Wesley nodded, his eyes wide and quivering in their sockets. Reece pushed him roughly away and then turned back to the metal cases. ‘Help me with these. We’ve got to get them out of here tonight or this is all for nothin’, you understand?’
Wesley stepped forward, reached down and grabbed the handle on one of the cases before hauling it backwards across the floor. The corner of the case screeched against the ground, and Reece whirled and thumped a thick forearm across Wesley’s chest.
‘Quietly, you idiot!’
The impact hurled Wesley onto his back, and as he fell he saw the flashlight beam arc up into the darkness above them. There, in the harsh white light, he saw the clouds of dislodged dust swirl as though an aircraft had sailed through them, spinning in tight vortices as the cloud folded over itself and then vanished from sight as the beam passed by.
‘Shit!’ he whispered and pointed up above them. ‘There’s something up there!’
Reece barely glanced up as he hefted one of the steel cases up off the ground with one hand.
‘What’s up, Wes?’ he inquired with a twisted, mocking scowl. ‘Pigeons gonna getcha?’
Wesley struggled to his feet and stared at Reece, as the older man snickered in delight and turned toward the far end of the warehouse. He made two paces when suddenly his feet lifted off the floor and he was hurled onto his face on the ground, the metal case crashing down alongside him. Wesley flinched as the sound echoed and bounced through the warehouse like rolling cannons.
Reece leaped to his feet and whirled to face Wesley as he pulled a snub-nosed pistol from beneath his jacket and aimed the weapon directly at him.
‘You think that’s funny, you little shit?’ he raged as he stormed toward Wesley.
Wesley did not move. His legs would not respond and his voice was entrapped in his throat with a terror that he could never have believed existed. He felt his neck trembling, felt saliva pooling in his throat and his heart fluttering in his chest as though afraid to go on.
Reece halted in front of Wesley, suddenly taut as he registered the blind terror etched into every pore in Wesley’s face. With a monumental effort, Wesley managed to rasp a few words in a voice that sounded thin in the darkness.
‘It wasn’t me, Connor.’
Reece winced uncertainly, but his eyes flicked left and right around them. Wesley felt something cold fill the air, as though somebody had opened the door to an enormous icebox right alongside him. His quivering breath condensed in a cloud before his eyes, billowing blue-white in the flash-light beam.
Both his and Reece’s eyes fixated on the cloud of moisture as it suddenly was sucked up out of the light as something raced past in the darkness above their heads.
Reece shouted something unintelligible as he whirled and aimed the pistol up above them. Wesley staggered backwards and away from him, and then Reece screamed as the pistol and flashlight fell from his grasp and he was yanked up into the darkness.
Wesley heard a cry of terror break free from his own chest as his legs crumpled beneath him. He crawled forward on the ground as he heard Reece issue a strangled cry of unbearable agony from somewhere far above him. A terrible ripping sound echoed across the warehouse and Reece fell silent as Wesley managed to grab the pistol in one shaking hand and the flashlight in the other.
A loud thump surprised Wesley and he hurled himself sideways as he aimed the flashlight into the darkness. He almost gagged as he saw Reece’s face staring back at him, lifeless like a waxwork in the harsh light, his face forever contorted in terrible pain and his mouth open wide in a silent scream.
Wesley turned the torch and saw thick blood draining from Reece’s entrails as they snaked across the warehouse floor and curled steam onto the cold air. In the distance, across the warehouse, he heard two faint thuds and glimpsed Reece’s legs tumble to the ground. Wesley began sobbing as he felt his bowels loosen and spill into his pants in a hot, thick mess.
The darkness seemed to close in on him and he cried out in terror as he kicked his way backwards and away from the grisly corpse until his back hit the wall.
‘Jesus, save me,’ he whispered through his tears. ‘Please save me.’
Something whispered through the air directly above him, and in panic he aimed the flashlight and the pistol up into clouds of dust motes swirling through the beam. A demonic face glared down at him with primal fury as it rushed from the darkness. Wesley fired the pistol over and over again, and then quite suddenly he felt a terrible wrenching pain surge through his chest as though he had been impaled.
He lurched to his feet to flee, but the pain suddenly intensified until it filled his universe as he folded over at the waist and dropped to his knees.
Then his world went black and he felt nothing.
10
‘So who are we going to see?’
The SUVs drove north in the pale dawn light and crossed the East River up towards Westchester, near the border with Connecticut. Ethan and Lopez had said little for the duration of the journey, knowing better than to try to draw information from Jarvis when he was on a roll, but now Lopez was getting impatient.
‘You’ll see,’ Jarvis replied. ‘We’re nearly there.’
Whatever the old man had discovered, Ethan could tell that it wasn’t something he physically possessed otherwise he would have produced copious files by now. Which meant that it was something outside of the DIA. Jarvis had claimed to have been working tirelessly for months to secure evidence sufficient to free Ethan and Lopez from the specter of a CIA-sponsored witch-hunt. Ethan guessed that whatever he had up his sleeve was waiting for them at their destination.
The SUVs slowed and turned onto the gravel drive of a moderately sized colonial house, all white paint and porticoes. Lopez peered through the rain-streaked windows and raised a mocking eyebrow at Jarvis.
‘Been moving up in the world since your retirement?’
‘If I’d moved up this far,’ Jarvis muttered, ‘I’d have stayed retired.’
The SUV pulled up outside the house and they disembarked as a man walked out of the front door, dressed in a smart pullover and slacks, his gray hair cut short and smart. Ethan recognized him as a military man at first glance, the bearing and poise as clear to him as if the man had still been in uniform.
‘Ethan, Nicola,’ Jarvis said, ‘this is Major Henry Greene, former United States Army. He worked with the CIA on many operations back in the day, mostly in South East Asia.’
Ethan introduced himself, the major clearly impressed by his background as a Marine officer and Lopez’s experience as a detective. Major Greene invited them into the house and led them to a drawing room. A large reading table was surrounded by ornate cabinets and a couple of decent-size canvasses of major historical engagements. Ethan recognized one as Gettysburg, and wondered not for the first time why anybody would want images of slaughter plastering the walls of their home.
‘Major Greene has information that may be of use to us,’ Jarvis explained as they sat down around the table.
‘You worked with the CIA during the Vietnam conflict?’ Ethan asked.
‘1969,’ Greene confirmed. ‘I was a greenhorn back then, got myself sent straight into the Tet Offensive.’
‘Baptism of fire,’ Lopez said, recalling the period of the South East Asia conflict during which some of the fiercest fighting occurred. ‘American troops began pulling out afterward.’
‘The tide of the war was changing,’ Greene acknowledged. ‘Public opinion and Congress were both favouring a pull-out of the conflict, something that occurred a few years later.’
‘An American defeat,’ Ethan said, knowing well as a former Marine the dismay US forces must have felt in retreating from a technically inferior enemy.