The Shadow Project

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Fuck you. You’re just as bad as him.’

  He could see the look in her eye. The argument was spiralling out of control, and the last thing he wanted to do was alienate the sister that he’d only just found again. He stepped towards her, put his hand on her arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You know I’d never stand in your way. If you want to go, go. Call Franz and tell him where you are. Or take the Mini. Here. It’s yours.’ He dangled the keys out in front of her.

  She snatched the keys furiously out of his fingers, and he realised he’d already pushed her too far.

  ‘Fine,’ she snapped. ‘I’m going to get some rest, and then I’ll leave tonight.’

  He pointed over to the trainee accommodation block. ‘Pick any room you want. The sheets are all fresh.’

  Without another word she turned away from him, wrenched open the office door and slammed it shut behind her. He watched her strut angrily across the yard, then powered down the laptop and left the office too.

  There was no sign of Storm outside. Ben walked alone to the house, feeling frustrated. He was hoping to find Brooke sitting reading in the kitchen. She was becoming more and more part of the place. But there was no sign of her there, nor in the living room.

  Then he heard the sound of someone moving around upstairs. Following the sound, he found the door to his quarters open. Brooke was crouched down on the rug, sweeping shards of glass into a dustpan. He saw that she’d been clearing up the debris. Broken chairs were piled in the corner, and the pictures that hadn’t been destroyed were back on the walls. She’d gathered up the bits of broken glass from the smashed frames and propped them up neatly and safely out of the way against the wall near the sofa.

  She hadn’t seen him, and he watched her from the doorway. Kneeling there with her thick hair tied back loosely over her shoulders, she looked so serene and calm. He thought of the last time they’d been here together in this room, that evening spent sitting on the rug eating Marie-Claire’s chocolate cake and drinking wine. It seemed so long ago now.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  She looked up, and smiled back.

  ‘Clearing this place up is my job,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Something to do while I stayed out of your way for a while.’ She stood up, dusting off her hands. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t as bad as it looked. She didn’t wreck quite everything.’

  He walked into the room, closed the door behind him.

  ‘You look shattered,’ she said.

  He sat on the sofa, and she walked over and sat next to him. He leaned back, closing his eyes, and for a few precious moments he was able to switch off and enjoy the soothing atmosphere of her presence. When he opened them, Brooke was watching him with a pained expression, like someone bursting to make a confession.

  ‘Ben, I have something to say.’

  He straightened up. ‘What?’ he asked, suddenly worried.

  ‘I’ve been thinking – and maybe this isn’t the right time to say it – but I’m not sure I should come here any more.’

  He was silent as her words sank in.

  ‘What I said to you in London. About the way I felt. The way I feel. I shouldn’t have said that. But I can’t pretend I didn’t say it, any more than I can pretend it’s not true.’

  ‘I don’t want you to stop coming here,’ he murmured. He looked in her eyes. Very slowly, he reached out and stroked her soft cheek. Then, even more slowly, with his heart beginning to thud faster, knowing he was crossing a bridge he couldn’t uncross, he leaned forward and kissed her.

  This time, Brooke didn’t pull away from his embrace. They moved closer together. The kisses started off gentle and soft. Then, as their breathing quickened, the kisses became deep and passionate. She reclined back on the sofa, clutching at his clothes, pulling him down on top of her.

  And then the door burst open with a juddering crash and two men in black tactical gear carrying silenced Skorpion machine pistols stormed into the room.

  Chapter Fifty

  In the split second before anything else happened, Ben was already reacting. As he whipped round he locked on to the two pairs of eyes in the black tactical masks and he saw the intent in them. He’d seen that look plenty of times, the deliberately unthinking stony look, like the expression of a shark, that passes across a paid killer’s eyes in the instant before he does his job. The clearing of the mind, removing all doubt, all hesitation, any last vestiges of humanity. No prisoners, no discussions. Gloved fingers were on triggers. Actions were cocked, safeties set to FIRE. The fat, stubby silencers were trained right on them.

