‘You publish it,’ Ethan asked, ‘under a different name? Or send it to England?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I had a better idea: just stay under the radar and keep collating evidence until there’s so much of it that it could never be denied. Especially, as I, the author, had effectively come back from the dead and could identify half of the men who had worked for the CIA out in Gaza. Those were the more experienced men but, of course, they always end up on home turf eventually, retired or whatever. I got a few of them on film.’
Ethan marveled at her tenacity and determination. ‘So you’ve been doing this for over a year now?’
‘Fourteen months,’ she replied. ‘But it’s getting harder. They’re cracking down, and the number of survivors of the original MK-ULTRA is getting less and less. We need to find one alive and get them to do a disappearing act all of their own, or everything I’ve achieved so far will be for nothing.’
‘How many CIA agents have you leaned on?’ Ethan asked.
‘Five,’ Joanna replied. ‘Some broke quicker than others, but they all spilled their guts when I got the power tools out.’
Ethan blinked. ‘Literally?’
Joanna’s gaze was hard and steady. ‘Just like they taught me all that time in Gaza, it’s the threat that’s more effective than the action. I gave each of them a good beating, enough that they didn’t doubt I’d go all the way. Once I got the tools out, they blubbered like little children and told me everything.’
‘Enough to hold a case in court?’ Ethan asked.
‘I doubt it,’ she replied. ‘Evidence obtained under duress and all that, but I know far more than I should about it all. The director must be quivering in his boots.’
‘He is,’ Ethan confirmed.
‘You’ve spoken to him?’
‘My boss has,’ Ethan said, nodding. ‘He thought that William Steel was afraid of being hit by an assassin. Seems like his biggest fear is you managing to drag him into a courtroom: he must have ordered the hits on the CIA agents you targeted, and must also have allowed you to be subjected to these experiments. That gets out, he’s done, totally. He’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars.’
‘That’s the plan,’ Joanna replied. ‘What have you been up to here?’
‘We’ve been doing something similar,’ he replied. ‘MK-ULTRA has been largely shut down but its legacy is right across the country. There could be hundreds of American citizens out there who have no idea that they’ve been experimented on, living here and in foreign countries. Just because the CIA has finally mothballed the program doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have the capacity to now use the assets created by it.’ Ethan looked up at Joanna. ‘Maybe even you.’
Joanna smiled bitterly and shook her head.
‘They tried cerebral reprogramming,’ she said, ‘spent weeks showing me those hours of images and footage, trying to desensitise me to violence or provoke outrage by showing me images of corruption and police brutality in the Middle East and using those damned electrodes.’
‘It didn’t work?’ Ethan asked.
‘Not even close,’ Joanna replied. ‘The thing was, I’d already seen it all and knew about it. It’s not like my father, who went straight from college and linguistics school into the army and off to Singapore. Times are different now. People have much better knowledge of life overseas: we have twenty-four-hour news, a free media. My father probably fell for these experiments because his knowledge of the world was not as extensive as mine. All that I got from it was a better idea of how to shoot dramatic photographs.’ She smirked. ‘Would have cost me a couple of thousand bucks for a course like that back home.’
Ethan gave a rueful shake of his head. ‘You’ve handled everything that’s happened better than I thought possible,’ he admitted.
‘Maybe, but otherwise, they were doing their job well, almost totally ruined me through isolation and sleep deprivation, until their idiot doctor showed up to run the experiments. He wore a watch and I caught sight of the date and time. Gave me the anchor I needed to hold out.’
‘You get a name?’ Ethan asked, his fists clenched on the table.
‘Sheviz,’ Joanna spat. ‘Damon Sheviz.’
Ethan looked at her for a long time and then a grim smile crept across his face. ‘Well, I can tell you that Damon Sheviz met a prolonged and painful demise at the hands of Bedouin tribesmen out in the deserts of Israel a couple of years ago.’
Joanna’s eyes flared in amazement as she looked at him. ‘You knew him?’
‘Found him on my first case for the DIA,’ Ethan explained. ‘He was by then using a similar experiment that he used on you, to try to clone the blood of another species to create hybrid embryos.’
‘He said something about that,’ Joanna said, thoughtfully. ‘That he’d only need my blood and that I no longer needed to survive the experiments. What species was he trying to clone?’
‘You don’t want to know.’ Ethan said as he leaned close. ‘Did you learn anything that we could use to bring them down?’
Joanna shook her head. ‘They weren’t that slack,’ she admitted, ‘but I do have my secret weapon.’
‘The names you memorized?’
Joanna nodded. ‘Not all of the names were tracked down by MK-ULTRA, due to the age of the list they were using from the First World War. I’ve managed to follow a trail out here, which tied in nicely with my search for Aaron Lymes.’
‘You found somebody?’ Ethan asked in amazement.
‘Not yet,’ Joanna cautioned. ‘The list of names refers to people who have been dead for many years. It’s tracking down their descendants, the ones who were experimented on, that’s hard.’
Ethan nodded. ‘You have the same list as we do, compiled from the experiences of families during the First World War.’
‘Crisis-apparitions,’ Joanna confirmed. ‘But I may have gotten a little further than you in identifying living descendants. I managed to track a family name from England in the early 1900s through family trees and records. Their name was originally Barraclough, but only the daughter of the family survived.’
‘Yeah, that’s the name we foud. You tracked them all the way here, to New York?’ Ethan asked.
‘Sure did,’ she acknowledged. ‘The daughter married a wealthy businessman by the name of Wilbur Thompson and they had three children, two of them girls. One girl married but died of pneumonia in her early thirties, without having had children.’
‘And the other?’ Ethan asked.
‘The other was a Mary Thompson, who moved to New York at the age of fifteen with her parents, just before the first shots of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, after France fell to the Nazis in the Second World War. It seems her folks feared that the United Kingdom would fall, too, and decided to get out of dodge. They settled in Manhattan and the daughter married in 1965.’
‘Who did she marry?’
‘A New York police sergeant by the name of Harold Ross. I’ve been tracking his family down.’
The name bounced around the inside of Ethan’s mind and finally he had confirmation of his worst fears.
‘My God, it’s Tom.’
‘Who’s Tom?’ Joanna asked. ‘You’ve already found the family?’
Ethan got up from the table. ‘We need to leave, now.’