The Shadow Project

by Scott Mariani

They found him just moments later, staggering along as if drunk, dragging his leg behind him and using the walls for support. It was the child’s father. O’Connor.

  The tall guy took out his pistol and aimed it down the corridor. O’Connor just stood there, swaying on his feet as though he was either resigned to a bullet in the head or he was just too crazed to understand what was happening.

  Irina pushed the pistol aside. ‘Let me.’ Drawing the knife from her sheath, she began walking towards O’Connor.

  The migraine in her temples was thumping violently, but she blinked the pain away. She had a job to finish. Pelham had told her that when this was all over, the child and his father had to be eliminated. And Irina Dragojević always honoured her contracts.

  Her lips twisted into a thin smile as she approached him. He lowered his gaze down to the knife in her hand. She made no attempt to hide it. Better like this, when they knew it was coming.

  ‘I know you,’ he said. His voice was cracked with emotion and fatigue, barely audible over the growing sound that was shaking the ground under their feet.

  She raised the knife. The flickering lamplight shimmered down the blade. She took another step closer to him.

  ‘You’re the bitch who hurt my child,’ he said more loudly.

  ‘That’s right. And now this is for you,’ she told him.

  ‘And this is for you.’ His bloody hand went to his pocket, and before she could react he’d drawn a gun. He pointed it at her and his face contorted as he squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing.

  Despite the pain exploding viciously through her skull, Irina began to laugh. Behind her, the tall man raised his gun and fired a single shot that blew O’Connor off his feet.

  Adam felt the bullet tear through his shoulder and spin his body round. He hit the floor on his belly, gasping. The woman was howling with laughter as he scrabbled for his fallen pistol. His fingers closed numbly over its grip.

  His vision faltered. The lever. The lever by his thumb. He pressed it, and it clicked upwards. He could sense her walking up to him, standing over him. The knife was coming. He was going to feel the cold steel any second now, carving into his flesh.

  No. He mustn’t give up.

  For Rory.

  He rolled over on his back and with all the strength he could muster he punched the gun out with both hands. Felt the smooth face of the trigger under his finger and squeezed it once, twice, three times, as fast as he could. The searing blast of the gun exploded in his ears.

  The woman called Irina was standing right over him when he shot her. The first bullet took her under the chin and blew away half her face. The second blasted into her chest, and the third went through her hand.

  The woman’s tall companion let out a cry of rage as she went down. Adam fired at him, but even as the pistol went off in his hand, he knew the pain and dizziness had made him miss. Before he could get off another shot, the tall man had come running towards him and lashed out with his foot and kicked the gun out of his fingers. Adam tried to scramble away, but his strength was quickly failing him.

  The tall man squatted down on his haunches in the blood and picked up the woman’s knife. ‘Now you’re going to die bad,’ he said.

  Adam gasped as he saw the blade plunge towards him. Then, in the next instant, he heard the shot and he was spluttering the tall man’s blood out of his mouth.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Ben lowered the smoking pistol as the tall man crumpled to the floor with a bullet in his skull. Rory went running up the corridor, screaming for his father. Adam O’Connor’s eyes opened wide in his bloodied face, and he let out a cry as his son flew into his arms. Rory hugged him, then saw the blood-soaked trouser leg and the pool of it on the floor under him, the ragged bullet wound in his shoulder. ‘Oh, God, you’re hurt!’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Adam sobbed. ‘Now I’m just fine.’ He held the boy tight in his arms, rocking him, tears cutting white lines through the blood on his face.

  ‘I don’t want to interrupt a happy family reunion,’ Ben said as he and Jeff ran up to them. ‘But we need to get out of here fast.’ He had to raise his voice to be heard over the terrible noise. He and Jeff picked up the wounded man and supported him as they made their way through the passages. The noise kept building and building, driving them mad with its intensity.

  ‘Need to find the main lift shaft,’ Jeff shouted. ‘Maybe it’ll lead down to the exit we found.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘That only leads straight down to the vault,’ he yelled back. ‘We need to use the service lift we came up on.’

