‘What is this all about?’ he asked.
‘Just watch.’
Some voices could be heard offscreen from behind the camera. Then someone went ‘Shh’ and the room fell into a hush. The hum from the equipment grew louder. Lights began to flash faster. The readouts on the dials went wild.
‘It’s starting,’ Ruth said. ‘You’re going to be amazed.’
Ben watched closely.
Nothing was happening.
‘I don’t see anything so spe—’ he began.
And his voice trailed off in mid-word and his eyes opened wide as the baseball cap, the truck axle and the enormous mangle all suddenly sailed weightlessly up into the air.
Chapter Forty-Nine
The items hovered there, levitating without support. Ben stared hard at the screen, searching for tell-tale wires that might explain how this trickery was being done. But there were no wires, and what happened next made his jaw drop. While the baseball cap and the mangle floated in mid-air, the massive truck axle started to rotate slowly around on an invisible pivot. Then it suddenly took off, flashing across the warehouse faster than the eye could follow and smashing itself into the far wall with a loud crash and a cloud of masonry dust. A solid lump of metal, half a ton or more, zipping through the air like a lightweight arrow.
Propelled, apparently, by nothing.
At that point, the video clip came to an end, the image of the axle’s impact freezing on the screen. ‘We turned everything off then,’ she said. ‘Aborted the experiment. We couldn’t control the movement or direction of the objects, and it was just too dangerous to continue. Then we packed up the gear and got the hell out of there before the warehouse owners discovered the damage to the wall.’
Ben tore his gaze away from the screen and turned to her. ‘This isn’t for real,’ he said. ‘It’s got to be faked.’
‘Come on. Open your eyes. To fake that on camera would cost millions. It would take the kind of CGI special effects technology they use in the movies. Did that experiment look that well funded to you? No, Ben, this is real. And there’s more.’
He looked at her, studied her face for traces of a lie and could see she was absolutely serious. ‘OK. That was impressive. But what the hell was it?’
‘It’s not a magic trick,’ she replied, allowing a smile. ‘It’s scientific reality. What I’ve just shown you was the most successful AG experiment Franz and I ever achieved.’
‘AG?’
‘Anti-gravity. The next one we did was a disaster. Nothing worked properly. Soon after that, the university cottoned on to what we were doing and found out that we’d borrowed some equipment from their labs without permission. We got sacked for conducting dangerous, unorthodox experiments – for which read experiments that the academic establishment and its corporate paymasters don’t want the world to know about.’
Ben shook his head in confusion. ‘Hold on. I thought that what you were going to show me had to do with the Kammler papers – stuff dating back to the 1940s.’
Ruth tapped the screen with her finger. ‘That’s exactly what this is, Ben. Harnessing hidden energies, tapping into the power of the ether. That’s what Kammler’s work is all about.’
‘It sounds more like science fiction. Something from the future.’
‘Wrong. Scientists have been talking about it for centuries. Benjamin Franklin said in 1780 that “We may learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity for the sake of easy transportation.”’
‘How did you get into this stuff?’ he asked, still reeling from what he’d just seen and fighting to make sense of it.
‘Remember I told you how I’d overheard Maximilian’s phone call that time, when I was a student? Well, this is the stuff he was telling his brother about. As soon as my vacation was over and I went back to university, I started digging through every science text I could find that could explain what it was all about. Of course, the tutors did all they could to discourage me. It was years before I started seeing the deeper implications, and understanding that this radical, incredible thing was based on a complex phenomenon called Zero Point Energy.’
‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Not many people have. That’s for two reasons. One, because the physics of it makes Einstein’s relativity look like first-year maths. Secondly, because there are a lot of rich folks out there who stand to gain if this thing stays a secret. Zero Point Energy is, basically, free energy.’
He pointed at the screen. ‘So you’re saying Kammler’s research was to make stuff float about?’
‘There’s much more to it than that,’ she said. ‘OK, I’ll try to make it simple. As Einstein showed, we need to think of the universe and everything in it as an infinite soup of energy. Including you and me. We might think we’re real and solid, but in reality we’re just floating clouds of electrons. All that’s stopping us from falling apart, or disappearing through the floor, is the interaction of electromagnetic forces. We’re literally made up of and surrounded by gigantic, limitless amounts of energy.’
Ben frowned, absorbing the ideas.
‘Now, when it comes to trying to exploit natural resources for human civilisation, our technology is limited to using the crudest methods imaginable. Fossil fuels are inefficient, wasteful and harmful to the planet. And they’re running out fast. But imagine if we could tap into the natural energies that surround us, literally pulling power out of the ether. We’d be rewriting the future of the planet. Each home with its own little Zero Point Energy reactor, providing unlimited power for heat and light. Free. Safe. Clean. No more toxic by-products to dispose of. No more gases pumping into the atmosphere, no more radioactive waste sitting at the bottom of the ocean. For the first time since the industrial revolution, humans would actually be living in harmony with the Earth instead of destroying it.’
‘I get you, but I still don’t see what this has to do with Kammler.’
