The Nemesis Program (Ben Hope) (26 page)

‘Open it,’ Roberta said.

With shaky hands Daniel ripped open the envelope, took out the paper inside and began to read urgently. Roberta stepped closer to peer at the letter in his hands. One glance was all she needed. ‘It’s the same as the one she sent me.’

‘This is what I warned her about,’ Daniel said breathlessly. The paper fluttered in his hands. He looked up. ‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Why are you here and not her? Something happened. Tell me.’

‘You’d better sit down again,’ Ben said. ‘We haven’t brought good news.’

Daniel settled in the chair, tightly gripping the crumpled letter.

‘There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll say it straight,’ Roberta told him grimly. ‘Writing to us was just about the last thing Claudine did before she was murdered. It happened in Paris, at her flat, a few days ago.’

Daniel’s mouth fell open. As the news sank in, he screwed his eyes tightly shut and slumped forward in his chair with his head in his hands. ‘No. No. Oh, my god. Oh, sweet Jesus. It can’t be true.’ He went on muttering incoherently for a while; then, suddenly: ‘I’m going to be sick.’

He staggered up to his feet and lurched out of the room. A door banged, followed by the sound of violent retching. After a few moments’ silence, a toilet flushed. Soon afterwards, Daniel returned, looking ashen and weak. He slumped back in the chair.

Roberta touched his shoulder. ‘You were close, weren’t you? I’m so sorry. She was my friend, too.’

‘Yes, we were close.’ Daniel shook his head. ‘I told her to be careful,’ he gasped. ‘I
told
her it was too dangerous to go on.’

‘We saw the emails,’ Ben said. ‘We know that you warned her. And we know you know what this is all about.’

Daniel struggled for breath and was unable to speak for a few moments. ‘I’m in shock,’ he wheezed at last, looking imploringly at them. ‘I need a drink. Please – there’s some vodka in the kitchen. Would you get me some?’

‘I think we could all use a little something,’ Roberta said.

Ben stepped over the mess of splinters in the passage and went through to the kitchen. He returned a few moments later with the bottle of vodka and three mismatched glasses. Setting them on the table, he poured all three and handed the biggest to Daniel.

Vodka wasn’t the only thing he’d found in the kitchen. He opened the matchbox that had been sitting by the stove, struck a match and lit up a Gauloise. It was the first one he’d had since leaving the safehouse in Paris, and it tasted good. He slipped the matchbox into his pocket.

Hunched on his chair, Daniel swallowed his vodka down like water. ‘How did she … how did it …?’ he asked bleakly.

‘It’s probably better that you don’t know the details,’ Roberta told him. ‘The police think it’s the work of a serial killer. We happen to disagree.’

Daniel took several deep breaths. The empty glass was shaking in his hands. ‘No, of course it wasn’t a serial killer,’ he said with a sudden flare of rage. ‘Those fucking animals. This is what they do. Lies. All lies. Oh God. My poor Claudine.’ He closed his eyes.

‘I’m sorry we had to break it to you this way,’ Ben said. ‘And I apologise for breaking into your home and frightening you. I didn’t think you’d speak to us otherwise.’

‘I thought you were them, come to kill me.’

‘Hence the shotgun,’ Ben said.

Daniel gave a weary, desolate shrug. ‘It was just in case. I don’t really know how to use it, never fired it until today. I just wanted to make myself safe out here. I always thought one day they might track me down.’

‘It’s not out of the question,’ Ben said. ‘You’re not that hard to find.’

‘Who were you expecting to come for you, Daniel?’ Roberta asked in a soft voice. ‘You know who these people are, don’t you?’

Daniel sighed and didn’t say anything. Sweat ran down his brow.

‘I know how upset you’re feeling,’ Roberta said. ‘But we really need you to talk to us. It’s the only way we’re going to make this right. They’re after us, too. Please help us understand. Who are they?’

Daniel fidgeted nervously in his chair, then heaved a reluctant sigh. ‘It’s a long story.’

‘We came a long way to hear it,’ Ben said.

‘Then sit down and I’ll tell you everything,’ Daniel said.

Chapter Thirty-Six

‘First, what do you know about Claudine’s work?’ Daniel asked, shooting a nervy glance at the door as if someone might be eavesdropping on them out here in the wilderness of Lapland.

