The Nemesis Origin

V

The interior of the vehicle was much as Lopez remembered government vehicles being: smart but Spartan, with a smoked glass screen between the rear and front seats where two agents drove the vehicle back towards the city.

Lopez sat on a rearward facing seat with Aaron Devlin opposite. Upon closer inspection she figured he looked a little old for a DIA agent, somewhere in his late forties, his hair speckled with grey and his physique surrounded by a palpable aura of competence that verged on the threatening. His dark eyes watched her for what felt like an eternity as the car whispered along the asphalt.

‘You want a photo?’

‘I already have several. I’ve been studying them for some time.’

‘I bet you have.’

If Aaron Devlin had ever possessed a sense of humor, Lopez wasn’t sensing it.

‘You’ve got quite an attitude, Miss Lopez,’ Aaron said as he opened a file on his lap. ‘You seem to be doing quite well for yourself running Warner and Lopez Incorporated.’

‘It’s Lopez Incorporated,’ she corrected him. ‘And yes, things are busy and time is money. What do you want?’

‘It must be tough having to do all of this work on your own,’ Aaron observed as though not hearing her last. ‘And I suspect you’re wondering where Doug Jarvis is?’

During the course of five investigations for the Defense Intelligence Agency, her superior officer had been Douglas Jarvis, a former Marine officer. An elderly man with a wealth of experience of intelligence gathering, Jarvis had been something of a mercurial boss who had been willing to take chances with the lives of those under his command in order to advance the needs and requirements of the United States government. There was no doubting in Lopez’s mind that Jarvis was a patriot through and through, but it had been her decision to cease working for the DIA over a year previously due to the inherent and increasing risks to life and limb.

‘I really hadn’t thought about him,’ she replied. Aaron did not reply as he continue to leaf through the file. ‘Do be sure to send on my warmest regards.’

Aaron looked up at that, as she had intended — her tone conveyed anything but the warmest regards.

‘I have not met him,’ Aaron informed her. ‘I’ve been sent here by a different branch of the agency.’

‘I don’t work for the government anymore.’

‘I’m not here to ask for your work, I’m here to ask merely for a little help in finding somebody. I understand from your record that doing so is something at which you excel.’

Lopez shrugged. ‘If you can call digging crap out from under stones a skill.’

Aaron closed the file and folded his hands over it. ‘I’m here to talk about Israel.’

‘Beautiful country, never been there.’

‘But you have a connection to somebody who has. His name is Ethan Warner.’

Lopez smiled tightly. ‘Then why don’t you go ask him?’

‘We tried. Unfortunately, we have been unable to find him.’

‘Shame, can I go now?’

‘I think you know where he is.’

‘I think you know nothing,’ Lopez replied. ‘I haven’t seen Warner in almost a year.’

‘So I see from the file we have on Warner and Lopez Incorporated.’

‘Lopez Incorporated.’

‘Of course,’ Aaron smiled without warmth. ‘Warner took off. I suppose that must have left you feeling rather jilted to say the least?’

‘What’s your point, Devlin?’

‘That you probably do not hold Mr Warner in high regard, and that therefore it might be of some interest to you to have him found so that you can bring him to task for leaving you to work alone here in Chicago.’

‘It was a mutual decision,’ Lopez replied.

‘That so?’

‘He suggested he might want to leave, I agreed.’

Aaron raised an eyebrow. ‘Is setting fire to somebody’s motorbike and punching them in the face what you consider an agreement?’

‘It was an emotional moment,’ Lopez shrugged. ‘What’s this about?’

Aaron leaned forward in his seat as the street lights flashed by silently outside.

‘I have a problem, Miss Lopez, and at this time the only person we know who may be able to help is beyond our reach. There have been some discoveries recently that bear similarity to excavations made in the Negev desert in Israel some years ago, discoveries in which Ethan Warner was involved. I have it on record that both you and he signed nondisclosure agreements regarding these events, and I find it highly unlikely that you would truly have no idea at all where Ethan Warner has disappeared to.’

