‘I know,’ Ethan replied, ‘we busted them open in Israel three years after you vanished. The CEO, Byron Stone, died before he could be brought to justice.’
‘Death isn’t justice enough for that asshole,’ Joanna snapped with uncharacteristic vehemence. ‘I only wish I could have killed him myself.’
Ethan and Joanna, as well as being engaged to marry, had once worked together as journalists in South America for some years, exposing government corruption. While there, Ethan knew that Joanna had come close to exposing a major corporation’s involvement in the ‘abductions-for-ransom business’ that had infected countries like Mexico and Colombia, but they had been chased away by death threats and the danger of arrest by local law enforcement. In Gaza, she had again come close to exposing MACE for deliberately organizing abductions, but this time their retaliation had been more definitive.
‘So what was the CIA’s connection to MACE?’ Ethan asked.
‘Covert,’ Joanna replied simply. ‘MACE was contracted through the Pentagon, but whatever Byron Stone arranged with the CIA was kept under the table. I never found any paperwork or evidence of CIA collusion until long after I’d actually been grabbed. But what I saw could blow the CIA wide open, even have it shut down.’
Ethan glanced around the diner as he spoke, as alert for eavesdropping as Joanna was.
‘You saw what, exactly?’
‘Saw and heard. They spent two years running all kinds of weird tests on me. Hypnosis, brain scans, stress tests, electroshock therapy, extrasensory perception analysis, psychokinesis, pyrokinesis, you name it. I really began to think that the people who’d picked me up were out of their minds. Sure, I knew about MK-ULTRA already, but this was totally insane.’
‘They find anything?’ Ethan asked.
‘Wish they had,’ she replied. ‘If it had turned out I’d been able to set things alight without touching them, I’d have torched every one of the fuckers right there and then.’
‘Electroshock therapy?’ Ethan echoed as he digested what Joanna had said.
‘They show videos,’ Joanna replied, and she seemed to shiver slightly despite the warmth in the diner. ‘Alternating images, some patriotic, others less so. The patriotic images turn up and they flush you with a bit of morphine, makes you feel all warm and fluffy. All’s good. The others, they send a couple hundred volts through you.’
Ethan’s throat swelled and he could no longer look at her as he averted his eyes and stared down into his coffee. ‘How long?’
‘About six months,’ came the reply. ‘Nine hours a day.’
Ethan wiped a sleeve angrily across his face, kept his head down. Joanna’s voice reached him gently across the table. ‘Stopped me from sleeping a lot, made me fear even seeing anything that wasn’t American.’ Her hand touched his again, and he looked up to see her smile faintly. ‘Put it this way, I can’t watch a Vietnam movie anymore without hitting the ceiling every couple of minutes.’
Ethan forced a crooked grin onto his face and tried to ignore the rage seething like acid through his veins. ‘What else.’
‘You don’t want to know,’ Joanna replied. ‘I’ve moved on from…’
Ethan grabbed her forearm. ‘What else?’
Joanna stared at him for a few seconds, and then replied as though she were talking about the weather.
‘They killed me,’ she said. ‘Drained the blood from my body and replaced it with chilled saline. Kept me in stasis for an hour and then reversed the process. When I came to, they asked me what I saw. They were looking for evidence of the afterlife, Ethan. They called it the Eternity Project. They wanted to know the face of God.’
Ethan could barely speak as he looked at her. ‘How many times?’
Joanna sighed. ‘Thirty-seven, I think.’
Ethan kept hold of her arm. ‘Jesus, I’m sorry.’
‘There’s nothing for you to be sorry about,’ she insisted, and averted her eyes. ‘Moving on.’
Suddenly, the creases marring Joanna’s once, flawless skin appeared ominous. Ethan wondered at the terrors she had endured in that room buried deep in the volatile streets of Gaza City, but he knew better than to pry further. ‘So you heard some stuff, later on?’
Joanna nodded. ‘After a couple of years of doing these tests, they gave up. I suppose that, after seven hundred days, they’d finally realized they were pissing into the wind. I got moved back to my little cell without windows, while they figured out what to do with me.’
‘MACE must have been long busted by then,’ Ethan said, ‘or at least on their way out.’
‘MACE was only responsible for the team that grabbed me,’ Joanna explained. ‘The CIA took over from that point. Once they’d given up on the experiments, they relaxed a bit. The building I was kept in was secure enough, but the walls carried sound and the door wasn’t sealed at the jamb. Sometimes the daft assholes had chats with each other right outside.’
‘About what?’
‘About Langley,’ she said, ‘about being back home, their wives, kids, that sort of stuff. They were as American as you and I, and any mention of Langley pretty much points the way. We were in the middle of Gaza, for Christ’s sake. Who the hell else would be running a safe house there?’
Ethan nodded. ‘Must have had people on the inside, though. Field agents would have stood out too much.’
‘Probably. I saw these guys often enough, so they may have had their own way in and out of Gaza, probably at night. Point is, they were getting lax and eventually they screwed up enough that they got hit by Israel just as they were trying to move me to a new location. They hadn’t bothered to liaise with Mossad or the Knesset, I suppose, and they also hadn’t bothered to blindfold me.’
Ethan nodded. ‘I know, I saw the hit.’
Joanna’s eyes flared wide open. ‘You were there?’
‘No,’ Ethan replied quickly. ‘I saw footage of the raid, saw you on foot. You were gone before we could track you, but it was the first evidence I had that you were alive.’ Joanna stared at her coffee as she digested this new information. Ethan looked up at her. ‘What happened next?’
‘Assan Muhammad happened next.’
‘Assan?’ Ethan finally laughed as an image of the rotund, cheery-faced trader they’d met in Gaza so many years before filled his mind. ‘Is that old bastard still ripping people off out there?’
‘Just like he’s been doing since the time of the Prophet.’ Joanna nodded, smiling. ‘I found him where he always was and he got me out of there real fast. I was in a smuggling tunnel beneath Rafah and over the border into Egypt before nightfall and out of Cairo forty-eight hours later. I headed for Europe, and stayed in the United Kingdom for three weeks to get myself sorted.’
‘Then what? You came home?’
‘Right,’ she replied. ‘Started looking for you again and for the bastards who’d kept me locked up all that time. I knew there’d be a shit-storm brewing at Langley after I got away from them, so I just started listening in. Got myself a job in the kitchens of an out-of-town diner during unsociable hours, a small rent in DC, and kept watching and waiting. Sure enough, the spooks started hanging around our old house near Anacostia.’
‘We were only there for six months,’ Ethan said in surprise.
‘Shows how desperate they were to find me. I guess they figured I’d come looking for you in all the old places.’
Ethan chuckled. ‘Thought that maybe you’d left something tucked away there,’ he guessed, ‘buried evidence and all that?’
Joanna nodded. ‘Dumb asses, the lot of them. I started shooting reels of them hanging around, identified the pool cars they were using, that kind of thing. They were maintaining low-level surveillance, using rookie agents, I guess, because they didn’t have the manpower, so they were making a few mistakes here and there. Now and again, bigger fish would come visit them, and I recognized one or two faces from Gaza. It wasn’t hard to link them all up and start putting together a piece on what was happening.’