The Eternity Project

by Dean Crawford

  She dropped the cell from her ear and glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall.

  ‘I have to go somewhere,’ she announced suddenly and strode toward a set of car keys hanging from a rack near the apartment door.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Lopez said, concern etched into her exotic features.

  Ethan, with no real choice left in the matter, followed them out of the apartment.

  16

  The apartment Karina drove to was just a few blocks away, near downtown. Ethan sat in the rear seat and watched Karina’s features in the rear-view mirror as she drove.

  Karina Thorne was a tough cop. Had to be really, serving in New York City, where crime was almost as prevalent as people. Although things were far better in the city than they had been twenty years before, it was still rough territory at times and nobody donned police blues without a sturdy backbone to support them. Yet he had seen a cold flicker of fear in her eyes in the apartment.

  Karina pulled up alongside one of the smarter apartment blocks and scrambled out of the car, Lopez and Ethan jogging to keep up as she launched herself up the entrance steps and jammed a finger against the door buzzer.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ Lopez asked her.

  ‘Gut feeling,’ Karina replied.

  No reply came from the speakerphone set into the wall. Karina hit the emergency button and, moments later, the voice of a site manager croaked out of the speaker.

  ‘Maintenance, how may I . . .?’

  ‘Thorne, NYPD, one-seven-six-nine-two,’ Karina snapped, flashing her badge at the small camera above the speakerphone. ‘I think there may be an emergency, apartment six-Charlie.’

  There was a moment’s wait and then the door buzzed open and Karina pushed through.

  ‘How come we haven’t tried that before?’ Ethan asked Lopez as they piled through and began running up the stairs two at a time in pursuit of Karina.

  Karina hit the sixth floor at a run, dashing down a corridor and reaching the door of apartment 6C, just as the site warden stepped out of a nearby elevator; a portly man with receding gray hair and a thick moustache.

  ‘What’s the rush, officer?’ he asked as he wobbled his way toward them.

  ‘Non-responsive,’ Karina replied urgently. ‘Just open the door.’

  The warden fiddled with his keys and slipped one of them into the lock, then turned it. Karina barged into the door, which snapped open three inches and then stuck fast on a security chain.

  ‘Damn it, Tom!’ Karina yelled. ‘Open up!’

  Ethan stepped forward and Karina ducked aside as he lifted one boot and slammed it into the door just below the safety chain. The door shuddered but held firm. Ethan leaped back and hit the door again with his boot, this time the chain straining as the wooden door frame splintered. Ethan stepped back and kicked again, and, this time, Karina slammed her shoulder into the door at the same moment.

  The safety chain burst from its mount and the heavy door swung open and cracked against the wall, as Karina raced into the apartment with Ethan close behind.

  The lounge was dark but for a single lamp that glowed in the far corner near the windows, the veils drawn tight. A large coffee table was stacked with photographs in their frames, all facing a long couch.

  There, slumped across it, was a man Ethan judged to be in his early thirties, another picture frame lying across his chest. A half-full glass of milk lay spilled on the thick carpet and, alongside, it a scattering of pills and an empty bottle.

  ‘Paramedics, now!’ Karina screamed.

  Ethan and Lopez dashed across the lounge, as the maintenance manager grabbed his cellphone. Karina reached the man first, reaching out toward him. A bright blue spark of electricity crackled up and snapped at her fingers.

  Karina leaped back involuntarily as the bolt of static writhed and vanished.

  Ethan stared at the body as a strange but somehow familiar smell tainted the air.

  ‘Electricity,’ Lopez murmured in surprise. ‘You can smell the charge.’

  Karina reached out again for the man’s body, this time more carefully. No further energy hit her as she tried to drag the man’s body off the couch and onto the floor.

  Lopez helped her, checking for breathing and a pulse, as Karina rolled the man over.

  ‘There’s nothing, he’s arrested,’ Lopez said.

  Karina responded instantly, starting cardiopulmonary resuscitation, as Lopez stood back and looked up at Ethan.

  ‘You see that spark?’

  Ethan nodded. ‘Maybe static or something off the couch before he arrested.’

