Apocalypse (54 page)

Jarvis reached out and tapped a button on the keyboard. A window popped up on the screen, with a message that read ‘Video 1 of 2’. Jarvis tapped the play button, and in an instant
Ethan was transported back years into his past.

A high-angle shot of Gaza City and the dangerous alleys of Jabaliya, a refugee camp crouched in the city’s northern reaches. Bright daylight, angular buildings blasted dry by a thousand
suns, abandoned vehicles and mangled masonry shattered by the incendiaries of Israel’s fighter planes.

The camera zoomed in to an altitude of perhaps thirty feet as, from a doorway, a tight huddle of figures burst out into the street. Masked faces aimed Kalashnikov rifles in all directions,
covering their points as they advanced toward a waiting dark-blue sedan stained with dust. In their midst a woman. Blonde hair. Tall. Shoved and jostled by her captors.

Ethan sucked in a breath and leaned close to the monitor, one hand reaching out as if of its own accord, to touch the screen where Joanna stood. The gunmen pushed her toward the car, hard enough
to make her stumble as she squinted. Ethan’s brain went into overtime.

‘She’s been held in darkness,’ he said quickly, his mind working faster than his mouth could produce words. ‘Her shirt’s fairly new. Hair’s longer than when I
last saw her. She’s not bound or gagged. Looks fairly healthy, a bit pale, maybe.’

‘Camera resolution can play with colors,’ Jarvis corrected him, then conceded Ethan’s point. ‘But she’s definitely squinting, so she’s been held
inside.’

The gunmen huddled in a tight circle around Joanna. One of their number broke ranks and sprinted across the street. Reached the door of the sedan and opened it. Immediately, the vehicle exploded
in a violent fireball that scattered the gunmen like skittles. Ethan glimpsed the tight huddle of men around Joanna tumble as though hit by a hurricane, as a scythe of supersonic shrapnel sliced
through their ranks.

Ethan leapt up out of his seat as his guts plunged inside him, one hand flying loosely to his lips as his other clenched into a fist. Thick clouds of smoke and dust swirled, obscuring his view.
He stared at the screen as, through the veils of smoke, the scattered bodies of the fallen gunmen began hauling themselves to their feet, and then a burst of gunfire shattered masonry around them
and kicked up tiny clouds of dust as bullets hailed down the street.

‘Jo.’

Her name fell from his lips as though she had never left his life. Bullets slammed into the already-stunned gunmen and hurled them into walls or onto their backs on Gaza’s ancient soil.
Ethan saw a pair of Israeli halftracks advancing toward the gunmen, a large-caliber section weapon atop each hosing bullets down the street and scouring it of life.

‘Shit, Doug!’

Jarvis did not move, and Ethan stared in stunned silence as the halftracks stopped firing. The street was littered with the dead or writhing bodies of masked gunmen, and framed by a thick
coiling pillar of smoke from the wrecked sedan. Israeli troops spilled from behind the halftracks and advanced down the street with their rifles aimed ahead of them, kicking dead bodies and firing
rounds into those that still showed signs of life.

The thick smoke from the burning car drifted clear of the street for a brief instant, and Ethan saw the tight knot of dead gunmen lying sprawled at awkward angles in the bright sunshine.

And Joanna was nowhere to be seen.

Ethan stared at the screen, unable to tear his gaze from it. ‘Where did she go?’

‘I don’t know, Ethan. But she clearly did not die in this raid by Israeli forces. They were looking for her, Ethan. After what happened when you worked for me there, the Israeli
Defense Force has kept an ear to the ground for information leading to the whereabouts of Joanna Defoe. They even offered a reward. An informant tipped them off.’

Ethan stared at the screen for a moment longer, and then he slowly turned and looked at Jarvis, his throat dry as he spoke.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Six months ago, Ethan.’

Ethan flopped back in his seat as sharp points of pain pierced the corners of his eyes. He dragged a hand down his face.

‘Watchman could track her movements,’ he said, ‘find out where she went.’

‘My leverage didn’t extend that far,’ Jarvis said apologetically. ‘This was all the time I could scrounge. Most of it was spent finding her and then grabbing this
footage.’

