Read The Nemesis Program (Ben Hope) Online
Authors: Scott Mariani
‘Fine. What are you trying to say?’
‘Simply, that I don’t buy that a modern-day researcher poking their nose into this stuff could get into trouble over it. Not after all these years. There’s got to be some other angle.’
Roberta shrugged. ‘Okay, then. Maybe Claudine discovered something new, something nobody’s ever come up with before. Maybe that’s what they’re after.’
‘In which case, why would they just bury it under tons of rubble? Why not make any attempt to acquire it?’
They pondered the issue, throwing questions back and forth and getting nowhere, until the train finally lumbered into the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. By now it was well into the small hours of the morning and the place was as quiet as any of Paris’ main stations could ever get, with just a few strings of late-night travellers hanging about the platforms. The drunks piled rowdily out of the train first, then Ben and Roberta quietly disembarked and made their way through the complex of old and modern architecture to leave the station via the east entrance on Rue Saint-Lazare. A smattering of traffic was zipping around the square in front. Ben looked about for a cab and spotted a single beige Mercedes cab was sitting parked at a taxi rank thirty yards away. The safehouse was only a couple of short miles across the city. They could be back there inside five minutes.
As they approached the taxi rank, Roberta noticed the man who was loitering alone at the foot of the ugly modern clock sculpture near the station’s entrance. He was dressed in jeans and a casual hooded top, smoking and apparently watching them from a distance. He suddenly flicked away his cigarette and started walking towards them, his pace quickening with every step.
Before Ben and Roberta reached the taxi rank, another group of people appeared around the corner: three women accompanied by two men, all dressed in evening wear. From the noise they were making, they must have had a good time that night. They got to the Mercedes first and spilled into it. The doors slammed shut with a last peal of laughter and then the car took off down Rue Saint-Lazare.
‘Looks like the subway for us,’ Ben said.
Roberta was still anxiously glancing back over her shoulder at the man in the hoodie top. There was no mistaking that he was making right for them. His head was inclined downwards and his hands were bunched up in his pockets.
‘Ben? That guy over there – I think he’s following us.’
Ben had already noticed him. The guy’s body language had set off his own alarm bells the moment they’d emerged from the station exit. ‘Keep walking, don’t look back,’ he said, taking Roberta’s arm, and guided her across the street towards the nearest Metro station at the corner of Rue Saint Lazare and Place du Havre. Out of the corner of his eye he was watching the man closely, more and more certain he didn’t like what he was seeing. At any moment a weapon was liable to appear from one of those hoodie pockets. Ben’s pulse began to quicken with apprehension and rage. How had these people picked up their trail again so fast?
And if he was one of them, chances were he wasn’t working alone. More of them could appear at any moment.
Down the steps into the bright Metro station; the man still followed. There was hardly anyone else around. Ben and Roberta headed briskly into the winding tunnels.
The man saw his targets disappear around a corner and pressed on quickly to catch up. Inside his pocket, the fingers of his right hand clenched around the handle of the knife. He rounded the corner after them, then halted and glanced about, perplexed. Nobody. His targets had vanished.
Suddenly the breath was driven out of him by a hard impact out of nowhere and he was slammed against the curved tiles of the tunnel wall.
Ben delivered two hard, fast strikes to force him quickly into submission. The man slumped down the wall. His right hand pulled feebly at his pocket. Ben saw the blade before it had moved three inches towards him. The man let out a screech that echoed up the tunnel as the weapon was twisted violently from his fingers. Before he knew what was happening, the edge of the blade was pressed hard up against his throat.
‘Who are you?’ Ben said in English. ‘Talk.’
The man was powerless in Ben’s grip. His eyes and mouth were distended with terror. ‘Quoi?’ he managed to blurt out.
‘I asked you who you are,’ Ben repeated in French. ‘You’ve got three seconds to spill it. Don’t think I won’t cut your throat. I’ve done it to better men than you.’
Everything about Ben’s tone and expression was enough to convince the man very quickly that he wasn’t joking. ‘My name’s Jules! Jules Leclercq!’
‘Who do you work for, Jules?’
‘Nobody! I don’t work for anyone, I swear! I don’t even have a job!’
