Covenant (36 page)

“What are you going to do when we get back to the city?” Rachel asked him.

“Meet with Ambassador Cutler, Shiloh Rok, or anyone in the Knesset who’ll listen and tell them what’s happened. We need them aware that MACE is involved in this.”

Rachel sighed. “We still don’t know that for sure. They were at Lucy’s dig site and they pursued us, violently, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they abducted Lucy.”

“MACE,” Ethan said carefully, “whoever they are and whatever they’re doing here, have no interest in Lucy’s survival.”

“They were at the site. It doesn’t mean they abducted Lucy, only that they found and were excavating the remains. We can’t lay blame without proof; that’s not how the law works.”

Ethan felt disbelief sluice through his gullet. “You’re living in denial.”

“Tell me what happened to your fiancée.”

Rachel’s unexpectedly direct question stumped Ethan.

“It’s not worth the telling.”

“It is, to me.”

Ethan turned away from her and looked out of the window even though there was nothing to see but the inky blackness. He looked down, and saw his hands trembling in the darkness. Nervous exhaustion, lack of sleep. More hallucinations would come next, probably, like the one in the market square in Jerusalem. He folded his hands tightly together, looking out the window and seeing Rachel’s reflection watching him in the glass as she spoke.

“Since we came here I have trusted you, relied upon you, and taken risks with you because my father told me that if anyone could find Lucy, it was you. I think I have a right to know why that is.”

“I haven’t found your daughter yet and I never said that I could,” Ethan murmured.

“No,” Rachel admitted. “That’s why I want to know the truth. I may have to spend the rest of my life wondering what happened to her. I might end up like you.”

Ethan shot her a sideways glance. “End up like me?”

“Cynical,” Rachel said, “aloof, nihilistic, thinking that nothing is worth anything. I want to know why you’re like you are so I can try to be something else.”

Ethan looked outside again for a long moment before whispering a name as though he were speaking of a ghost.

“Joanna.” He could see Rachel staring at him in the window’s reflection. His own face was illuminated starkly on one side by the glow from the city ahead, the other half lost in deep shadow. “Joanna Defoe was my fiancée. We met while I was serving in the Marines and she was covering the invasion of Iraq, embedded with our platoon. We fell in love, the usual crap. I resigned my commission and worked freelance with her after my unit pulled out of Iraq, traveling together to wherever the news was: New Orleans, Aceh, Afghanistan, Africa, you name it.”

Having started, Ethan let the words fall from his lips, not looking at Rachel but staring out into the shadows sprawled like slumbering demons in the desert darkness.

“While everyone else was covering the war on terror, we decided to change tack and cover the smaller stories, human stories, things that were forgotten in the wake of the obsession with terrorism.”

“Where did you go?” Rachel asked in a whisper.

“Bogotá, Colombia,” Ethan replied. “We’d uncovered a lot of reports there of abductions, criminal syndicates that owned the police forces, a hostage-ransom industry, not to mention the trade in drugs coming from South America. After exposing a number of corrupt officials within the Colombian government, we decided to do the same again, this time in Gaza. During that time we gained a reputation for being able to locate missing people as a result of our investigations.”

Ethan did not feel as though he was speaking, the words drifting through his awareness as though he was picking up a faint distress signal on an archaic radio.

“We wrote several articles about atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza City by both Hamas and Israel that made the international press, but I suppose somehow we dug too deep or pissed off too many people who were making too much money to see their dirty little industries shut down. Joanna Defoe vanished from Gaza City on the afternoon of December 14, 2008, abducted by persons unknown. No ransom, no contact, no information or evidence. Nobody knew a thing about it except that a cleaner said she’d seen someone wearing clothes that matched Joanna’s being dragged from the back door of the hotel we were staying in, with a bag over her head, and that the person was dumped into a car that disappeared. No plates, maybe dark blue in color, she thought. Maybe.”

Ethan’s voice trailed off as though he was miming the words, watching in his mind’s eye as the past replayed itself once again on an endless, miserable loop.

“I spent the next two years searching for her. I used up all of our savings, sold everything we possessed, spent months scouring the alleys and back streets, the refugee camps and villages for her. I printed thousands of pictures of her and put them up all over Gaza City.” He shook his head. “I never heard a word.”

Rachel waited patiently as he went on.

“When the money ran out I thought I’d just curl up and die, that there was no point in going on because there was nothing worth going on for. It was Amy O’Hara, a journalist friend who had covered our stories, who helped me from Chicago to find Joanna. I’d done a piece on missing journalists in the hope of raising awareness. Amy read it, hated what had happened, and decided to help me out. She actually came out to Jerusalem in the end, lent me some money, and told me to get out of the city and find the world again. That Joanna was probably dead and gone, and that even if she wasn’t, there was nothing more that I could do. That if I didn’t leave I’d just destroy myself.”

Rachel remained silent, Ethan speaking without thought or conscious planning.

“So I did. I went back to Chicago, back to work. I did okay until the pointlessness of it all hit me. I resigned my job, gave up on whatever it was I had left. The thing about it was, I didn’t care, didn’t give a shit. I might just as well have been dead already.”

Ethan fell silent, caught in the web of his own memories, of months and years lost in a paralysis of grief. Rachel’s voice spoke softly from nearby.

“What happened next?”

Ethan roused himself.

“Nothing happened next,” he said. “I’ve been fully unemployed ever since. Posttraumatic stress, they call it, makes me medically unable to work. I don’t sleep much, maybe an hour here, an hour there.” Ethan shrugged to himself, felt her penetrating gaze on him but went on talking quietly. “She was a great person, Joanna. You’d have liked her. She loved life. Always full of energy, always quick with a joke. Bright. Cheerful. One of those people that you can’t help but like.”

