The Eternity Project

52

HARLEM



Mr. Wilson sat in his non-descript sedan and ignored the cold seeping through the vehicle and his bones.

As a covert agent, he had spent countless hours sitting immobile in cars, watching, waiting or simply sleeping. Often, there was no alternative, the risk of identification in motels too high. Instead, a deserted and trash-strewn service alley on Harlem’s south-side off 8th Avenue served as the perfect anonymous staging post. He could reach Queen’s via Randall’s to the east, or head directly south toward Manhattan at a moment’s notice while remaining unobserved and undetected.

There were no cameras or pedestrians. Ironically enough, he was only a couple of blocks from a police precinct building, but there was nothing of interest to them where he sat. A handful of vehicles were parked behind service shutters for businesses that faced the main streets either side of the block, plus a couple more vehicles long abandoned and coated with a thin film of dust splattered with raindrops.

His cellphone vibrated on the passenger seat next to him and he reached down and pressed the answer button. The line connected via a small speaker plugged into his car, allowing him to answer without picking the cell up.

‘Wilson.’

The voice of Douglas Jarvis answered. ‘I have them.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know where they’re headed yet. All I can be sure of is that Joanna Defoe and Ethan Warner are together as we speak. Nicola Lopez is not with them right now, but it’s only a matter of time.’

Wilson nodded. Today had turned out better than he could have expected. With both Warner and Defoe searching for the same person, the descendent of the long-dead soldier Barraclough, it was now simply a waiting game. As soon as they found their mark, Wilson would be in position to complete his mission. Two birds, one very violent stone.

‘What direction are they currently headed?’


‘Stay where you are. Every indication suggests they’ll move north out of Manhattan. I’m tracking them as we speak.’

‘Keep me informed.’

‘Your director lied to me,’ Jarvis said. ‘He lied to the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, too. Joanna Defoe hasn’t killed anybody, you did. Steel’s afraid of prosecution and . . .’

Wilson cut the line off and then dialed another. An automated voice answered, and demanded a code from him.

‘Wilson, eight-eight-one-five-nine-three-alpha.’

The line clicked and, moments later, the Director of the CIA, William Steel, picked up.

‘What news?’

‘They’re within reach,’ Wilson replied without emotion. ‘Chances are they’ll be neutralized before tomorrow morning.’

‘Take your time, and don’t underestimate either Warner or Lopez,’ the director warned. ‘We thought they were dead in Idaho and they returned. We’ll finish this properly this time.’

Wilson’s expression betrayed a hint of disgust that flickered behind his eyes. The director was safely tucked up in his office in Virginia, not hunting down American citizens in the field. There was no we.

‘What about Jarvis? He knows that Defoe is innocent of the slayings.’

There was a moment of silence before the director replied.

‘Accidents happen.’

Wilson shut the line off and started the engine, before he looked at his watch. It was half three in the afternoon and already the bleak gray horizon was touched with streaks of fiery gold where the sun was sinking into the west between tenement blocks.

Wilson pulled out and dialed another line. This time it was Donovan who answered.

‘Where are you?’ Wilson demanded without preamble.

‘The east side,’ Donovan replied, his tones equally crisp and uncompromising. ‘I’ve been in contact and they’re on the move. The person you’ve been looking for is Tom Ross, a police officer.’

‘Where are they going?’

‘Hell Gate Field,’ Donovan said. ‘The subject is with a woman, Lopez, and another of my team, Karina Thorne.’

‘Good,’ Wilson replied.

‘Too many people are getting involved,’ Donovan insisted. ‘ We can’t wrap this up quietly if half the damned city knows what’s going on.’

‘Then you had best hurry to ensure that nobody else turns up!’ Wilson snapped. ‘Get there ahead of them and secure the area. I’ll join you shortly.’

Wilson shut the line off and turned southeast toward Randall’s and Queens. With luck, he would be there in time to close the last couple of blocks on foot. He knew the area only because of the crime scene that Warner and Lopez had been poking their noses into. Remote and full of nothing but old dock buildings and small-holdings. Deserted at night.

Perfect.

Doug Jarvis sat in the rear seat of an SUV and stared at his cellphone for a long moment. There was no doubting that Wilson would double-cross him – the CIA man’s sole purpose was to clean up the mess that his bosses back at the Barn had created over the past four or five decades.

Jarvis was not idealistic enough, and more than cynical enough, to know that there was no point in expecting the CIA to honor its side of the bargain and leave Warner and Lopez alone. Joanna Defoe, likewise. All of them represented a clear-and-present danger not just to the security of CIA operations but to the agency’s very existence. It was one thing to blow the whistle on malpractice or corruption, but another entirely to expose several decades of cruel and unusual punishment meted out to innocent American civilians. The backlash, even from the hawks in Congress and the Senate, would be unprecedented.

Jarvis’s dilemma came not just from his loyalty to Ethan and Nicola. It was far more complex for him than that. His problem came from his equally powerful sense of loyalty to his country. The needs of the many. A United States of America without the protection offered by a Central Intelligence Agency able to operate freely beyond the reach of congressional scrutiny was an America vulnerable to attack from afar. Like all Americans, he knew all too well the consequences of failures of security, of letting foreign nationals with a taste for martyrdom cross onto American soil to launch their suicidal campaigns of hate and mayhem. With the CIA disbanded or broken up piecemeal into fragmentary offices of impotent agents handcuffed to everything from worker’s rights to anti-discrimination and goddamned health and safety laws, a significant fraction of America’s ability to analyze, conclude and act upon foreign intelligence would be forever lost. And along with it, American lives.

Jarvis stared out of the windows of his vehicle as it drove through the crowded streets of Manhattan, the agent at the wheel instructed merely to cruise close to the Williamsburg Bridge. Thousands of citizens crowded the streets, bustling back and forth as they went about their daily lives, blissfully unaware that disaster could strike at any moment, just as it had done before. For most all people, it always happened to the other guy. The bombed-out apartment building in another city. The explosives in a parked vehicle reported on the television. The IED that decimated a platoon of Marines by a roadside in Sangir. Distant, something that could be discussed at arm’s length.

Until it happened on their doorstep, as it had in New York City in 2001. Then everybody’s attitudes changed.

Jarvis was protecting Ethan and Lopez because, frankly, he gave a damn about what happened to them. But as a patriot and a servant of the United States, he was also obliged to give a damn about the other three hundred million countrymen who relied upon men like him to make the right decision, no matter how hard it might be, time and time again.

He looked at his cellphone one last time and then dialed a number. The line picked up on the first tone.

‘Ethan.’

‘It’s Jarvis. Get yourself to Hell Gate right now.’

‘Donovan’s corrupt,’ Ethan informed him down the line. ‘The whole team may be responsible for what happened on the bridge.’

‘I know,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Bring Lopez and Joanna, and Tom Ross, if you can. We’ll take them into protective custody from there. It’s time to bring this all to an end.’

There was a pause on the line, and then Ethan’s voice came through.

‘Understood. We’re on our way.’

Jarvis shut the line off and tried to ignore the waves of self-loathing churning through his guts. It was the only choice he could make, because he never really had one.

He hoped that Ethan and Nicola would understand, one day.