The Eternity Project

6

WILLIAMSBURG, QUEENS



‘We’ve got them. Two males heading north, just passing us now.’

The voice came through a radio transmitter fitted to the vehicle’s dashboard, designed to look like a cellphone. The agent in the front seat glanced out of the tinted glass of his window and spotted the two figures strolling down union   Avenue. Both wore clothes that looked normal enough but could also be used to conceal their identities and physiques; one wore a hoodie while the other wore a baseball cap, shielding their faces.

‘They look like the same ones from the CCTV footage in Grand Central,’ said the driver. ‘You sure one of ’em’s a woman?’

The two men sitting in the front of the vehicle watched as the two suspects ambled along, pointing at shops and chatting.

‘Like they haven’t got a care in the goddamned world,’ said the man in the passenger seat.

‘Don’t be deceived,’ came a voice from the back seat of the vehicle. ‘They’re professionals. We need to disarm them quickly or this will all go very wrong.’

The agents in the front both looked over their shoulders at the old man behind them. A senior intelligence officer, his word was highly respected, but even so . . .

‘There’s only two of them,’ the driver replied.

The old man nodded. ‘That’s all they need.’

‘What’s the plan then?’ asked the other. ‘Call in the Marines?’

The old man grinned bitterly but shook his head.

‘We let them get to wherever they’re going, circle them to prevent an escape, and then we close them down.’

‘They’re onto us.’

Lopez’s voice betrayed no concern as she walked alongside Ethan down union   toward the motel they had booked.

‘Where?’ Ethan asked.

‘Ten o’clock, corner of South 2nd.’

Ethan didn’t look up immediately as he walked with a bag of groceries tucked under his left arm. He feigned a chuckle and nodded as though Lopez had muttered a gag, kept looking the way they were walking. But his focus switched immediately to an SUV parked near the sidewalk, maybe thirty yards away on the opposite side of the street.

‘Looks like government,’ Lopez said as they walked, pointing randomly at a furniture store on their side of the street. ‘Too damned clean.’

Ethan did not reply but he agreed. The vehicle’s windows were tinted with a film that concealed enough of the occupants’ features to make it suspicious.

‘Check our tail,’ he said, and stopped on the sidewalk to examine the interior of his bag of groceries.

Lopez stopped alongside him, reaching into the bag as though searching for something within but scanning the sidewalk behind them. As they started walking again, she spoke quietly.

‘Another one about a hundred yards behind,’ she confirmed. ‘It’s not crawling, just sitting there.’

‘Anybody on foot?’ Ethan asked.

‘Not close enough to be a threat.’

Ethan felt certain that anybody wanting to take them down would not be foolish enough to open fire in broad daylight in New York. Even a drive-by shooting from the relative cover of a vehicle would present numerous risks if those responsible were identified in any way. No. If they were going to make a hit, it would be at the motel and probably through more covert means than a shooting disguised as a drug or gangland dispute.

‘How the hell did they find us?’ Lopez asked. ‘We’ve barely stayed still for six months.’

‘Maybe a lucky break,’ Ethan hazarded. ‘Or somebody anticipated our next move.’


Lopez shook her head. ‘I doubt that. What are we going to do about it?’

Ethan didn’t look at the SUV as they passed by, instead thinking about angles and distances. ‘We have to assume they already know where we’re staying,’ he said, ‘and that we haven’t just spotted them.’

‘Could be a team waiting,’ Lopez cautioned him.

‘Yeah, but if we don’t keep going, they’ll know we’re onto them.’

‘You want to fight it out?’ Lopez asked, looking up at him.

Ethan shook his head. ‘No, but let’s see if we can’t vanish again.’

They walked across the lot of the motel and passed the foyer. Ethan glanced inside the small waiting room as they passed and saw nobody waiting for them. As he looked up he saw a cleaning lady wheeling her trolley of laundry down along the rows of apartment doors just past their own.

Lopez led the way to their motel-room door, fumbling for the keys as she did so.

‘We’re virtually inviting them in for coffee,’ she said.