Ethan shot out of his seat again. ‘Then get more time!’

‘I had to pull in another favor for you.’ Jarvis raised his hands defensively. ‘I couldn’t get any more than I did. If I could, you know that I would have.’

Ethan leaned on the desk and took a deep breath.

‘What other favor?’ he asked finally.

‘Ethan, we downloaded the contents of the camera that you retrieved from Joaquin Abell before he died. We’ve seen all of it.’

Ethan lifted his head. ‘You’ve seen six months into the future?’

Jarvis offered him a brief smile.

‘Everything as seen through the lens of that camera,’ he confirmed. ‘I have to say that, for the most part, it was remarkably boring. The camera’s travels did not exactly
bring it into contact with much except our own agency’s various buildings and offices. I suppose we should have known better: once we acquired it, the camera was in our own hands and thus
would only see what we see.’

‘You’re saying that, after all that, after Scott Bryson and Dennis Aubrey gave their lives, all we got was six months of your office furniture and people using the coffee
machine?’

‘Well, it’s not quite that bad,’ Jarvis said. ‘One of our analysts managed to obtain glimpses of future news reports, events occurring in the operations rooms of the
building, that kind of thing. Of course, once we saw that footage, we knew that one way or another the camera would end up in those rooms. The point is, it caught enough information to have been
more than worthwhile: most of it is sensitive enough to have been classified.’

Ethan chewed his lip for a moment.

‘You likely to be able to stop any wars or anything because of it?’

‘No,’ Jarvis admitted, ‘but the lives of a good number of soldiers and operatives working overseas will be saved and otherwise dangerous situations avoided. You and Lopez did
good yet again, Ethan, and the director was delighted with what you’ve achieved. The unit here will continue to receive funding and you’re getting more interest from the
Pentagon.’

Ethan managed a faint smile of relief.

‘At least we won’t have to spend all of our time chasing bail runners around Illinois,’ he said finally.

Jarvis nodded, glancing at the computer. Ethan peered at him.

‘Is there something else on this computer you wanted to show me?’

Jarvis nodded slowly.

‘Yes, there is. When we finished reviewing the footage, and despite the fact that the contents were marked as classified, the director agreed with me that, considering the lengths you and
Lopez went to in obtaining the footage for us, you deserved to see the final part of it. Ethan, sit down again, please.’

A tremor of apprehension twisted through Ethan’s guts.

‘What’s going on here, Doug?’ he asked, reluctantly sitting down.

‘There’s no way to describe it,’ Jarvis replied. ‘You’ve just got to see it for yourself. You understand that what you are about to see will not happen for six
months, and that it cannot be discussed beyond this room. It must remain absolutely classified, and between you and me. Not Lopez, not anyone.’

Ethan nodded, but Jarvis put his hand on Ethan’s shoulder.

‘Let me hear you say it, Ethan.’

‘I understand.’

Jarvis nodded, and Ethan looked at the blank monitor before him. Jarvis reached down to the keyboard and pressed one of the buttons. Immediately, an image appeared on the screen before him. It
was dark and indistinct, and he wasn’t sure what he was looking at until his brain processed the scene and it leapt into life before him.

There was no sound, and the image occasionally flickered with static as coils of energy flared around the edges of the screen.

Ethan saw a forest, deep and black, impenetrable trees lining a trail that wound its way through the woods into the inky distance. The sky above was velvet black, and jagged mountain peaks
towered across the horizon in the distance, their snowy peaks glowing blue beneath a brilliant white moon high above.

Ethan’s eyes flicked down to the trail below as he caught sight of movement, a shadow against the shadows. A body was slumped on the trail, and as it moved he saw a thick mass of long
black hair draped across damp grass. The body wearily lifted its head, and Ethan felt a bolt of electricity spasm through his chest as he recognized the face.

‘Lopez.’

Ethan stared at the screen, transfixed, as Lopez looked over her shoulder and away from the camera. He saw her begin to frantically drag herself toward the camera, as though trying to escape
from something.

And then he saw it.