  ‘Jesus. This whole place feels like it’s going to blow apart.’

  ‘The machine,’ Adam muttered. ‘It’s out of control.’ His head lolled sideways and his body went limp in Ben and Jeff’s arms.

  ‘Dad!’ Rory screamed.

  ‘He’s just fainted, don’t worry,’ Ben reassured him. Adam’s body was a dead weight as they carried him back the way they’d come. By the time they reached the service lift, the floor was trembling like an earthquake under their feet.

  Just as Ben and Jeff were hauling the unconscious scientist on board the crude wooden platform, a massive shock seemed to ripple through the whole facility. It felt like an explosion, but with no blast – like a devastating pulse of pure energy capable of destroying everything around it. As the walls shook and the air seemed to thrum, the thick steel cables holding up the lift platform began to vibrate and buzz like plucked guitar strings. The platform began to judder.

  Ben’s eyes met Jeff’s for a fraction of a second. They were both thinking the same thing. Get off this thing now!

  They leapt off the platform, dragging Adam’s slumped body with them as Rory watched in horror. At the same instant, the vibrating cables began to fray dramatically, and then parted with a lashing crack. The platform tumbled down the shaft, taking bits of masonry with it. Jeff lost his balance and almost went down with them, but Ben grabbed his webbing belt and hauled him away from the crumbling edge.

  ‘There’s no other way out of here,’ Jeff yelled, pointing down the empty shaft. ‘We’re trapped.’

  Ben’s mind raced, fighting the rising tide of dizziness that was beginning to overcome him. He felt a tug on his sleeve and turned to see Rory standing there gesticulating back down the corridor. ‘I know a way,’ the boy shouted.

  ‘What way?’

  ‘Trust me. I found it.’

  There was no choice but to follow the kid. Ben and Jeff manhandled the unconscious scientist as his son led them at a run back towards the stairway where they’d found him.

  The moment they started down the metal steps, Ben knew they weren’t going to get out in time. The stairway was rocking and swaying dangerously as they clattered down it. Struts and rails were cracking and breaking off, falling down around them. A guillotine blade of sheet metal crashed down, narrowly missing them and tearing away a section of framework. The whole construction lurched sideways and began to topple slowly over.

  Seconds after the four of them had reached the bottom, the stairway fell apart. Debris rained down, burying Ivan’s body where it lay on the cavern floor. They ran. Adam was beginning to come round as Ben and Jeff hauled him along.

  ‘This way!’ Rory was yelling. ‘Here! This is it!’

  Ben looked where the boy was frantically pointing. ‘Where does it lead?’

  ‘Some kind of air vent. Like a big pipe. It goes all the way through to the outside.’

  Ben looked hard into Rory’s eyes, blinking to focus his vision. ‘You’re sure? You’ve been in?’

  ‘Some of the way in.’

  Ben took a deep breath. It seemed insane, but it was their only option. The facility was rumbling like the world’s biggest volcano about to erupt. ‘Can you crawl?’ he asked Adam.

  ‘Just leave me here,’ Adam slurred. ‘Get my son out.’

  Ben ripped his tactical webbing belt out of his trouser loops. ‘You’re goin
g up that vent if I have to drag you. Hold this and don’t let go.’

  Then it was the frantic scramble up the tunnel. Rory led the way, followed by Jeff. Ben half-dragged Adam behind him on the end of the belt, praying it wouldn’t snap. After half a minute of crawling, he could taste the cool air from outside and there was a definite glow of moonlight up ahead. But would they ever reach the end? The metal walls were heating up fast, burning their hands and knees. The nausea was crippling.

  At that moment, the world seemed to come apart. The explosion was like nothing Ben had experienced before. A horrible sensation of weightlessness as they seemed to be falling, falling, followed by a barrage of enormous impacts. The steel pipe was as fragile and vulnerable as a twig tossed around in a hurricane. Ben heard Rory’s scream of terror as it rolled over and over, battering them around inside. The pipe groaned as unimaginable outside pressures tried to stamp it flat. An ear-splitting shriek of rending steel, a cascade of dust and stones showering over them.