‘The number codes in her letter led us to where she’d hidden her research material,’ Roberta said. As she spoke, Ben was unstrapping his bag and taking out the notebook computer along with the remote hard drive they’d retrieved from Germain De Bourg’s tomb. He laid it on the table, connected the drive and powered up the machine. Daniel stood, grabbed a pair of glasses from his desk and approached the computer as Roberta went on.

‘Until we found this,’ she said, ‘I’d expected to find her research on Tesla, nothing more. But there was all this other stuff in there, too. Seismology reports, images of disaster zones. I know it makes sense, somehow. I just can’t put it together in my mind. What was she doing, Daniel?’

Daniel’s grief-stricken face hardened as he accessed the files, clicking from one to the next in rapid succession. ‘Claudine showed how all this was connected,’ he said. ‘The unexplained phenomenon discovered in Mongolia in March is just one example. This is another.’ Opening up the image file that showed the devastated city, he pointed at the screen. ‘You know where this is?’

‘None of the image files are labelled,’ Roberta said. ‘We thought it looked like Latin America.’

Daniel nodded. ‘Taráca, a tiny republic between Bolivia and Paraguay. This image is of San Vicente, its capital city, after the earthquake that devastated the country eighteen months ago.’

‘I heard about it at the time,’ Roberta said, remembering now where she’d come across the name San Vicente before. ‘But I don’t …’

Daniel stared at their puzzled faces and his mouth twisted into a humourless smile. ‘You’re still not getting what this is all about, are you? Tell me, what other hidden items of Claudine’s did you find? Perhaps a small electronic device, metallic, oblong, about seven inches long?’

‘Her Tesla oscillator?’ Roberta said.

Daniel looked gravely at her. ‘You found it, then. I knew Claudine would have hidden it. Do you have any idea what it’s capable of?’

‘We had an interesting taster,’ Ben said.

‘Which is why we don’t have it any more,’ Roberta said. ‘It got buried under a thousand tons of rubble that we only just managed to get out of ourselves.’

‘Then you understand what this is all about,’ Daniel said. ‘Or perhaps you still don’t want to, because it’s too terrible to imagine.’

‘Start from the beginning,’ Ben said. ‘What’s your involvement in all this? Are you a scientist like Claudine?’

Daniel shook his head. ‘I was a freelance investigative journalist. For some time I lived in the States, then for the next several years my investigative work took me from place to place around Europe.’

‘Investigating what?’

Daniel shrugged. ‘Environmental concerns, ecology, green issues, things like that. I spent time with protest groups, demonstrated against motorway construction, hung out with alternative types, anarchists, people with way-out causes. I guess a lot of it rubbed off on me. In time I started getting deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories. I became convinced that the reality the citizens of the modern world are presented with is really no more than a carefully designed tissue of lies intended to hide the truth of what our global ruling elite are really doing, the future they’re creating for all of us. I became involved in a whole network of people who devote themselves to studying and investigating the secret goings-on that most people never hear about. My main interest back then was the global warming controversy and the growing evidence that the entire thing was invented purely to generate massive revenues in so-called green taxes, hijack the ecological movements for purposes of gain and impose more controls on us all. Whatever money I could make I spent travelling around Europe to meet up with like-minded individuals. Unfortunately, that world draws a lot of cranks and crazies.’

‘That’s not such a big surprise,’ Roberta said. Ben had met his fair share of those, too, but he was getting impatient with Daniel’s account. ‘Get to the point,’ he said.

‘I’m coming to it. It was at one of those meetings, an alternative science conference in London, that I met Claudine. I saw right away that she wasn’t one of the crazy ones. She was different, and she was serious. Before long, we found what we had to say to one another more interesting than the conference. So we left. A drink turned into a meal. We talked and talked until the restaurant closed and we went to her hotel to talk some more. I was attracted to her, but that was only part of it. She had so much to tell about the research she’d been doing that I suddenly realised my global warming crusade was like nothing compared to what she was uncovering. I was hooked, even though some of it seemed impossible to believe. She described to me how she had built this machine based on Tesla’s original. I was pretty incredulous at first, but she told me she could show me an actual demonstration. The very next morning I found myself going back to France with her. We stopped in Paris, then she drove me out into the countryside, to where she had come across an isolated, derelict farmhouse.’

