‘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.
53
‘What kept you?’ Lopez asked. ‘And why the hell did you call Tom’s apartment and order us to come here?’
Ethan and Joanna hurried across the street to where Karina, Lopez and Tom Ross were waiting for them beneath the bare branches of trees lining the sidewalk.
‘We were working things out and didn’t want to be tracked,’ Ethan replied. ‘Karina, Tom, this is Joanna. She’s on our side.’
Tom and Karina glanced suspiciously at Joanna, who kept her gaze fixed on Tom as she spoke.
‘I’ve been looking for you for a long time,’ she said.
‘Why’s that?’ Tom asked, his voice feeble and barely audible above the sound of the traffic hustling past.
‘To stop you having to go through what I had to,’ she replied.
Tom Ross squinted at her without really understanding. Karina turned to Ethan.
‘We can chat about old times over coffee when all this is over with,’ she said quickly. ‘Right now, we’ve got to figure out what the hell Donovan’s up to.’
‘Already done,’ Ethan replied. ‘He’s behind everything: the Pay-Go hit, the hiring of the thieves, bribing both the clerk and the lawyer to assist him and corrupt the court hearing. He’s engineered the whole thing and, by now, I’m pretty sure he’ll know that we’ve busted him.’
‘You got evidence of all that?’ Karina challenged. ‘You go in there and accuse Donovan of all this without something solid and we’ll all go down.’
‘It’s him, all right,’ Joanna insisted. ‘The whole event on the Williamsburg Bridge was a set-up. But the auto wreck screwed everything up for them, and they’ve been trying to fix it ever since.’
‘But how could Donovan have done this without the team noticing?’ Karina protested. ‘Surely, one of us would have realized what was going on?’
Lopez looked at Karina for a long moment before she replied. ‘Karina, the whole team was in on it. You and Tom are the only ones they didn’t cut in.’
Karina stared at him for a long time before she replied. ‘Glen?’
‘All of them,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘That’s why the wraith is hunting them down but hasn’t directly attacked you or us. Donovan made sure that you were positioned furthest from the Pay-Go truck when it went down. He then covered the two thieves driving the flatbed truck. They loaded most of the cases into Donovan’s vehicle, or maybe even another one parked ready, then took a few cases with the flatbed as a diversion. Earl and Gladstone sat on top of them in the back of the flatbed to conceal how many cases were actually there. Donovan then controlled the scene at the Pay-Go and made sure the remaining cases disappeared real fast.’
‘And the thieves who escaped from the bridge?’ Lopez asked.
‘Jackson,’ Ethan said, ‘who was most likely waiting in Queens and helped Reece and Hicks switch sides on the bridge and high-tail it back the way they had come. With the auto wreck taking up everybody’s attention and the police blockade on the east side of the bridge, it’s the only plausible way they could have escaped.’
Ethan noticed that Tom Ross was staring vacantly into space, his dark eyes filled with an emotion that Ethan didn’t want to check out. Karina turned away from them, her hand flying to her mouth, and he heard the name she whispered in horror.
‘Glen.’
Lopez stepped forward and placed a hand gently on her shoulder. ‘You couldn’t have known, Karina. Nobody could have kno
wn how this would turn out.’
Karina shook her head. ‘It’s why he wouldn’t move in with me, until this was all over. He kept talking about money worries. I thought he was in debt or something and couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t move in with me to save money, why he was so distant all the time. But all this time, he was planning a goddamned heist with Donovan.’
‘Donovan had it all worked out,’ Joanna said. ‘All we’ve got to do now is bring him in.’
‘Not that easy,’ Karina said as she swiped a sleeve angrily across her eyes. ‘Donovan’s just put out an APB on you both.’
‘He’s done what?’ Ethan snapped.
Karina gestured to Ethan and Lopez. ‘Claims that the two out-of-towners must somehow be tied into all of these murders. You guys showed up in the city at the same time the murders started, have been staying at my apartment and have visited Tom Ross twice. You’ve both had access to police officers on the team, one of whom is now dead, and now it seems that you have government agencies interested in questioning you about events that occurred several months ago in Idaho.’
