Bring Him Back (12 page)

‘What’s the Indigo Project?’ Ben demanded.

‘A secret initiative founded in 1999 by Linden Global, with the long-term aim of cornering the market in ESP research for defence and espionage,’ Mike replied nervously. ‘Its purpose is to locate and research children with extra-sensory potential, as studies have repeatedly shown a higher incidence of extraordinary psychic perception among the young. It often seems to fade with the onset of adulthood. A global network of scouts are employed to find these gifted children, by infiltrating schools, scouring local media reports and other sources, sometimes just from hearsay.’

Ben stared at him, appalled, as the pieces fell into place. The Spanish chess incident that had drawn public attention to Carl’s abilities; the newspaper clipping hidden in Mike’s briefcase. Everything Drew had said was true. Carl had been deliberately targeted by these people. ‘And that’s where you came in.’

Mike nodded miserably. ‘Where possible, field agents with psychology training are inserted to gain further evidence. There’s a 99-plus per cent elimination rate due to all the false claims and new-age bullshit that’s out there. Early assessments strongly indicated that Carl was one of the genuine ones.’

‘So what happens to the genuine ones?’ Ben said through gritted teeth.

‘The extent of the research needed isn’t possible within the home environment. The subjects are removed to a secure location with the necessary facilities.’

‘You mean kidnapped. What facilities?’

‘It’s a specialised laboratory unit in the Black Forest,’ Mike said. ‘Extremely secret, very well hidden in the mountains. Armed guards patrol twenty-four-seven.’

‘Germany. That’s where you said you were going next.’

‘I travel up to the lab from time to time,’ Mike admitted. ‘It’s part of my work.’

Ben glared at him. ‘To do what, help train your kidnap victims into little psychic spies for whichever government agency bids the highest?’

Mike shook his head. ‘It doesn’t work like that. It’s been tried, and it’s a waste of time. The subjects failed to perform under the duress of being separated from their families and placed in an unfamiliar environment. Coercion didn’t work, and the incentive of financial gain was meaningless to them. They were children. Simply too frightened and confused by what was happening to them, with fatal results for whatever ESP aptitude they might have shown under normal relaxed conditions. We had to come up with alternatives. It’s now essentially a neuroscience-based approach.’

Ben could feel the cold fury slowly spreading through him. Loose matches sprinkled the caravan floor as he crushed the box flat in his fist without even knowing it. ‘Neuroscience-based – what does that mean? That you pull their brains apart into pieces to see how they work? Is that the idea?’

‘No!’ Mike protested, blanching at the look on Ben’s face. ‘I mean, surgical procedures are strictly considered an extreme measure.’

‘An extreme measure. But not out of the question.’

‘Where at all possible, other analytic methods are used. CT scans, imaging techniques . . .’

‘Carl had better be alive,’ Ben warned. ‘Or you’re going to wish you never had been.’

‘Look, I’m fond of that boy. I mean it. I’ve spent a lot of time with him. You think I’d want him to suffer?’

‘What happened to the children who failed to perform under duress?’

Mike looked down at his chest and made no reply.

Ben stood up, fists clenched. ‘Answer me, Mike. What happened to them? They couldn’t be returned to their families, could they? Not after what they’d been through. Not in the state they were in. Did they just disappear?’

‘Look, that’s not my area,’ Mike blurted. ‘I’m just a field assessor.’

Ben stood over him, wanting to tear his head off. ‘How many other children like Carl are they holding now?’

Mike’s reply was almost a sob. ‘Carl makes seven.’

‘Boys and girls? How old?’

‘Both. Gender makes no difference. The youngest is Franck. He’s nearly eight. Satoko’s the eldest now, with Kristina g—’ Mike checked himself and shut his mouth.

‘You were about to say “gone”, weren’t you?’ Ben asked harshly. ‘What happened to Kristina?’

‘She …escaped. There was …an accident. She fell.’

‘Fell?’

‘Down a ravine. The mountains are full of them. They found the body at the bottom …but you have to believe me. I wasn’t responsible for what happened, I swear. I wasn’t even there.’

‘Oh, you’re not that involved,’ Ben said, his fists clenched in anger. ‘Then I suppose you didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Paul Finley, either.’

‘He was asking too many questions,’ Mike jabbered. ‘By the time we realised he was following me and taking pictures of my meetings, he’d already identified one of my contacts from an old army connection. He was getting too close.’

‘So you had him killed. Just like your three goons for hire tried to do to me in Dover. Did they actually believe Drew Hunter had sent them, or is that just what they were told to say?’

‘We really didn’t want you to be hurt!’

‘No, you didn’t want to have to replace me,’ Ben said. ‘Not with your precious asset on the run, and the clock ticking. But you couldn’t let me get too close to Finley’s discoveries, either, could you? My purpose was just to recover your lost property, and you bastards were watching me the whole time to make sure I did my job. Dover. Monaco. Every step of the way. I know when I’m being followed. I wasn’t. How did you do it?’

‘You don’t even begin to understand what you’re dealing with here, do you?’ Mike yelled with a flash of defiance. ‘Linden Global is one of the biggest private defence corporations in Europe. Big enough to have their own satellite division. They see everything. And they’re watching us right now. They can pinpoint our location to within a metre.’

‘I doubt that very much, Mike. Nobody knew I was coming back to Jersey. I’ve been presumed dead for three weeks, remember? Burned up in the fire. And you know what they say about presumption.’

‘I’ll be missed, don’t you see?’ Mike threatened. ‘I’m due to report to the lab. If I don’t turn up at the pick-up-point, the pilot will report back immediately and they’ll know something happened. It won’t be long before they figure it out. They’ll hunt you down. You’ll be a walking dead man.’

