The Shadow Project bh-5 Page 3

  But Shannon wasn’t listening. ‘Stand down,’ he yelled again. ‘Get on your knees. Hand over the principal.’

  ‘Rupert—’ Brooke began. Shannon ignored her and took another step towards Ben.

  ‘Put the weapon down,’ Ben said quietly. ‘You’re wasting everybody’s time. I’m not going to say it again, OK?’

  Shannon kept the gun levelled. His face was burning red. ‘On your fucking knees,’ he bellowed. ‘Throw down your guns and let her go.’

  Ben stared at him for a second, then moved. He carried out the disarming technique gently and at half speed. Because doing it properly at full speed, he would have trapped Shannon’s finger in the trigger guard and broken it like a twig when he twisted the weapon round out of his grip, disarming and crippling him at the same time. He didn’t want to do that.

  But Ben was quick enough that Shannon’s hand was empty before he even knew what was happening. He tossed the weapon to Jeff, who was looking at Shannon in disgust.

  ‘You think you’re pretty fucking smart with your SAS tricks, don’t you?’ Shannon sneered. ‘None of that stuff’s worth shit in the real world.’

  ‘Change of plan,’ Ben said. ‘No coffee break. We’re going to work straight through the morning. Maybe through lunch, and through dinner if we have to. Nobody leaves this house until we get it right. Understood, Shannon?’

  Shannon said nothing. Instead he came on another step and took a swing at Ben.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Jeff groaned.

  The punch was long and curved, and Ben had plenty of time to anticipate it. He stepped easily back out of the arc of the blow. He didn’t try to block it. He didn’t want anyone getting hurt.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Major Hope? Forgotten how to fight?’ Shannon took another swing, and again Ben moved out of the way.

  ‘You’re being ridiculous, Rupert,’ Brooke shouted. ‘This is supposed to be an exercise, not a bar-room brawl. What’s got into you?’

  But Shannon had completely forgotten the exercise. ‘Just like I said, Hope. You’re getting too old and too slow for this, you fucker.’

  Ben ignored him and calmly turned away. ‘Enough. Everyone back into position.’ He clapped his hands, twice. Pointed through the open door at Shannon’s trussed-up team. ‘Paul, Raoul, untie them. Let’s go again.’

  It was partly the look on Jeff’s face, but mostly Ben’s natural instinct that made him sense the movement behind him.

  It happened fast. He half-turned. This time Shannon was flying at him with all his weight and power.

  If Ben had done nothing and stayed where he was, the incoming punch was on course to take him on the side of the head. Shannon was a muscular guy, with a broad back and thick shoulders. A blow like that could do considerable damage. Loss of hearing in one ear. Damage to an eye. Or worse.

  Naturally, the blow couldn’t be allowed to land. Instead, Ben moved again. And this time he moved at full speed.

  Shannon hit the floor with a crash that almost broke through the planks and sent him tumbling down into the foundations. He writhed and rolled and howled in agony, clutching his arm. ‘You bastard!’

  Brooke ran over to Shannon and kneeled down beside him. ‘Let me see.’

  ‘He’s broken my fucking arm!’

  She looked angrily up at Ben. ‘What did you do to him?’

  Ben didn’t reply. Apart from Shannon’s groans, there was absolute silence in the room. Shannon’s men were lying there staring in horror through the open door at their prostrated leader.

  Jeff had his arms folded and one eyebrow raised. Ben caught his look. Jeff didn’t have to say it. Respect the client, no matter what?

  Shannon was still whimpering on the floor.

  Ben turned to his assistants. ‘Raoul, call an ambulance, will you?’

  Twenty minutes later, there were flashing blue lights in the yard at Le Val as paramedics took Shannon away on a stretcher. Ben watched from a distance, saying nothing, trying not to contemplate what had just happened. He looked on numbly as Brooke climbed into the back of the ambulance. The paramedics closed up the back doors and Ben lost sight of her.

  ‘Ben?’ said Jeff’s voice behind him, and Ben turned.

  ‘I’ll go along too. Best you stay here, OK?’

