‘She’s had it,’ said another American voice. ‘It was too much. I told you so.’
‘Plenty more where she came from,’ came the monotone reply. ‘Give her to the doctor. There’s nothing left of her for us to work with.’
‘He won’t be happy about that,’ said the nearer of the two men as he lifted her unresisting body out of the chair and dumped it unceremoniously onto a gurney, strapping her in.
‘Who cares?’
She was wheeled out of the room, back toward her cell. But this time, the two men pushed her past the cell door and on through the building to another room. Her eyes, dry and unseeing, could not focus properly on her surroundings. She was wheeled into the new room and heard the door close behind her.
A rhythmic beeping sound, that of a heart monitor, echoed slightly as though she was in a much larger room. Another figure, dressed in white, moved around her as she slowly focused.
‘She’ll see us.’
The voice came from her right and she swiveled her eyes to see the blurred images of the two men, both dressed in gray suits.
‘It will take hours for her eyes to recover,’ said the white figure as he moved to stand by her gurney. ‘You have nothing to fear. I take it that she has been unresponsive to the programming?’
She felt a tiny pain in her right arm as a needle was slipped into a vein, and, within moments, she felt a strange surge of energy pulsing through her body.
‘We completed the memory flush some time ago,’ came the response. ‘Cerebral reprogramming has proved positive but she has demonstrated no evidence of any ability to perform remote-viewing, precognition or any other extrasensory-perception tasks beyond those associated with chance. We’re done with her.’
‘And you’ve left her barely alive!’ the white figure snapped. ‘What use is she like this?’
‘You’re going to kill her anyway,’ one of the gray suits said, shrugging.
‘Temporarily,’ replied the white figure.
‘Whatever.’
The energy in her system flushed her senses, making her hyper-alert, and, as her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she saw the men come slowly into perfect focus. The adrenaline sharpened her thoughts and she did not look directly into the eyes of the two men, letting her gaze wander as though she were still blind.
One of them had dark, short hair, maybe late twenties, military-looking. A small scar on his left cheek, maybe a shrapnel wound from service in Iraq or Afghanistan. The second man in a gray suit was a taller and older. It was hard to avoid his cold gaze, but she managed to focus on his tie instead. His voice was utterly without emotion.
‘Be sure that she is removed from play as soon as you’re finished with her. We preserve security before any other considerations, including your insane little project. Is that understood, Doctor?’
The voice from beyond her line of sight replied calmly.
‘It is understood. And it gets her out from under your skin, does it not?’
She tried to speak but her throat was utterly dry and nothing came out. She worked her jaw, trying to formulate words, but they would not come.
The white-coated figure emerged into view, and she saw a bright halo of white hair draped across an elderly face. The figure reached down and touched her arm. More pain, as another needle slid beneath her skin. She gasped, but no sound came out.
‘Ssshhh,’ the figure said to her, and touched a cold, dry finger to her lips. ‘Save your strength. You’re about to go on a journey you’ll never forget.’
‘Make it fast,’ snapped the older gray suit. ‘You’re not done within six months, I’ll ice her myself.’
The doctor glanced over his shoulder in irritation, but he nodded before he looked down at her and a chilling smile crept across his face.
‘Now then, Joanna. I hope you’ve never experienced LSD before. I’d like this to be a uniquely maiden voyage for you into another world. Or, more accurately, somewhere else in this world.’
Joanna struggled to speak but her voice remained impotent. She felt the world around her begin to lose coherence as a warmth began tingling through her body, as though the doctor had injected her with a serious overdose of morphine.
The pain and the discomfort vanished as the last of her feeble resistance collapsed in the face of the drugs coursing through her system. With the last vestiges of her awareness, she saw the doctor loom over her.
In an instant, just before her senses disconnected from each other, she saw something that changed everything. In a flash that momentarily overpowered all of the suffering and all of the pain she had endured, Joanna knew how long she had been in captivity and knew how long it was that she had been experimented on. For a brief instant, that felt like the first ray of sunlight after an interminable darkness, Joanna remembered who she was again.
The doctor spoke.
‘Joanna, my name is Doctor Damon Sheviz, and I’m going to take you to another plain of existence. You, my dear, are about to visit and return from the grave.’
Joanna’s eyes flared in horror as the doctor went on.
‘First, you will be anesthetized. Then, I will wire you up to a heart-bypass machine and you will receive heparin, which is made from cow’s gut, to prevent blood clotting. Your heart will then be stopped via intravenously administered potassium chloride. Your body will be cooled over a period of about one hour to a temperature of around sixteen degrees Celsius, essentially as cold as a corpse. I will then drain the blood from your body and replace it with a chilled saline solution. By this time, you will be clinically dead, with no heartbeat, no blood and no brain activity. I will leave you in stasis in this condition for two hours, before reversing the process, returning your blood to your body, warming it and applying a small electrical charge to your heart to initiate rhythm.’
Joanna gasped but her throat was too dry and her muscles too weak to form words.
Damon Sheviz looked down at her and smiled.
‘I expect that you have never had a near-death experience before,’ he said. ‘Trust me, by the time we’re done here, you’re going to have had many. You’re going to meet God, Joanna, and I want to know what He looks like.’
The doctor’s features swirled into a kaleidoscope of hazy colors, as Joanna Defoe finally lost consciousness, his words distant in her mind.
‘Welcome to my Eternity Project.’
19
‘They ain’t the talkin’ kind.’
Ethan stood in a service corridor alongside Lopez as a duty sergeant signed them in and signaled a colleague sitting nearby in a small booth surrounded by bullet-proof glass. An electronic motor hummed as mechanical locks disengaged and a huge steel-barred door rolled open.
Located on an island in the East River between Queens and the Bronx, Rikers was a city of jails, with the Taylor Center, or ‘6 Building’ as it was known, housing all adult and adolescent sentenced males. It was one section of a total population of fourteen thousand inmates, all awaiting trial. As new arrivals, the two men they had come to see were housed in the New Admissions cells, where they were kept in a sort of quarantine until the results of tests for tuberculosis and other diseases came back from dedicated labs.
Ethan walked with Lopez onto D-Block, a high-security wing of the center dedicated to holding high-profile inmates. The block was deserted, the steel tables and benches bolted to the floor devoid of prisoners. All of them had been locked-down as Ethan and Lopez were brought onto the block.
‘We’re wasting our time here,’ Lopez whispered to Ethan as they followed the sergeant onto the block. ‘We should be looking for Joanna, not visiting deadbeats in jail. Jarvis is stalling.’