The Nemesis Program (Ben Hope) (16 page)

They climbed the gate. Ben was the first to drop down to the other side. He walked up to within a few yards of the car and halted, eyeing it suspiciously. ‘They knew we were here,’ he said. ‘Nobody followed us from Paris, but they were able to pinpoint us exactly in the middle of nowhere.’

‘How could they do that?’

‘There are a thousand ways,’ he said. ‘None of them very reassuring from our angle.’

Roberta considered. ‘Maybe they were there, in Montmartre. Watching us as we checked out Claudine’s apartment. Maybe they didn’t want to make a move, draw attention to themselves in a public place. But they could have stuck some kind of tracking device on the car, couldn’t they?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ he conceded.

‘Then if we could find it, we could just detach it and leave it here in the bushes to make whoever’s monitoring our whereabouts from a distance think the car was still here, while we drive back to Paris. Or else we could stick it on the back of a truck heading for Germany or somewhere. Throw the assholes right off our trail.’

Ben glanced back over the trees at the smoke rising into the sky, still visible for miles even now that the flames had died down. ‘Someone’s bound to have reported the fire. Emergency services and police will be here any time soon, and they’re going to know this was an arson attack. If the car’s still here when they arrive, they’ll start asking questions and it’ll be reported in the media, which you can be sure our friends will be watching.’

‘So?’

‘So if we leave the car where it is, as far as anyone’s concerned there’s a couple of fresh corpses buried in the remains of that tomb back there,’ he said. ‘Mission accomplished. Which is what we need them to think, if we want to buy some time before they catch up with us again.’

‘You think they will?’ she asked anxiously.

‘It’s what I would do.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

Ben and Roberta were half a kilometre away from the gates of the château and walking quickly up the dark country road in the direction of the small town they’d passed earlier, when the wail of sirens became audible in the distance followed by a halo of flashing lights on the horizon.

‘In here,’ he said, quickly directing her off the road towards a dark, dense patch of forest to their right. By the time the emergency vehicles came screaming by in a glare of lights, they were well hidden among the trees.

Silence again. ‘Who’re you calling?’ Roberta asked as Ben took out his phone.

He wasn’t calling anybody. ‘I can’t use this any more,’ he said, and tossed the phone on the ground. He picked up a nearby lump of rock and dashed the device to tiny pieces that he stamped and spread into the dirt. ‘These people know who I am by now. The fewer ways they have of tracking us, the better.’

Roberta touched his hand in the darkness. ‘Got you into a whole mess of trouble, didn’t I?’ she said sadly.

He found himself moving stiffly away from her touch. ‘Come on, let’s go and catch a train.’

The little railway station was deserted. Roberta went to get them some coffee from a machine while Ben checked timetables and saw that the last late-night train headed for Paris was due to come through in another forty minutes. He bought tickets from an automatic dispenser, then fed the last of his change into a payphone and called Jeff Dekker’s mobile number.

‘It’s me. I can’t talk long. I’m okay, everything’s fine.’

Jeff had known Ben long enough to know that ‘everything’s fine’ could mean just about anything. ‘Right,’ said his sleepy voice.

‘Listen. The police are going to be round at Le Val pretty soon asking questions about the Alpina. Before that happens, you need to report it stolen. Do it now, tonight. Say it was taken in the last couple of days but you only just noticed it was gone. Got it?’

‘What the fuck are you up to this time?’ Jeff said, rapidly awakening.

‘I’ll be in touch. You haven’t heard from me.’ There was so much more he wanted to say. In the brief pause before his long-suffering friend could muster a reply, Ben very nearly asked him if he’d spoken to Brooke, if she was okay, and if he’d pass on the message that Ben loved her and would call her as soon as he had a chance. But his questions stayed clammed up inside him and he quickly put the phone down, painfully aware of how hard and terse he must have sounded.

He walked slowly back to where Roberta was sitting on a plastic bench on the station platform. She handed him a paper cup, saying ‘Sorry, it tastes like boiled shit’. The two of them sat and sipped the dismal machine coffee in silence. Still feeling dazed, Ben reached for his Gauloises, found the pack badly crumpled from earlier on, then discovered that his Zippo was lost, still lying in the ashes of the De Bourg family chapel. He slumped wearily back against the bench.