  Ben nodded. ‘Fine.’

  Jeff held his eye for a moment. It was hard to tell whether he was about to laugh or start yelling at him. Maybe both. Then he ran over to the ambulance and clambered in the front, leaving Ben standing there on his own. A blast of the siren, and the ambulance took off. He watched as it drove out of the yard and started making its way down the long drive towards the gates. He guessed they’d take Shannon to the hospital at Valognes, a few miles away.

  There was nothing left to do except wait. Ben slumped on a low wall and lit up a cigarette. Storm, his favourite of the German Shepherds, and more of a pet than a guard dog, came running over and licked his face. Ben ran his fingers through the dog’s fur, genuinely grateful for the company.

  He sat on the wall and smoked as Shannon’s team came filing past about thirty yards away, firing hostile looks across the yard at him and muttering among themselves in low voices. They disappeared one by one into the trainee block. Neville was the last to go in, shooting a long stare at Ben before slamming the olive-green door shut with a bang that echoed around the buildings. Paul and Raoul had repaired to the office, maybe awaiting his instructions.

  He couldn’t think of any to give them. They might as well go home now.

  He blew out a cloud of smoke and ruffled the dog’s ears.

  ‘Well, Storm, that surely was a fine morning’s work.’

  Chapter Five

  The outskirts of Dublin shrank away in the Saab’s rearview mirror as Adam O’Connor drove southwards into the green countryside. A choral air by the medieval composer Thomas Tallis filled the car from the six-speaker CD player, but Adam hardly heard the music. He was thinking about the deaths of his old friends, and feeling sad. And just a little guilty, too, that he’d allowed himself to lose contact with them.

  Michio and Julia and him. Part of Adam missed those days. The three of them might have seemed an unlikely bunch of friends – the sober American professor quietly going crazy with his marital problems, the ebullient, fun-loving Japanese planetary scientist and the brilliant, hard-driving young head of the Applied Physics Department at Manchester University – but it had been great for a while, a refreshing antidote to the daily drag of teaching and research, lectures and seminars and department politics. There’d been a kind of innocent camaraderie between them, almost like schoolkids. From the outside, it might have seemed even stranger that what had drawn the trio together from across the world was their shared interest in an obscure, all-but-forgotten, wartime Nazi engineer and SS general. Hans Kammler had been personally appointed by Adolf Hitler in 1943 to work on some very, very strange things indeed.

  Their first meeting had been a chance encounter at a physics conference in Cambridge, just about the driest and most uninspiring series of lectures Adam had ever listened to. He’d actually fallen asleep in the middle of the morning session, until he’d been prodded awake by the grinning little Japanese guy sitting next to him and he’d realised with a flush of embarrassment that he’d been snoring.

  When the lecture ended, Michio had laughed about it all the way to the delegates’ lunch. Adam liked him right away, and sat with him. Across from them had been a bright-eyed, attentive and switched-on young British physics PhD who introduced herself as Julia Goodman.

  Instant friends. Just one of those moments in life when people seemed to chime with one another. They’d endured the rest of the afternoon’s lectures as a threesome, then got together again for the evening in the bar at the hotel where many of the delegates were staying.

  That had been when the ever-smiling Michio had first mentioned the name Kammler to them. He’d kept them up until after midnight in the bar, babbling on about his discoveries. The
little guy’s almost hyperactive enthusiasm had been infectious, and it hadn’t taken him long to persuade them that this obscure piece of science history was more than just bizarrely compelling. Adam could still remember the rush of amazement he’d felt, and the look on Julia’s face, when Michio had told them what he reckoned the Nazis had really been into. If you were even half-alive, if academia hadn’t yet dried out your soul, it was the kind of physics that could turn your blood to wine just thinking about it.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ Adam had asked Michio. Sometimes the most exciting theories were nothing more than a cool idea waiting to be destroyed by an ugly, inconvenient truth. But even as he’d asked the question, the sparkle in Michio’s eyes told him this was no fanciful notion.

  ‘I’m more than sure. I know they could make it work.’