  And then, nothing. As suddenly as the insane forces of destruction had reached their climax, it was over. There was silence, just the sound of grit and pebbles slithering down the inside of the pipe, and the soft groans of the others.

  Ben raised his face out of his arms and blinked. The awful sensation was gone, the headache and nausea quickly clearing. Raising himself on his hands and knees, he realised he could stand. The pipe had ruptured above them, creating a jagged opening through which he could see moonlight and twinkling stars. He slowly, painfully got to his feet. A couple of metres away, Jeff was doing the same, looking stunned, his hair white with dust.

  Rory stirred, let out a whimper and went scrambling over to his father. Adam O’Connor groaned in pain and joy as he sat up and hugged him.

  The moon shone down on a transformed landscape. Kammler’s mountain was gone. It had collapsed in on itself, the facility swallowed up, vaporised. All that was left was a giant crater of rubble and debris and twisted metal, like the scene of an air disaster without the plane.

  Ben knew he’d never be able to describe what they’d just witnessed. The power of Kammler’s machine was too incredible to contemplate. Now it was buried forever in its rocky grave – the Nazi weapon that might have saved the Earth or destroyed it was going to remain a secret for the rest of time.

  Nobody spoke for a long while, just breathing the air, listening to the silence and savouring what it felt like to be alive. Ben stepped over to where father and son were holding each other tight. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘You saved us, Rory.’

  Adam O’Connor gripped Ben’s hand in his bloodstained fist. ‘You saved us.’

  Ben just smiled.

  ‘Who the hell are you, anyway?’

  ‘Nobody much,’ Ben replied. He looked towards the sweeping forest, and pointed across the tree line to where they’d left the Porsche Cayenne, a few hours and a lifetime ago. ‘There’s a car down there. Let’s get you to hospital, and then home.’

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  While Adam was getting patched up in Budapest the next day, Sabrina flew out from London on a Steiner aircraft. Meanwhile, Ben was on the phone to Switzerland. Heinrich Dorenkamp told him the news. Ruth was on her feet and had already discharged herself from hospital after arguing with the doctors. As for Maximilian Steiner himself, he had come out of intensive care, weak and grieving for his nephew, but stable and headed for a full recovery.

  Ben didn’t bother watching the news, because he knew nothing would ever come to light about the incident in the wilds of Hungary. What had happened there was buried and gone, just as surely as the legacy of SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler. Nobody would ever know the whole truth about who had been behind it. With Otto Steiner dead and his operation in ruins, the faceless, nameless figures who’d financed the project would now slip back into the shadows and wait for their next opportunity. That was just the way things worked. Always had, always would.

  Ben hung around for a while in the hospital while Adam and Rory were reunited with Sabrina. He smiled to himself at the emotional scenes. Things hadn’t worked out too badly in the end.

  He walked away without anyone noticing. Jeff was sitting in the Porsche outside. Ben climbed in next to him, and they headed for the airport.

  It was the next afternoon, when Ben was sitting with Storm in the kitchen at Le Val, feeding him pieces of sirloin steak and watching him grow stronger by the hour, that he heard a car outside, and a minute later the door opened.

  He turned, half expecting to see Jeff.

  It was Ruth. Other than the sling around her arm, she looked fine.

  ‘Is he all right?’ she asked, looking with concern at the bandaged dog.

  ‘People who’ve been shot don’t just travel about the place,’ he scolded her.

  ‘Would you take that kind of advice from anyone?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted.

  She swiped a glass off the side, pulled up a chair at the table and poured herself some of the wine he was drinking. ‘How are you, bro?’

  ‘I heard about Maximilian. I’m glad he’s going to pull through.’

  She shrugged. ‘Me too. I feel pretty bad about what’s happened.’

  ‘Some of the things you did were wrong,’ he said. ‘But you did them for the right reasons, and that’s what’s important.’