  The silence of the room gave way to a flurry of muted gunfire, like the ripping of corrugated cardboard, as both shooters opened up simultaneously. But by then, Ben had Brooke shielded with his own body and he was kicking out with his legs while hurling his weight against the backrest of the sofa. Bullets thunked into its wooden frame as it toppled over backwards. Their bodies sprawled on the floor as a swarm of splinters and ripped pieces of foam flew around them.

  There weren’t many good things about being on the wrong end of a Skorpion Vz61 submachine pistol in the hands of a man who knew how to use it. But even the most effective shooter couldn’t do much about the combined effect of a rapid 850-round-a-minute rate of fire with the limited capacity of its standard ten-round box magazine. One quick dab of the trigger, a flurry of recoil against the shooter’s palm, and the machine would have rattled itself empty. In a shade under three-quarters of a second, it was all over. That made the compact Skorpion an ideal assassination weapon. Walk into a restaurant with one under your jacket, go striding up to the target’s table as he sits there innocently chewing on his steak au poivre, and before anyone knew what was happening the job was carried out and you were walking out of the place with a corpse in your wake. And a quick, clean assassination was exactly what these guys had had in mind for Ben and Brooke.

  The problems arose when that opening gambit failed to claim its victim; and they intensified considerably when the intended victim was within arm’s reach of an improvised weapon of their own and had the reflexes and the instincts to press their advantage while the assassins were too busy dropping their empty magazines and slamming in new ones to notice that the odds had shifted against them.

  As Ben rolled across the carpet he found himself a foot away from the broken picture frames that Brooke had gathered up. His fingers closed on a big triangular shard of glass and he skimmed it like a Frisbee, across the top of the overturned sofa and straight at the shooter on the left, a fraction of a second before the guy was able to let off another burst of fire.

  The glass whirled sideways through the air and caught him on the side of the neck, where the flesh was exposed between the collar of his combat vest and the ski mask. Its jagged edge ripped through the jugular vein like the blade of a meat slicer. The man’s mouth opened into a screaming red hole in the mask and his left hand flew across his body to the gaping slash in his neck that was already spraying a livid jet of blood across the room. His knees crumpled under him and the muzzle of his Skorpion flailed out wide. As the shock almost instantly started shutting down his central nervous system, nerve endings overloaded with signals from the brain, his fingers twitched involuntarily.

  And touched off the trigger of his weapon just as it was pointing at the other shooter’s side. The weapon jerked under recoil, twisting upwards as though it had a life of its own. Ten rounds of 9mm raked the second shooter from thigh to chest, punching through every major organ on its way up. The man was dead before he hit the carpet.

  The shooter with the slashed neck was the second to fall. He rolled and writhed and screamed as blood jetted under high pressure from his wound.

  Even before he was down, Ben was up and over the upset sofa. He leapt across the room and landed in a crouch. Snatched up the fallen Skorpion that was still loaded and cocked. The guy he’d sliced was quickly bleeding to death. The rug was saturated with a spreading red stain, and squirts of
blood were still pulsing weakly from the severed artery.

  Ben could have made it easy for the guy, used the Skorpion to bring a quick end to the pain and terror of his last few moments of life. But having a loaded weapon in his hand was more important than showing mercy to his would-be killer.

  Brooke was clambering out uncertainly from behind the fallen sofa. Ben ran to her. She was unhurt but visibly shaken as she gaped in horror at the bodies on the floor, the guns, the blood. He took her in his arms and held her tight for a second, both of them way beyond words.

  Then he thought of Ruth and his guts turned to ice.

  * * *

  Just a minute before, Ruth had been sitting on the bed in her room, talking to Franz on the phone. She could tell from his voice that he’d been sick with worry.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t call you sooner.’

  ‘Where the hell are you, Luna?’

  ‘France. Don’t worry, it’s all fine.’

  ‘You were kidnapped by this fucking maniac and now you tell me it’s all fine? Have you any idea—’

  ‘Look, things are complicated. It wasn’t what it seemed like.’