  ‘I guess,’ Lopez agreed, then looked at Karina. ‘How did you know he was like this?’

  Karina shook her head as she rhythmically compressed the man’s chest. ‘I just knew. I don’t know how.’

  Ethan knelt down alongside the man’s body and rested one hand on Karina’s, to stop her, before he leaned down and touched his finger to the man’s neck. A faint pulse threaded its way past his fingertip.

  ‘He’s got a rhythm,’ he said to her, ‘but it’s very faint.’

  Lopez stepped aside as two paramedics rushed into the apartment, the maintenance manager following them and pointing at the man on the floor. Ethan glanced at the glass of milk and the pills nearby and touched a hand to the glass.

  ‘He’s an overdose,’ Karina informed the paramedics desperately, ‘arrested but we’ve got a pulse.’

  ‘How long since he crashed?’ one of the men asked.

  Karina shook her head, but Ethan spoke for her.

  ‘Five minutes, maximum,’ he said. ‘Bottle has pills left in it, the milk’s still warm and we’d never have gotten a pulse back if he’d been down any longer.’

  Ethan got out of their way and watched as they went to work on the man’s body, slipping an intravenous line into his arm and preparing a stretcher. Lopez put her arm around Karina as the trauma of the day finally began to catch up on her. Ethan watched as her face began to crumple and she turned away from the scene, hiding from the light.

  Ethan looked around the apartment, at the photographs stacked on the table and the one that had been resting on the man’s chest. He guessed that it was Karina’s partner, Tom Ross, who had attempted to take his own life. He could see it was an image of Tom, his wife and his daughter taken at close range maybe on a beach holiday in bright sunlight, all three of them smiling and laughing at the camera. As the paramedics hoisted the stretcher with Tom Ross upon it, Ethan could hardly blame the guy for wanting to quit. Ethan himself had lost his fiancée years before and he knew well the grief that such an event could generate, but to lose an entire family was beyond comparison.

  ‘Ethan?’ He turned to see Lopez looking up at him. ‘I’m going to go with Karina to the hospital. Why don’t you get on the horn to Jarvis from here, instead of using our cells, and find out what we’re going to do? It’ll help prevent anybody from tracking our movements.’

  Ethan nodded, admiring her quick thinking.

  ‘Sure, I’ll catch you up later.’

  Ethan waited until everybody had left the apartment except the maintenance manager, who looked questioningly at Ethan.

  ‘I’m going to turn everything off in here before I leave,’ Ethan explained to the portly man. ‘I don’t think Tom’s going to be home for a day or two and he’ll need some clothes for hospital, when he wakes up.’

  ‘Right, sure,’ the manager said ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

  Ethan waited alone in the apartment until he heard the elevator door close further down the corridor outside. Then, he walked across to a telephone on a shelf near the window and picked it up. He dialed Jarvis’s number from memory.

  ‘Jarvis.’

  Ethan hesitated for a brief moment before replying.

  ‘It’s Ethan. We got any news on the Hell Gate victims or Aaron Lymes yet?’

  ‘Nothing on the Hell Gate case,’ Jarvis admitted, ‘but Aaron Lymes was murdered in his own apartment. Donovan’
s investigation concluded that he let his attacker in, believe it or not. If it was Joanna, she might have been able to win his confidence before overpowering him. Lymes was in his late fifties when he retired from the agency, so it’s plausible.’

  ‘What was the cause of death?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Blunt force trauma followed by asphyxiation,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Been busy,’ Ethan replied by way of an explanation. ‘You remember what Major Greene said, about crisis-apparitions?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Nothing I’d worry about. The CIA may have taken them seriously but, then again, they dropped oversized condoms on the Vietcong to try to intimidate them into thinking American soldiers were more manly.’

  ‘I wouldn’t write them off so quickly,’ Ethan said. ‘Something just showed up at Karina’s apartment and near scared the life out of her.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Jarvis replied. ‘What happened?’

  ‘She spooked,’ Ethan said, ‘then came running over to her friend’s apartment, the one who lost his family the other day. We found him lying on his sofa, overdosed on pain medication.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Maybe there’s more to her than meets the eye. Stay close, Ethan, see what turns up.’