  ‘You’re too nice to me. Fact is, I have some changes to make to my life. A lot of amends to make, and it starts here. Did Heinrich tell you that Maximilian is thinking of retiring?’

  Ben shook his head. ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Well, Silvia’s not interested in running a business. So, with Otto gone, that just leaves me.’

  ‘Sounds like something new for you,’ Ben said.

  ‘Franz will help me. We’re going to build the greenest multinational corporation you’ve ever seen. Use its power and money to do something for the world.’

  ‘Something that doesn’t involve Zero Point Energy?’

  ‘Maybe that’s still a little ahead of its time. We’ll find other ways to make a difference.’

  ‘Something tells me you’ll do pretty well.’

  She smiled. ‘Now, enough about me. Did you call Brooke?’

  ‘We’ve left messages for each other.’

  ‘You’re nervous about talking to her.’

  ‘Things were left a little up in the air,’ he said.

  ‘She and I have been talking a lot on the phone. She told me a few things. Like the fact that your business is in deep shit because of that guy Rupert Shannon.’

  With all that had been going on, Ben had almost managed to forget the Shannon situation. The prospect of losing Le Val returned like a toothache. ‘Back down to earth with a thump,’ he said.

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘It’s true. But I’ll sort it out somehow. I’ll be talking to Dupont at the bank soon. Whatever happens, we’ll survive.’

  ‘Well, maybe you won’t need to,’ she said enigmatically as she reached into her bag and took out an envelope.

  Ben slipped out a single folded sheet from inside. It was a letter from the new CEO of Steiner Enterprises, Ruth Steiner-Hope. He smiled at that.

  ‘Read it,’ she said.

  The letter was brief and straightforward, an offer to reinstate the original contract with Rupert Shannon and his team. Ben read it twice, then looked up at her with a frown. ‘But you don’t need them any more. Especially as they weren’t much use in the first place.’

  She chuckled. ‘Shannon will be so keen to grab the dough, he won’t read the small print of the new contract that’ll be attached when this is posted in the morning. It basically states that they’re being hired for general duties. No specific mention of bodyguarding. Which means we’re going to put them to work mucking out the new stable complex I’m building, mowing the golf course and sifting out the swimming pools. If they refuse, it’s their choice. Either way, you’re off the hook.’

  Ben folded the letter back into the enve
lope and handed it to her. ‘Thank you, Little Moon.’

  ‘There’s a condition. Something I want you to do.’

  ‘Name it.’

  ‘I want you on a flight to London. You’ve got to go and see Brooke.’

  Two hours later, cutting northwards over the Channel on board his sister’s personal jet, he dialled Brooke’s number.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said.

  ‘At last. Where have you been?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about all about it when I see you.’

  She was quiet for a second. ‘I don’t know when that will be, Ben.’

  ‘It’ll be within the hour,’ he said.

  She said nothing, but he could hear the smile in her silence.

  ‘You and I started something,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, we did,’ she replied after a beat.

  ‘How would you feel about picking up where we left off?’

  ‘You and me?’

  ‘You and me.’

  There was a pause. ‘See you in an hour,’ she said.

  Read on for an exclusive extract from the first book in the

  thrilling new VAMPIRE FEDERATION series coming

  from Scott in summer 2010.

  SINCE THE DAWN of civilisation, vampires preyed on human beings, drank their blood and regarded them contemptuously as an inferior species, a mere disposable resource. For aeons, the vampires ruled.

  But things have changed. With the birth of the modern age and the explosion in human communications and surveillance technologies, many vampires realized that they could no longer carry on the old ways. Something needed to be done, if the ancient culture was to survive.

  In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the powerful World Vampire Federation was founded to control and oversee the activities of the vampire community. No longer would vampires prey unrestricted on human beings and turn them into creatures like themselves. New biotechnologies enabled the Undead to walk in daylight, living among us, in our cities, our streets. Strict laws were imposed to control vampire activity and allow their community to carry on. Quietly. Unnoticed. Undisturbed.