  ‘This guy trashed the house and tied me and Rudi up in the shed.’

  She sighed, rubbing her hair. ‘Yeah, I know, babe. I’m really sorry that happened. You OK?’

  ‘No, I’m not OK. I’ve been going crazy. What are you doing in France?’

  ‘Listen, I’m coming home and I’ll explain everything to you. Just don’t worry about me, OK? And don’t worry about the guy either. Everything’s cool. See you really soon.’

  She’d put the phone down and gone back to fretting about the argument she’d had with her brother. Part of her wanted to go and find him, make up with him; another part was too proud to.

  Other thoughts, too. I am not Luna Steiner. I’m Ruth Hope. It felt very strange, thinking that. Alien, yet somehow it made her glow inside.

  The heavy thump from somewhere outside her door jolted her alert.

  There it went again. Thump, crash. It was coming from inside the block.

  She jumped off the bed and ran to the door. She was about to yank it open and step out when she heard the noise again. And then again, making her heart race with fear. Something was wrong here.

  She turned the handle, slowly, cautiously, opened the door a crack and peered out.

  Two guys in black were working their way systematically along the corridor that ran up the middle of the block, kicking down doors as they went and aiming small black automatic weapons into the empty rooms. In that moment, she understood intuitively that the adrenaline that was starting to speed through her body, making her hands shake and her knees go to jelly, was the instinctive fight-or-flight reaction of a prey animal in the presence of a predator. They were hunting for someone, and she knew that someone was her.

  She’d opened the door just a millimetre too wide. One of the men turned and saw her. A yell as he alerted his buddy, and all at once they were dashing up the corridor towards her.

  She burst out of the room and ran for her life. Right up ahead, beside the door marked ‘TOILETTES’, was the emergency fire exit. She grabbed the handle of the heavy door and ripped it open with a grunt. The two gunmen opened fire as they ran, two brief chattering bursts that strafed the wall and punched jagged, splintered holes through the wood of the exit door just inches from her body. She slammed the door shut and staggered out of the building. Found herself in a little walled yard on the other side with archways leading off it. She glanced around her, looking for a way to the main house. She had to find Ben. Where was he?

  The emergency exit door opened and the two men in black came striding purposefully out, their weapons reloaded, glancing grimly around for her, motioning to one another. She darted through one of the archways, hoping they hadn’t noticed her.

  Then she skidded to a halt and let out a cry of fear as the man with the double-barrelled shotgun came out of nowhere and she was staring into the twin muzzles not three feet from her face.

  Ben had emerged from the house and out into the hot sun just in time to see the second pair of black-clad intruders disappearing through the door into the trainee accommodation block.

  He broke into a sprint. He had the Skorpion in his hand and the four spare magazines he’d lifted from the dead men in his pocket, but he still felt vulnerable as he ran across the cobbles, keeping low, skirting the edge of the buildings. No telling how many more intruders there were, and how they’d managed to get past Le Val’s security guys. No time to stop to think about why they were here and what the hell was happening. And no time to get to the underground armoury room, just a few yards away under the innocuous-looking brick hut between the trainee block and the purpose-built gym. He had enough military hardware stored away inside the armoury’s safes to hold off an entire regiment – but it might as well be a thousand miles away.

  Brooke was right behind him, fierce and determined with the second Skorpion cupped in both hands. Ben had spent enough time on the range with her to know she could handle a gun and he trusted her to back him up.

  He darted through the open doorway into the accommodation block, Brooke following. Saw the doors kicked open off the corridor, the bullet holes in the far wall and the emergency exit, and ran that way with his blood chilling in his veins as he thought of his sister. But every room in the building was empty. There was no sign of her, nor of the attackers. He ripped the exit door open so hard that he almost tore the handle off. Burst out into the little walled yard that separated the back of the trainees’ block from Jeff’s bungalow. The yard was empty too.