Ben kept him pinned down and pressed the knife edge harder against his neck. But even as he did it, he could see the signs. The blade was dull and cheap, mail-order trash. Jules smelled of sweat and stale alcohol and his clothes were grimy. He began to whimper pitifully. A wet patch appeared in the crotch of his jeans and a puddle of urine began to spread under him.
There were slick, efficient professional killers who posed as down-and-outs, and then there were poor stupid opportunist lowlifes who thought they could harvest the odd wallet at knifepoint in a lonely subway station. It wasn’t hard to see which one Jules was. Ben slackened his grip. He turned round to where Roberta was hovering in the background, and shook his head.
‘Don’t kill me!’ Jules sobbed. ‘Please God don’t kill me! I just needed some cash … I’ll never do it again, I swear.’
‘I’m not going to kill you,’ Ben said. ‘Which means today’s your lucky day. Remember, the next person you try it on with might not be so kind to you. Now get out of here.’ He dragged Jules roughly to his feet and shoved him back up the tunnel.
Jules Leclercq was gone in seconds.
Ben sighed. ‘I’m getting jumpy,’ he confessed to Roberta.
It was 2.30 a.m. by the time they got back to the safehouse and locked the armoured door securely behind them. Ben and Roberta both knew that at some point they were going to have to get some sleep, but they were each too keyed-up and anxious to investigate what they’d recovered from the tomb to even think about rest.
After they’d quickly cleaned themselves up, Ben brewed a pot of very strong black coffee, lit a Gauloise from the gas stove and then dug out the notebook computer that had been stored away unused for a long time. ‘It isn’t quite state-of-the-art, but it’ll do us.’
As he set the notebook up on the bare desk and pulled up two chairs, Roberta retrieved the hard drive from his bag. ‘All right, let’s check out what’s on this thing.’
‘Assuming its innards didn’t get frazzled in the fire,’ he said, plugging the drive into the computer. Roberta sat down at the keyboard. ‘Don’t say that, Ben. It’s
got
to work or we’ve got basically nothing. We’ll be right back where we started.’
After a few moments’ tense wait, the machine recognised the hardware and they were in.
‘This is it,’ Roberta said with relief. ‘Claudine’s Tesla research. I hope to hell it tells us something.’
One thing was for sure – they weren’t short of material to trawl through. ‘This is going to take the rest of the night,’ Roberta said, running her eye down the endless list of data files that had filled the screen.
Ben sipped the scalding black coffee. ‘I’ve nothing else planned, have you?’
‘Let’s get into it. Where to even start, though?’ She peered closely at the screen. ‘All right, looks like we’ve got a lot of technical stuff here in these PDF documents.’ As she opened up one after another, they came across what appeared to be scans of original blueprints for a weird and wonderful array of technological devices from the early twentieth century. ‘These are all Tesla designs, as far as I can see. Christ knows where Claudine even got this stuff.’
Dispensing with the blueprints, Roberta opened another file that contained the drawings for Claudine’s updated electro-mechanical Tesla oscillator, together with her own reports and images documenting the stages of building and testing it.
‘We’re going to need more than technical drawings to make sense of this,’ Ben said, using the tip of his dying cigarette to light another.
‘Ben, it’s disgusting to chain-smoke like that.’
‘I lost my Zippo.’
Roberta rolled her eyes, closed the file and scrolled further down the list. ‘There’s so much stuff. Wait, this looks interesting.’ She clicked open a document file labelled ‘TUNGUSKA’.
‘The Tunguska incident?’ Ben said as the document came on screen. It appeared to be a page scanned from a science journal from some years ago. Grainy monochrome images showed a desolate landscape ravaged by destruction, a giant crater surrounded by countless fallen trees.
Roberta’s gaze flicked rapidly down the page. ‘Okay, I know a little bit about this, so I’ll summarize. June 1908, Tunguska, Siberia. The largest meteorite or comet impact on or near Earth in recorded history. Conservative estimates equated the destructive power of the incident to around ten to fifteen megatons of TNT. That’s a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima atom bomb. Two thousand square kilometres of forest and eighty million trees wiped out. No significant human casualties, due to the remoteness of the location.’
‘Why would Claudine have stored information about a comet collision?’ Ben said. ‘These things hit us naturally every so often, don’t they?’
