Ben Hope 05 - The Shadow Project Page 19

  Salt kept gaping speechlessly at Ben.

  ?Now clean that beer up, and let?s go outside and talk.?

  Salt hesitated, then tore off a length of kitchen roll from a dispenser next to the stove. He used the paper to mop up the puddle on the floor while Ben grabbed two more beer cans from the fridge and led the way outside. Salt joined him, watching him warily, and they sat opposite one another at the picnic table.

  Ben snapped open his beer. ?I?m sorry if I scared you before, Lenny. I didn?t want to.?

  Salt grunted in reply, opened his own can with a spit of foam and took a long gulp, keeping his eyes on Ben. The business card was still clenched in his fist, and he scrutinised it carefully, first its printed front, then the blank back, staring at it as though it was the lost map to the secret US Government alien farm at Roswell.

  ?No invisible ink,? Ben said. ?No holographic cryptograms.?

  Salt looked up. ?Tactical Training Unit? What does that mean??

  ?It?s my business. Just a training school.?

  ?Bullshit. It means you?re military.?

  ?Was military,? Ben said. ?Not any more.?

  ?Sure. That?s what you would say, isn?t it?? Salt sneered. ?I don?t talk to people like you.?

  ?I?m being completely honest with you. I?ve been out of the military for a long time now. I left there to do my own thing, and now I teach people how to do the same. I could give you the phone numbers of a dozen people who?d vouch for that.?

  ?Teach them to do what?? Salt asked suspiciously.

  ?To protect vulnerable people and stop bad things happening to them,? Ben said. ?And if something bad?s already happened, to help them get out of it. To find people who?ve been kidnapped, or who?ve got into trouble.?

  ?So you?re a detective??

  ?Not exactly.?

  ?A cop??

  ?Definitely not,? Ben said.

  Salt narrowed his eyes. ?Are you looking for someone now??

  Ben nodded. ?Yes, I am. I?m looking for a young woman who might have got herself mixed up in something very dangerous. And I?m hoping you might be able to help me with information. I?ll pay you for your time.? He dug some notes out of his wallet and held them up so that Salt could count them.

  Salt?s eyes flicked down to the money, then back up to meet Ben?s. ?Cash up front.?

  Ben tossed the money across the table. Salt palmed it and stuffed it in his pocket. He smiled. ?Now, what if I don?t feel like talking??

  ?Then I might feel like snapping your neck,? Ben said.

  Salt swallowed. ?What information do you want??

  ?I want to know about Kammler.?

  Salt gave a dark little chuckle. ?Of course. Seems like everyone?s getting interested in Kammler all of a sudden. There?s a lot of weird shit going on, man.?

  ?Are you saying someone else has approached you??

  ?Not for a while. I?m keeping my head down low.?

  ?What about before??

  Silence.

  ?The neck-snapping part still applies. I thought we had a deal.?

  ?There was the German.?

  ?What German??

  ?This crazy German girl.?

  ?Go on.?

  Salt shrugged. ?There isn?t that much to say. It was about eight, nine months ago, just before I left Manchester. She emailed me, same as you did. Wanted to talk to me about Kammler. Said her name was Luna, and she was based somewhere in the Black Forest. Offburg, Hoffenburg, something like that.?

  ?Offenburg?? Ben knew of the place. It was close to Strasbourg, near the border between France and Germany.

  Salt nodded. ?That?s it. But I wouldn?t take that too seriously, man. I knew right away she was phoney. Told me she sold ceramics.? He smiled knowingly. ?Like someone who sells ceramics would be genuinely interested in this stuff. I tell you, man, the covers they come up with are pretty fucking thin sometimes.?

  Ben asked, ?Did she arrange a rendezvous with you??

  Salt nodded again. ?St Peter?s Square in Manchester. She was very keen to meet. Flew over the same day. At least, that?s what she said. The woman I saw might not have been the same one. Might have been one of her team, you know??

  ?So you turned up for the RV.?

  ?Oh, I turned up, all right. Old Lenny always turns up.?

  ?But you didn?t talk to her. You did what you did with me, took her picture from a distance and then buggered off. That?s a very bad little habit, Lenny.?

  Salt flushed angrily. ?Got to protect myself, haven?t I? Can?t be too careful.?

  ?Have you still got the picture??

  Salt hesitated a second, then shrugged and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the caravan. ?Let me see it.?

  ?What, now??

  ?Right now, Lenny. It?s important.?

  Salt got up and went into the caravan. Ben heard him pottering about for a moment, then he re-emerged carrying a laptop and a battered screw-top tin labelled ?coffee?. He laid the computer on the picnic table, flipped it open and powered it up. While it was whirring into life he twisted the lid off the coffee tin. Ben caught the smell of ground beans. Salt shoved his hand into the brown powder, spilling a lot of it on the table, and came out with a small object wrapped in a miniature plastic Ziploc bag. He opened it, and Ben saw that the object was a computer USB flash drive.