  He froze as the two loud shotgun blasts boomed out from beyond the wall. At first he thought someone was shooting at him. Then he realised the shots had been for someone else. He raced towards the sound, his mind suddenly flooded with terrifying images. Convinced he was going to round the corner and find Ruth’s body there. Torn up with buckshot. Vital organs shredded. Her blood spilling out across the ground. He almost cried out in horror. It was the kind of blind panic that he knew was liable to get him killed in battle, but at that moment he didn’t even care.

  He sprinted out of the walled yard, through one of its archways and round the corner through the back passage that ran around the wall of the bungalow. Up ahead was the little lean-to where Jeff kept his Land Rover. Ben whipped around the corner with the Skorpion thrust out in front of him and his finger tightening on the trigger.

  Stopped dead in his tracks. Looked down and saw the bodies of the two men in black lying there a couple of yards apart. One sprawled on his back with a red hole a foot across where his heart and lungs used to be, shattered bits of rib poking through the carnage. The other propped up against the garage wall with his legs splayed out at impossible angles and his upper and lower halves only loosely connected by quivering intestines. A huge red flower of blood was painted up the wall behind him. At close range, there wasn’t much that was more devastating than a shotgun.

  ‘Ah, Jesus,’ Brooke said, catching up and seeing the mess.

  Ben looked up from the corpses to see Ruth standing there, looking small and frightened with her hands to her face. Shocked, but safe.

  Beside her, cradling the shotgun, was Jeff Dekker. He nodded to Ben as he broke open the action to eject the smoking spent shells and quickly inserted the fresh pair that he was holding between the knuckles of his left hand.

  ‘I should come home early from holiday more often,’ he said laconically. ‘There I was, sunshine and sand and beautiful girls everywhere, and all I could think about was this place. Couldn’t rest for a second. If I’d known you were having a party I’d have come back even sooner.’

  ‘Glad you showed up,’ Ben said.

  ‘Not sorry I kept this old twelve-bore in the toolshed, either. Thought it might come in handy for rats. I hate bloody rats.’ Jeff used the shotgun barrels to point at the corpses. ‘So what’s the story on these guys?’

  ‘Two more in the house,’ Ben
said. ‘No idea who they are.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they’ll tell us much now.’

  Ben was walking over to Ruth when the bullet came out of nowhere and caught him in the chest. Somewhere through the bursting white flash of pain, he heard Brooke’s distant scream. He staggered back two steps and keeled over in the dirt.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Ben felt his body hit the ground, felt the breath burst out of his lungs with the impact. The pain in his chest was crippling. He fought for air, and sounds became a dull booming in his ears. As if from some remote place, he watched the others scatter in slow motion and dive for cover as gunfire blasted across from the Dutch barn next to the house. Bullets raked the ground near him, kicking up sprays of dust.

  This is no time to die, he thought as he lay there. But for some reason that his mind couldn’t grasp, he wasn’t dead. He’d been down just a couple of seconds when he realised that his senses were already bouncing back, sharpening, focusing. He willed his body to move, and it did. Ignoring the pain that stabbed through his upper body, he rolled over and wedged himself in the gap between the bungalow and the lean-to.

  A moment’s silence as the shooters across the way reloaded, then another ripping rasp of silenced full-auto fire came from the barn and bullets sang off the wall right by his head.

  He put his hand to where he’d been hit, felt the wetness seeping into his shirt. But it was cold, not warm, and when he looked at his hand there was no blood and the moisture on his fingers smelled like petrol.

  He understood then what had happened. Another life gone, he thought grimly.

  He risked a glance around the corner of the lean-to and saw a movement inside the shadows of the barn. Two men, same black tactical gear and ski masks. They were using the parked Mini Cooper as cover, scanning left and right across the yard with their weapons. Burst, reload, burst. It was a good vantage point, giving them an open view of the whole place. Jeff and the women were pinned down in the alley beside the bungalow a few yards away. Anywhere they tried to move, they’d be out in the open.