Covenant

54

The Israeli Humvee in which Ethan sat handcuffed to a door handle was hardly a luxury vehicle, but in his exhausted state the rolling of the chassis on the road and the hum of the engine was almost comforting. He wound down a window and let the cool night air blow away some of the weariness aching through his bones.

Along with Rachel he had been safely escorted across the Gazan border at Erez; the Israeli troops there were forewarned of their passing. Now, the glittering panorama of Jerusalem glowed against the horizon while above a thousand stars glistened like jewels adrift on a black sea. Ethan stared at them, hearing Hassim’s words whispering across the empty void above, of gargantuan stars and broiling elements, of supernovas and embryonic solar systems, of the cycle of life replayed endlessly across the tremendous ages that had passed and were yet to come, long after he had been cast back into the dusts from which he had been forged. Life, everywhere.

Somehow, the traumas of his life seemed suddenly trivial against the epic backdrop of the universe. Even Joanna’s shadowy presence, her unknown fate looming over everything that he did, seemed inconsequential. Nothing matters. One day he would be nothing more than a footnote in history, or an image in a photograph, dead and forgotten along with his woes. Maybe he should just quit and get out of Israel before his time came to a premature end.

But then he looked at Rachel, and remembered that science didn’t have an explanation for the human spirit, for courage, fortitude, or love.

She sat beside him, her head nestled against a jacket folded up against the opposite window frame. She had fallen asleep within minutes of crossing the border an hour previously, and despite the hardship and trauma that she had endured over the last few days, her sleeping face was an image of serenity. No regrets. Her inner demons, doubts, fears, and insecurities were temporarily silenced by the solitude of a sleep that still eluded Ethan.

He turned away and looked into the blackness of the Israeli night. Far out to the east, the first faint line of dawn was creeping toward them, broken ribbons of distant cloud black against the deep blue. He looked at his watch: 5:26 a.m.

He looked again at Rachel. Ethan’s past was full of regrets packed, jammed, and shoehorned into every crevice of his existence until some had inevitably spilled out to contaminate his present. He regretted not attending college, regretted resigning his commission in the U.S. Marines and the animosity that had developed between himself and his father as a result, regretted becoming a journalist, regretted the risks he had undertaken and the risks he had exposed others to, and he regretted most of all losing Joanna in this brutal and uncaring corner of the world.

And now he had let Rachel down too.

Rachel yawned, sitting upright and peering out of the window. “Where are we?”

“About ten miles from Jerusalem,” Ethan said.

“You haven’t slept,” she observed.

“Didn’t want to,” Ethan lied, and immediately wondered why.

Rachel’s eyes narrowed slightly, almost playfully, and then it was as though she suddenly recalled where they were and why, and her features sagged. She looked at her makeshift pillow, probably wishing she could return to oblivion.

“Hassim,” Ethan said to her in an effort to distract her. “Before he died he mentioned something called cargo cults. You know what they are?”

Rachel ran her fingers through her long black hair and sighed.

“There’s a few of them, mostly in the Pacific,” she said. “They’re Melanesians who encountered Westerners for the first time during World War II when U.S. Marines were advancing on the Japanese. What’s that got to do with Lucy?”

“Just bear with me for a moment,” Ethan said. “Why do they call them cargo cults?”

“Well, the occupying American forces built runways on the islands, brought in supplies using aircraft loaded with weapons, radios, medicine, and suchlike. They had a good relationship with the islanders. But when the war was over they left, taking their equipment with them and leaving the islanders alone again. What happened was that the islanders built mock runways complete with air control towers, hangars, and aircraft made of straw. They even sat in them wearing wooden radio earpieces, trying to make contact with the great gods and their powerful sky machines. They would have flaming torches at night on the runways to guide down the ‘airships,’ or march up and down with either salvaged or wooden rifles like parading troops, mimicking American dress styles and behavior.”

“And all of it to bring the Americans back?” Ethan asked.

“Pretty much.” Rachel nodded. “The practices eradicated any existing religious observances they previously had. The leaders of the cults promised their people that if they did all of this, then the ‘gods’ would return. It got the leaders power, and it gave the people hope that they were not alone anymore, that they were special.”

Ethan shook his head in wonder.

“Hassim Khan was right. The ancients didn’t have extraterrestrial help in building their megastructures: they built them themselves in an attempt to reestablish contact with their godlike visitors.” He looked at her. “How many cargo cults could there have been?”

