Salt gave a dark little chuckle. ‘Of course. Seems like everyone’s getting interested in Kammler all of a sudden. There’s a lot of weird shit going on, man.’
‘Are you saying someone else has approached you?’
‘Not for a while. I’m keeping my head down low.’
‘What about before?’
Silence.
‘The neck-snapping part still applies. I thought we had a deal.’
‘There was the German.’
‘What German?’
‘This crazy German girl.’
‘Go on.’
Salt shrugged. ‘There isn’t that much to say. It was about eight, nine months ago, just before I left Manchester. She emailed me, same as you did. Wanted to talk to me about Kammler. Said her name was Luna, and she was based somewhere in the Black Forest. Offburg, Hoffenburg, something like that.’
‘Offenburg?’ Ben knew of the place. It was close to Strasbourg, near the border between France and Germany.
Salt nodded. ‘That’s it. But I wouldn’t take that too seriously, man. I knew right away she was phoney. Told me she sold ceramics.’ He smiled knowingly. ‘Like someone who sells ceramics would be genuinely interested in this stuff. I tell you, man, the covers they come up with are pretty fucking thin sometimes.’
Ben asked, ‘Did she arrange a rendezvous with you?’
Salt nodded again. ‘St Peter’s Square in Manchester. She was very keen to meet. Flew over the same day. At least, that’s what she said. The woman I saw might not have been the same one. Might have been one of her team, you know?’
‘So you turned up for the RV.’
‘Oh, I turned up, all right. Old Lenny always turns up.’
‘But you didn’t talk to her. You did what you did with me, took her picture from a distance and then buggered off. That’s a very bad little habit, Lenny.’
Salt flushed angrily. ‘Got to protect myself, haven’t I? Can’t be too careful.’
‘Have you still got the picture?’
Salt hesitated a second, then shrugged and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the caravan. ‘Let me see it.’
‘What, now?’
‘Right now, Lenny. It’s important.’
Salt got up and went into the caravan. Ben heard him pottering about for a moment, then he re-emerged carrying a laptop and a battered screw-top tin labelled ‘coffee’. He laid the computer on the picnic table, flipped it open and powered it up. While it was whirring into life he twisted the lid off the coffee tin. Ben caught the smell of ground beans. Salt shoved his hand into the brown powder, spilling a lot of it on the table, and came out with a small object wrapped in a miniature plastic Ziploc bag. He opened it, and Ben saw that the object was a computer USB flash drive.
Salt inserted it in one of the ports on the side of the laptop. ‘You have to look away now,’ he said, turning to Ben.
‘Why?’
‘Because I can’t let you see me typing the password.’
Ben sighed and looked away. Salt rattled the keys, and then said, ‘OK. You can look now.’
Ben turned back towards the computer as the contents of the flash drive came up onscreen. It contained a vertical list of JPG photo files, at least thirty of them.
‘What is this?’
‘Them,’ Salt replied.
‘Them?’
‘My enemies.’
Ben scanned the list up and down. Salt had labelled each one with the date and place the picture had been taken.
‘These are all people who’ve approached you?’
‘Nah, nah. They wouldn’t do that. It’d blow their cover. Most of these were just following me in the street.’
‘So they could be anyone.’
Salt gave him a look. ‘No way, man. I know when I’m being followed. So I take their picture, and then they don’t come back, see, but they always send more. You’ve got to know your enemy.’
Ben didn’t say anything.
Salt scrolled down the list of files, stopped and tapped a finger on the screen. ‘This is her.’ He clicked, and a photo of a woman flashed up.
Ben stared at it.
The photo was of a woman standing on a flight of steps leading up to what looked like a library. She was on her own, and even frozen on the screen she looked tense, as though waiting for someone but not quite sure what she was going to find when they turned up. It had been a dull, cloudy day in Manchester, and she was dressed for cool weather in a dark green fleece. She had the same slight build as the woman he’d chased in Switzerland, about five-eight, with shoulder-length blond hair blowing in the wind. There was just one problem.
Ben looked at Salt. ‘She’s got her back to the camera. You can’t see her face.’
‘Hold on. I got a better shot just after that.’ More clicking, and Salt exchanged the picture for another. Same place, seconds later. Now the woman was turned towards the camera.
Ben’s heart sank again. The definition on the face wasn’t good. All he could see was a blur of features. She could have been anyone.
‘Can you zoom in and sharpen it up?’ Ben said.
Salt tapped a couple of keys and the image expanded. The woman’s face disappeared offscreen, so that Ben got a close-up of the dark green fleece and the designer logo on its breast. Then Salt flicked another couple of keys and her face panned back into view. Salt used the cursor to draw a rectangle around her head, clicked down a sub-menu and the image suddenly sharpened into focus.
Ben was drawn into the screen, so that nothing existed outside of it.
It was her. It was Ruth. If there’d been any doubt in his mind until that moment, now it had been suddenly blown away into spinning fragments like flying debris in a bomb blast.
Adam’s eyes fluttered open to a world of blurs and echoes.
He blinked, struggling to focus on the kaleidoscope of images and jumbled pieces of memory that were swirling randomly through his brain. Faces hovered in front of him, distorted and elongated, like reflections in the back of a spoon. He knew the distant voices he could hear were talking to him, but he couldn’t make out the words. Nausea washed over him, and his eyelids felt weighed down with lead. He sank his chin on his chest and groaned. Tried to move and found he couldn’t. Looked down at his hands, saw his fingers groping like claws. His wrists tied down, his arms pinned. The sudden fear opened his eyes wider and forced his brain to sharpen.
He was sitting in a wheelchair in a small room with grey walls and a bare bulb for a light. He wasn’t alone. One of the figures in the room with him, standing watching him with his head slightly cocked to one side, was Pelham. Behind him stood the two armed guards he’d seen before and another he didn’t recognise.
Now he was beginning to recall what had happened. He remembered the Kammler machine in the vault deep below. He remembered what he’d said to Pelham. Then the sudden shock of the man tripping him to the ground, effortlessly, like he was nothing, and holding him down while the needle had lanced painfully into his flesh.
