ he replied. ‘If he’s worked out that Tom’s behind the revenge killings, then he’ll try to have him iced.’

‘These are revenge killings you’ve been investigating? How could this Tom guy have done those things?’

Ethan grabbed his cell and dialed Lopez’s number as he led Joanna out of the room. ‘I think we’re about to find out.’

The line buzzed in his ear, a strange clicking sound. Ethan looked down at his cell and frowned.

‘Line’s out.’

Joanna grabbed it from him and listened to the tone for a moment before she shut the line off. ‘Electronic scrambling,’ she said. ‘Your phone’s being jammed.’

‘But how can it be jammed when it was Doug who . . .’ Ethan stopped walking as he stared down at the cell in his hand. A cold dread settled on his shoulders. ‘Oh, no.’

Joanna looked at Ethan for a long moment as she connected the dots.

‘Your man’s not what he says he is,’ Joanna said. ‘I bet that if you call him though it will connect, no problem.’

Ethan felt almost physically sick as he realized that Joanna was right. The burner cell Jarvis had given him was not just for contact, but to keep tabs on him.

‘He’s probably had me followed,’ Ethan realized. ‘Probably knows where we are right now.’

‘He’s controlling you both, Ethan,’ Joanna said. ‘Probably always has been. Now do you understand why I couldn’t trust anybody?’

‘Christ,’ Ethan said. ‘Do you have a cellphone?’