“In history? Thousands,” Rachel said. “The Nazca’s lines in Peru, depicting animals on such a scale that they’re only visible from the air, would be among the most likely candidates.”

“Right,” Ethan agreed. “I’ve heard about them, and as icons visible from great heights they’d be perfect.”

“Most of the pyramidal structures built by civilizations around the world could have served a similar purpose,” Rachel agreed, “and they’re everywhere, not just in Egypt. Mesopotamian ziggurats that were once colorfully painted, Nubian pyramids in Sudan, the Sula Temple in Java, the granite temples of the Chola Empire in India, others in Samoa and Greece and those of the Maya and Aztecs at Teotihuacan in South America. The pyramids in Egypt are the most famous, but few people realize that there is not a single hieroglyphic anywhere suggesting that they were burial sites for pharaohs, or that they were once covered with smooth white sandstone: they would have shone like beacons in sunlight, perhaps brightly enough to be visible from space. Virtually every religion on Earth could have started out as a sort of cargo cult and just grown from there.”

“And pyramids would make sense as they’re a stable structure,” Ethan said. “I’ve read that we know they were built by human hands because the graves of the builders were found near the pyramids themselves in Egypt, complete with hieroglyphics recording their achievements.”

“Stability is one reason,” Rachel said. “But we’re used to seeing pyramids from the ground. If you fly directly above one, you see a big X in a box.” She smiled. “Sometimes, X does mark the spot.”

Ethan grinned ruefully.

“What are you going to do when we get back to the city?” Rachel asked him.

“Meet with Ambassador Cutler, Shiloh Rok, or anyone in the Knesset who’ll listen and tell them what’s happened. We need them aware that MACE is involved in this.”

Rachel sighed. “We still don’t know that for sure. They were at Lucy’s dig site and they pursued us, violently, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they abducted Lucy.”

“MACE,” Ethan said carefully, “whoever they are and whatever they’re doing here, have no interest in Lucy’s survival.”

“They were at the site. It doesn’t mean they abducted Lucy, only that they found and were excavating the remains. We can’t lay blame without proof; that’s not how the law works.”

Ethan felt disbelief sluice through his gullet. “You’re living in denial.”

“Tell me what happened to your fiancée.”

Rachel’s unexpectedly direct question stumped Ethan.

“It’s not worth the telling.”

“It is, to me.”

Ethan turned away from her and looked out of the window even though there was nothing to see but the inky blackness. He looked down, and saw his hands trembling in the darkness. Nervous exhaustion, lack of sleep. More hallucinations would come next, probably, like the one in the market square in Jerusalem. He folded his hands tightly together, looking out the window and seeing Rachel’s reflection watching him in the glass as she spoke.

“Since we came here I have trusted you, relied upon you, and taken risks with you because my father told me that if anyone could find Lucy, it was you. I think I have a right to know why that is.”

“I haven’t found your daughter yet and I never said that I could,” Ethan murmured.

“No,” Rachel admitted. “That’s why I want to know the truth. I may have to spend the rest of my life wondering what happened to her. I might end up like you.”

Ethan shot her a sideways glance. “End up like me?”

“Cynical,” Rachel said, “aloof, nihilistic, thinking that nothing is worth anything. I want to know why you’re like you are so I can try to be something else.”

Ethan looked outside again for a long moment before whispering a name as though he were speaking of a ghost.

“Joanna.” He could see Rachel staring at him in the window’s reflection. His own face was illuminated starkly on one side by the glow from the city ahead, the other half lost in deep shadow. “Joanna Defoe was my fiancée. We met while I was serving in the Marines and she was covering the invasion of Iraq, embedded with our platoon. We fell in love, the usual crap. I resigned my commission and worked freelance with her after my unit pulled out of Iraq, traveling together to wherever the news was: New Orleans, Aceh, Afghanistan, Africa, you name it.”

Having started, Ethan let the words fall from his lips, not looking at Rachel but staring out into the shadows sprawled like slumbering demons in the desert darkness.

“While everyone else was covering the war on terror, we decided to change tack and cover the smaller stories, human stories, things that were forgotten in the wake of the obsession with terrorism.”

“Where did you go?” Rachel asked in a whisper.