‘I find it highly unlikely that you think I would give a f…’ The sound of a truck’s horn blared outside the vehicle as it rushed past in the opposite direction. ‘… where Ethan Warner has disappeared to.’

‘He was your partner for several years.’

‘He was a pain in my ass for several years. People move on. He outlived his usefulness.’

Aaron leaned back in his seat and shook his head. ‘Was your relationship about something more than just business?’

A tiny smile curled from the corner of Lopez’s sculptured lips.

‘You’re starting to outlive your usefulness, Devlin,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know where Ethan Warner is and frankly I don’t give a damn. For all I know he’s disappeared up his own ass.’

Aaron sighed and looked out the window at the passing city.

‘There is more to this than just the government needing to speak to Ethan Warner. There could be immensely important implications in what’s happening, and right now we’re trying to play catch up because there are others way ahead of us.’

‘Others?’

‘Need to know,’ Aaron replied, ‘and like you said, you don’t work for the government anymore.’

‘Then we’re done here,’ Lopez informed him. ‘How about you be a good boy and drop me, Dyson and his crony off at Cook County Jail?’

Aaron watched her for a moment longer, and his reply was as deep and rumbling as the road beneath them.

‘So be it.’

It was close to midnight by the time Lopez finally got home.

True to his word, Aaron Devlin had ensured that both Dyson and his accomplice had been delivered to Cook County Jail, along with Lopez’s car which she had found parked by the sidewalk after she had booked Dyson in. She had also taken the precaution of downloading the video of both Dyson’s drug deal and assault attempt directly at the jail, just in case any of Dyson’s accomplices attempted to break into her offices and snatch the evidence away before she could bring it to court.

Lopez pulled into her parking slot and killed the engine, then sat quietly for a moment and rubbed her eyes. She was working eighteen hour days and could not really remember the last time she had taken a break to do anything other than wash, eat or sleep. The sheer number of bail jumpers and the scale of Chicago meant that tracking down any one perp’ was like looking for a needle in a haystack and as she had found out on numerous occasions, grabbing a needle sometimes hurt.

She got out of her car and walked towards the apartment block she had lived in for the past five years. Her apartment had been paid for by the proceeds of her very first investigation with Ethan Warner, which at least meant that her cost of living was appreciably lower than most people living in the city. That was just as well, because since working alone as a bail runner her income had dropped dramatically: most all bail companies employed several agents to track down and apprehend bail jumpers. Doing it solo was widely considered to be something of a lost cause, the romantic notion of a bounty hunter shattered by the sheer difficulty and low financial reward of hunting down individuals alone. Without Ethan Warner to back her up, every successful mission was the result of a long hard slog that often lasted weeks.

Lopez walked wearily up the steps toward the apartment entrance and was surprised to find a woman sitting at the top of the steps. Young, with long blonde hair and green eyes, the woman had obviously been waiting for some time because she got to her feet the moment she laid eyes on Lopez.

‘You must be Nicola?’ the woman said.

‘You must be psychic.’

The woman smiled and extended a hand. ‘Sorry, my name is Dr Lucy Morgan. Ethan told me a lot about you. Is he about?’

‘Sure he is,’ Lopez replied as she shook the proffered hand, ‘somewhere. If you find him, let me know as it seems everybody in the damned city’s looking for him.’

‘He’s not here?’

‘Hasn’t been for a year or so,’ Lopez replied. Despite being tired she could tell that Morgan was not of the same ilk as Dyson or Devlin, and she remembered enough of the name to recall that she was some sort of scientist. ‘You’d better come up.’

Lopez’s apartment was larger than most and reasonably well decorated, her feminine eye for tasteful furniture marred only by her natural disregard for tidiness. Magazines were scattered across the leather couch, a couple of small beer bottles stood on a glass coffee table in the centre of the lounge and a fairly impressive stack of washing-up remained untouched on the kitchen counter.

‘It’s a nice place you’ve got here,’ Lucy said politely as Lopez shut the door.

‘It was until I moved in and forgot to tidy. Make yourself at home in any space you can find.’