From the dense forest blackness a huge man lumbered into view. Heavy arms dangled from broad, thick shoulders, huge legs strode cumbersomely beneath a thick fur coat. The man was wearing an
oddly shaped cap that was almost conical, but it was his size that stunned Ethan. The guy must have been two meters tall, and—

Ethan’s heart stopped in his chest as he realized that the man was not wearing a coat, and was not wearing a hat. For a moment he thought that perhaps a bear had reared onto its hind legs
and was tracking Lopez, but then he saw the face briefly illuminated by the moon’s pale light, and the unmistakably humanoid features, a low and heavy brow with eyes sunken into deep
sockets.

Thick fur hung in knotted tags as the broad, flat face looked down at Lopez as she hauled herself toward the camera. A thick, meaty hand as big as Lopez’s entire head reached down and
stopped her before the creature looked up, as though noticing the camera. Ethan felt fear shudder through his guts as he looked into a pair of eyes that belonged to something that was both human
and animal, an unspeakable chimera of man and beast.

Ethan watched as the red eyes flared angrily at the camera, and then a huge arm flashed across the screen and swatted the camera into the air, and the image crashed into static and vanished.

Ethan sat in stunned silence and stared at the screen. Joanna was alive, Lopez was facing death and he didn’t have the first clue about which problem he should deal with first. He looked
up at Jarvis in despair.

‘You know the future, Ethan,’ Jarvis said, ‘but you’re going to have to deal with that yourself.’

I often get asked by readers just how much of the science incorporated within my novels is ‘real’. The simple answer is that
all
of the science within my
novels is real, but some of it is stretched to embrace the extreme events that are part and parcel of thriller fiction.

As described in
Apocalypse
, we really do see back in time the further away we look, the speed of light does have a finite velocity and an endeavour like
Project Watchman
is
entirely within the physical and technological capabilities of the United States’ intelligence community. Their KH-11 ‘Keyhole’ satellites are also real, and are rumoured to have
optics more than capable of clearly photographing newspaper articles from orbit. Modern supercomputers could indeed crunch data sufficiently to provide a virtual replay of events from around the
globe: only the storage of so many years of data might prove problematic. Quantum computers, just over our technological horizon, may resolve that issue.

The only science that I have adjusted for the sake of the plot in
Apocalypse
is the black hole itself. In reality it would take a black hole with the mass of hundreds of suns to produce
the time-dilation described in the novel: an object this massive would swallow our entire planet almost instantaneously. Time-dilation, however, is real, as is the ability of objects to travel
through time via extreme velocities. If one were able to stand alongside the event horizon of a sufficiently massive black hole, then time would indeed be dilated in the manner described. Although
a low-mass black hole could probably be suspended in a tokomak just like Joaquin Abell’s, the gravitational field of such an object would not be likewise contained: it would continue to
affect its surroundings both inside and outside of the chamber.

At the time of writing, physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN labs in Geneva have observed what they believe to be the fabled Higgs boson, the elementary particle
responsible for mass in our universe. This discovery paves the way for a greater understanding of our universe, and potentially brings the subject matter in
Apocalypse
one step closer to
reality.

Dean Crawford, 2012

Since the publication of the first Ethan Warner novel, Covenant, time has flown by so incredibly quickly. The writing of new novels in the series, the rounds of edits on each of
them, the new projects and the crime festivals have been a constant whirlwind of activity. I couldn’t have done any of it without the fabulous support of the publishing team at Simon &
Schuster, my literary agent Luigi Bonomi at LBA, my wonderful partner Debbie and our beautiful daughter Emma, and my family and friends who continue to champion my work so enthusiastically. Thanks
also go to aspiring author Dean Owen, who won my blog competition to suggest the title for this book while I was writing it. Although ultimately not used by the publisher, it was an inspired choice
and I’m sure his is a name you’ll see on bookshelves before long.

Finally, at the time of writing, a team working at the CERN laboratories in Geneva have reportedly found the fabled Higgs boson, the particle that holds our universe together and is responsible
for gravity: many thanks to them for spearheading the forward march of science and perhaps bringing the subject matter of this novel a little closer to reality.