  ‘We’re staying at her apartment for now,’ Ethan said. ‘She and Lopez hit it off pretty good.’

  ‘Perfect,’ Jarvis replied. ‘How’s her partner?’

  ‘Alive,’ Ethan said. ‘I’m heading down after them right now.’

  ‘Let me know what happens,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Maybe one of them has something to do with MK-ULTRA. It would make sense. You followed Joanna’s trail to New York and the killings certainly point in that direction.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘We’re assuming that Joanna’s responsible for them but there’s no hard evidence for that. It could even be a CIA set-up itself, using Joanna’s name to cover their own clean-up operation.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Jarvis admitted. ‘But I saw DCIA’s face in that meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Something was making the fat asshole nervous, and, as much as I enjoyed seeing it, it’s unlikely to be orchestrated by him.’

  ‘And what about Joanna?’ Ethan asked. ‘What if we do find her here?’

  ‘I can’t do much until she shows up,’ Jarvis insisted. ‘Let’s do this one step at a time, Ethan. Right now, just concentrate on solving this homicide case. I’ve got you both a visit to Rikers Island in the morning, to see if the two thieves Donovan’s team arrested on Williamsburg Bridge will identify their accomplices. The police didn’t get anywhere. See what you can get out of them, because it will help your standing with the NYPD. We might need their help to locate Joanna before the CIA do, if she’s in the city.’

  Ethan hesitated for a moment, before finally deciding that there was no real use in arguing further. If Jarvis had a solution up his sleeve to this whole damned mess, then he probably wouldn’t reveal it until the last possible moment.

  ‘I’ll let you know what we find out,’ he said.

  Ethan put the phone back in its cradle, and was about to leave when he felt a tingling sensation creep across his shoulders, as though a gossamer web had settled on his skin. He turned, looking around the silent apartment for a long moment, before he finally shook himself out of it and shut off the lights. He closed the door to the apartment behind him, pursued by a strange and unsettling feeling.

  17

  NEW YORK DOWNTOWN HOSPITAL

  Lopez had never been a fan of hospitals, the clinical odour reminding her of the one time when she had been taken into an emergency room as a young girl, way back in the mountains of Guanajuato, Mexico. The experience had not been pleasant.

  She sat on a bench alongside Karina, as orderlies, doctors, nurses rushed back and forth between the patients who shuffled or were being wheeled between wards. Karina remained silent, staring at the tired-looking floor tiles with her hands clasped together in her lap. Lopez watched her for a long time, before choosing her words carefully.

  ‘How long have the two of you been working together?’ she asked.

  Karina blinked awake, as though emerging from a daydream, and looked across at Lopez.

  ‘Just over a year,’ she replied. ‘Donovan hand-picked Tom to work with me.’

  ‘He controls every aspect of your unit?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Sure,’ came the response. ‘We work mostly homicide and each of us is a specialist. I work forensic and trace evidence. Glen handles firearms, Jackson’s attached from vice, Tom usually covers victim and perp’ histories and sometimes profiles. Donovan oversees and reports to the commissioner.’

  ‘Tight unit,’ Lopez guessed. ‘Good idea in a big city. Should’ve tried it back in DC.’

  Karina nodded slowly.

  ‘It works well to have teams rather than just partners,’ she replied. ‘We have our own strengths and weaknesses, but the total is greater than the sum of its parts. We’ve cracked every case we’ve been handed except one since we formed – that’s better than any other single unit in the city.’

  Lopez nodded. ‘Probably in the country,’ she pointed out. ‘There are always unsolved cases. Which one got the better of you?’

  ‘Homicide in downtown, a gang-slaying between Crips and Surenos. We know who did it but we couldn’t provide enough evidence to place them at the crime. Perpetrator got bail and took off into Mexico. Hasn’t been seen since.’

  Lopez took a chance and gave Karina a playful nudge. ‘Should’ve called Warner & Lopez, Inc. They’re amazing, apparently.’