Lucy perched on the couch and watched with some consternation as Lopez un-holstered her pistol and laid it on the kitchen counter, followed by a nightstick, two savage-looking blades and what might have been a knuckle duster.

‘Tools of the trade,’ Lopez said with a faint smile as she saw Lucy’s concerned expression.

‘Ethan said that you were bounty hunters.’

‘Law enforcement assistance,’ Lopez replied as she tossed her leather jacket across a table and then slumped into a well-used armchair nearby. ‘We’re like street cleaners, sweeping up the trash and the dregs of society. Beer?’

‘I’m good,’ Lucy replied as Lopez pulled the cap from a bottle and took a deep swig.

‘What do you want Ethan for?’ Lopez asked. ‘I thought that the case he worked with you finished some years ago?’

‘In Washington DC, so I recall,’ Lucy replied with a nod. ‘It’s about where he met you, correct?’

Lopez replied simply by inclining her head in acquiescence.

‘Ethan kept in touch the year following my return to Chicago,’ Lucy explained. ‘He saved my life in Israel and remained friends with my mother Rachel, so I got to hear about your work from time to time.’

‘Must have been fun,’ Lopez replied.

‘Ethan didn’t say anything about the details. I got the impression he probably wasn’t allowed to.’

‘That’s government contracting for you.’

‘I think that what happened in Israel has happened again,’ Lucy said simply.

Lopez set her beer bottle on the coffee table between them and looked at Lucy for a long time. Because of the nondisclosure agreements signed by herself, Ethan and anybody else involved in the case they had shared little information on what had happened. Lopez had only met Ethan when he had arrived in Washington DC in search of a crazed Baptist minister by the name of Kelvin Patterson, whom it was alleged had paid Lucy Morgan to go in search of the remains of Angels buried in the deserts of Israel. What Lucy had found had not been the remains of Angels at all but something far more earth-shattering: the seven thousand year old remains of a creature not of this earth.

What Patterson had been intending to do with DNA of those remains had so appalled Lopez that she had not really allowed herself to think about it much. She had seen the consequences of the pastor’s actions in the deaths of many innocent people and had no wish to be involved in the case any further. In fact, virtually all of the cases that she and Ethan had worked for the DIA had involved a variety of paranormal or supernatural events, many of which had nearly cost them their lives.

‘This is kind of Ethan’s area of expertise,’ Lopez explained. ‘Have you contacted his family?’

Lucy nodded. ‘I spoke to his sister, Natalie, and she said that they speak to him regularly by phone but that they have no idea where he is.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

‘Natalie promised that she would tell him that I was looking for him but she admitted that contact with Ethan is sporadic and it could be weeks or even months before he speaks to her again. I don’t know who else to turn to.’

For the first time Lopez recognised a hint of fear in Lucy’s tone and instinctively her disinterest vanished as she leaned forward in her seat.

‘How do you know that somebody has made a similar discovery as the one in Israel?’

‘A man came to see me this morning,’ Lucy explained. ‘He insisted I share with him everything I knew about what was discovered in Israel. When I explained that I knew nothing, he threatened me.’

‘Do you know his name or where he came from?’

‘His name was Vladimir Polkov, and I think he was Russian or at the very least eastern European.’

‘And do you know anything about what was discovered in Israel?’

Lucy nodded. ‘I know a great deal about it, because I’ve been studying it for the past five years.’ She reached into her bag and produced a clear plastic cylinder. Inside the cylinder was a bone that looked a little like a finger bone but was much, much longer. ‘I think they were looking for this.’

Lopez peered at the bone for a moment and saw the label stuck to the outside of the cylinder. Inscribed with the word Negev and a date from five years previously, she did not need to ask what the bone was.

‘Who else knows that you have that?’ Lopez asked.

‘Just Ethan, because it was he who gave me this bone. He liberated it from the remains that I excavated in Israel and handed it to me before my return to Chicago, and before he met you in Washington DC. Miss Lopez, I don’t know who is watching me but I think they know that I’m lying and I’m not sure what they’re going to do next. I really need to find Ethan Warner — will you help me?’