‘We look like a couple of hoboes,’ Roberta said, breaking the silence, gazing at their dishevelled reflection in a window on the other side of the tracks.

‘You smell like a Connemara Smokehouse mackerel,’ he told her with a faint smile.

‘Gee, thanks for that one. It’s not just me, I assure you.’

When the train arrived, the two hoboes sat at the rear of a near-empty carriage with just a small gang of harmless drunks for company. As they rattled away from the station, one of the gang came reeling up the aisle with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, looking for a light. With a pang of regret, Ben told him he didn’t have one. The drunk sniffed the air and peered curiously at their blackened faces and dirty clothes. ‘What happened to you two?’ he slurred.

‘Got caught in an earthquake,’ Ben told him, and the drunk shambled back to his friends looking puzzled.

Roberta gave a dry smile. ‘So, are you still in denial, or what?’

‘I can’t explain what I saw,’ he said. ‘But I won’t deny it either.’

‘Okay. Time for the backstory. 1898, New York City. Nikola Tesla was in his Houston Street basement laboratory when—’

‘I thought you said he was Serbian.’

‘He was, but he emigrated to the States in 1884, went to work for Thomas Edison and later became a US citizen. It was in New York, well over a century ago, that he designed and built the prototype of the oscillator device you saw today. Once it was completed he had to test it, and Tesla being Tesla, he did that by tuning it to the resonant frequency of the building in whose basement the lab was housed. A crazy thing to do, but then he was a pretty crazy guy by all accounts. According to the story, as he cranked up the power he and his assistants heard first a hum, then a crack, then another, then the whole building began to tremble, along with neighbouring buildings with similar resonant frequencies. Mayhem in the street. The fire department and police reserves rushing to the scene, everyone convinced a mega-quake was about to happen. And who knows what
would’ve
happened, if Tesla hadn’t taken a hammer to his machine before it could run away with itself and do too much damage.’

Ben just shook his head and wished he had his cigarettes.

Roberta went on: ‘Now, that wasn’t enough for Tesla, so he built a second oscillator, this time about the size of an alarm clock. He took the machine to a construction site in the Wall Street district and clamped it to one of the support beams of a ten-storey building. Within minutes, he said the structure began to creak and weave, and all the steel workers came rushing down to ground level in a panic because they thought the building was going to fall apart. In the middle of the chaos, Tesla just slipped the machine back in his pocket and made his exit, knowing – and I’m quoting – “I could have laid the whole edifice flat in the street”. Is all this sounding a little more plausible now?’

It was, but Ben was still having trouble digesting it. ‘And this was the same kind of machine Claudine built.’

Roberta nodded. ‘Hers was an update, that’s all. It’s essentially a very simple concept. The original oscillator used just five pounds of air pressure acting on a pneumatic piston. Tesla initially pretended to the New York authorities that his Houston Street experiment must have been an earthquake, but he later claimed that the same five pounds of pressure could have dropped the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River or brought down the Empire State Building. In fact, the larger the structure, the easier it is theoretically to destroy, because the resonant frequency gets lower as mass increases. Like I told you before, Ben, there’s no limit to what it can do. Remember how I said that Tesla believed he could split the world in two? With a large enough machine, no problem.’

‘How large is large?’ Ben asked, looking at her in bewilderment.

‘Not as large as you might imagine,’ Roberta said. ‘Claudine once told me that Tesla claimed a scaled-up version of his device weighing two hundred pounds and measuring three feet high would be capable of transmitting motive power anywhere through the earth, over any distance. Sounds about right to me.’

‘This is some pretty wild story you’re telling me.’

‘But you don’t need proof any more that it’s not crazy, right? You’ve seen this working with your own eyes. That should be able to convince even you.’

Ben shrugged helplessly. ‘All right. You’ve got me. But I have a question. Why the hell isn’t this stuff more widely known about? I mean, unless I’m missing something, it would seem fairly important.’

