The Eternity Project Read online

  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.

  ‘What does this have to do with us?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘It’s not what it has to do with you,’ Jarvis said. ‘It has to do with what happened to Major Greene next.’

  The former soldier looked at Ethan as he spoke.

  ‘We were pulled out of Vietnam in 1971,’ he said, ‘and brought back to the States. At that time, combat-experienced troops were flooding back to their barracks from the conflict and there was no shortage of manpower. So they start laying us off, ten to the dozen. Only way for me to avoid being tossed out onto the street was to sign up for what was called “special duties”.’

  Ethan leaned forward with renewed interest. ‘Paramilitary work?’

  Greene inclined his head. ‘Working for the Barn, the Central Intelligence Agency. Those of us who signed up were retrained, taught to work in urban environments instead of those damned jungles. It was good work, covert intelligence gathering.’

  ‘Until?’ Lopez murmured.

  Greene looked uncomfortable, frowning as he talked.

  ‘It’s hard to figure out,’ he said. ‘We were put on a watch detail for what we were told were suspected lead figures in communist organisations working within the United States. The brief was that elements of Russia’s KGB had inserted small sleeper cells, groups of highly trained communist agents who lived and worked as Americans. Their placement was to create an enemy within, so that if in some future event Russia wanted to attack us, these sleeper cells could create havoc within the country’s infrastructure, provide intelligence and so on.’

  Ethan had heard of the long-running Soviet program that had placed countless Russians inside the United States, as well as other Western nations like the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain.

  ‘They’re still here,’ Lopez said, ‘so I’ve heard.’

  ‘They are,’ Greene confirmed. ‘The CIA and other agencies pretty much know who the agents are now. But better than bust them wide open, they used to just keep an eye on what they were doing. Every now and again, they’d turn one or two of them into double agents. You’d have been surprised how much even the most ardent communist enjoyed living in a country where they didn’t get their head chopped off at the slightest error.’

  Jarvis gestured out of the window.

  ‘It’s reckoned that there may be several hundred loyal sleeper agents still living in America, although whether they will ever see the action they were trained for is doubtful.’

  Major Greene nodded.

  ‘We kept a watch on one of these suspected sleeper cells for almost two months and sure enough we began to detect suspicious activity, but none of it anything to do with monitoring US interests. All of the individuals seemed to us to be spending a lot of their time high on drugs.’

  Lopez blinked. ‘Seriously? The Ruskies were coming here for their hits?’

  ‘They weren’t Russian,’ Greene said. ‘One of the guys, after watching their odd behavior for a few days, decided to make a close pass on them when they were walking down a boulevard. They were taking with American accents, which you’d expect of well-trained Soviet agents, but he actually recognized one of them.’

  ‘Who was he?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘His name was Harrison Defoe,’ Greene said. ‘He’d been a CIA spook working out of Singapore during the Vietnam War.’

  Ethan stared for a long moment at the soldier, and then sat back in his seat. ‘Joanna Defoe’s father. This must have been after he served time in Singapore.’

  ‘You know this man?’ Major Greene asked in amazement.

  Jarvis leaned forward on the table as he spoke.

  ‘Joanna Defoe is Harrison’s daughter and Ethan’s fiancée,’ he explained to the major. ‘In 1967, Harrison had been a serving officer in the United States Army, working as a translator in Singapore. He was a languages expert and spoke fluent Cantonese as well as Vietnamese, working as part of an electronic-intelligence outfit tasked with monitoring Vietcong communications with sympathetic communist parties in the Malay. They worked on tracking funding and weapons smuggling that came up into Vietnam from the south, instead of the more normal route down from the Communist north and Russia.’

  Major Greene took up the story.

  ‘Harrison could talk to local people and so get information from the ground, which is the best way to find things out. But the people he was tasked with watching were largely well-known civilian figures discreetly supporting the communists. Popular with people in the region, if the American military had arrested them, somebody, somewhere, would probably know about it and expose them, losing the United States respect and support in the region.’

  ‘So the CIA got their man Defoe to do their dirty work for them,’ Lopez guessed.

  ‘Pretty much,’ Jarvis said. ‘Ethan’s sister, Natalie, uncovered much of this during her work within a much larger congressional investigation last year, before the CIA managed to get it shut down. Harrison was asked in 1967 by the CIA if he would like to use newly developed hypnosis techniques to expand his knowledge of Malaysian dialects. Over the next three months, he un
derwent numerous, extensive hypnotherapy sessions. His testimony says that he did indeed learn a great deal about various dialects but that also he began to develop an inexplicably strong sense of outrage toward communist businessmen in Singapore, especially those whom he knew had links to the Vietcong.’

