In rural Wisconsin, a thirty-six-year-old man had been murdered in an apparent robbery gone-wrong. Stripped of his possessions, the man’s unfortunate demise might have remained a footnote in the records of county police if not for one major factor: the man was identified as a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The murder hit the news state-wide, having gotten out before the CIA could close the lid on what had happened. Before the familiar veil of silence had settled on the case, Ethan and Lopez had seen it on the news and thus been alerted to a possible thread that they could follow in what felt like an endless and equally hopeless quest to clear their names.
‘You got a rent?’ he asked her.
‘It’s a motel across the river in Williamsburg,’ she replied. ‘Not perfect, but we’re not going to get anything we can afford on the Lower East Side or Manhattan.’
Ethan shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it; right now, the more anonymous our accommodation is, the better.’
Ethan followed Lopez out of the station and onto the crowded streets of the city. Heavy traffic, swathes of pedestrians and a wall of noise filled the air as Ethan craned his neck back and looked up at the buildings soaring up toward the cold sky above.
Lopez turned to him on the crowded sidewalk. ‘You think we can track her down here in New York?’
Ethan nodded as an image of his long-vanished fiancée drifted like a ghost haunting the deepest recesses of his mind.
‘The trail led here,’ he said. ‘If she’s following the same information that we are, New York’s a great place to disappear and get some work done at the same time. Nothing like eight or nine million people to make it easy to hide in plain sight.’
Fact was, the leads that Ethan was following were tenuous in the extreme.
Six months previously, he had approached his sister, Natalie, after learning that Joanna Defoe was alive. Asking her if she would be willing to use her influence within the Government Accountability Office during a congressional investigation into CIA corruption, Natalie had gone on to uncover evidence of an immense covert operation named MK-ULTRA, used to abuse unwitting American citizens both within homeland borders and abroad. Whatever it was, MK-ULTRA was definitely illegal and represented the core issue that had landed Ethan and Lopez in their current mess.
Joanna Defoe’s name had been connected with the program, as had her long deceased father. Harrison Defoe had worked in the Far East as a translator during the Vietnam War and had suddenly gone on the rampage in Singapore, shooting dead several leading opponents to the US intervention in the conflict. Her father had served time in a Singapore jail for his crime and had become a vocal opponent and critic of the CIA afterward. He represented the likely source of Joanna’s determination to root out corruption at government level as a journalist.
That same determination, it now seemed, was what had gotten her abducted. If they could find Joanna, she might possess enough evidence to expose MK-ULTRA and clear all of their names.
‘What’s the next move?’ Lopez asked, as they walked.
Ethan scanned the thousands of faces and the dense city skyline.
‘We start digging and hope that we get lucky.’
4
‘If it’s going down, it’ll be within the next ten minutes.’
The car in which Detective Karina Thorne sat was parked by the sidewalk on the corner of Broadway and Pike, looking across the intersection toward a Pay-Go cash-checking store where a trickle of customers were filing in and out, many of them with envelopes in their hands.
Karina kept her hands in her lap, preventing herself from checking her sidearm for the twentieth time. Anxiety twisted her stomach muscles and her gaze flicked back and forth from the store to her wing mirrors, catching a glimpse of her long dark hair pinned back in a ponytail. Her features were a little too stern to be called attractive, the line of her mouth thin and her jaw a little too wide.
‘Relax,’ came a voice from beside her. ‘No need to get twitchy until something happens.’
Jake Donovan, a twenty-year veteran of the New York Police Department, glanced sideways at her with a wink and a smile. Donovan was in his mid-fifties but could still bench-press two-fifty for five and was surrounded by an aura of competence that commanded complete loyalty from his team. Karina let some of her tension out in a long sigh.
‘It’s a big deal if it goes down, is all,’ she replied.
‘They’re all a big deal,’ Donovan said, ‘especially when we catch them in the act.’
Karina nodded but did not share her boss’s confidence.
Over the past two months, several major bank heists had rocked the east coast from Pennsylvania right up to Maine. It was considered almost impossible to hit a major bank successfully these days: accounts at all American banks were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, bringing such heists under federal jurisdiction and involving the FBI. Federal Sentencing Guidelines mandated long prison terms and there was no parole in the federal prison system. Coupled with biometric markers on bank cases — dye-emitting sensors that rendered stolen cash useless — the massive resources of law enforcement and the involvement of the media in pursuing and catching violent gangs ensured that few such criminal enterprises succeeded for long.
But the gang that had hit four armoured trucks in New Hampshire and Connecticut were a different breed. Wily, patient and yet supremely violent, their genius was a blend of deception and simplicity. They wore disguises, but not just clothes. Instead, they wore complex, expensive latex headpieces and gloves most often seen in movies, that completely altered their features and even their skin color. Using these skillfully crafted latex masks, no law-enforcement agency yet had been able to identify any of the gang members. All of the men were of similar height and build and conducted themselves in a manner that seemed to suggest a military background. But with the United States having been on a war footing for over a decade and with the heists occurring across several states, the number of disgruntled former infantrymen who could be suspects ran into the tens of thousands.
In short, it had been the perfect crime. No evidence. No leads.
Until now. An informant had tipped Donovan off a week previously that the gang was rumored to have moved even farther south, losing themselves in New York’s population with a plan to hit one of the countless cash-checking centers located all over the city. A further tip put the target as the Pay-Go on Broadway. It was a good target, sitting on a broad intersection with multiple egress routes across to New Jersey, up into Midtown and Harlem or out across the East River to Queens and Long Island. If the gang hit either the Pay-Go or the armoured truck due to make its daily collection and were able to give police the slip, then they would have multiple opportunities to transfer vehicles, split up on foot or just hunker down somewhere and wait for the dust to settle.
A car pulled in ahead of them, a dark blue Prius with three occupants: one woman, one man and a young girl in a child seat. The man got out and kissed both the woman and the child goodbye. The Prius pulled away and the man walked to Karina’s car, opened the rear door and climbed in.
‘We need more units,’ he said as he closed the door.
Tom Ross was a young but dedicated service officer who had joined the department in his late teens and was now Karina’s partner. A firearms and forensics officer, he’d made detective by his twenty-sixth birthday, an extraordinary achievement by any standards. In the rear seat alongside Tom sat Glen Ryan, Karina’s boyfriend of the past five years. Glen was a former soldier who had joined the NYPD two years previously, all buzz-cut hair and square-jawed efficiency. It was like dating the Terminator, minus the sense of humor. Iraq and Afghanistan had drained Glen of his zest for life and he viewed most of humanity with a disappointed disdain.