  Salt inserted it in one of the ports on the side of the laptop. ?You have to look away now,? he said, turning to Ben.

  ?Why??

  ?Because I can?t let you see me typing the password.?

  Ben sighed and looked away. Salt rattled the keys, and then said, ?OK. You can look now.?

  Ben turned back towards the computer as the contents of the flash drive came up onscreen. It contained a vertical list of JPG photo files, at least thirty of them.

  ?What is this??

  ?Them,? Salt replied.

  ?Them??

  ?My enemies.?

  Ben scanned the list up and down. Salt had labelled each one with the date and place the picture had been taken.

  ?These are all people who?ve approached you??

  ?Nah, nah. They wouldn?t do that. It?d blow their cover. Most of these were just following me in the street.?

  ?So they could be anyone.?

  Salt gave him a look. ?No way, man. I know when I?m being followed. So I take their picture, and then they don?t come back, see, but they always send more. You?ve got to know your enemy.?

  Ben didn?t say anything.

  Salt scrolled down the list of files, stopped and tapped a finger on the screen. ?This is her.? He clicked, and a photo of a woman flashed up.

  Ben stared at it.

  The photo was of a woman standing on a flight of steps leading up to what looked like a library. She was on her own, and even frozen on the screen she looked tense, as though waiting for someone but not quite sure what she was going to find when they turned up. It had been a dull, cloudy day in Manchester, and she was dressed for cool weather in a dark green fleece. She had the same slight build as the woman he?d chased in Switzerland, about five-eight, with shoulder-length blond hair blowing in the wind. There was just one problem.

  Ben looked at Salt. ?She?s got her back to the camera. You can?t see her face.?

  ?Hold on. I got a better shot just after that.? More clicking, and Salt exchanged the picture for another. Same place, seconds later. Now the woman was turned towards the camera.

  Ben?s heart sank again. The definition on the face wasn?t good. All he could see was a blur of features. She could have been anyone.

  ?Can you zoom in and sharpen it up?? Ben said.

  Salt tapped a couple of keys and the image expanded. The woman?s face disappeared offscreen, so that Ben got a close-up of the dark green fleece and the designer logo on its breast. Then Salt flicked another couple of keys and her face panned back into view. Salt used the cursor to draw a rectangle around her head, clicked down a sub-menu and the image suddenly sharpened into focus.

  Ben was drawn
into the screen, so that nothing existed outside of it.

  It was her. It was Ruth. If there?d been any doubt in his mind until that moment, now it had been suddenly blown away into spinning fragments like flying debris in a bomb blast.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Adam?s eyes fluttered open to a world of blurs and echoes.

  What happened to me?

  He blinked, struggling to focus on the kaleidoscope of images and jumbled pieces of memory that were swirling randomly through his brain. Faces hovered in front of him, distorted and elongated, like reflections in the back of a spoon. He knew the distant voices he could hear were talking to him, but he couldn?t make out the words. Nausea washed over him, and his eyelids felt weighed down with lead. He sank his chin on his chest and groaned. Tried to move and found he couldn?t. Looked down at his hands, saw his fingers groping like claws. His wrists tied down, his arms pinned. The sudden fear opened his eyes wider and forced his brain to sharpen.

  He was sitting in a wheelchair in a small room with grey walls and a bare bulb for a light. He wasn?t alone. One of the figures in the room with him, standing watching him with his head slightly cocked to one side, was Pelham. Behind him stood the two armed guards he?d seen before and another he didn?t recognise.

  Now he was beginning to recall what had happened. He remembered the Kammler machine in the vault deep below. He remembered what he?d said to Pelham. Then the sudden shock of the man tripping him to the ground, effortlessly, like he was nothing, and holding him down while the needle had lanced painfully into his flesh.

  And now he was here. But where was here? He tried to speak, but something was clamped against his lips and it wasn?t until then he realised he was gagged.

  Pelham?s voice, gentle and soft. ?Just a mild sedative, Adam. You?ve been out no more than a few minutes. You might get a bit of a headache, but nothing serious. Now, let?s get started.?

  A guard stepped forward and grabbed the handles of the wheelchair. Adam felt himself being swivelled round, and he suddenly saw himself dimly reflected in a big glass pane in front of him. He looked like a wild man, eyes staring, strapped to the chair by leather belts around his wrists and ankles and another one across his chest. The gag over his mouth was like a ping pong ball, pulled tight into his mouth by a buckle behind his neck.

  The glass in front of him was a window, and he was looking through into another room.

  ?I?m sorry you decided to be difficult, Adam,? Pelham?s voice said behind him. He could see the man?s reflection standing behind the chair. ?I?m disappointed. I was hoping you and I could have a good relationship.?

  Through the window, Adam saw the door open and somebody walked into the other room. He?d seen that face before. It was the woman who?d brought him from his hotel. She turned to the window with that impassive, steely gaze he remembered from Graz. Her eyes seemed to be searching, and he realised that she couldn?t see him. The window was a two-way mirror.

