Natalie ran one hand through the thick tresses of hair hanging down across her shoulders.
‘That’s a long shot, especially seeing as she disappeared so long ago and in Gaza City of all places. The likelihood of her waltzing straight back into Illinois is just about zero.’
‘Like I said,’ Ben replied, ‘a last-resort action. There’s nothing else that they can do but sit tight and hope that Fate throws them a lead.’
Larry Levinson spoke softly beside Natalie. ‘You know what would bother me the most about all this, if it were me?’
‘What?’ Natalie asked.
‘Why?’ Larry replied. ‘What could be so important about a journalist that a government agency would spend so much time and effort on even the smallest possibility that she might turn up alive?’
Natalie stared at the monitor screen and wondered for the first time whether she actually knew Joanna Defoe at all.
They had first met when Ethan had brought her round one Sunday to meet the family. The pair had already been dating a while but Ethan had always been naturally cautious when it came to relationships. Joanna was one of just a handful of girls he had brought home. Natalie had taken to her instantly, which wasn’t hard to do. Joanna had one of those smiles that was infectious and bright, a genuine enthusiasm for other people’s lives and a willingness not to speak but to listen. Natalie had, in retrospect, embarrassed herself by confiding to Joanna her entire past semester at college, including several fumbling encounters with a fellow student.
But Joanna had listened without complaining, all the while fielding questions from Natalie’s parents and also carefully observing the growing animosity between Ethan and their father over his resignation from the Marine Corps. Joanna had effortlessly mediated, endearing herself to their parents as a result, and had proven herself the perfect catch for her troubled but decent brother.
Natalie had not been surprised at how hard Ethan had taken her disappearance years later in the dark and dangerous alleys of Gaza. For such a personality to simply vanish from the face of the earth must have been like witnessing the sun blinking out and plunging a warm summer’s day into a frozen darkness.
‘We could try some of the other databases,’ Ben suggested, ‘see if she turns up there.’
Natalie blinked herself awake from her reverie and forced herself to think. Fact was, nobody was looking for Joanna because she had disappeared too long ago for there to be any real hope of picking up any trail she might have left behind.
The answer popped into Natalie’s head almost immediately and she kicked herself for not thinking of it earlier.
‘The agency responsible for this must know that she is alive, somehow. That’s the reason they’re willing to commit to surveillance operations. The odds must not be so long after all.’
‘But I thought you said that Ethan told you he was starting the search for Joanna again?’ Ben said. ‘Did he find evidence of some kind that confirmed she was alive?’
‘Yes,’ Natalie replied. ‘He had proof of life, video footage.’
Beside them, Larry frowned uncertainly.
‘Proof of life usually concerns abduction victims,’ he said, ‘and is used in order to provide leverage for ransom negotiations or whatever the kidnappers want. If they’ve got proof of life of Joanna but are watching your family then surely she must have escaped from somewhere.’
Natalie nodded, a sudden urgency to her thinking.
‘It makes sense,’ she said. ‘Ethan told me that he wanted closure on all of this, that he just wanted to know what happened to her so that he could finally shut the door on all that happened to him. He’d been shown footage of her alive in Gaza, and said the reel was a year old. So if she’s still alive…’
‘He’ll go after her,’ Ben finished her sentence for her. ‘If he’s as tenacious as I’ve heard, he won’t let it go.’
Natalie clenched her fist and thumped the desk.
‘The DIA must know what happened to her,’ she said. ‘They’re the ones employing Ethan and Nicola, they’re the ones who showed Ethan that reel and they’re the ones who sent Ethan to Israel.’
‘Where he had his mysterious experience and came out a changed man,’ Ben agreed. ‘But there’s no way we’re going to get near any documentation of what might have happened out there.’
Natalie shook her head.
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ she said, and looked at her watch. The sun was just descending toward the horizon outside the office windows.
‘What are you thinking?’ Ben asked.
‘This surveillance and all that it entails,’ Natalie replied. ‘What if Joanna knows something of immense importance, or perhaps has evidence of some kind? She was abducted by militants in Gaza, and then apparently escaped. So why didn’t she run to the cops or to Israel? Why disappear? Only reason I can think of is that she wasn’t abducted by militants but by somebody else, and then escaped with evidence of her abductors. If it was a government agency, that would be reason enough to hunt her down before she could blow the whistle.’
‘Extreme rendition,’ Ben conceded, ‘civilians apprehended and taken to foreign countries outside of the Geneva Convention for interrogation as enemy combatants. But how can we figure out if it’s true and why? We don’t know any more than whoever’s searching for her does.’
‘It depends on whether Ethan still works for the same guy he served with in the corps,’ she replied. ‘Can you find out if a Douglas Jarvis still works at the DIA? Maybe I’ll pay them a visit after all.’
29
‘You want to tell me what the hell that was?’ Lopez asked.
Ethan sat down alongside her in front of the fire, the haunting howl that had echoed through the forests bothering him far more than he dared admit.
‘Coyote or something,’ he said.
It sounded lame and he knew it.
‘Coyote,’ Lopez repeated. ‘Well, that sounded like the biggest, meanest and most unfriendly coyote I’ve ever god-damned heard.’ She glanced across at Dana Ford. ‘You ever heard anything like that before?’
Proctor and Dana sat side by side as Dana replied.
‘We’ve been sent a thousand recordings that sound just like that,’ she said. ‘Sometimes the howls are long, low and mournful like that one was. Other times, they’re high-pitched and warbling. The worst ones aren’t the howls at all though.’
‘No?’ Lopez murmured. ‘You figure that, how?’
It was Proctor who replied, awkwardly playing with his mug as he spoke.
‘It’s the ones that sound like dialect,’ he said. ‘It’s horrible to listen to, the strangest combination of growls, whoops and gabbling you’ve ever heard. It sets the hairs of your neck on end because it’s something so familiar and yet so odd.’
Proctor seemed to shiver where he sat and clasped the warmth of his mug with both hands.
‘How many of these things have you gone after?’ Ethan asked them.
‘We’ve uncovered evidence for bipedal apes in almost every state but how many of the encounters are genuine we just don’t know, and we have to do it in our own time and pay for it out of our own pockets because we’d never get grants for this type of work,’ said Dana.
‘Yeah,’ Proctor snapped. ‘You even utter the word cryptozoology in the halls of residence and you’re out on your ass by the end of the week. Nobody wants to fund research into sea monsters or North American bipedal apes, but if you find anything suddenly everybody says they suspected it was there.’