Ethan’s voice started to become strained as though his vocal chords were being twisted.

“You’ve got some idea, now, of what it’s like when someone you love so much just vanishes, completely and utterly, without explanation or information. What it’s like when you have no idea if they are safe or not, suffering or not, alive or not. I have images of people harming her, and of going and finding those people and skinning them alive, or having them fed to sharks or lowered feetfirst into wood-chipping machines.” He saw Rachel wince and shook his head. “It brings things out in you that you can’t imagine.”

Ethan glanced out of the window, fatigue amplifying his grief.

“I send her parents flowers on her birthday, every year. They always return them unopened. I still don’t feel right alone in bed at night unless I wrap her T-shirt around a pillow next to me. Can you believe that?”

He lowered his head, not willing to let Rachel see what he knew she already must have seen. His voice when he spoke sounded strained in his own ears.

“I wanted to find out what happened to her, and to find Lucy for you. I thought maybe I could put this all right, but I can’t. There’s no such thing as a hero when there’s no way to solve a case. There’s nothing more I can do for you here except tell the authorities about MACE’s involvement.”

Rachel’s reflection was pinched with remorse.

“You’ve done enough,” she said quietly. “It took a lot for you to come out here after all that’s happened. I wouldn’t have come this far alone.”

Ethan was still unable to bring himself to look at her.

Rachel squeezed his arm and rested her head against it, while Ethan continued to stare out of the window at the pale strip of light now slicing across the eastern horizon.

WADI AL-JOZ
WEST BANK, PALESTINE

L
ucy Morgan awoke, struggling to overcome her drug-induced lethargy and reach the shore of consciousness just ahead.

She tried to move her body but her wrists and ankles were still firmly bound and a thick leather strap encircled her waist. Cold metal touched her skin. She turned her head and saw the room about her, enshrouded in darkness, and with a bolt of panic she realized where she lay.

“Good morning.”

The voice, somehow familiar, hovered somewhere beyond the periphery of her vision. A face appeared and gazed down at her, hollow-looking eyes, a flare of white hair illuminated like a halo by the bright light, and wearing what looked like a surgeon’s gown. She realized that semi-opaque adhesive patches had been attached to her face to protect her eyes, obscuring her vision.

Lucy Morgan swallowed thickly, trying not to tremble.

“Murderer,” she whispered. “You killed Ahmed.”

Again, that excruciatingly compassionate smile.

“No,” the surgeon replied. “A discoverer, a journeyman, a seeker of the truth.”

Lucy’s addled brain struggled to comprehend what the man was referring to as he moved around the gurney upon which she lay. As he spoke, she realized that her body and forehead were covered with electrodes attached with adhesive patches. Small wires ran from the pads to the monitors alongside the gurney.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” she muttered with forced contempt. “You’re dabbling in things that you can’t possibly comprehend.”

The surgeon looked at her in surprise, and nodded happily.

“You’re the first patient to say that, Lucy. I’m impressed, truly I am.”

Lucy saw him adjust dials on one of the monitors before turning to look down at her again. She was naked but for a small pair of white briefs and a bra, not her own, she realized. He must have dressed her, tended to her as she lay comatose beneath the anesthetics that he had forced into her unwilling body. The knowledge sent a bolt of nausea through her.

“Don’t worry,” he said quietly, as if sensing her discomfort. “You have been cared for without violation of any kind.”

Lucy looked at him, radiating hatred. “You don’t call
this
a violation?”

The surgeon chuckled. “It is for the greater good, Lucy. Not just yours, not just mine.”

Lucy remembered what she had seen here previously, the image of Ahmed Khan’s bucking, writhing, salivating madness filling her with horror.

“Maybe nobody can survive whatever you’re doing.”

He shook his head again.

“It was their brains. The arteries could not withstand the rise in blood pressure nor the oxygen bubbles reaching the brain during transfusion. The drug addicts developed cerebral aneurisms. I should have tilted their bodies to raise the head, preventing oxygen bubbles in the blood from reaching the brain. But that matters not; now I have you.”

Lucy felt a mounting sense of horror.

“That might not be enough!”

“There is always a way, Lucy. You of all people should know that, as a scientist. The gathering of data, over time, leads to evidence, hypothesis, and eventually to theory, and that theory, based on fact, must be accepted by the observer regardless of their own prejudices. I have examined every single patient, every single procedure, and thus have seen the error in my thinking. They might have survived had I been more adept.”

Lucy shook her head.

“Your errors cost them their lives. Murder is murder no matter how it comes about, when it is done against the will of your so-called patients.” Lucy covered her fear with a thin smile. “What goes around, comes around.”

The blurred figure shrugged.

“My fate is irrelevant, Lucy. Only the results matter, and when they are published, the cost will be far outweighed by the value of the discovery, of the evidence.”

“Evidence of what?”

The surgeon moved toward her, and she realized he was carrying a syringe. He reached up for the saline tube that ran into her left arm.

“Time for you to go to sleep, my dear,” he said softly.

“You don’t have to do this,” Lucy said, her voice quivering now.

“But, Lucy, of course I do.”

“No.”

Lucy’s voice was a weak whisper, but a deeper voice growled from the darkness.

“Wait.”

A figure lumbered out of the gloom to stand over her body. Thick stubble and bulky features, squinting piglike eyes, wearing combat fatigues and boots.

“Time for you to see the light of day,” the soldier said to the surgeon.

The surgeon looked at the soldier, frustration building in his body until he trembled and with one hand thumped the metal desktop beside him.