‘Because,’ Roberta explained, ‘in common with a lot of other very important discoveries, which would include things like the secret of potentially creating eternal life or transmuting base elements into gold, it’s been so wrapped up in hokum and conspiracy theories that it became, as far as science was concerned, an untouchable subject. That’s why hardly anyone remembers the name Tesla anymore. In mainstream academic research circles, just to mention it makes you out to be a total crank.’ She pulled a dark smile. ‘And believe me, I’ve spent enough of my science career dealing with untouchable subjects to know what I’m talking about. That’s one way to see why so few people know about Tesla’s work. The other way to see it is as a deliberate cover-up, engineered by certain people who didn’t want the public to know about it, for their own reasons. In which case the whole nutty conspiracy element provides the perfect smokescreen, just like the whole Roswell thing in the 1940s was deliberately allowed to be sidetracked by disinformation about aliens and UFOs, to protect the truth that the US government were developing secret aircraft technology.’

‘So now you’re saying the US government were implicated in this.’

‘Well, they did take an interest in him from early on,’ Roberta said. ‘He was paid millions by the War Department to develop all kinds of diabolical secret weapons, none of which ever went into production. In 1917 he patented a wireless engine that he claimed could wipe out an entire naval fleet from ten thousand miles away, just by pulling a lever. Then years later in the lead-up to World War II, he unveiled plans for a so-called particle “death beam” weapon that was supposed to be able to bring down whole squadrons of enemy aircraft at a stroke or cause a million-strong army to drop dead in its tracks like some Bolt of Thor that would protect any nation who possessed it from foreign invasion. As you can imagine, it never got past the theoretical stage. I guess Julius Oppenheimer’s lovely atom bomb project was more in line with conventional wisdom and won over the government’s hearts and money instead.’

‘I’m glad that one didn’t catch on,’ Ben said. ‘Sounds like I’d have been out of a job.’

Ignoring his stab at levity, Roberta went on, ‘But the powers-that-be never lost interest in him, no matter how wacky his ideas became. It’s pretty certain that immediately after Tesla’s death in almost complete poverty at the age of eighty-six in January 1943, agents of the FBI, the Office of Alien Property and the War Department conspired to magic away, impound and safeguard a bunch of his secret weaponry papers, blueprints and design plans. The legend is that, with the tacit knowledge of J. Edgar Hoover and various military top brass, sometime that January they broke into the safe in Tesla’s room in the New Yorker Hotel, where he’d spent the last years of his life, and stole vital information along with a key to another vault at the Governor Clinton Hotel.’

‘Which contained pink dinosaur eggs and a set of Hitler’s lost dentures,’ Ben said.

‘Not exactly,’ she corrected him with a hard look. ‘If you go along with the stories, and Claudine said there was good evidential reason to do so, it was where Tesla had stored a prototype working model of the death ray machine.’

The train was clattering fast along the tracks, shaking them softly in their seats. Paris was just a few minutes away. Ben had slumped down low with his feet on the seat opposite, and was gazing out of the window as he sat absorbing what she was saying. The story of the theft of the death ray machine didn’t seem to have moved him in the least.

‘What’s the matter, don’t you believe me?’ she asked, seeing the doubtful look that was spreading over his face.

‘After tonight’s episode, I’ll believe that Jesus Christ and the Apostles sold cheeseburgers on the Temple Mount,’ he said. ‘That’s not the problem.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Seriously? You’re making a case that secret government agents murdered Claudine over her research.’

Roberta looked at him earnestly. ‘Wouldn’t that make sense, Ben? It would’ve been so easy for them to pin it on some maniac serial killer, just by copying his M.O. They do this kind of thing all the time. I mean, look at what’s happening to us here. Who could track me to some tiny village in the asshole of England? Who could find us again in Paris, and stick a homing device on our car? Who’s got those kinds of resources?’

‘I agree, it seems to make sense in a lot of ways,’ Ben said. ‘But here’s the problem. All right, let’s say for argument’s sake that the conspiracy buffs are right on the money, and that this is all true and that back in 1943 the FBI and the other government spooks were all desperate to get their hands on some loony weapon that can shoot beams at the moon, turn entire nations to stone, or whatever. We’re talking about things that were dreamed up decades and decades before you and I were born. Even if these devices worked exactly as Tesla claimed they could, do you have any idea how wildly obsolete they’d be in the modern age? We have ICBMs now; we have drone warfare, battlefield robotics and depleted uranium warheads and weaponized anthrax and a whole list of horrible things designed to kill and maim, that make Tesla’s creations sound like something out of an old black and white Flash Gordon matinée movie.’