‘Kammler was the inventor of something called the Bell,’ Ruth explained. ‘A very special and completely unique device, commissioned by Hitler in 1943 or 1944 and built by Kammler’s team of SS engineers and scientists. Not much is known about it, except that it was in development in a secret facility somewhere in Eastern Europe during the final years of World War Two. Whatever it was, it was so potent that it had to be kept locked inside a vault. Witness reports from the time claimed that it had strange powers, interfered with electrical equipment and emitted a weird blue light when it was turned on. Based on what we know about Kammler’s research from leaked information at the time and vague references in some of his correspondence to fellow SS engineers, there’s a very good chance that he was building some kind of Zero Point Energy reactor.’
‘Reactor?’
‘An instrument capable of extracting raw energy from the ether and converting it into usable power. Like electricity, but not artificially generated. Straight from nature. What we can create ourselves is a pale imitation.’ She paused. ‘But when Kammler disappeared in 1945, in the very last days of the war, so did all trace of his invention. Nobody knew where it was, whether it had even survived. US Intelligence spent years searching for it, but never found it. The same goes for his research papers, containing the secrets of his invention.’
‘But you think Steiner found them?’
‘That’s right, Ben. I believe that’s what he found by accident and has locked away – you can easily see why this stuff would be a threat to him. And from what he said that day on the phone to Karl, I think he knows not only the secrets of the Bell, but where it might be – its hidden resting place since 1945.’
‘Let me get this right,’ Ben said. ‘You’re saying that this Bell was a machine capable of drawing the energy out of thin air and converting it into usable power? Like a nuclear reactor, but without the need for fuel, and with no waste products?’
Ruth nodded. ‘The future of our planet.’
‘It’s a little hard to imagine the Nazis as the invento
rs of a wonderful green technology that could save the Earth,’ Ben said. ‘Especially as they were in the middle of losing a war at the time. I’d have thought they had other things on their mind than green ideology.’
‘There are other theoretical applications. Like the potential to create a super high-speed anti-gravity aircraft. There’s some evidence that the Nazis might have been doing just that. And then there are other things, too.’
‘Such as?’
‘We’re talking about energy, Ben. A limitless force of nature. If you control its release, harness it, you have a safe, clean reactor that can go on churning out endless amounts of power for all eternity. But if you speed up the process and let the energy come pulsing out much more strongly, you have something else altogether.’
Ben’s stomach gave a lurch. ‘A bomb.’
‘Infinitely more powerful than the effect of merely splitting the atom. While the Americans were developing the first nuclear weapons, they had no idea that their enemies were working on something that could potentially have made Oppenheimer’s atom bombs look like kids’ fireworks by comparison. It’s safe to say that when Hitler gave Kammler’s SS Special Projects Division carte blanche to develop this technology, it wasn’t because he cared about the future of the environment. It would have given him the power to obliterate half of Europe. He could have won the war in a day.’
‘So isn’t it just as well that the Kammler research stays safe and secret?’
Ruth shook her head, resolute. ‘No, Ben. The planet deserves it. Whatever dark side there may be to Zero Point Energy, it’s no different from any other natural resource. Take electricity. You can use it to provide light and warmth and make people’s lives better; or you can use it to fry a man in a chair. If we can just control that energy responsibly, we really do have the key to saving the planet.’ Her eyes were bright with excitement as she talked. ‘Think of it. The end of our dependence on fossil fuels. The total breakdown of the evil business empires based on raping the environment.’ She smiled darkly. ‘Including Steiner’s. He has billions tied up in the aerospace and oil industries. Imagine the catastrophic losses he’d suffer if this technology broke through into the mainstream. Greedy capitalist bastards like him, plundering the planet’s natural resources and holding them for ransom, would become as extinct as the dinosaurs.’
Ben now understood why Steiner had lied about the real nature of the documents in his safe, inventing the Holocaust denial angle to put any enquiring minds off the track.
‘I think I get it,’ he said. ‘This is really just about you and him. You wanted your revenge on him, for what he represents to you.’
‘No, Ben. I want what’s best.’
‘Really? That’s why you and your radical friends decided to get tooled up with real guns and start playing at being kidnappers?’
‘It was a long time before we even considered that kind of desperate measure,’ she protested. ‘Years of trying everything we could think of. Like the guy in Manchester I tried to talk to. I’d heard through the grapevine that he was this big Kammler expert. I flew all the way over there to see him, and—’
‘And he never turned up to the meeting,’ Ben finished for her. ‘I know about Lenny Salt. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think he’d have been much help to you.’
‘Then I tried to get in touch with this colleague of his called Julia something. Julia Goodman. But she never got back to me. Meanwhile, whenever we weren’t trying to earn our living selling Franz’s art or doing a bit of private science tuition here and there, we were scraping together money to hire equipment and premises to run more experiments. We kept hoping that we’d crack it. But there was something missing. We just couldn’t quite get it to work consistently. One time in twenty, we’d get a positive result, and even then we couldn’t work out why it was happening.’ She sighed. ‘In the end we sat down and realised we had no choice but to get hold of what Maximilian had in his safe. But it wasn’t for lack of trying every other possible alternative. We didn’t actually want to be criminals.’
