The Shadow Project

by Scott Mariani

  When Pelham was gone, Adam sank his chin on his chest, put his hands over his face and sobbed. He didn’t care about the guards in the room with him. Dignity no longer served any purpose.

  Then he went rigid with fear as a thought struck him like a bullet to the head.

  Sabrina. He’d forgotten all about her.

  Oh, God. Sweet Jesus. Please don’t let Sabrina still be there.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  ‘Is she the one you’re looking for?’ Salt asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ Ben said quietly. ‘It’s her.’

  ‘Any idea who she is?’

  ‘Some idea.’

  ‘You going to tell me? Could come in handy.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ Ben had to speak carefully. He could hardly breathe.

  ‘She’s a spook, isn’t she? One of Them. That’s what They do, man, they hook them in. Brainwash them. Turn them into automatons to carry out their missions.’ He pointed. ‘I’m sure these are the bastards who killed Julia and Michio. It’s all got to do with Kammler, see? The whole thing.’

  Ben stared at him. ‘Julia and Michio?’

  Salt nodded through a swig of beer. ‘Julia Goodman and Michio Miyazaki. They were part of the Krew,’ he mumbled. ‘Like me. We were all in it together.’

  ‘I don’t get it. What crew? You mean they were lab assistants like you at Manchester?’

  Salt shook his head. ‘No, man. Julia was my boss. She was head of department. Michio was a planetary scientist based in Tokyo. I’m talking about the Kammler Krew.’

  This was getting more and more impenetrable. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Climbing accident. Heart attack. At least, that’s what the official reports will tell you. But here’s what really happened. I was in email contact with them all the time. Not every week, you know, but often enough. Then, bang, they’re gone. Off the radar. Vanished. So I make a few enquiries, don’t I? I’m told that Julia’s taken a long holiday. OK, she was seriously into hiking and climbing, that kind of thing. But she never mentioned anything to me about a holiday. Next thing you know, she’s fallen off a mountain in Spain. Dead, of course. Meanwhile, I hear from Michio’s brother who tells me Michio was off on a research trip to America. Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. But guess what? Wouldn’t you know it, Michio gets stung by a scorpion, goes into shock, dies of heart failure. Both of them killed in a short space of time, and nothing to link them whatsoever except for one thing. Both members of the Kammler Krew. See? Ha.’ Salt slapped the table.

  Ben was feeling a growing surge of unease as he listened. It started in his guts and worked its way upwards until his throat felt clamped and his heart was thudding. If what Salt was saying was the truth, it meant that the stakes had just risen from attempted kidnap to actual abduction and murder.

  And was Ruth part of it?

  A dull roar filled his ears. His eyes lost focus.

  Salt jabbed his finger again at the screen, making it wobble on its hinges. ‘So who knows, man? What side is she on? The assassins’, or someone else’s? That’s the world we live in, man. You can’t trust anybody.’ He paused, looking down at Ben’s hand. ‘Hey. You’re bleeding on my table. I eat off this table.’

  Ben followed his gaze and realised that he’d crushed his can in his fist without knowing it. The thin metal had sheared, leaving a sharp edge that had gashed his palm. A trickle of blood was dripping across his hand onto the wood. He wiped it away, struggling to clear his mind.

  ‘I’m not getting this, Lenny. Why would these people, whoever they are, be going after scientists?’

  Salt frowned at him, apparently taken aback, as though it was the stupidest question of all time.

  ‘Maybe it’s to do with tests of some kind?’ Ben said, remembering what Don Jarrett had told him.

  Salt’s brow crunched up into a grimace. ‘Tests?’

  ‘Tests on the gas chamber. Poison residues in the ground, something like that? But why physicists? That would be something a chemist would do.’

  Salt stared. ‘You’ve got this totally wrong, man. This has nothing to do with gas chambers.’

  ‘Holocaust deniers,’ Ben said. ‘It’s about people who…’ But he could see the deepening look of consternation on Salt’s face, and his voice trailed off.

  ‘No way, man.’

