‘Maybe it’s a result of what happened in Israel,’ she said, looking at the page. ‘Maybe he got involved in something sensitive enough for them to want to keep an eye on him?’
‘It gets weirder,’ Ben said, tapping a finger on another piece of paper. ‘Your brother is repatriated to the United States, heads home to Chicago and then promptly goes off the radar for almost three years. Doesn’t move much, doesn’t do much. No job, no pay checks, no nothing. Looks like he was renting a small apartment on the Lower East Side and paying for it with menial jobs, cash in hand. He didn’t even have a bank account.’
‘We didn’t hear from him the entire time,’ Natalie replied. ‘I was at college for most of it and would have visited but he refused to reveal his address. He could have been dead for all we knew.’
Ben nodded and slapped down a black-and-white photograph of Ethan stepping out of what looked suspiciously like Cook County Jail, Illinois. His face was bruised as though he’d been in a fight, a cut on his left cheek half-concealed by thick stubble, his clothes tattered and dirty.
‘You didn’t know where he lived but somebody did. Took this shot of him a couple of years ago: I found it on his file. Up until this time there’s not much in the files, just general movements. It seems that the watch got careless, didn’t stick close enough to him. Then, Ethan vanishes into thin air.’
Ben slid another piece of paper in front of her and his features became animated.
‘The CIA goes ape-shit! I’ve never seen so much traffic in such a short space of time around a single individual since Osama Bin Laden started getting big ideas back in the 1990s. They put agents all across Illinois trying to track him down.’
‘Jesus,’ Natalie whispered. ‘What the hell’s so important about Ethan that they’d commit so much to finding him?’
For intelligence agencies to pursue an interest in an individual and commit funds and resources to doing so would have to be justified to the chain of command, probably to field office level if the Bureau was involved. That would leave a record, a series of authorizations that could be traced back to an agent on the ground. And yet here there was nothing, no leads to follow.
‘The orders must have come from the top down,’ Natalie realized out loud. ‘Christ, this isn’t about Ethan, it can’t be. He’s just not important enough to warrant a surveillance operation this large.’
Ben leaned closer to her, his blue eyes wide.
‘It’s not Ethan they’re interested in,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
Ben didn’t take his eyes off of hers, but he slid the final piece of paper across to her. Natalie looked down at it. What she saw there chilled her to the bone.
NATALIE WARNER
Surveillance active and deployed.
Natalie backed away from the page on her desk as though it were a poisonous insect. Her heart fluttered briefly in her chest as her eyes cast further down the page.
HENRY WARNER / KATHERINE WARNER
Surveillance active and deployed.
‘That’s my entire family,’ she uttered, feeling almost sick.
18
‘When Ethan disappeared the government placed watch-cells on all of you,’ Ben informed her. ‘This is high-level covert surveillance, with all that it entails. I’ve never seen so many resources directed in this way at a single family before. The surveillance itself is not uncommon, but this level and persistence is. I’m guessing it’s because they hoped that Ethan would turn up either at home or at your university.’
‘But he didn’t,’ she said, struggling to understand why on earth anybody at the CIA would be keeping her entire family under surveillance. She worked at Congress, for Christ’s sake, so wasn’t hard to find. Her parents were retired and rarely left Illinois, their mother now too frail for long-distance travel. The level of surveillance simply wasn’t justified.
‘No,’ Ben said, ‘he turned up in Israel. That’s where everything closes.’
Natalie looked at him. ‘Just like that?’
‘Totally,’ Ben replied, looking up at Guy Rikard’s desk to ensure he wasn’t listening in. ‘It’s like suddenly the entire department just shuts down the files as though it had never had the slightest interest in Ethan Warner.’
Natalie frowned. ‘But it says the surveillance is currently active?’
‘That’s what I don’t get either,’ Ben agreed. ‘They’re still watching you all, Natalie. Weirder still, whatever Ethan got up to in Israel has been completely rinsed from the system.’ He turned to her. ‘What happened to him out there?’
Natalie sighed and shook her head.
‘Nobody knows and he certainly doesn’t talk about it. All I know is that he went out there at short notice then came back a few days later. Suddenly he had an apartment, money and was hooking up with a Latino woman called Nicola. She’s some kind of ex-cop or detective out of DC.’
‘Ah,’ Ben said, shuffling through his handful of printed pages. ‘Yeah, here you go. Nicola Lopez, formerly one of DC’s finest. She founded Warner & Lopez Inc with Ethan the year before last. Bail bondsmen and investigators. Quite a turnaround for your brother. You think this Nicola had something to do with it?’
‘Maybe,’ Natalie said absent-mindedly as she thought about her brother. Members of staff walked to and fro between the ranks of desks, and she waited for a pair to pass out of earshot before speaking. ‘But he only starts working with her upon returning from Israel. So whatever happened to him probably occurred beforehand.’
Ben cast a glance across the pages. ‘Joanna then?’
Natalie nodded, thinking hard about the video footage of Joanna that Ethan had mentioned back in Chicago. Not having seen it herself, she did not feel as though it could be used as evidence to further her cause. Besides, Ethan had said he had seen the footage only recently.
‘Maybe he found something else out there in Israel, some new information that gave him hope. Not long after he founded this company with Lopez, he showed up at home and started talking to our pa again. Believe me, that’s a big deal.’
Ben leaned back in his chair.
‘Doesn’t explain why the government is still watching Ethan, unless it’s not Ethan they’re interested in.’
‘Joanna,’ Natalie agreed. ‘There must be something about her that they’re keen on. It’s maybe why they put us all under surveillance, in case she showed up.’
‘Which means they also think that she’s alive.’
She forced herself to calm down, taking slow deep breaths and clearing her mind of obstructive thought. Focus.
‘File gets opened when Joanna disappears,’ she murmured to herself, ‘gets closed a while afterward, then gets opened again when Ethan heads back to the Middle East for reasons unknown…’
Natalie saw in her mind’s eye Ethan sitting opposite her in the restaurant. The name popped into her head of its own accord.
‘Defense Intelligence Agency,’ she said.
‘DIA?’ Ben echoed. ‘What connects them to Ethan?’
‘He mentioned them,’ she said. ‘Ethan told me that he and Lopez do work occasionally for the DIA, something to do with cases that are rejected by other agencies.’