Ethan stared at Lopez, who shook her head in disbelief.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t believe it either. He’s got to have spoken to somebody high up, somebody with enough weight to pull this off’
Ethan nodded, thinking furiously. If Donovan had somehow managed to look them up, maybe contacted police departments in Chicago or Idaho, then he might have attracted the attention of government agencies. The National Security Agency’s immense wire-tapping and surveillance could have detected keywords or vocal-resonance signatures, which would have flagged alerts up at the Barn and quite possibly at the FBI. Inter-agency alerts would have brought the traces to the attention of those concerned at the CIA or perhaps even MK-ULTRA, if they had a dedicated complex.
Amid the seething digital maelstrom of communications, the names of Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez could have landed right on the doorstep of the very people they had been trying to avoid.
‘It’s worse than that,’ Ethan said. ‘The cell that Jarvis gave me is being monitored by him.’
‘So?’ Lopez asked.
‘I couldn’t call you directly to warn you about Donovan,’ Ethan explained. ‘That’s why I called Tom’s apartment instead and I used Joanna’s cell. It’s a burner, too.’
Lopez stared at Ethan for a moment. ‘I told you so.’
Ethan nodded. ‘Even now, after all that’s happened, he’s playing us.’
‘You think he’s in with Donovan?’ Karina asked.
‘No.’ Ethan shook his head. ‘He’ll be playing a much bigger game,’ he said as he looked at Joanna. ‘He said repeatedly that we wouldn’t be tracked by the CIA because he’d cut a deal. I think I know what he traded.’
‘Me,’ Joanna guessed. ‘Only way he can protect you is to sell me out.’
‘But how would he know you’re even here?’ Karina asked.
Ethan retrieved from his pocket the burner cell that Jarvis had given him and turned it over. He prized the back cover free and peered inside. A small, glossy black device lay taped to the battery pack, which was only half the size it should have been.
‘It’s got a bug in it,’ he explained to Lopez. ‘GPS tracker, very small, very sophisticated. Enough to track me in case Joanna showed up. Jarvis knew that our paths might cross on this eventually. He’s probably had somebody tailing us since we met him at the motel.’
‘Son of a bitch,’ Lopez uttered. ‘He’s always got a motive. We can’t trust him, Ethan.’
‘There isn’t anybody else we can trust!’ Ethan pointed out.
A silence hung in the air for a moment around them, and then Lopez stepped slowly forward and looked up at him. ‘We trust each other,’ she said simply.
Ethan stared at her for a long moment, and then Joanna stepped forward alongside Lopez.
‘And me.’
Karina looked at him and nodded. ‘We’re all in this now. Let’s do it our way.’
Ethan’s gaze fell on Tom Ross, who seemed to have returned to the present as he looked at his four companions. As if finally realizing all that had been done and all that had happened in the last three days, he stepped forward with a glitter of new resolve, burning like a distant star in his eyes, as he looked at Joanna.
‘What do you want with me?’ he asked.
‘To expose what the CIA has done to me,’ Joanna said. ‘You’re the wraith, Tom, but what’s happening to you is similar to something that they did to me. Been having any bad dreams lately?’
Tom swallowed. ‘Like what?’
‘Like being alone in the darkness, hunted and angry, for what feels like a thousand years but could have been moments? They’re called near-death experiences, Tom, and I suspect you’ve been having quite a few.’
Tom held Joanna’s gaze for a moment before he spoke.
‘It’s time,’ he said softly, ‘to finish this. All of it.’
Ethan looked at each of them and felt his shoulders fall. ‘Okay.’
‘Donovan wants us to meet him at Hell Gate,’ Karina said. ‘Says he wants to work this all out. If I can speak to Glen, I might be able to turn him, get him to come clean and end all of this. Christ, if this wraith is hunting for revenge then he’s as much of a target as Donovan.’
‘It’s too dangerous,’ Lopez insisted. ‘Donovan’s not going to fold now. He’s in this for the long run.’
‘It’s the only way,’ Karina insisted. ‘Donovan won’t try to attack me if Glen’s there, he wouldn’t just stand by and do nothing.’