  ‘But Kammler was the designer—’

  ‘I know that,’ Salt interrupted him. ‘SS Building Division, and all that shit. But that’s a whole separate thing. Forget about the Holocaust and all that. That’s not why people are going after the Kammler stuff. This is about science.’

  Ben stared at him. ‘Science?’

  ‘Weird, weird shit.’ Salt shook his head. ‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘As in Nazi time machines and UFOs? You’re right. I don’t.’

  ‘You’ve got to be open, man. There’s stuff out there that would blow your mind. The Germans were developing all kinds of far-out technology in the war. Heard of the Foo Fighters? Those lights that the British bomber crews saw on night missions over Germany that would just, like, hover there and then go whizzing across the sky like nothing anyone had ever seen before or could explain? Who do you think made those? And where d’you think the Yanks stole it from after the war? Philadelphia Experiment. Heard of that? US Navy special optical cloaking device, 1943? They made a whole ship disappear, man. Right into the ether, with all the crew on board. Then brought it back. Electromagnetic fields, anti-gravity. Weird science is all real, man. Everything you’ve ever heard of is real. But the fucking spooks use disinformation to cover it up, discredit a few scientists here and there so that nobody will take it seriously. Meanwhile the bastards know full well it’s all true and they’re hiding it from the world.’

  Salt’s voice started fading away into the background of Ben’s thoughts, and after a while Ben could hardly hear him at all as he sat there ranting and gesticulating, his eyes wide with indignation, his wizened face cracked open in a snaggle-tooth snarl.

  Ben closed his eyes and remembered that day in Switzerland. Replayed the events in the clearing, the kidnappers coming out of the trees in their black combat clothes and masks. The swastika badges on their jackets.

  He remembered them clearly. He hadn’t imagined it. And much as he despised the idea of his sister wearing that badge, until now he’d at least had some clear grasp of what was going on – or had thought he had. It had seemed to fit so perfectly with what Steiner had said. Yet what Salt was telling him blew the whole logic of the situation out of the window. Suddenly everything was changed, turned upside down.

  Now his head was aching with concentration as he tried to make sense of it all. There was just one clear thread running through the mess. It was the clear, unalterable fact that, whatever the hell this was about, this woman calling herself Luna, but who was really his lost sister Ruth, had attempted to talk to Lenny Salt about Kammler. He didn’t know why she had – that could come later. For now, all that mattered was the evidence he was looking at on the screen in front of him. She’d come a long way to talk to Salt, and that meant she was determined. Determined enough, perhaps, to want to talk to someone else when Salt failed to honour their rendezvous.

  Ben thought about it for a moment, then looked up at Salt and asked, ‘This group, this crew or whatever it was. Was it just you, Michio and Julia? Just the three of you?’

  Salt shook his head. ‘There were four of us, for a while at least. Until Adam dropped out.’

  ‘Adam?’

  ‘Adam Connor. O’Connor now. Changed his name. Irish roots, but he’s American. He was Professor of Applied Physics at the University of New York.’

  ‘You haven’t mentioned anything happening to him. Does that mean he’s still alive?’

  ‘He was when I talked to him a few days ago,’ Salt said.

  ‘You told him your theory about Michio and Julia?’

  Salt nodded. ‘I warned him, and if he’s got any sense he’ll keep his head
down, like me.’

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘Oh, he probably thinks I’m paranoid. Mad old Lenny. Serve him right if they do get him.’

  Ben paused, thinking hard. ‘When did you take down the Kammler page on your website, Lenny?’

  ‘When all this happened. To protect myself.’

  ‘Before you took the page down, was Adam’s name mentioned there?’

  Salt looked puzzled. ‘Yeah, it was, until he made me take it off. He didn’t want to be associated with us any more. Thought it was bad for his reputation or something.’

  ‘So Luna could have found him, the same way she found you.’

  Shrug. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Is Adam into conspiracies the way you are, Lenny?’

  Salt flushed. ‘No, he’s got his head in the sand like everyone else.’

  ‘So if she’d turned up, he wouldn’t necessarily have tried to avoid her. But months later, nothing’s happened to Adam. So she can’t have been involved with whatever happened to your friends.’

