Apocalypse

5

Ethan Warner pulled off his leather biker jacket and tossed it onto a couch in the office that he and Lopez had rented since founding Warner & Lopez Inc. Lopez and Jarvis followed him inside. The office contained little more than two desks, some filing cabinets, a safe, a cooler and a small television. Posters on the walls portrayed numerous bail-jumpers in the Chicago area, right out as far as the Michigan border. Being bail bondsmen wasn’t a glamorous part of their work, and nor was being hired as private detectives, but both jobs paid the bills.

Since losing everything years before in the aftermath of his fiancée’s disappearance, Ethan had been prudent with the money that Warner & Lopez Inc. brought in, but Lopez was another story. Impulsive to the point of recklessness, she had bought her Lotus despite having only managed to furnish half of her tiny apartment. Forced to send a third of her salary home to her impoverished family south of the border, she seemed to have given up on her once responsible attitude and thrown caution entirely to the wind.

Lopez shot Jarvis a dirty look as she tore an image of Hayden Decker from the wall and tossed it into a waste-basket with a flourish.

‘Eighteen thousand bucks down the drain,’ she said to him. ‘Thanks.’

Jarvis said nothing as Ethan and Lopez gathered cameras, notepads, cans of pepper spray and, from the safe, two sports bags that contained a change of clothes for each of them. Jarvis surveyed them from one side of the office, checking his watch every few moments.

The old man had once been Captain of a United States Marines rifle platoon, and Ethan’s senior officer from his time in the Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their friendship, cemented first during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and later when Ethan had resigned his commission and been embedded with Jarvis’s men as a journalist, had led to Warner & Lopez Inc.’s unusual and discreet accord with the Defense Intelligence Agency, where Jarvis continued to serve his country. So far, Ethan and Lopez had been involved in two major investigations for the DIA, both of which concerned what the agency liked to discreetly term anomalous discoveries.

‘So what’s the story?’ Ethan asked as he hefted his pistol thoughtfully in his hand. Then he stuffed it into his kit bag. Better safe than sorry.

Jarvis frowned at the weapon but did not protest.

‘Homicide, way down in Miami. County Sheriff sends in officers to investigate a witness report of a man fleeing his home under suspicious circumstances. The cops arrive, gain entry and find a dead woman and child, both executed with a single shot to the head.’

Ethan grimaced.

‘Any idea on the perpetrator? Could be family if the kid was shot too.’

‘The man who fled the scene is one Charles Purcell, the husband and father of the victims. He hasn’t been seen since, but he has contacted the police.’

Both Ethan and Lopez stopped what they were doing.

‘Why’d he do that?’ Lopez asked.

‘That,’ Jarvis replied, ‘is why you’re heading down there right now. He made a call to the officer heading up the investigation and told him to contact you, Ethan.’

Ethan stared at Jarvis for a long moment. ‘I don’t know anybody down in Miami.’

‘We’ve already run checks,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘There’s nothing to show that the two of you have ever met.’

Ethan felt a wave of foreboding sweep over him. Visions of a psychopathic serial killer with twisted plans of vengeance for some unknown or long-forgotten offense flickered darkly through his mind. Most all victims of the truly insane had no real understanding of why they were targeted, often because the reasons made sense only within the tortured crucible of their killer’s mind.

‘Then how does this guy Purcell know who I am?’ Ethan asked. ‘And what the hell’s a suspected murderer want with me?’

‘That’s what’s bothering us,’ Jarvis admitted. ‘This guy must have gone to some lengths in order to locate you.’

Ethan almost laughed at the absurdity of it all, but he glanced out of the office windows as though he were being watched. ‘How would he know where to find me if he doesn’t know me? It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Believe me,’ Jarvis replied, ‘not much about this case makes any sense right now. You two ready?’

Ethan, his thoughts fogged with confusion, zipped up his bag as Lopez slung hers over her shoulder and they walked out of the office onto the street outside. Ethan had just locked the door when a UPS truck pulled up alongside and the driver stepped out with a board-back envelope in his hand.

‘Ethan Warner?’ the driver asked him.

Ethan stepped forward and signed the driver’s palmtop, then took the envelope and looked at it.

‘You can open it when you get back,’ Jarvis said as he snatched the envelope away and slipped it through the mailbox. ‘We’ve got to move, okay?’

Ethan shrugged and followed Lopez and Jarvis into the Durango, which immediately pulled out and sped toward the nearest freeway heading south. Ethan experienced a mild sense of self-importance as he glanced around the hushed interior of the SUV and saw several other Durangos join them on the on-ramp and form an honor-guard around them as they sped through morning traffic. Silent hazard lights flashed on the roofs. Working for the DIA had often proved dangerous, but it had its advantages too.

‘Where are we going?’ Lopez asked.

‘Scott Air Force Base, Belleville,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I’ll explain when we get there.’

‘What’s the rush?’ Ethan asked. ‘Fugitive’s on the run. The first forty-eight hours are crucial, but isn’t local law enforcement on the case already?’

‘We’ve shut them down for now. Only the senior investigating officer is still in the loop. As far as we know we have about twelve hours to solve this case. Time is everything.’

‘Fill us in then,’ Lopez suggested, as the SUV careered through the rush-hour traffic. ‘What’s so special about this guy Purcell?’

Jarvis opened a glossy black folder emblazoned with the DIA’s logo, handing Ethan and Lopez each an identical file as he read.

‘Charles Purcell is a physicist who worked for fifteen years at NASA, down at Cape Canaveral. He was a major player in many of the scientific experiments that were carried into space aboard the Shuttle, not to mention his contribution to the Hubble space telescope. Apparently, however, the central focus of his work within the agency was the study of time.’

Ethan felt a faint glimmer of relief. As psychopaths went, a diligent scientist was somewhat less threatening than a coked-up Hell’s Angel. He raised an eyebrow. ‘So he was a clock-watcher then?’

‘I’ll do the jokes,’ Jarvis replied, without looking up from his file. ‘Purcell made some astounding theoretical breakthroughs during his career, but they were considered so radical that NASA routinely denied him funds to conduct experiments to confirm his equations, preferring to support more conventional work instead.’

‘So what happened to him?’ Lopez asked as she leafed through her copy of the file without interest and twirled a loop of her long black hair through her fingers.

Jarvis turned a page in his file.

‘Purcell resigned his post at NASA and began working freelance for various private organizations, many of them charities.’

‘That’s a major change of pace for a physicist,’ Ethan observed. ‘You think that he just got tired of doing equations?’

‘Quite the opposite, or so we suspect,’ Jarvis replied. ‘You see, Charles Purcell had followed in his father’s footsteps for most of his life. Montgomery Purcell had worked with the US Government on the Manhattan Project, which led to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and the end of the Second World War. From what we can gather, Purcell Senior continued working in the government’s weapons programs until his death.’

‘What happened to him?’ Ethan asked. ‘He can’t have been very old when he died, if Charles Purcell is his son.’

‘That’s the interesting bit,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Montgomery Purcell disappeared without trace whilst flying a light aircraft in 1968. No wreckage was ever found, nor were there any witnesses to the crash. Essentially, he vanished.’

After the trauma of recent years, Ethan considered himself something of an authority on vanished people. Even before Joanna had disappeared they had worked together on government corruption scandals in various countries that had involved enforced abductions of wealthy citizens: ransom to order. Many of the unfortunate victims had been located and liberated due to their investigations in countries like Mexico and Colombia.

‘Where exactly was he when he vanished?’ Lopez asked Jarvis.

The old man looked up at them. ‘The Bermuda Triangle.’