Ethan looked at Lopez, who shrugged. ‘I guess it’s worth a shot.’
‘What have you managed to dig up?’
Donovan looked Glen Ryan in the eye. The kid shrugged as he replied.
‘Nothing. Out-of-towners, nothing to suggest they’re up to no good here. Karina’s not hiding anything as far as I can tell but we’re not on great terms right now.’
Donovan turned his gaze to Jackson. ‘You?’
‘Plenty,’ Jackson replied. ‘They took off out of Chicago a few months back and somebody’s been housekeeping for them, that much we knew. I checked the local rags for information around the time they cleared out, and guess what I found?’
‘Tell me.’
‘It was all over the news,’ Jackson said, ‘a major congressional investigation into corruption at the Central Intelligence Agency. A big government department in DC was running the show when suddenly two staff members were killed in suspected homicides. The investigation is shut down, the media goes quiet and everything’s forgotten.’
‘What’s that got to do with Warner and Lopez?’ Glen Ryan asked.
‘Only the fact that Warner’s sister was on the team that got hit,’ Jackson replied. ‘Natalie Warner. She too goes off the radar for a few weeks, but then turns up again after an internal investigation clears her of any wrong-doing. Point is, there was no need for her to disappear at all, seeing as she wasn’t ever a suspect in the murders.’
Donovan stared thoughtfully out of his office door. ‘Their man Jarvis works for the DIA,’ he mused out loud. ‘Maybe some kind of inter-agency-rivalry thing? The CIA tying up loose ends in some kind of cover-up?’
Jackson shrugged. ‘Beats me. They’re up to their necks in something, but, as it involves government agencies, there’s never quite enough evidence to tie them down. You want me to call Langley and see what they say?’
Donovan thought for a moment, then shook his head.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’ll do it.’
35
The experiments ceased, finally.
She had known they would, after the last had almost resulted in her dying for good.
The tunnel of light had not reappeared. Instead, Joanna had found herself sucked down into a gruesome, black, cold, timeless place, where every step was hindered by dense tangles of writhing undergrowth. Cruel, threatening creatures tracked her from the darkness, loud noises shocked her or ground interminably through her skull like a thousand fingernails dragged down endless chalkboards. There, in that seemingly endless pit of despair, she had felt something new and terrifying that had haunted her thoughts ever since.
Evil.
Like most adults, she no longer believed in monsters under the bed or ghosts haunting the darkened corners of lonely houses, but now she had a new appreciation of what evil truly was: the construct of our wildest and yet darkest fantasies, lived for real through the actions of those unable to contain them. Monsters, ghosts, gargoyles — all were the inventions of men designed to avoid facing the truth of what evil really was: their own actions.
Joanna had seen the evil lurking within her in her last voyage into her own soul, a beast of indescribable fury and strength that if unleashed would destroy the world just to see the sparks it made going up. There was no Satan but that which lived within her, and all other people, too.
For the first time, Joanna was relieved to have found herself lying on the cold gurney as her body was dragged back from the brink of oblivion once again.
Joanna Defoe remained in captivity, in the tiny cell in the darkness, although now she no longer wore the blindfold: only her hands remained bound. She sat on her mattress as the voice of Doctor Sheviz reached out for her through the hatch in the door.
‘Tell me, Joanna. What did you see?’
Joanna remained silent. She ignored the question just as she had ignored it hundreds of times before. Doctor Sheviz had gone through alternating paroxysms of hatred, rage and desperation, but Joanna had never once faltered. Finally, after months of repeated experiments, the men who were funding the doctor’s insane Eternity Project had demanded that he either obtain verifiable results or abandon the work.
To Sheviz’s dismay and Joanna’s veiled delight, he had failed. He had already made a fatal mistake and now deep within Joanna was forged a core of cold iron, hard and without flaws, impervious.
‘Please, Joanna,’ Sheviz whined through the hatch. ‘Tell me what you saw. I know that you saw something, Joanna. I could tell, by your features, by your eyes. You saw things, tell me what they were!’
Joanna remained silent. Since Sheviz’s failure, the men who she assumed were responsible for her abduction had gradually become more relaxed. The men in the gray suits, and there were several over the months that had passed, had spoken more openly around her. Sometimes, they had exchanged entire conversations right outside the door to her cell, their American accents and terminology as plain as the day was long.
Then, as now, Joanna had simply listened, all the while playing the part of a catatonic waif divested of both resistance and interest in the world around her. It had become surprisingly easy to adjust, to recover the spark of hope, ever since she had laid eyes on Doctor Sheviz months before on the gurney. What she had read there had provided her with the vital link to reality that she so desperately craved, the anchor they had tried to take from her. After all of the painstaking care they had taken to break her down into an emotional and physical blank slate, the insane doctor had eradicated all of it with one simple error.
The digital watch on his wrist displayed the time, the date and the year. As he had leaned over her, the sleeve of his white coat had ridden up his wrist and exposed the face of the watch to her at close range.
In an instant, Joanna had known how long she had been incarcerated, what month and day it was, what year it was. In a rush of awareness like the first stars igniting in a new-born universe, she had regained that which had been so brutally taken from her. Despite the crushing emotional trauma that she had endured since at the hands of Sheviz, she had looked forward to each and every visit, because each strengthened her awareness and her ability to maintain her fragile grip on the notion that she was still a part of a larger world and that there was still a future for her.
For the first time in years, she was able to think of escape. Three years, two months and seventeen days, to be precise.
‘Please, Joanna. One last time: tell me what you saw.’
Joanna sat silent for a moment longer and then slowly turned her head. The desire to take immediate action, to escape this shadowy prison and simply breathe fresh air again was overwhelming, but that time was not now.
Sheviz’s fanatically blazing eyes peered through the hatch as she turned to look at him and silently opened her mouth. Joanna croaked something unintelligible from her lips, tried to speak. No sound came forth.
Sheviz’s face vanished from the hatch as he shrieked frantically at the guards outside. ‘Open the door!’
The Palestinian gunmen, hired hands who were being paid to stand watch over the building in which she had been held for so long, hurried forward. She heard the jingling of keys, the heavy clank of the locking mechanism in the doors grinding around.
Joanna had been a pliant and comatose prisoner for many long, long years. The guards and the doctor had no fear of her. She liked that. The iron ball deep inside her pulsed into life as the door opened and Sheviz burst in, dropped to his knees in front of her and grasped one of her hands in his.