  ‘Maybe that’s just what they want us to think,’ Salt said. ‘See how they fuck with our minds, man?’

  Ben ignored him. He was thinking about this American guy. The man sounded like a sensible kind of person, as different from Lenny Salt as it was possible to be. Nothing made sense any more, and maybe it was an outside chance – but what if Adam had actually spoken to Ruth? He might know something. She might have given him a phone number, an email address. Even terrorists lived normal lives, lived in regular homes like everyone else. Or she might have given him a surname. Even a fake name could be a useful lead.

  ‘You’d better give me O’Connor’s number. I’d like to talk to him.’

  ‘I can’t give it to you. I don’t have it.’

  ‘Lenny—’

  ‘Seriously, I don’t have his number. I never did. I don’t like to use phones, man. They’re always listening.’

  ‘I’m going to be pretty annoyed if I have to travel all the way to America just because you don’t like to talk on the phone.’

  ‘He’s not in America any more.’ Salt pointed west, through the trees. ‘He’s just across the water there.’

  ‘Across the water?’

  ‘Ireland. He moved there, out in the Wicklow Hills near Dublin. Got a smart house business, lives out in the sticks by a lake.’

  ‘Will he be at home?’

  Salt shrugged. ‘Don’t see why not. He said something about expecting a visitor to stay when I saw him, so I don’t think he’s going anywhere.’

  Ben looked at his watch. It was nearly quarter to two. He could drive from here to Pembroke Dock, catch the first ferry and cut across to Rosslare, then head north towards the Wicklow Hills. He should be there by nightfall.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Night was falling fast and early over Teach na Loch as the gathering storm rattled the glass in the windows. Sabrina looked out at the black clouds scudding across the sky and the ripples distorting the moon’s glow on the surface of the lake. Then, as she watched, a cloud passed in front of the moon and the water went dark. The gently rolling hills were suddenly black, ominous silhouettes against the even blacker sky.

  Not a prick of light anywhere to be seen, not a single person for miles. It made her feel very alone in the isolated house, and she found herself wishing she were back in noisy, cramped London.

  The cream floor-length curtains suddenly swished shut without warning, making her jump before she realised that it was the house detecting the sudden change in the light and closing the curtains automatically. Three side lamps came on simultaneously a second later, the eco-bulbs glowing dull at first and then brightening.

  ‘Would you like the fire on?’ asked the soothing, electronic female voice from somewhere and nowhere.

  ‘Go screw yourself,’ Sabrina said to it. Every time she came here, Adam had installed some new piece of gadgetry, and it always took her by surprise. Pretty soon there’d be a robot arm in the bathroom waiting to wipe your ass.

  She walked over to the big, soft sofa, stretched herself out on it and went back to her thoughts.

  Still no word from Adam all day. She’d been hoping he’d at least call her from Edinburgh to let her know when he was coming back. She’d tried calling him, but his phone was always off. And of course it was way too much to expect him to bother to answer the three messages she’d left him.

  It was getting harder to know what to do. Why was Adam acting so oddly? Had he stashed Rory away at tennis camp so that he could go off with some woman he’d met? But that didn’t make sense. If he’d met someone, why the furtiveness? It wasn’t like he had anything to hide. Oh, wait, maybe she was married. That would explain a lot. He wouldn’t want to let his little sis know about that kind of thing. Little sis who was pushing thirty but still had to be treated like a kid.

  Or maybe Adam wasn’t acting oddly at all, and he was right about Rory’s practical joke, and there was a glitch with the email dates, and Rory had got himself another phone, and she was just winding herself up pointlessly with bullshit delusions. That would make more sense, Sabrina thought – and it was almost certainly what the cops would have said about it all, if she’d been dumb enough to go to them. She’d been tempted a few times that day to call them. Glad she hadn’t.

  She jumped up from the sofa, a vision of a gin and tonic in a tall, frosted glass suddenly filling her mind. As she padded down the corridor in her bare feet, the house sensed the movement and turned lights on to guide her way. She walked into the kitchen and it was suddenly a blaze of white light.