‘I think they’re hoping to corner us,’ Ethan replied. ‘But they didn’t have anybody out on foot, so that means they were in vehicles when they spotted us. But if they’d pulled in ahead of us now they’d have risked being spotted by us. So my guess is they’ll let us get inside, quietly surround the motel, and move in.’

‘Which helps us how?’ Lopez asked as she opened the door.

‘Because we won’t be here.’

‘They’re inside, room 27.’

The old man in the rear seat of the SUV reached up to one ear and pressed a tiny button on the microphone that he wore.

‘Block all exits, secure the room and take them down!’

The driver started the engine and pulled out, just as the second vehicle passed in front of them on union  . They pulled in behind and followed it to a weary-looking motel a couple of hundred yards down, drove into the lot and parked a short distance from a block of rooms that ran east–west along one side of the lot.

The old man climbed from his own vehicle and followed his agents as they converged on the door marked with plastic numbers: 27. Three of the four agents pulled pistols from shoulder holsters and checked the mechanisms before looking at the old man for orders. The fourth man held a black iron door ram cradled in his arms.

‘Any chance of exit from the rear?’ he asked them in a whisper.

Two of the men shook their heads and the old man gestured to the door. ‘Do it.’

The agent with the door ram moved into position and hefted it up before smashing it into the door right alongside the lock and jamb. The door shuddered and splintered at the lock with the first blow, and with the second it smashed through as the door swung open and the five armed men plunged into the room.

The old man walked in behind them, to see them staring about in amazement.

The room was entirely empty.

Ethan followed Lopez through the sparsely furnished surroundings of room 28. The room smelled of fresh linen and cleaning fluids. He turned to a large cabinet that stood against the wall opposite the bed.

‘Help me shift this one,’ he said.

Lopez grabbed the cabinet and, with Ethan, hefted it away from the wall and turned it sideways. ‘What, you think you’re going to find the gateway to goddamned Narnia behind one of these?’

Ethan smiled as he examined the wall and tapped it lightly. ‘Near enough.’

Cheap motels had thin stud walls, built with timber and often not more than six inches thick. Ethan rapped his knuckles on the wall until he found what he was looking for and then lifted a boot and pushed it hard against the plasterboard wall, close to the thinly carpeted floor. The wall bowed and then with a soft crack it folded inward and exposed a gaping hole. Ethan swiftly pushed it out and knelt down. The timber frames in the wall were built in a cross-hatch pattern that created two-foot square gaps. Ethan got down onto his butt and slammed his boot through the wall of the adjoining room, smashing the plasterboard aside and then scrambled to his feet.

‘Off we go, quickly. They’ll check the adjoining rooms. Ladies first.’

Lopez shook her head and hurled their backpacks through the hole before she scrambled through it and disappeared.

Ethan turned to the bathroom and hurried through, reaching up for one of the dressing gowns hanging from the door and pulling the waist tie from it. He quickly dragged the cabinet as close to the wall as he could while still leaving enough room to wriggle through the hole he had created, and then looped the gown’s tie around the base of the cabinet.

Ethan climbed backwards into the hole in the wall and through into the adjoining room, then hauled on the robe tie. He heard the cabinet shuffle back into place an inch at a time, until it bumped gently against the damaged wall, concealing the hole. Moments later, he heard two dull thumps, a loud crack and a rumble of heavy feet bursting into the room.

Ethan released one end of the tie and then yanked on the other, pulling it through the gap. He got to his feet, dusted his hands off, and looked at Lopez with a bright smile. ‘You’re welcome.’

Lopez raised an eyebrow. ‘Are we going to be doing that all the way down the block?’

Ethan shook his head.

‘The rooms have just been cleaned,’ he said, ‘that’s why I knew these would be empty. My guess is that our government friends want to be discreet, so they’ll ask the cleaner instead, who will confirm that the rest of these rooms were empty when she cleaned. I’m hoping they’ll think we gave them the slip.’

Another series of loud crashing sounds came from outside, and Ethan hurried to the window. Through the aged blinds, he saw a group of suited men barging their way into Room 28, pistols in their hands.

‘That’s a big chance to take,’ Lopez said as she heard the scene unfolding outside.

‘Not that big,’ Ethan said, and suddenly opened the front door of the room and stepped out into the lot.