‘Couldn’t you just have sneaked the keys out of his pocket like all rebellious kids do?’
‘You don’t understand. I haven’t been back to that house for nearly eight years. I’m the estranged daughter, remember?
The crazy one who dropped out of society and went off on some crusade to save the Earth. Why do you think Dorenkamp told you there’d never been any Steiner children? I’m officially disowned, dead and forgotten. All I have is some money that’s left from the Geneva apartment and the allowance they gave me.’
‘You said you were close to Silvia and Otto, though. They might have helped you get inside the house.’
‘Uh-uh. No way would I have done that to Silvia. She’s a bad liar and Maximilian would have sussed her out right away. But I did try to work on Otto.’ Ruth smiled. ‘Poor, sweet Otto. It was about a year ago, I called him on his mobile, managed to persuade him to leave his golf clubs alone for a few hours. We met up for lunch in Bern, and I told him about these old papers of vague scientific interest that I wanted to look at. All he had to do was to go into Maximilian’s study, open up the safe and photocopy them for me. But Otto’s weak. He got cold feet, backed out. The big soft chicken’s totally dominated by his uncle. So that didn’t work either. Like I said, soon after that we realised we were all out of options. We thought, fuck it, go for it.’
‘Dressing up like Nazis – I take it that was just a red herring for the police?’
She shrugged. ‘We’ve all been active in green circles. Half our names are probably down on police files. They’d come knocking on our door pretty fast if a bunch of greenies started trying to take down the likes of the great Steiner. So we figured that with the Kammler SS connection, the best possible front would be to pass ourselves off as something the complete opposite of what we really were, some kind of neo-Nazi terror group. It wasn’t hard to find the swastika badges. There were eleven of us involved, all committed. The first time, we almost got him. We were unlucky.’
‘I heard what happened.’
‘Then the second time, we had an even better plan. We spent ages working out every detail. But, as I recall, someone interfered.’ She shot him a look.
‘I’m glad I did, Ruth. You were risking your freedom, even your life, just because you believed that a bunch of documents written by some obscure Nazi loony almost seventy years ago was the key to saving the planet.’
‘It’s not a question of belief, Ben. These are facts.’
‘I think you’ve been smoking too much of that weed of yours. You’re stacking an awful lot of faith on this mumbo-jumbo.’
‘That’s neat, coming from someone who studied theology. You believe in a god that nobody can prove exists, that nobody’s ever seen, and who never shows himself. I show you something real, and you choose to dismiss it without a second thought.’
‘I don’t know what I saw just now.’
She snorted, glaring at him, her temper rising fast. ‘Yeah, it’s easier just to close your eyes. Anyway, I don’t care if you believe me or not. You wanted to know why we tried to kidnap Maximilian, and now you know. So maybe now you’ll let me go back home.’
‘To do what? To sell pottery? Or to pin your little Nazi badges back on and try to kidnap him again?’
‘We’re not going to stop trying. This is important.’
‘I don’t like what you’re doing. What if someone had been hurt, or killed? You weren’t shooting blanks that day.’
‘It wasn’t meant to go that far,’ she said. ‘I swear it.’
‘You’re throwing away your life.’
‘I don’t need your approval.’
‘You might think you got away because you were clever, well trained and well rehearsed. The fact is, you were just lucky. If I’d been properly in charge of a close protection outfit that I’d had the opportunity to train and equip the way I wanted instead of just having to make do with amateurs, you and your friends would all
be in prison now awaiting sentence. And if you keep trying, that’s what you’re going to come up against. You’re going to get caught, Ruth. Ever been in a cell? I don’t think you’d like it. If you thought Steiner was cramping your freedom, wait until you get a load of Interpol.’ She said nothing.
‘And that’s not all,’ he went on. ‘While you’re running around playing your little games and dabbling in things that should be left well alone, people are being kidnapped and murdered for real. Julia Goodman, the woman you tried to contact?’
Ruth frowned.
‘Dead,’ Ben said. ‘Along with another of her colleagues who was heavily into this Kammler stuff, someone by the name of Michio Miyazaki.’
She’d clearly heard the name, from the way she flinched.
‘And have you heard of a man called Adam O’Connor? He’s missing, and so is his young son. Whoever’s out there doing this stuff is armed and means business, and it’s clear that someone is paying them to take an interest in all this.’
‘Someone like who? Maximilian?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I do know that anyone connected with this Kammler research is a potential target. Which includes you and your cronies, too. You’re way out of your depth. You need to back right off.’
‘Thank you for the lecture. But I’ll take my chances. I can look after myself. I’ve done it for long enough. And I’d rather believe in something, and suffer the consequences, than not believe in anything at all.’ She looked up at him hotly. ‘So can I go now? Or am I your prisoner?’
‘I ought to keep you locked up until you see sense.’
The Shadow Project Page 26
