The Nemesis Program_Ben Hope

by Scott Mariani

  Ben pounded on the door, but he might as well have tried to punch his way out of an Abrams main battle tank. They were closed inside the tomb, and there was no way out.

  ‘Ben?’ Roberta’s panicked voice cried out from the darkness.

  ‘Stay calm,’ he said, running back down the steps to join her. She latched onto his arm, gripping him tightly. ‘Who’s up there? Who closed us in?’

  ‘Let’s just say it’s someone who doesn’t want us to get out again,’ Ben said grimly. ‘But we’ll find a way out of this.’ He winced as the hot metal of the lighter singed his fingertips. The flame was beginning to gutter. Their only light source was soon going to run out.

  ‘You smell that?’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Smell what?’

  ‘Something’s burning,’ she said.

  Now Ben could smell it too. And it wasn’t the flesh of his fingers smouldering from the heat of the lighter. The sharp, dense odour of burning was coming from somewhere else.

  ‘This isn’t good,’ he muttered under his breath. Breaking loose from Roberta, he ran back towards the steps and held the dying flame up high.

  It was as he’d feared. Wisps of smoke were already beginning to trickle in, under and around the edges of the tomb door. The acrid stench was becoming stronger, and so was the growing crackle and roar he could hear from outside. He touched his hand to the iron door and felt the heat spreading through it.

  Whoever had shut them in wasn’t content with merely letting them starve to death among the corpses.

  The chapel was ablaze above them.

  Chapter Twenty

  Whoever had set fire to the chapel, it wasn’t kids messing around with matches. Ben had had enough experience of high-powered incendiary devices in his lifetime to know how fast a building could be reduced to a bone-melting inferno. If he and Roberta didn’t succumb to smoke inhalation first, they’d soon cook in the heat. It was already getting uncomfortable standing close to the door. The smoke was pouring in more and more through the gaps. Every moment counted.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Roberta asked as he leaped down the steps and started hunting around inside the tomb. She was still clutching the Tesla device.

  ‘What’s happening is, the whole bloody place is on fire,’ he replied. He’d found what he was looking for. Grabbing the wrecking bar off the floor, he paused to reach back inside the coffin and rip a long piece of burial shroud from the skeleton inside. Loose ribs clattered to the floor as he jerked the cloth away. ‘Keep this over your nose and mouth,’ he told Roberta, shoving it at her.

  ‘This was wrapped around a goddamn corpse.’

  ‘Do it now!’ he yelled. He dashed back to the door. Stinging tears filled his eyes as he stabbed the chisel end of the bar into the door seam and started trying to lever it open. He knew the risk of causing a backdraft that would suck fire into the tomb and turn it instantly into a superheated oven. At least it would be over quickly for them then.

  He forced the bar in deeper and levered with all his strength. A piece of stonework broke away. He kept on working furiously, hardly able to keep his eyes open, racked with coughing from the smoke. Another piece of masonry broke away from the door arch. The first flames were beginning to lick hungrily around the edges of the door. The situation was worsening more rapidly than he could deal with.

  He knew now that this was futile.

  ‘Come away from the door, Ben!’ Roberta screamed. He hesitated for a second, then stumbled dizzily back down the steps and beat his way through the smoke to where Roberta was crouching in the fiery glow at the far side of the tomb with the piece of burial shroud clamped over her face. She was no longer holding the device.

  He wanted to smash the tomb walls down, tear them apart stone by stone with the steel bar in his hands. But they were impossibly thick, and buried under ten feet of earth. The door had been their only way out.

  There was no way out. Not any more. They were going to burn.

  Ben dropped to his knees next to Roberta and wrapped his arms tightly around her, intent on shielding her from the flames with his body when the moment came, probably just minutes away. By then, the smoke would most likely have got to them. He could feel her ribs convulsing as she fought to breathe.

  He buried his face in her hair. It won’t be long now, he wanted to say.

  His own life didn’t matter to him that much. He’d come very close to losing it many times before now – it had always just been a question of how the end would come about, and how soon. You got used to living with the idea. But it wasn’t right that Roberta should die like this, just because she’d wanted to find out what happened to her friend. Just because she was good, and loyal, and caring. She didn’t deserve this.

  But even as he prepared himself for the worst, Ben was becoming conscious of something happening. Something strange. At first he thought it was his own pounding heartbeat filling his senses. But no; it was coming from underneath him, as if from deep beneath the flagstones: a kind of pulsing, quivering sensation that doubled in intensity with each passing second. A deep rumble, seeming to emanate from everywhere at once, flooded his ears.

  Roberta could feel it too. She pulled away from his embrace, looked up at him through streaming eyes and seemed to be trying to say something, but her spluttering words were drowned out by the steadily rising sound. She motioned weakly into the shadows of the tomb.

  Ben squinted through the smoke to where she was pointing, and thought he glimpsed the blink of tiny lights. Was it some trick of the retina, caused by oxygen starvation of the brain? No; he saw it again.

  ‘What’s—?’ he croaked inaudibly, but the question died on his lips. The whole tomb now seemed to be shaking violently. The thrumming noise seemed to penetrate everywhere and everything.

  It’s an earthquake, said a voice in Ben’s mind. But it was wrong, it was impossible. They didn’t have earthquakes in northern France. Not like this.

  With an ear-splitting crack, a whole section of the interior wall suddenly came crashing down in a landslide of crumbling masonry. Tentacles of flame quickly came snaking in through the jagged hole, hunting for something to consume.

  Roberta struggled to her feet, bent double with coughing, and grasped Ben’s hands. Confused and disorientated, he sensed that she was trying to pull him towards the deep, dark recess where they’d opened the coffin. Over the roaring of the fire and the deafening rumble he heard her say something about ‘take cover’.