  The door in the other room swung open again and a man walked in backwards, pulling something into the room. Adam knew him too. He was the muscular, bull-necked man who had been with the woman in Graz, the one who had hit him in the back of the head in the hotel corridor. The thing he was pulling into the room was some kind of trolley. Adam?s fuzzed-out brain took a second to register what it was.

  When he did, horror shot up through him like lava in an erupting volcano.

  The upper tier of the medical trolley was covered with shiny implements. Scalpels, drills, saws, needles. A large serrated knife. Beside it, a meat cleaver with a big square-nosed blade and a wooden handle.

  The stocky man rolled the trolley across to the far wall and left the room. The woman took her time walking over to it. With her back to the two-way mirror she kneeled down beside it to pick something from the lower shelf, then stood up holding some kind of opaque plastic bundle. Adam watched as she unfurled it and realised it was an apron, the kind that slaughterers wore for butchering animals. She tied the apron strings neatly around her narrow waist, then reached into the front pocket, took out a pair of rubber gloves and pulled one on, then the other.

  They?re going to torture me, Adam was thinking. They?re showing me the implements. He felt his bowels twitch.

  But then the door of the room opened again, and the stocky man walked in backwards again clutching the handle of another wheeled trolley. This time it was heavier, and his tall companion from before was helping him with it.

  But Adam wasn?t watching them. When he saw what they were bringing in, he started screaming through the gag and thrashing against his bonds.

  The trolley was a workbench on wheels. Lying on his back across its pitted wooden surface, chained to its four corners by his wrists and ankles, stripped to his underwear, was Rory.

  All Adam could hear was the screaming and crying and pleading of his son as they wheeled him in.

  ?Let me go! Dad! Dad! I want my dad! Don?t hurt me!? His back was arched as he struggled against the cuffs, the pale skin stretched over his ribs. He looked sickly and fragile and ill with terror.

  Adam fought the leather straps holding him to the chair with every muscle in his body. He thought his heart was going to give out.

  ?I told you I was just someone with a job to do,? Pelham said quietly. ?And I always do my job. Even if it?s not very pleasant. And this isn?t going to be, Adam. I?m sorry.?

  The two men wheeled the bench into the middle of the room, then stepped back to the side and let the woman take over. She glanced at the two-way mirror and nodded, and Adam saw a thin smile spread over her stony face. It was the first expression he?d seen on it. She seemed to be watching him, looking right at him as though she could sense his presence on the other side of the glass and knew what he was feeling.

  ?Her name is Irina Dragojevi?,? Pelham said behind him. ?The less you know about her background, the better. Of all the unsavoury things she does for a living, this is her favourite. She?s an expert. That?s why she was hired for this job, to do the things that the rest of us won?t. She enjoys it, Adam. You can see it in her eyes.?

  Adam was bellowing through the gag, twisting his head from side to side and trying to bite the material apart as he watched the woman walk slowly around the boy on the bench and go over to the instrument trolley. She ran her hand along the row of implements, like a chef selecting the best tool for the task in hand. A heavy hacker to chop through a tough joint, a long slim blade to fillet a fish. Her fingers rested on the handle of a scalpel. She picked it up and examined the blade against the light, ran her gaze thoughtfully along the cutting edge. She shook her head, neatly replaced the scalpel and picked up the big meat cleaver. She weighed it in her hand and nodded to herself. Looked slowly back at the two-way mirror and one side of her mouth twisted into a smile of anticipation.

  Next to her on the bench, Rory was struggling harder than ever, fingers clawing at the wooden bench, veins standing out horribly on his neck, screaming so hard Adam was terrified that his lungs would burst.

  The woman?s gaze swivelled down at the child. She stared for a moment, then drew back her free hand and slapped him across the face, twice, with cracks that echoed in the room.

  ?Quiet,? she said.

  The harsh blows silenced Rory?s screams. His chest heaved and he began to sob piteously.

  Adam wasn?t a violent man. He?d never enjoyed nor invited confrontation, never been in a fight, always dreaded trouble. Once, when he?d been a student in New York, a tough guy in a bar had spilled his drink to see if the shy boy would put up his fists. Adam had left the place as quickly as he could, and never returned.

  But if he could have got free of the chair, he?d have been through that window like a missile and he would have sawn open that bitch?s throat right there on the floor with a shard of broken glass and tasted the spray of her blood and spit in her face as she died.

  ?You still have time to reconsider,? Pelham said. ?I wouldn?t like you to think I was being unreasonable.?

&nb
sp; On the other side of the glass, the woman slid the blade of the cleaver along Rory?s body, up his stomach to his chest, then over the trembling curve of his shoulder and down his arm. It stopped at his left wrist. Played on the skin, just hard enough to leave a white mark.

  Then the woman took deep breath, looked as if she?d just seen God, and raised the cleaver eighteen inches in the air.

  ?Noooo!? Adam screamed through the gag.

  The blade paused, catching the light. The woman glanced back at the mirror with raised eyebrows and a look that said ?Shall I go on??