  Major Greene smiled bitterly.

  ‘Like I said, the writing was on the wall by the time of the Tet Offensive,’ he said. ‘We were relying on carpet-bombing, Agent Orange and brutal jungle combat.’

  ‘So you’re saying that Harrison’s CIA work was in fact MK-ULTRA, and that he was hypnotically induced to commit murder?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Harrison Defoe shot four Malaysian businessmen outside a downtown restaurant in Singapore, and served three years in jail for the killings,’ Jarvis said.

  ‘And that’s how we recognized him,’ Major Greene explained. ‘We were being pulled out of Vietnam, and boarded a transport plane that stopped over in Singapore. Your man Defoe got aboard with a diplomatic envoy for his ride home.’

  ‘Harrison picked up a government pension and a Purple Heart,’ Ethan said, dimly recalling what little Joanna had told him of her father. ‘I think he spent a few years at Harvard teaching languages to students.’

  Major Greene nodded. ‘Which was where we set up our observation post. The student route was a common location for Russia to send newly trained sleeper agents, young and full of enthusiasm for Mother Russia.’

  ‘But Harrison Defoe was no junkie,’ Ethan protested. ‘He was as cut-and-dried as they come. Far as I know, he liked a drink but nothing excessive.’

  ‘And if those drinks were spiked with drugs?’ Jarvis suggested.

  ‘You think MK-ULTRA was still working on him?’ Lopez asked, amazed.

  ‘We kept a closer watch after that,’ Greene said. ‘We went beyond our remit to see if we could figure out why a patriotic educator like Harrison Defoe would be taking drugs. We pretty soon figured it out. The water supply to his apartment had been spliced with a canister that supplied a steady flow of LSD. We even caught the guys doing it on camera, filmed them sneaking in and topping up the canister.’

  ‘The Barn.’ Ethan guessed.

  ‘Same department we were working for,’ Greene confirmed. ‘We even knew some of their names. My surveillance team was working for MK-ULTRA and didn’t even know it.’

  ‘Have you got that footage?’ Ethan asked.

  Greene smiled and reached into his pocket. He produced a small tape of 8mm film, a vintage 1970s magnetic recording that he handed across to Jarvis.

  ‘It’s all here,’ he said, ‘and the agents responsible are still alive.’

  Lopez and Ethan exchanged a glance.

  ‘This is it,’ Lopez said. ‘This is hard evidence.’

  Jarvis smiled, clearly enjoying himself as he pulled from his pocket another piece of paper, this one sealed in a protective sheet of clear plastic.

  ‘Better than that,’ he said. ‘I managed to obtain this with the major’s help. This is a list of names found by the CIA in 1947.’

  Ethan’s eyes widened as he looked at the yellowing sheet of typed paper entrapped in the plastic sheath.

  ‘What kind of list?’ Lopez asked.

  Jarvis held the sheet of paper up.

  ‘It turns out that this sheet of paper was the catalyst for the start of MK-ULTRA’s covert mind-control programs and the CIA’s research into paranormal phenomena. It’s extremely old, close to a century, and it concerns a series of events that occurred during the First World War. These names are those of young soldiers who died in their thousands during the Battle of the Somme, and who appeared thousands of miles away as crisis-apparitions to their families at the moments of their deaths.’

  Jarvis looked at Ethan and Lopez directly.

  ‘This document represents the first recorded evidence of life after death.’

  11

  ‘What’s a crisis-apparition?’ Lopez asked.

  Major Greene looked uncomfortable, leaning back in his chair as though to distance himself from the conversation. Jarvis took his cue.

  ‘It’s a sort of ghost,’ Jarvis replied. ‘They’ve turned up throughout history when people have died, usually appearing to close family or loved ones as an apparently solid embodiment at the moment of death, which then fades away.’

  ‘What the hell would the CIA be doing with a piece of paper like that?’ Ethan asked. ‘It belongs in a museum.’

  Jarvis laid the delicate sheet down on the table as he spoke.

  ‘It turns out that when the CIA started MK-ULTRA, they weren’t just looking for strategically placed military personnel who were susceptible to things like hypnosis and such like. They were actively seeking out evidence of families who had a strong history of what we would call paranormal activity. The idea seems that they felt that anybody who might inherit a strong propensity for paranormal events would also be an ideal candidate for experiments probing things that MK-ULTRA was designed to look into, like remote-viewing.’