  The flames were past the tomb door and rolling greedily in through the gaping cavity in the wall. But the most frightening thing was the all-encompassing vibration that rocked the floor under their feet and made it hard to stay upright. Roberta let go of Ben’s hands and frantically gripped the edge of Germain De Bourg’s coffin, struggling with all her strength to drag it out of the recess.

  Seeing what she was trying to do, Ben grasped the rough stone, braced his feet against the wall and pulled with all his remaining reserves of energy, until his back felt about to break.

  The coffin lurched outwards with a grinding scrape of stone on stone. A few inches, then a few inches more, until its weight overbalanced it and it toppled out of the recess and crashed out onto the flagstones, splitting apart and spilling the skeletal remains of its occupant in pieces across the floor.

  Roberta clambered over the shattered coffin and into the hole, reached a clawed hand out to him to follow her. He half-caught her choking scream of ‘Get in!’ just as another great rippling crack shuddered through the tomb and a shower of rock and stone and dust came thundering down all over the floor just yards from where he was trying to stay on his feet.

  Another wave of the inferno from the blazing chapel above came spreading and licking down through the hole. Ben felt its scorching breath sear his back as he threw himself into the recess with Roberta. The two of them wedged themselves in as deeply as they could against the hard stone.

  Now all they could do was lie huddled there and wait for whatever was
going to happen to them.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The terrifying vibration seemed to threaten to tear everything apart. It felt as though they were aboard some vast rocket ship taking off. Ben’s blurred vision could just about make out the chapel’s blazing timbers through the gaping hole in the ceiling of the tomb.

  Roberta clung tightly to him. He heard her frightened gasp in his ear as another incoming onslaught of searing heat and flame rolled across the narrow mouth of the recess.

  This was it. They were about to be roasted alive.

  In a deafening chaos of noise and fire, the chapel timbers came crashing inwards amid an avalanche of roof slates, bringing down the rest of the tomb ceiling. It felt like being caught in a direct hit from a bomb.

  Then … nothing.

  Ben opened his eyes. Something was different. The terrible vibration had stopped. He turned his face towards the opening of the recess and realised he could taste air, fresh air, on his dry lips.

  He could breathe again.

  Still coughing from the smoke, he struggled out of the hole, stood uncertainly and gazed around him. ‘What the …’ he muttered to himself, blinking as if he were seeing things.

  The whole building had fallen in on itself, extinguishing the blaze. Where the chapel had stood, there was nothing left but a circle of ruined walls and heaps of rubble. The bronze cross that had earlier adorned the steeple now lay blackened and half-buried under a ton of smouldering timber. A hundred small fires were still burning all around, and a vast column of orange-lit smoke was towering upwards to blot out the stars.

  Ben glanced sideways and saw that Roberta was standing at his shoulder. Her face was glowing by the firelight. One cheek was blackened and her hair was almost white with dust. She couldn’t stop grinning shakily as she squeezed his arm. ‘Hey, looks like we made it after all,’ she said in a raspy chuckle.

  ‘… What happened?’ was all he could say. His own voice sounded hollow and deathly.

  ‘I couldn’t see the controls in the dark,’ she explained, talking fast. ‘Just by chance I must have pressed the right button, then I rammed it into a crevice in the wall there.’ She pointed to a pile of smoking rubble.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The device must’ve been set up to automatically attune to the natural frequency of the building, instead of the manual analogue system Tesla used,’ she went on. ‘I guess we’ll never know now, even if we could dig out whatever’s left of it. Least we know it worked, huh?’

  Ben stared at her. ‘Hold on. Surely even you wouldn’t be trying to tell me that that thing – that little tin pot piece of crap machine – did this?’

  Roberta’s excited grin dropped and she returned his fierce stare. ‘Why, you think it was a miracle or something? God heard your prayers and sent down an earthquake to rescue us in our moment of need? That what you’d rather believe, Ben?’

  He couldn’t reply. The alternative seemed wild, insane. But there was no other way to accept what he’d just witnessed.

  ‘You know it’s true,’ she said. ‘So much for pie in the sky, hmm?’

  He surveyed the devastation and shook his head. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘He had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be the crazy one,’ he muttered. ‘You almost got us killed.’

  ‘I got us out, didn’t I?’ Her grin returned. ‘Then you do believe me.’

  ‘Principle of resonance,’ he grunted reluctantly.

  ‘Principle of resonance. You got it, Hope. You ought to trust me a bit more by now, after all we’ve been through together.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me everything you know about this stuff,’ he said.

  ‘With pleasure. And once we get home, with any luck we’ll both be able to learn exactly what Claudine was doing and what she knew, which you can be damn sure was a lot more than I do.’

  Roberta tried to shake the worst of the dust out of her hair and cleaned up her sooty face as best she could while Ben searched for his bag. He found it among a pile of wreckage, rather more battered now than before and partly singed from the fire. Its contents were warm to the touch. He could only pray that the heat hadn’t affected the remote hard drive inside. He took out the machine carbine, checked it over and kept it handy as they clambered over the rubble that covered the tomb steps and picked their way through the ruins of the chapel.

  ‘You think they’d still be hanging around?’ Roberta asked nervously, glancing at the trees.

  ‘Better not be, for their sake,’ Ben replied. ‘I don’t much appreciate some joker trying to stonebake us.’

  But whoever it was, they were long gone. The grounds were deserted as Ben and Roberta walked towards the gates, both happily filling their raw lungs with the wonderfully fresh night air.

  ‘Alive again,’ she said.

  ‘For now,’ he replied.

  ‘That’s what I always loved about you,’ she said. ‘That cheery optimism just never goes away.’

  Everything was as they’d left it. The gates were still locked, the Alpina still in the same spot. It was as if nobody else had been there that night.

  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.’

  Rob
erta 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.