  Karina stared at the tiles for a long time. Lopez cursed herself inwardly. Then Karina spoke softly. ‘I heard they were crap.’

  Lopez looked at her as a tiny smile flickered briefly across Karina’s lips.

  ‘Miss Thorne?’

  Lopez and Karina bolted upright from the bench as a doctor approached them. A warm smile told them all they needed to know before the doctor even spoke.

  ‘He’s in recovery,’ she said. ‘You got to him just in time.’

  Lopez heard Karina let a sigh of relief spill from her chest as she reached across and hugged her. Karina returned the embrace briefly and then looked at the doctor.

  ‘Is he okay? Awake?’

  ‘He’s conscious,’ the doctor replied. ‘Given what he’s attempted, I’d suggest you go and see him now. In my experience, people who have tried to take their own lives feel extremely isolated and often embarrassed. The sooner that notion is taken from him, the sooner he can begin healing.’

  Karina nodded, and Lopez guided her toward the nearby ward. A private room had been set aside for Tom, his standing as a police officer and the terrible loss he had endured warranting him special treatment until he was on the road to recovery.

  Lopez followed Karina into the room and closed the door behind them.

  Tom Ross sat on his reclined bed, his eyes open but drooping with fatigue as he looked at them both.

  ‘Tom?’ Karina asked in a whisper. ‘You hear me okay?’

  Tom Ross stared at Karina for a long moment and then replied with a barely perceptible nod.

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ Karina said, perching on the side of Tom’s bed and reaching out for his hand. ‘We’ll get through this, okay? I’ve got your back.’

  Tom’s dark eyes drifted across to meet hers and, for a long time, he said nothing. Then, as Lopez watched, he spoke in a quiet voice.

  ‘How did you find me?’ he asked.

  ‘Came to check up on you,’ Karina replied.

  Tom’s eyes flicked up to the clock on the wall, as though he knew she was lying. ‘You’d only just left me.’

  ‘It had been a couple of hours,’ Karina said, ‘and I was worried about you.’

  Tom glanced back at her. ‘Worried I might do something stupid?’

  Karina looked at him for a long beat, then nodded.

  Tom looked across at Lopez. ‘Who are you?’

/>   ‘Working a case with NYPD,’ Lopez replied. ‘In town for a couple of days.’

  Tom looked at Lopez as though sizing her up, then looked back at Karina. He sighed softly.

  ‘It was so easy,’ he whispered. ‘Once I decided to do it. So easy.’

  Karina squeezed his hand. ‘That doesn’t mean it was right.’

  ‘Right for whom?’ Tom challenged her. Karina struggled to find an answer and, when she failed, Tom squeezed her hand back a little. ‘You should have let me go, let me leave. I didn’t want to be here anymore.’

  Lopez caught the way Tom used the past tense, as though he had changed his mind since. Karina noticed it, too.

  ‘Things change with time,’ she replied. ‘It’s all just empty words right now, I know, but, someday, you’ll be able to move on. You’ve just got to take it one day at a time.’

  Tom shook his head.

  ‘It’ll be easier next time,’ he said.

  Karina’s features became stern as she leaned toward him. ‘There isn’t going to be a next time, Tom. Okay?’

  Tom looked at her. ‘I saw something.’

  Lopez felt a chill ripple down her neck and spine as Tom’s softly spoken words drifted through the room around her.

  ‘Saw something?’ Karina asked. ‘When? What do you mean?’

  Tom’s face looked both elated and haunted at the same time, as though he were struggling to decide whether he should speak at all.

  ‘You have another friend in town,’ he said finally, and looked at Lopez. ‘A tall guy with light brown hair and a Chicago accent.’

  Lopez felt another chill tingle across her shoulders and she shivered involuntarily as she replied. ‘Ethan, my partner. How did you know?’

  Tom looked at her, his expression serious now. ‘He checked my pulse and told the paramedics I’d been out for no more than five minutes.’

  Karina’s jaw dropped as she stared at Tom. ‘You were out cold,’ she protested. ‘Barely alive.’

  Lopez stepped closer to the bed. ‘Where were you, Tom?’