  ‘But the implications of what you’re saying—’ Julia cut in.

  ‘Blows your mind, doesn’t it?’ Michio had grinned. ‘Get used to it. There’s more.’

  And there was. The more Adam and Julia listened to what Michio had to say, the more incredible it seemed. This was pure, beautiful, intoxicating science. Nothing to do with politics or ideology. Science the way it was meant to be. It was easy to forget that the man behind it all was an SS general, one of the minds behind the building of Hitler’s death camps and, in the closing days of World War II, one of the top five figures in the dying Third Reich. Adam had found himself almost obsessively consumed with the Kammler theories, as the months went on. The three of them had started meeting up whenever they could – London, Tokyo, New York – and staying in touch via email in between, mulling over ideas, postulating what-if scenarios. It had become a little gang of three, and they’d even made up a fun name for it. The Kammler Krew. Almost as much as his relationship with his boy Rory, it had been what had sustained Adam through the dark times of his break-up with Amy.

  About a year into their friendship, the trio had become a foursome with the arrival of Lenny Salt. Lenny liked to tell people that he was a physicist, but in fact he’d just been Julia’s lab assistant at Manchester, doing basic routine jobs that any decent first-year student could do. Adam hadn’t been too sure about his coming on board, and had thought that Julia was too soft in letting him join. She’d said that Lenny was deeply interested in the subject and that he’d be happy to do some research for them to help out. By the time they’d discovered he was unable to contribute much to their discussions except his own brand of conspiracy paranoia, it had been too late to say anything for fear of offending Julia.

  Lenny Salt’s arrival had cooled Adam’s enthusiasm for the Kammler Krew. After another year and a couple more meetings, he could feel himself drifting away from the group. By that time the whole smart house thing had begun to take over Adam’s life in any case; he’d been winding up his teaching career, heavily involved in buying the plot of land in Ireland and designing, and subsequently building, Teach na Loch. With all that going on, he’d had less and less time to keep in touch with his fellow Krew members.

  What nobody knew was that, though he’d slackened his involvement with the gang, Adam hadn’t lost his interest in the Kammler research. He’d still often sit up late into the night, day after day, working feverishly on his ideas, even after setting up in business and moving to Ireland. He had a bunch of notes on four CD-ROMS that he kept locked away in his safe at the house. Sometimes he’d think about it, when he was supposed to be working on his smart house business, and the possibilities would start to flood his mind all over again, coming so thick and fast he was almost choking.

  The worst thing had been having to keep quiet. This stuff was just too hot, and not just because it derived from the work of a Nazi. It was hot because of its incredible, almost limitless implications. Never mind making millions from smart homes. If anyone could make the Kammler theories work, they’d be talking billions. Money on tap.

  And maybe, Adam thought now as he drove, that was also the problem. With Julia and Michio dead and Lenny’s warnings still echoing in his ears, he could feel his heart beating and an icy chill run down his spine.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror. Had that black Mercedes been following him all the way from Dublin? He started to worry as he watched it, taking his eyes off the road so long that he had to hit the brakes hard to avoid crashing into the back of a slowing truck. He overtook the truck, glanced nervously in the mirror and saw the Mercedes indicate and move out to follow him.

  Shit. They are tailing me.

  Don’t be ridiculous.

  He drove faster nonetheless, and the Mercedes kept pace with him. Then, just as he was getting really edgy, a straight opened up ahead and the black car flashed by him, doing at least ninety. Adam laughed shakily to himself.

  A couple of miles further on, he spotted the Mercedes in a fuel station forecourt and saw that the driver was a young woman with a small child.

  He cursed Lenny Salt for putting daft ideas in his head. What a weirdo the guy was. What an insult to their poor friends to come out with such a cockamamie story and cheapen the tragedy of their deaths like that. It was typical of the conspiracy theory mindset. Pure ego. Like anyone would even think to come after a pathetic old fart who thought he was a real scientist.

  Adam’s thoughts wandered back to Julia and Michio. The coincidence was terrible; but surely a coincidence all the same.