Ben remembered the picture of the old house they’d seen on the computer hard drive. He could guess what was coming next.

‘The walls were still standing, though nobody had lived there for years. I stood back and watched as Claudine attached her machine to an outer wall. I didn’t know what to expect. Then she switched it on.’

‘We’ve seen how this works,’ Roberta said. ‘The device auto-tuned to the resonant frequency of the building and started to shake it?’

‘It was unbelievable,’ Daniel said, with a look of awe. ‘One wall fell in, then another. Then what was left of the roof, right before my eyes. If she hadn’t turned the machine off in time, the whole thing would have been turned to rubble. That was when I became completely persuaded that what she had discovered was true, no matter how terrifying it seemed.’

He paused for another long gulp of vodka, swallowed it down and looked at them with a leaden expression. ‘The most terrifying thing of all is what ruthless people could do with a technology like that. Here are the facts. Shortly after Tesla’s death on 7 January, 1943, two US Secret Service agents who may have been one Bloyce Fitzgerald and one Ralph Doty, removed key items from his safe at the New Yorker Hotel as well as safety deposit box 103 at the Governor Clinton Hotel, leaving phoney benign material behind in their place for the investigators of the subsequent Trump Inquiry to find, so that everyone could be satisfied that Tesla wasn’t working on anything of potential military interest to enemy spies at the time of his death. The Trump Inquiry concluded that Tesla had been increasingly eccentric and possibly mentally ill during the last ten years of his life, producing nothing but useless gibberish that had no practical or scientific value.’

‘While the genuine items were being whisked away to some secret government warehouse,’ Roberta muttered.

‘More than a warehouse, a laboratory,’ Daniel replied. ‘Claudine believed that this became the basis for a highly classified and massively funded research and development program to explore and expand the range of Tesla’s discoveries. For over seventy years they’ve been secretly furthering his work, amplifying the powers he discovered, fine-tuning them, perfecting them.’

Daniel paused to drink more vodka, the glass trembling in his hand. ‘
Now
do you begin to see what this is about? The seismological data, the graphs, the images – Claudine had spent years compiling them, analysing them, searching through them until she was completely certain, beyond reasonable doubt—’

‘Completely certain of what, Daniel?’ Roberta asked, in a tone of dread that showed she already knew the answer.

Daniel’s face turned a little paler. He wiped his mouth. ‘That not all of the large-scale disasters of recent times, the mass destruction, the loss of countless human lives … were necessarily down to such natural causes as we have all been led to believe.’

‘You mean—?’

‘They were caused on purpose, yes,’ Daniel said quietly.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

There was a silence in the room. Roberta turned to look at Ben, then at Daniel. The Swede nodded gravely. ‘Triggered. Deliberately. Using a highly refined modern-day version of Tesla’s exact same design principle.’

‘Hah! It’s what I
told
you, Ben,’ Roberta said in grim triumph. ‘The goddamn US government has been behind this all along.’

Ben said nothing.

Daniel waved his hand in a gesture of ambiguity. ‘Well, that’s a little simplistic, hmm? You need to understand that, basically, at this point in history, the concept of nations is nothing more than a public relations scam and a way to distract us all from what really goes on. Forget governments. The true rulers aren’t the guys you see on TV. They’re not the finger puppets we vote for. The New World Order. Call it what you will, it’s a reality. Do you understand the terrible, terrible power that’s involved here, the kind of people you’re dealing with? They will stop at nothing. I mean nothing.’

Daniel turned back to the computer and pointed at the image of the wrecked cityscape that had been in the background as he’d been talking. ‘Republic of Taráca, one of the smallest South American countries with a population of just 2.6 million people, but rich in copper and natural gas. For decades it’s been a one-party state run by General Alberto Suarez, pretty much a military dictator who enjoyed support from Russia and Cuba, then more recently from the Chinese who were very keen to tap into Taráca’s resources. There were increasing rumblings about the country slanting towards Socialism. Then the earthquake happened. Eight point five on the Richter Magnitude Scale, way more powerful than the one they had back in 1996. Much of the city was reduced to rubble, including the Presidential Palace. There was no warning. The quake struck so suddenly that General Suarez and his family had no time to get out. The palace collapsed right on their heads, killing everyone inside. In the crowded poorer districts, people had no chance at all. The final death toll was over thirty thousand.’