Adam was left staring at an empty room.
Pelham wheeled the chair round brusquely to face him. ‘So let’s start again, shall we?’
Adam nodded weakly.
Pelham undid the straps holding his wrists and ankles, then unbuckled the leather belt around his chest. Adam slumped in the chair. His hands were as pale as a corpse’s, and the pain was excruciating as the blood started flowing back into them.
‘You told me you left your notes in the safe in that smart house of yours in Ireland. Is that right?’
Adam let out a defeated sigh. ‘In my study,’ he whispered.
‘Such a stupid thing to have done. Look at the time you’ve wasted, and the unnecessary stress you’ve inflicted on your son. No parent should ever allow their child to experience trauma like that. I only hope he can forgive you.’ Pelham pulled up a stool, sat down and took out a little notebook and pencil. ‘Right. Now that you’ve decided to see reason, you’re going to tell me exactly where those notes are and how to get to them. Then I’ll be sending Irina and her colleagues over immediately to fetch them, and I won’t be expecting them to return empty handed. Understand?’
‘I understand,’ Adam murmured.
‘Now, I know you’re a very clever chap and you’ve got that whole house password-controlled. So I want you to give me all the necessary codes to get into and around it. Start talking.’
Adam told him everything. The passwords for the gate, the front door, the study, the safe, even the bedrooms.
Pelham looked pleased as he stood up and headed for the door. ‘See how easy it can be?’ He paused with his hand on the handle and waved the pad. ‘I’m going to give this information to our friend Irina. Then we’ll get you cleaned up and you can start familiarising yourself with that thing downstairs. Making that machine work is your life from this moment on, Adam. And your son’s, too.’
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.
‘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?
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.
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.