‘We need to protect Tom,’ Joanna said. ‘It’s him they’re after. Their biggest threat now is the wraith, not us. First chance they get, they’ll ice him and then run.’
Ethan nodded slowly and handed the bugged cellphone to Karina. ‘Then we’d better make sure that doesn’t happen.’
54
HELL GATE, QUEENS, NEW YORK
Jarvis watched through the tinted windows of his vehicle as he drove slowly along 26th toward the shoreline. He was alone this time, knowing what was at stake and what he intended to do. If his own people saw that he was willing to sacrifice allies in order to achieve agency goals, it might bring their own loyalty into question.
Besides, this was personal. Jarvis wanted to finish this himself, not hide behind his men.
Despite the galling sense of betrayal that seethed like an infection in Jarvis’s guts, he knew that this was the safest way. If he let Wilson come alone then the agent would almost certainly take the opportunity to eliminate Ethan, Lopez and most probably Joanna Defoe and Tom Ross, too. But this way was safer, with Jarvis on the scene and ready to intervene should Wilson even think about taking down Jarvis’s people.
The plan was simple: Tom Ross into protective custody; Ethan and Lopez out of the city; Joanna Defoe into the hands of the CIA and Donovan under arrest.
He glanced at Ethan’s tracker. Moving north, toward Hell Gate.
Jarvis’s vehicle pulled into the abandoned lot, the nearby warehouse looming against a dark gray sky of scudding clouds, the afternoon light fading fast. A faint drizzle dusted the windshield. Another of New York’s vigorous nor’easters would hit the mainland within the hour and darkness would fall.
He pulled up discreetly alongside the warehouse, turning around so that the vehicle pointed back toward the exit but was out of sight of the main lot, and shut the engine off.
Jarvis watched the rain spill in ripples down the windshield and the wind rumble and gust past outside. Another vehicle turned into the lot, a low-slung sedan that swung around and parked out of Jarvis’s view. Jarvis wasn’t close enough to see the faces of the two men inside, but he guessed by their silhouettes that he was looking at Donovan and Glen Ryan.
Jarvis climbed out of his vehicle, pulled his collar up against the bitter wind gusting off the East River, and walked to the edge of the lot for a clearer view.
He saw the tiny, unmoving shape of a man standin
g amid small trees on one side of the lot. Invisible, unless you were looking for him. Wilson was taking no chances, remaining under cover until the last moment. His actions confirmed Jarvis’s suspicions. Apprehending Joanna Defoe was of prime importance to the CIA’s director, and yet here was Wilson all on his own. Instead of sending a small army of agents, one man was taking all the chances. William Steel was keeping the entire event off the books at the CIA, doing everything possible to cover his own ass. That put Wilson at a disadvantage, and he knew damned well how Wilson would deal with that. Shoot anybody who crossed his path, in order to achieve his objective. Then, this would all be over.
They waited.
Finally, a black suburban pulled into the lot. It advanced slowly, lights blinking out as it pulled up and the engine stopped.
He watched as the driver’s door of the vehicle opened and Karina Thorne climbed out. Jarvis waited for the others to climb out of her vehicle, but nobody appeared.
‘What the hell?’
Jarvis waited, staying out of sight as he watched Karina approach Donovan’s vehicle, and was plagued by the knowledge that Ethan had lied to him. Jarvis knew with utter finality that he had lost the trust of his most valuable asset.
Karina walked slowly toward the parked vehicle and saw Donovan and Glen sitting inside. The two men opened their doors and got out, both squinting against the gusts of drizzle sweeping the lot.
‘Where are they?’ Donovan demanded as he shut his door. ‘You said we would meet them all here.’
‘Change of plan!’ Karina snapped back. ‘We know, Donovan. We know everything that you’ve done.’
Donovan said nothing in reply. Karina switched her gaze to Glen, who shook his head.
‘You’ve got it all wrong, Karina,’ he said quickly. ‘This was all supposed to be . . .’
‘Shut up!’ Karina shouted. ‘We’re done, asshole.’
Donovan chuckled bitterly and shook his head. ‘You can save the theatricals, Karina. We’re all done here now, so we might as well figure out a way to resolve this situation. What’s your cut?’
The Eternity Project Page 31