  Just then, his mobile ringtone chimed through the car’s sound system.

  It was the housekeeping agency. Adam frowned as he listened to the woman informing him that the new housekeeper wouldn’t be able to come until tomorrow, due to a minor road accident.

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’

  ‘She just had a bit of a shock,’ said the woman. ‘She’ll be right as rain in no time, and with you tomorrow afternoon.’

  Adam said he was pleased to hear that. Tomorrow afternoon was no problem. He ended the call and huffed with irritation. Wonderful. Now he’d have to start clearing up the house himself for Sabrina’s visit.

  Don’t be such a jerk, Adam. You’ll survive. He stabbed at the CD player and switched from the Tallis to a lively Vivaldi violin concerto. Michio and Julia floated up in his thoughts again, and he tried to focus on driving.

  A couple of minutes later, the phone rang again.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Hey, Rory.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Sorry I was held up. Be with you in about five minutes, all right?’

  ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s under control. She just got here.’

  ‘Sabrina’s there already?’

  ‘No, not Sabrina.’

  ‘Then who?’ Adam asked. Rory was like that. A separate question and answer for everything. You had to tease stuff out of him. He was at that age.

  ‘The housekeeper, stoopid,’ Rory said in an affected moronic voice. ‘Remember?’

  ‘I hate when you talk in that damn voice. And what are you going on about? The agency just called me to say she won’t be arriving until tomorrow.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rory said in a deadpan tone. ‘Maybe they changed their mind.’

  ‘How do you know it’s the housekeeper?’

  ‘Because I spoke to her just now on the security monitor. She said her name was Sue. I just buzzed her in the gate and she’s parking her van up outside. I’m watching her right now, from the window.’ A pause. ‘Where’s she from? Kinda weird accent.’

  ‘I’ll be there in exactly two minutes, all right?’

  ‘Hey, there’s a couple of guys with her,’ Rory said.

  ‘A couple of guys?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re walking towards the house.’

  ‘Rory, hold on till I get there. Don’t open the door.’

  But the kid had already hung up.

  The Saab was coming into the bends a mile and a half from the house as Adam dialled the number for the agency. ‘This is Adam O’Connor. We spoke a couple of minutes ago.’

  ‘Yes, Mr O’Connor?’ the
same woman replied pleasantly.

  ‘Did I misunderstand you before? I thought you said nobody was coming out until tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then where did this Sue come from?’ he asked, letting his irritation flood out. ‘And who are these two guys with her? You know, this kind of disorganisation doesn’t make you people look very good.’

  ‘We don’t have anyone called Sue working for us,’ the woman said archly. ‘There must be some confusion. And I must say I don’t like your tone, sir.’

  ‘Fine. Shove it up your ass. I’ll find someone else.’

  Two seconds after the call was over, Adam started to feel the first trembles in his hands. He put his foot down and the needle soared as he rounded the side of the big hill and the solitary lake house came into view. Everything looked peaceful enough. Acres of glass and the surface of the lake glittered the sunlight back at him from between the rolling green hills. A perfect picture.

  But he just knew something was terribly wrong.

  The gates sensed his car approaching and opened automatically to let him through. He roared into the gateway and up the long drive.

  There was no van parked anywhere. The shakes got worse, and his step was wobbly as he got out of the cool Saab and into the hot sun. He strode to the front door and said ‘Constantinople’ to the sensor. The lock clicked open and he ran through into the wide, airy entrance hall.

  ‘Rory?’ It was a big house, and you sometimes had to yell to communicate from one part to another. But from the instant he stepped inside, something told him the place was empty. ‘Rory?’

  No reply. No Rory, no housekeeper. He checked the living room. Empty. Strode across the hall and thundered up the stairs and threw open his son’s bedroom door.

  ‘Dad, I wish you wouldn’t burst in like that.’ That was what Rory would have said to him, turning towards the door with a scowl. But Rory wasn’t there. His chess computer and TV and Blu-ray player and drawing pad and the model spyplane he was building were all exactly where they should be. But no Rory.