“Bogotá, Colombia,” Ethan replied. “We’d uncovered a lot of reports there of abductions, criminal syndicates that owned the police forces, a hostage-ransom industry, not to mention the trade in drugs coming from South America. After exposing a number of corrupt officials within the Colombian government, we decided to do the same again, this time in Gaza. During that time we gained a reputation for being able to locate missing people as a result of our investigations.”

Ethan did not feel as though he was speaking, the words drifting through his awareness as though he was picking up a faint distress signal on an archaic radio.

“We wrote several articles about atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza City by both Hamas and Israel that made the international press, but I suppose somehow we dug too deep or pissed off too many people who were making too much money to see their dirty little industries shut down. Joanna Defoe vanished from Gaza City on the afternoon of December 14, 2008, abducted by persons unknown. No ransom, no contact, no information or evidence. Nobody knew a thing about it except that a cleaner said she’d seen someone wearing clothes that matched Joanna’s being dragged from the back door of the hotel we were staying in, with a bag over her head, and that the person was dumped into a car that disappeared. No plates, maybe dark blue in color, she thought. Maybe.”

Ethan’s voice trailed off as though he was miming the words, watching in his mind’s eye as the past replayed itself once again on an endless, miserable loop.

“I spent the next two years searching for her. I used up all of our savings, sold everything we possessed, spent months scouring the alleys and back streets, the refugee camps and villages for her. I printed thousands of pictures of her and put them up all over Gaza City.” He shook his head. “I never heard a word.”

Rachel waited patiently as he went on.

“When the money ran out I thought I’d just curl up and die, that there was no point in going on because there was nothing worth going on for. It was Amy O’Hara, a journalist friend who had covered our stories, who helped me from Chicago to find Joanna. I’d done a piece on missing journalists in the hope of raising awareness. Amy read it, hated what had happened, and decided to help me out. She actually came out to Jerusalem in the end, lent me some money, and told me to get out of the city and find the world again. That Joanna was probably dead and gone, and that even if she wasn’t, there was nothing more that I could do. That if I didn’t leave I’d just destroy myself.”

Rachel remained silent, Ethan speaking without thought or conscious planning.

“So I did. I went back to Chicago, back to work. I did okay until the pointlessness of it all hit me. I resigned my job, gave up on whatever it was I had left. The thing about it was, I didn’t care, didn’t give a shit. I might just as well have been dead already.”

Ethan fell silent, caught in the web of his own memories, of months and years lost in a paralysis of grief. Rachel’s voice spoke softly from nearby.

“What happened next?”

Ethan roused himself.

“Nothing happened next,” he said. “I’ve been fully unemployed ever since. Posttraumatic stress, they call it, makes me medically unable to work. I don’t sleep much, maybe an hour here, an hour there.” Ethan shrugged to himself, felt her penetrating gaze on him but went on talking quietly. “She was a great person, Joanna. You’d have liked her. She loved life. Always full of energy, always quick with a joke. Bright. Cheerful. One of those people that you can’t help but like.”

Ethan’s voice started to become strained as though his vocal chords were being twisted.

“You’ve got some idea, now, of what it’s like when someone you love so much just vanishes, completely and utterly, without explanation or information. What it’s like when you have no idea if they are safe or not, suffering or not, alive or not. I have images of people harming her, and of going and finding those people and skinning them alive, or having them fed to sharks or lowered feetfirst into wood-chipping machines.” He saw Rachel wince and shook his head. “It brings things out in you that you can’t imagine.”

Ethan glanced out of the window, fatigue amplifying his grief.

“I send her parents flowers on her birthday, every year. They always return them unopened. I still don’t feel right alone in bed at night unless I wrap her T-shirt around a pillow next to me. Can you believe that?”

He lowered his head, not willing to let Rachel see what he knew she already must have seen. His voice when he spoke sounded strained in his own ears.

“I wanted to find out what happened to her, and to find Lucy for you. I thought maybe I could put this all right, but I can’t. There’s no such thing as a hero when there’s no way to solve a case. There’s nothing more I can do for you here except tell the authorities about MACE’s involvement.”

Rachel’s reflection was pinched with remorse.

“You’ve done enough,” she said quietly. “It took a lot for you to come out here after all that’s happened. I wouldn’t have come this far alone.”

Ethan was still unable to bring himself to look at her.

Rachel squeezed his arm and rested her head against it, while Ethan continued to stare out of the window at the pale strip of light now slicing across the eastern horizon.