  ‘What’s remote-viewing?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘A failed surveillance technique,’ Major Greene replied. ‘The CIA started Project Stargate in the early 1970s and it ran until 1995, investigating the ability of people who claimed to be able to view places and objects thousands of miles away just by mentally focusing on them.’

  ‘But it failed,’ Ethan said.

  ‘The project was deemed a failure,’ Jarvis replied for the major, ‘but not because the technique did not work. Individuals were able to view Russian missile silos and even objects in space. It’s recorded in documents that have since become part of the public domain that one man identified that the planet Uranus had faint rings long before passing space probes were able to prove it.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘The intelligence received was reliable,’ Greene replied, ‘but the translation of that intelligence by the viewers was highly unpredictable. One remote-viewer gave an extremely detailed account of what was believed to be a missile silo being built in Russia, making drawings and such-like. The CIA devoted millions of dollars into physical surveillance of the site, until they realized that it was in fact a power station. The viewer felt that he was looking at large missiles; in fact, they were power conduits and ventilation shafts. That mistake revealed the flaw in using psychically adept civilians to visualize uniquely complex locations – they just couldn’t be relied upon to accurately decipher what they were seeing.’

  ‘So how does this tie in with us?’ Ethan pressed.

  Jarvis gestured to the list of names.

  ‘All of these families independently reported experiencing crisis-apparitions during the First World War,’ he replied. ‘The CIA used this list and tracked down the families in the 1950s, targeting them as potentially viable subjects for experiments like Stargate and MK-ULTRA. This is the source document, the real-world evidence that set them on their course. It’s likely that any family on this list may have descendants that were either hired by or experimented on by MK-ULTRA.’

  Ethan carefully lifted the list off the table and scanned down the names. All of them were written in a flowing yet precise script. Given the time that the document was written and the location of most of the fighting in the First World War, it wasn’t surprising that many of the names were British and French.

  ‘Did we have troops fighting in the First World War?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘We did,’ Major Greene confirmed. ‘American Expeditionary Forces fought alongside British and French troops in the last year of the war.’

  ‘However,’ Jarvis cautioned, ‘we can’t use nationality to refine our search. Families have moved around, marriages have confused the lineage of inherited names. We could just as likely pursue an American on this list and end up with a descendant who has lived in Norway all their lives. A century has passed since the Great War.’

  Ethan sat back for a long moment.

  ‘So these crisis-apparitions,’ he said, thinking
out loud, ‘are used as a marker to identify individuals or families susceptible to paranormal events. Then what? They haul them in and start some kind of weird brain reprogramming?’

  ‘The MK-ULTRA and Stargate programs were many and varied,’ Jarvis explained, ‘covering every possible facet of extrasensory perception and mental manipulation, depending on what part of the program was being experimented on. Most of the cerebral programming was via hypnosis and forms of electroshock therapy, rumored to have been designed to create these unwitting assassins. Certainly, the actions of otherwise entirely sane and patriotic individuals suggests that they were under some kind of influence, whether by drugs or therapy.’

  ‘You think that Joanna was a part of this, that she underwent some kind of programming?’ Ethan asked outright. ‘You think that because it worked on her father, the CIA might have assumed that it would work on her?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Jarvis said nodding. ‘She could even have been placed back into the population as a sleeper agent herself, primed to cause who-knows-what chaos when activated. But it’s not for that reason that I’ve brought you here.’

  Ethan instinctively looked across to Major Greene, who spoke quietly.

  ‘My work with the CIA continued right up to my retirement, two years ago,’ Greene said. ‘As well as commanding an infantry battalion, I would often be asked to act as oversight for covert operations with the 24th Special Tactics Squadron, a paramilitary outfit that . . .’

  ‘. . . supports the CIA,’ Lopez finished the sentence for him. ‘We know all about those guys. Bumped into some of them in Idaho a few months back.’

  Greene looked at Jarvis in surprise, who nodded.

  ‘Ethan and Lopez got into this whole mess when they were tracking down evidence of some kind of monster up in the forests of central Idaho. Turns out that the CIA’s work in MK-ULTRA had extended well beyond anything we could have imagined. They barely got out of there with their lives.’

  Greene looked across at Ethan and Lopez, and continued. ‘Then you’ll know that the STS are elite troops, highly specialized in both conventional and urban combat. You might also like to know that a small unit was inserted into Palestine five years ago, with a briefing to maintain surveillance on a pair of journalists who had been stirring up trouble in South America and who had recently arrived in Gaza City.’