Ethan felt his blood run cold as he sat bolt upright in his chair and glared at the major.
‘You were watching us, even back then?’ he asked in disbelief.
‘We were watching,’ Greene replied. ‘And when Joanna got a little too close to uncovering the actions of a private arms company, Munitions for Advanced Combat Environments, our team was ordered to apprehend her.’
The rest of the room blurred in Ethan’s vision, only the major’s features and icy-gray eyes piercing his from across the table. Greene’s words traveled toward him as though from down a long-distance telephone line.
‘Our team abducted Joanna Defoe from a hotel in Gaza City. The CIA held onto her via militant groups paid to hold hostage Westerners who were considered “troublesome” by intelligence agencies here in the States.’
The major made no attempt to apologize for what he had done, his features calm and his hands folded before him on the table.
He was completely unprepared for Ethan.
The confined, imprisoned rage of thousands of days of not knowing swept up and through Ethan’s body as though it had never left, as he lunged across the table and hauled the major out of his seat as though he were a rag doll. He didn’t hear Lopez or Jarvis shouting at him as he dragged the major across the table and pinned the back of his neck against the edge, the older man’s head hanging over it as Ethan drove his forearm down against the major’s jaw.
Greene gagged as the back of his neck came under unbearable strain, his vertebrae cracking and his eyes swimming with panic as he realized that he was utterly defenseless against the sheer force and speed of Ethan’s attack.
Jarvis stepped forward to free the major, but Ethan swiped the old man aside with his free arm as though he were barely there. Jarvis staggered backwards in surprise.
Ethan glared down at the major. ‘Who ordered the abduction?’
Greene, barely able to speak and with his neck on the verge of being broken, struggled to reply.
‘I don’t know.’
Ethan leaned in harder and the major screamed and grasped at his hands. ‘For God’s sake, I don’t know!’
Ethan leaned forward again, driven by something inside of him that was utterly devoid of emotion, of empathy and regret. The major’s eyes widened in pain and the sudden realization of impending death.
A hand touched Ethan’s face.
Softly, without force and yet a thousand times more powerful for it. It stayed there, unmoving, until Ethan turned his head. Lopez looked down at him, her hand cupping his face, and shook her head.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘This isn’t the way and you know it.’
Ethan stared up at Lopez for a long moment and then he whirled away and released the major’s head. He ran his hands through his hair as the older man rolled off the table and thumped down onto the thick carpet. Ethan desperately sought a vent for his anger, but found nothing. He couldn’t even smash the place up, because some part of his mind remained annoyingly, stupidly sane and told him that it would achieve nothing. That grabbing the major had achieved nothing. The man had been here to help.
Ethan ran his hands down his face. In the five years since Joanna had vanished, he had believed that the raw fury, the sheer rage, that had festered within him due to being powerless to find her, had somehow abated. He had really believed that the corrosive anger was gone but now he realized that it had remained all along, just waiting for the catalyst it needed to unleash itself on the world around him.
‘Ethan.’
He turned to see the major on his knees with his hands clasping his throat as Jarvis helped him to breathe. Lopez was watching him and perhaps for the first time since they’d met, he saw a shadow of fear in her eyes. She took a pace toward him, rested her hands on his forearms.
‘Ethan, this is what I was afraid of. You’ve got to keep yourself under control because you can’t finish this from a prison cell, okay?’
Ethan looked up. Jarvis was also watching him with a look of genuine caution on his features, as though Ethan were no longer an ally but more an enemy kept close.
‘You done?’ Jarvis asked.
Ethan looked at the major. Greene got to his feet, leaning against the table and recovering his breathing as he looked at Ethan.
‘I suppose, in some way, I probably deserved that,’ he managed to utter. ‘We were abducting US citizens.’
‘You didn’t know that,’ Lopez said. ‘You thought that they were sleeper agents, right?’
‘We had our doubts about the cover story,’ Greene rasped. ‘It bothered us all, but there was no real way of getting word out about the abductions without us all being thrown into military prisons.’
Some of the rage flared once more inside Ethan. ‘So you let Joanna get thrown into one instead?’
‘We had no idea what happened to her after she was picked up by the STS grab team,’ Greene insisted. ‘It was only when Doug contacted me and told me about his search for Joanna Defoe and that she was known to have escaped, that I felt it was worth telling all. But it’s not without risk. I’m still bound by non-disclosure protocols and could be court-martialed if they find out I’m talking about this, especially to you.’
Ethan managed to get his anger under control and his brain back into gear.
‘What did they do to her, for all of those years?’ he asked.
‘That much we don’t know,’ Jarvis said. ‘But given the connections with the CIA, her father’s presence in the MK-ULTRA program and Joanna’s history of exposing governmental corruption, it’s quite likely that the CIA would have at the very least tried to dissuade her from any further investigations upon her release.’
‘Dissuade?’ Lopez murmured bitterly. ‘That mean what I think it does?’
Jarvis nodded.
‘They’d have likely used any of MK-ULTRA’s methods to alter Joanna’s personality, to make her more pliable. That’s why they’re so keen to find her. Since she escaped, whatever they did to her she could now be using against them. She’s walking evidence of everything they’ve ever done and she’s on the loose.’
A cellphone trilled faintly and Jarvis reached into his pocket and answered. Moments later, he looked across at Ethan.
‘Something’s happened,’ he said. ‘We need to get back to the city.’
12
The room was dark. She couldn’t see because of the blindfold bound tightly around her head, but somehow she knew. There was no way to mark the passage of time. Here and now was all that mattered. Nothing, and nobody else.
She had long ago paced the perimeter of her tiny patch of loneliness and knew it to be precisely eight feet square. She knew also that this tiny space was built deliberately to be small enough to feel claustrophobic, but large enough that she could not touch the opposing walls at the same time with her hands and feet. If her hands weren’t lied, that might have allowed her to shimmy up to the small opening nine feet above her head where a faint breeze drifted in from outside, and the people who had incarcerated her here were clearly not willing to let that happen.
Her hands were bound behind her back with tough plastic cords, far too strong to break. The plastic had once cut deep and painful grooves into her wrists, but the skin there had long ago hardened against the constant rubbing of the cords.
She sat on a thin mattress that lay across two cardboard boxes stuffed with Styrofoam balls and crushed by the weight of her body. The simple bed presented nothing with which she could construct a weapon or means to escape the tiny room. A single door made of heavy wood and sealed with big iron locks sealed her in. She knew that on the other side of the door was a four-foot wide latch that dropped into its holders either side of the door frame, making breaking the door down an utter impossibility. She had glimpsed the outside once, when her captors had applied her blindfold too hastily and left a gap for her to see through at the bottom.