Bring Him Back (11 page)

Now he could see that there was blood everywhere, all around him, spreading thickly on the marble floor, soaking into the rug. But not all of it was his. Drew’s body was a few feet away, sitting half-propped against the wall, staring at him lifelessly. A trickle of blood from his mouth was quietly dripping down to add to the pool between his legs. Two bullet holes were punched into his chest.

Ben gritted his teeth and staggered to his feet, only for extreme nausea and agony to double him up and almost make him collapse again. He leaned against the wall for support, leaving a jagged smear of blood along it as he tried to fight his way towards the door. He had to … get out …of here. Had to …
find Carl
.

Ben’s last memory was of the men taking him. The boy had been right. They’d come for him.

And Ben had let them do it.

A wave of crippling weakness made him stop, leaning heavily against the wall, his chest heaving as he fought to breathe. The air was thick and foul. What was that he could smell? His nostrils twitched. He tried to focus. His half-conscious mind telling him it was something important.

Gas. That was what it was. The reek of it filled the room.

Ben slowly turned. Blinked as he registered the sight of the heating timer control on the wall. The plastic cover had been removed. Exposed wiring.

And like the thudding of his heart, he heard the ticking of the countdown.

Move!
shrieked a voice inside his head. He turned and staggered for the glass doors leading out onto the balcony. Crashed through the doors and swayed on his feet, blinking in the bright sun, fighting the rising blackness that threatened to overcome him at any moment.

He grasped the rail of the spiral iron staircase that led upwards. Marshalling all his strength he dragged himself up it like an injured spider. Now he found himself on a rooftop garden. He ran, stumbled, almost fell flat, somehow kept on running, then was tumbling into space—

And the whole penthouse apartment erupted in a firestorm behind him.

18

Jersey
Three weeks later

IT WAS MORNING. Jessica Hunter sat alone in her empty kitchen. She blinked, feeling that she wanted to cry. But she’d cried so much already, and for so long, that now the well was dry. There was nothing left but the aching, desolate rawness she felt inside.

With an unsteady hand, she picked up the glass of vodka from beside the half-empty bottle on the breakfast bar surface in front of her. Closed her eyes and knocked back a stinging mouthful, then let the glass slip out of her hand back onto the surface. Beside the bottle was a small framed picture of Carl. She picked it up, gazed at it – and that was when the flooding tears finally came again.

Suddenly aware of a presence, she turned. She gasped when she saw the lean, silent figure in the doorway. How long had he been standing there, watching her?

‘You,’ she breathed.

He said nothing.

‘I thought you were . . .’ her voice trailed off and she just looked at him. She’d never seen him look this way. So still, so quiet, with a fire in his eyes that made her almost afraid.

Ben took a step closer. He stooped and picked up the crumpled three-week-old edition of
Le Monde
from the floor, to glance at the headline and the photo of the devastated apartment building belching smoke into the sky over Monte Carlo. The movement made him wince as a sharp jolt of fresh pain shot through him; and for an instant his memory drifted back, reliving the suffering of the last weeks like a nightmare daydream. The escape over the rooftops and through the chaos of Monte Carlo in the wake of the explosion. Stealing the car. The interminable fevered agony of the drive across the Italian border and northwards into Switzerland, to the tiny mountain village near Mont Blanc and the home of his old comrade, retired ex-SAS medic Frankie Gallagher.

Frankie might be every bit as crazy as they said he was, but he still knew how to get a bullet out. The nine-millimetre full metal jacket had clipped Ben’s left shoulder blade on entry and bounced diagonally to plough a channel deep into his shoulder, stopping just a whisker from the collarbone. The surgery hadn’t been easy. He’d refused to let himself pass out until he’d seen Frankie drop the flattened one-hundred-and-forty-seven-grain FMJ and six bone fragments from his bloody forceps into a surgical dish. An experience Ben wouldn’t forget in a hurry – but still preferable to facing the kinds of questions he’d have been asked in any hospital.

And sometimes it was better to let them all think you were a goner.

For a while, at least.

‘Heard that one myself,’ he said to Jessica. ‘But now I’m back.’

‘My boy is dead,’ she quavered, barely audible. ‘Why would you show your face around here? Why can’t you leave me alone? You failed. You said you’d bring him back and now he’s—’ her words dissolved into a spasm of tears. She buried her head in her arms, shoulders quaking.

