‘They’re digging around too much,’ Donovan insisted. ‘Sooner or later…’
‘I don’t give a damn!’ Glen snapped and smashed his fist down on the chief’s desk. ‘You saw what happened. There’s something out there and it’s hunting us down! At least Warner and Lopez seem to know something about it. Without them we’d probably be dead by now.’
Donovan looked at Glen for a long moment before he spoke.
‘Glen, you saw what Karina did in that corridor, didn’t you?’
Glen sighed and sat back, rubbing tired eyes with his fingers. ‘I saw her do something,’ he replied. ‘I heard her say to Warner that she was calling for back-up.’
Donovan shook his head. ‘I don’t buy that. She could have called for back-up any time and she’d have used her radio not her cell.’
‘Our radios were down,’ Glen said. ‘So were our cellphones for that matter, while we were stuck in that elevator.’
Donovan nodded.
‘Seems like whatever the hell that wraith thing is, it only affects an area immediately around it. The lights flicker, batteries drain, shit like that. Maybe Karina was far enough away that her cell was working.’
‘It fits,’ Glen agreed. ‘The lights were on outside the building and on other floors. Did you feel that cold, too? But that also figures if what Ethan said is right, that it gets its juice from something but that it can run out, too.’
Donovan thought hard. Karina had still used her cellphone and not her radio, which meant that she wasn’t calling for back-up. Something nagged at him but he couldn’t put his finger on it. With Jackson down for the moment, there was nobody else he could ask. At least, he figured, he’d get to know where Glen’s loyalties truly lay.
‘Glen, I need you to pull Karina’s cell. We need to know who she was calling.’
Glen stared blankly back at Donovan. ‘What the hell for? What does it matter who she was calling?’
‘She’s up to something, Glen,’ Donovan replied. ‘I don’t know what, but whatever it is it’s important enough that she would make a call whilst we were under attack from some godforsaken homicidal ghoul.’
Glen shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It was a panicked situation, she probably just grabbed the first thing that came to her mind and—’
‘Glen,’ Donovan interrupted him. ‘If you’re worried about upsetting her now, imagine what will happen if she, Warner, Lopez or Jarvis manage to figure out what really happened on Williamsburg Bridge.’
Glen sat silently for a moment and then dragged a hand down his face.
‘If I try to pull the records, it’ll show up,’ he said. ‘Easiest way to do this is for me to just take a look at her call list on the cell itself.’
‘However you do it,’ Donovan muttered, ‘do it soon. We don’t figure out a way to stop all this before they do, then everything we’ve achieved is for nothing.’
Glen stared at Donovan. His features paled slightly. ‘You really think that this thing that’s hunting us is the ghost of Tom Ross’s wife?’
‘I don’t give a damn what it is!’ Donovan snapped. ‘Right now, all that matters is stopping it, understood?’
Glen got up out of his seat and looked down at the chief. ‘What about this CIA guy? What are you going to say to him?’
Donovan grabbed his jacket as he stood and slipped it over his shoulders.
‘I’m going to offer a trade,’ he replied. ‘I’ll hand Warner and Lopez over to them provided that they get the DIA off our case here. Everybody wins.’
‘But that doesn’t remove our problem,’ Glen insisted. ‘Christ’s sake, Donovan, we’re being haunted!’
‘Everything dies,’ Donovan snapped, and jabbed his finger into Glen’s chest. ‘We use our brains to figure out how to kill it. It’s not invulnerable — we’ve just got to figure out where it gets its juice from, okay? We solve that, then we finish this.’
Glen exhaled noisily, then turned and walked out of Donovan’s office.
The chief looked at his desk for a moment and then rested one hand instinctively on his sidearm. He had no idea why a CIA agent would want to meet him in secret in the middle of the night way up in Harlem, but, after what Jackson had found out about the killings in DC, he sure as hell wasn’t going unarmed.
43
Ethan stood on legs that felt as though the strength had been drained from them.
His heart fluttered in his chest as though unsure of whether or not to keep beating, and he reached out for something to steady himself as he released his grip on Joanna’s neck. The chain-link fence rattled as he leaned on it.
‘Hello, Ethan.’
Her voice reached him as though from another dimension, a voice that he had not heard for five years. Strange, how her face had been burned into his conscience over time but he had forgotten how she spoke, the slight southern lilt to her accent, the perfect pronunciation that had always eluded him.
He sought for something to say but he felt as though somebody had stuffed a sock into his mouth.
‘Joanna?’ was all he finally managed to utter.
Idiot. It wasn’t like she could be anybody else. Joanna did not mock him, however. She nodded.
‘You must have a lot of questions,’ she said.
Ethan was about to reply when a figure vaulted over the chain-link fence and landed cat-like in the shadows. Lopez stormed straight toward Joanna. ‘Okay, who’s the asshole?’
Ethan raised a hand to hold Lopez back, but it was still as if somebody had anesthetized his jaw. He couldn’t speak. Lopez caught the atmosphere between them and slowed of her own accord, watching the blonde woman warily. ‘Ethan?’
Joanna took a pace forward. ‘I’m Joanna Defoe,’ she said.
Lopez’s dark eyes widened slightly and she glanced at Ethan before looking back at Joanna. ‘Oh.’
Ethan managed to re-inflate his lungs and gain control of his wildly swinging emotions.
‘Why are you here in New York?’ he gasped, unable to think of anything more profound to say.
Joanna, keeping one curious eye on Lopez, answered: ‘It’s a long story.’
Finally, some of the emotions swirling in a silent maelstrom in Ethan’s mind found their voice through anger as he broke through the shock and surprise.
‘No shit,’ he said. ‘You’re alive. You’ve been free for at least a year and you never made contact.’ Joanna opened her mouth to reply but Ethan kept going. ‘I spent years searching for you across half the goddamned planet and you show up here in New York with a camera and start shooting holiday pictures like nothing’s happened? Where the hell have you been? What happened in Gaza? How did you get out of there and back home? Why didn’t you call or make contact or…?’
‘Because I couldn’t!’ Joanna snapped. ‘I couldn’t make contact, or call anybody or be seen wandering around. You don’t know what’s been happening, so don’t judge me.’
‘Don’t judge you?’ Ethan uttered in disbelief. ‘I’m not judging anyone — I just want to know what the hell happened. You’ve been gone for five years, Jo, and you don’t know what’s been happening to me either.’
Joanna fixed him with a serious gaze. ‘I’ve had other things on my mind.’
‘So did we,’ Lopez cut in. ‘You can’t expect Ethan to not be surprised when you show up with a camera having spent the last couple of days spying on us.’
‘And who’s we?’ Joanna glared at her.
‘Nicola Lopez,’ she shot back, ‘of Warner and Lopez Incorporated.’
‘River Forest, Illinois,’ Joanna replied with surprising speed. ‘Former detective, Washington, DC, left the force after your partner was killed. Joined forces with Ethan afterward and set up as bail-bondsmen.’