  ‘I am capable of flipping a switch, you know,’ she muttered. ‘Fucking smartass house.’

  The house didn’t respond. At least it didn’t ask her, Shall I put the kettle on?

  ‘Frank Sinatra,’ she called out.

  This time the house responded instantly with ‘Come Fly With Me’ from hidden speakers all around the room.

  She mixed her drink, sliced a lemon, clinked ice in the glass and took a slurp. ‘Cheers, Frank.’ Then she added some more gin for good measure, left the kitchen and the lights escorted her back down the corridor.

  What’s the matter with you? she thought to herself. Why couldn’t she just chill out and enjoy what was left of her vacation?

  Well, maybe it’s got something to do with being left all alone in a dark, creepy house that talks to you and makes things happen by themselves, with nobody around for a mile in every direction and a storm blowing outside.

  As she thought this, a gust of wind hit the building and she was sure she felt it move.

  ‘What is this place, Tornado Alley?’ she muttered to herself. Wondering for a moment about what she would do if there was a power cut, she quickly reassured herself that her oh-so-scientifically-minded and supremely clever brother would have a genny down in the basement if it came to it.

  She slumped back down on the sofa with her drink, grabbed the remote control, aimed it at the giant wall-mounted TV and pressed a button.

  The TV stayed blank. Instead, a bright flame whooshed up to fill the electronically-controlled open fireplace below it.

  Sabrina cursed. Why did all the goddamn remotes have to look exactly the same? She killed the fire with another touch of a button, chucked the remote down and picked up the right one to turn on the TV. Flipped through a bunch of channels and landed on a rom-com movie she’d seen years ago but liked enough to watch again.

  She settled back against the cushions, getting in the mood and smiling to herself as Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal went through their bickering, fast-talking routine.

  Suddenly, lights came on in the corridor. One after another, click, click, click. And stayed on.

  She frowned. ‘Adam, is that you?’

  She half-expected him to walk into the room, brushing rain off his jacket and putting down his case, calling, ‘I’m ho-ome.’

  But there was no reply.

  Sabrina muted the TV. ‘Adam?’ she called again. Sti
ll nothing. She got up from the sofa, stepped across the room and peered out into the corridor. The lights were already fading again.

  ‘Is someone there?’ There was a tremulous little edge to her voice that she wished hadn’t come out. Her heart began to beat faster.

  Outside, the thunder rumbled, and the rain lashed down harder on the windows and the skylights.

  Sabrina was frozen to the spot, staring out into the dark corridor.

  Something moved.

  She tensed.

  Cassini came slinking out of the darkness.

  ‘Oh, Cass, you almost scared the shit out of me,’ she sighed. ‘Jesus.’ She couldn’t help but chuckle with relief as she scooped the cat off the floor and walked back to the sofa, holding him in her arms. ‘Don’t you ever think about doing that to me again, pal. OK?’

  She went back to the sofa, took another gulp of gin and tonic and turned the movie sound back on. Cassini draped himself across her lap, so floppy he felt boneless, and she stroked him absently. She could feel the tiny vibration of his purring resonating through her, relaxing her.

  ‘I would be proud to partake of your pecan pie,’ said Billy Crystal in a funny voice up on the screen. Sabrina smiled.

  And the cat’s body suddenly tightened like a spring on her lap, and his needle-like claws dug through her jeans and stabbed into her skin. She let out a cry of pain. The cat was up on his paws, arched. Then he jumped off her and darted away.

  Then Sabrina looked up and saw that the lights were back on in the corridor.

  And that there was a man standing there.

  Watching her.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Sabrina shrieked and took off across the open-plan living room towards the stairs.

  Too slow. The man was squat and heavy with muscle, but he was quick on his feet and in two powerful bounds he was on her. She went crashing into a side table, rolling and lashing out at him with her bare feet. A grunt as her heel connected with his eye socket; he let go of her and she scrambled to her feet and made the stairs. Her legs felt ready to buckle under her as she raced up the open treads. His footsteps pounded up behind her. Then she was on the landing and launched herself down the glass corridor.