‘Where’s Mike?’ Ben said softly.

She slowly raised her head, pointed a trembling finger towards the French windows and the sweep of lawn beyond. ‘Hiding down there in his office,’ she sniffed bitterly. ‘He can’t even be near me now. Says he can’t handle it. Says he’s leaving me. My whole world …gone . . .’

Ben touched her arm as he walked past her. There was nothing more to say, not yet. He swung open the French windows and walked down the garden.

Mike was at his desk in Drew Hunter’s old summerhouse studio, wearing a tweed jacket and getting ready to leave. All the desk drawers were open and empty, and he was busily packing the last of his papers into his briefcase when the door crashed in. Gaping up in speechless alarm, he was half out of his chair by the time Ben grabbed him by the neck and slammed his head twice, three times, against the desk.

‘Going somewhere, Mike?’ Ben rasped in his ear, then hurled him backwards into his chair so hard that it fell over backwards, spilling him to the floor. Mike could have done very little to fight back, even if he’d been conscious at that point.

Ben walked calmly around the desk. He closed the briefcase and tucked it under his arm. Then he seized a fistful of Mike’s jacket collar and dragged him out of the summerhouse; dragged him all the way up the garden and along the pebbled path around the front of the house to the car. He didn’t give a damn if Jessica saw him from the window. Didn’t give a damn if she called the cops.

The car engine was running, and the boot lid and driver’s door were open. Ben hauled Mike upright and bundled him into the boot. Slammed the lid. Walked around to the driver’s door, threw the briefcase inside the car and then got in and took off in a spray of gravel.

19

MIKE’S EYELIDS PEEPED open slowly at first, then snapped wide in panic as he realised he couldn’t move. ‘Where am I?’ he yelled, straining against the bonds that held him to the chair and twisting his head wildly this way and that in the murky shadows. His glasses were badly twisted and cracked, and he couldn’t see properly. Just a little light filtered through the drawn curtains. There was a smell of damp and mouldy carpet. He tried rocking the chair, but it was stuck fast to the floor.

Ben was lounging in another chair a few feet away, where he’d been patiently waiting for the man to wake up. ‘Welcome back,’ he said.

‘Where am I?’ Mike repeated shrilly.

‘Somewhere nobody can hear you calling for help,’ Ben said. He swung open the caravan door with his foot. ‘See?’ he said, motioning out at the empty field. ‘Drew picked the spot pretty well, I’d say. So go ahead and make all the noise you want. It won’t help you.’

Mike’s eyes bulged. ‘What the hell do you want with me?’ he raged. ‘Are you mad?’

‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know,’ Ben said. ‘Very dangerous for you, Mike, if you don’t co-operate.’

‘Fuck you! You’ll get nothing out of me!’

Ben sighed, standing up. ‘Thought you might say that. That’s why I brought some truth serum with me.’ He walked across to the far side of the static caravan, picked up a plastic five-litre fuel can and walked back towards Mike’s chair. Taking his time, he unscrewed the top of the can, then set it on the floor and slid it under the chair with a nudge of his boot. The tang of petrol rose sharply upwards as liquid sloshed out of the can’s open nozzle.

‘You wouldn’t
dare
,’ Mike sputtered, coughing in the petrol fumes.

Ben drew his own chair closer to the draught of fresh air from the doorway. ‘Peaceful here, isn’t it?’ he said, taking out his Gauloises and Zippo. ‘Nippy sea breeze, though. They say it might warm up quite a bit later. Smoke?’ He flicked open the lighter and tutted. ‘This damn thing’s run empty on me again. Looks like I’m down to matches.’

‘No,’ Mike said, turning white. ‘Please.’

Ben replaced the lighter in his pocket and came out with a matchbox. He struck one and flicked it into Mike’s lap, where it fizzled out in a tiny puff of smoke. ‘Whoops. Sorry.’

‘No! Oh, Jesus! Don’t do that!’

Ben paused, about to strike another match. ‘You’re right, Mike,’ he said, putting the cigarettes away. ‘These things’ll kill you.’

‘What do you want?’ Mike asked, panting hard.

‘Just a few simple answers,’ Ben said. ‘You tell me who you really are, who you work for and where they’ve taken Carl, and you stand a chance of seeing tomorrow. If not …and by the way, there are three more open cans of fuel under the caravan, right below where I nailed your chair to the floor. You’re in the hot seat, Mike. How about we start with your real name and go from there?’