‘Except that this one didn’t hit us at all,’ Roberta replied. ‘The weird thing about it was, even though it’s classed as an impact event, no actual impact happened. There’s no crater, no meteorite fragments, no physical evidence of a collision. To this day, the cause of the explosion is unknown. An official mystery. The best most scientists can suggest is that the object burst above the Earth’s surface, and the destruction was caused by the shockwave.’
‘I’m sure that’s very fascinating, but what’s it got to do with Tesla?’
‘It might have a lot to do with him. Some people believe he caused it.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘It’s all here,’ Roberta said, scrolling down. ‘Yup, here we are. “It was speculated at the time that Tesla might have used the Wardenclyffe Tower to deliver a charge of energy big enough to bring about that kind of effect”.’
‘The Wardenclyffe Tower?’
‘It was a specially-built laboratory,’ she explained, ‘housed inside a giant tower on Long Island, sixty-five miles from New York City, funded by J.P. Morgan, the founder of US Steel and one of Tesla’s biggest private sponsors. It was built between 1901 and 1902, kind of like a giant steel mushroom hundreds of feet tall, and was meant to be a revolutionary new wireless telecommunications transmitter. Secretly, Tesla planned it as a precursor to his death ray machine. He called it his “Peace Ray”, and allegedly claimed that it could project an electrical shield that would make America invincible to attack, while throwing out beams of incredible power right across the world.’
‘Hmm. Right.’
‘I know how it sounds, but it’s as simple as bringing down a building using small vibrations,’ Roberta explained. ‘The difference between an electrical current that can be used to run a small household appliance and one that can be used as a weapon of mass destruction is just a question of timing. The same amount of energy it takes to run a 240-volt appliance for an hour, delivered in a millionth of a second, would blow it to bits. Now imagine a transmitter generating 100 million volts of pressure and currents of 100 billion watts, resonating at a radio frequency of 2 megahertz. That means the amount of energy released in one cycle of its oscillation would equate to 10 megatons’ worth of destructive energy. In effect, you’ve got the power of a nuclear warhead delivered by radio signal, at the speed of light, allowing the sender to instantly vaporise any location in the world at the touch of a button.’
It sounded too horribly convincing for Ben to go on acting sceptical. ‘Forget Hitler,’ he said. ‘This Tesla’s got to be the most dangerous lunatic who ever lived.’
‘Funny, that’s what the Wardenclyffe financiers thought too, when they found out what he was up to. Before he knew it, the cash got pulled out from under him and the tower was closed down. But there are some who say even that wasn’t enough to kill the project, not if Tesla had anything to do with it. It’s been claimed he was still secretly experimenting with it as late as 1908.’
Ben went on blazing through the text of the article. Most of the technical data meant nothing to him, but he caught the upshot: at the time of the Tunguska event, Tesla, in a state of desperation over losing the precious funding for his Wardenclyffe Tower, was reported to have been attempting to direct energy beams at the Arctic Circle in order to catch the attention of Admiral Robert Peary, the polar explorer and expedition leader who had set out in July 1908 to become the first man to reach the North Pole. Months earlier, Tesla had contacted the influential Peary to ask him to take note of any unusual phenomena he noticed on his expedition.
But if Tesla had been hoping to gain some publicity for his little toy, the experiment went badly awry when he overshot his target and the beam hit the Siberian tundra by mistake, laying waste to a gigantic tract of it. Thanks to the remoteness of the location, the turmoil of the 1917 Russian revolution and the civil war that followed it, the sheer extent of the damage had gone unreported until 1927.
‘But surely there’s no real evidence for any of this?’ Ben said.
Roberta gave a dry smile. ‘When is there ever?’ She closed the file and immediately opened the one directly beneath it that had caught her eye, titled ‘TUNGUSKA 2’ followed by several question marks.
The file was a scan of a small news report from a recent edition of a science periodical. ‘Wow, this is strange,’ she said. ‘Listen. “In March a team of archaeologists, led by Dr Hermann Murke of Bonn University to search for lost ancient Hindu temples across the mountainous regions of Kazakhstan and Mongolia, stumbled on a wide and hitherto unreported area of extreme devastation that has left scientists baffled. The nature of the damage appears to resemble that caused by the still-unexplained Siberian Tunguska incident of 1908, but on an even greater scale. Early reports suggest that an asteroid-like object may have struck the remote location, although these findings are disputed by leading astronomers and other scholars”.’