‘Simonsen. Dr Mark Simonsen.’

‘Nice to meet you, Dr Simonsen. You won’t mind if I go on calling you Mike, though, will you? So tell me, Mike. You’re not really a “development consultant” for an optics firm. What are you?’

Mike’s head hung down to his chest. ‘I’m a clinical psychologist,’ he admitted.

‘And not just any old one, either, not with a fancy PhD and such an important job to do. They must have been queuing up to move in with a nice-looking woman like Jessica Hunter, get paid to sleep in her bed every night with nothing else to do except send reports back about her son’s, shall we say,
unusual
abilities? Where were you about to sneak off to, now that the job was finished? Your next assignment?’

After a long pause, Mike gave a reluctant nod. ‘Germany first. Then onto North Carolina.’

‘Quite the globetrotter, aren’t you, Mike? I’m sure your accent would go down well over there in the States, with whatever divorcée or single mother whose life you were planning on worming your way into. Does she have a psychic kid too?’

Mike sighed heavily. ‘So you know everything.’

‘No, but I soon will. Who’s paying you?’

‘Linden Global. They’re …they’re a provider of technology solutions.’

‘When I hear vague euphemisms like that, I get stressed out,’ Ben said. ‘When I get stressed out, I get this overwhelming urge to light a cigarette.’

‘All right, all right,’ Mike said. ‘They’re a private military contractor, okay? One of the biggest. Urban population control technologies. Surveillance and counter-surveillance. Defence systems. They’re into everything. Recruit from all sectors. Ex-military, intelligence, science. I …I’m just a low level operative. I barely know anything that goes on—’

‘Then I’m wasting my time talking to you, correct?’ Ben said, taking out the matches again.

‘Remote viewing,’ Mike spat out in a hurry. ‘ESP. The Indigo Project. That’s what it’s all about, okay? Please don’t burn me. I can tell you everything.’

‘Then you’d better get on with it. Starting with this remote viewing.’

‘It was researchers at the Stanford Research Institute who came up with the term decades ago,’ Mike explained, nervously eyeing the box of matches in Ben’s hand. ‘Basically, it’s the practice of seeking impressions about an unseen or distant target using extra-sensory perception. When the Americans launched their Stargate Project in the seventies, the goal was to determine the potential military or domestic application of psychic phenomena. They funded a series of rigorously controlled trials at a think tank called The Science Applications International Corporation.’

‘Go on,’ Ben said.

‘The results were classified at the top level, because they were so incredible that even the project leaders could hardly believe them. The first successful remote viewer who came out of the program was Joseph McMoneagle, codenamed Psychic 001, who went on to work for thirteen years with the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory in California. During his time with Stargate, he provided intelligence data that no regular spy could have fed back. Months before a top-secret new Soviet submarine was even completed, he predicted accurate launch data and in-depth design details that were so revolutionary at the time that nobody but a handful of Russian engineers could have guessed at them. All his predictions turned out to be correct, down to the last detail. Later, when a US army general was kidnapped by the Red Brigade, he was able to pinpoint the exact location where they were holding him captive.’

Mike swallowed anxiously, then went on: ‘McMoneagle wasn’t the only remote viewer who showed extraordinary abilities. Another predicted the release of a hostage in the Middle East three weeks before the kidnappers let him go, with a description of the medical problem that had brought about his release. Yet another, Pat Price, made detailed sketches of Russian weapons manufacturing plants that conformed to US intelligence photographs he’d never been shown. Stargate was declassified in the 1990s to give the impression that nobody took the research seriously any more. The Americans claimed it was history, axed, discredited as never anything more than a joke. The truth is, that was just a disinformation exercise, to make it look as if they were cleaning house while in reality they had no such intention.

‘And it’s not just the Yanks,’ Mike continued. ‘Russia. China. The big players in Europe, as well as emerging powers like North Korea. They’re all at it. Now the floodgates are wide open for private corporations vying to secure billion-dollar contracts from any nation with deep enough pockets. The public has no idea this is happening. But it’s a serious part of classified military intelligence R&D programmes worldwide, and competition is intense. In the days of Stargate, an effective remote viewer could be expected to make contact with a target with about 65 percent reliability. Nowadays the expectations are far higher.’