Ben smiled. ‘Then we’ll have to make sure you don’t miss that flight, won’t we?’

20

THE SMALL AIRFIELD was out in the countryside, twenty minutes from the ferry port of Saint-Malo. The corporate brains behind the Indigo Project were clearly hot on secrecy, as Ben could tell from the disused state of the rendezvous point. Buildings and hangars stood empty amid patches of yellowed and weed-strewn grass that waved in the breeze. There wasn’t a soul about to witness the mysterious comings and goings of Dr Mark Simonsen, a.k.a Mike Greerson, and that was exactly how his employers wanted things to be.

Mike peered closely at his watch. ‘Any time now,’ he muttered, and squinted myopically up at the sky, shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun. He walked a few steps from the car towards the airstrip. He was still moving stiffly from his undignified confinement in the boot during the ferry crossing from Jersey. ‘I hear it,’ he said, scanning the sky.

So could Ben. The distant buzz of an approaching plane, growing steadily louder. Moments later, he saw the incoming aircraft’s tiny white speck against the blue.

Ben grabbed Mike’s briefcase from the car. He’d already examined its contents on the ferry. There was no incriminating paperwork inside, only a set of disks containing information that he was certain would be inaccessible to him even if he’d had a computer. The case also contained a laminated ID pass card and a clip-on name badge, both with the company header “Drexler Optik GmbH”. In a zippered compartment was a spare pair of glasses, a comb and some pens.

‘You do realise this isn’t going to work,’ Mike said, turning round with a scowl. ‘The pilot’s going to take one look at you and sound the alert. I’m supposed to be the only passenger.’

Ben nodded. ‘You’re right. It won’t work. In fact, I was meaning to talk to you about that.’

Mike stared at him in blank incomprehension. ‘But you said—’

‘I know what I said,’ Ben replied, laying the briefcase down on the bonnet of the car. ‘That I didn’t want you to miss this flight. Fact is, Mike, I lied. Which I have no problem doing to vermin like you. This is as far as you go.’

Mike’s jaw hung open as he realised what Ben was saying. ‘No,’ he mumbled, staggering back a step, then another. ‘Wait. Let’s be reas—’

Ben made it quick, for the sake of economy if not merciful compassion. The blow to the neck was sharp, swift and instantly lethal, and he caught Mike’s falling body before it hit the ground.

The approaching plane was beginning to drop in altitude as the pilot prepared to land. It would be here in ninety seconds. Ben had work to do, and he needed to move fast. Cupping his hands under the dead man’s arms, he dragged the corpse a few yards and let it flop to the concrete next to the car while he transferred his own wallet from his leather jacket to his jeans. It contained only cash, no cards, no ID. Taking off his jacket, he bundled it into the back of the car alongside his bag. Next came off the dead man’s tweed jacket, which Ben laid across the car bonnet beside the briefcase. He locked the car up, pocketed the key and then bent down to grab the dead body by the wrists and haul it hurriedly out of sight into the thick bushes at the edge of the airstrip.

It only took a moment to dump the corpse where nobody would find it for a good while. Ben ran back to the car. The plane was coming in to land. He slipped on the tweed jacket; not a bad fit. Opening up the briefcase, he took out Mike’s spare glasses: chunky designer plastic, different from the thin wire frames Ben had always seen him in. Ben put them on. They made everything look too small, and threatened to start his eyes watering if he wore them too long. Next he took out the dead man’s comb, and used the wing mirror to quickly smooth and part his hair in a rough imitation of the way Mike had worn his.

By this time, the plane had touched down and was taxiing along the strip towards him. A red and white Cessna 400. Single pilot, capacity for three passengers and a fuel range of over twelve hundred miles. Ben smiled and waved casually as he walked up to meet it, briefcase in hand.

The aircraft halted and its gullwing cockpit hatches popped open. The pilot climbed out to greet Ben. He was in his early to mid-forties, casually dressed in jeans and a check shirt. ‘Dr Simonsen?’ he called over the noise of the idling engine.

It was a worrying moment. If the pilot knew Mike well from previous trips, Ben couldn’t be sure that the masquerade would fool him. That was where Plan B came in, involving two dead bodies in the bushes instead of one. Ben could fly the plane all right; he’d just have to hope that he could figure out his exact destination. The Black Forest was a big area.

But as the pilot broke into a smile, Ben’s anxiety melted away.

‘We haven’t met,’ the pilot said, extending his hand. ‘I’m Tommy. Standing in for Jürgen today.’ His accent was European tinged with American.

They shook hands. ‘How is Jürgen?’ Ben asked amiably, doing a passable imitation of Mike’s voice.

‘Lying on a beach somewhere for the next two weeks, the lucky fuck.’

‘Nice for some, eh?’ Ben said as Tommy ushered him on board. The plane’s interior was like a small car’s. Ben strapped himself into a passenger seat. The pilot climbed in after him, settled behind the controls and clapped on his headset. Moments later, the plane began to taxi round in a circle for takeoff.

Ben settled back in his seat, gratefully removed the eye-watering glasses and watched as the ground fell away below. For the next couple of hours of so, he’d have little to do but try to relax, clear his mind and prepare mentally for what lay ahead of him.

21

URBAN SPRAWL ALTERNATED with open country as the aircraft tracked in an eastward curve across over France towards southern Germany; bridges and railway lines and industrial zones tiny down below. Ben took little notice, letting himself be lulled into a deep thoughtful state by the monotone of the engine. It was only much later, as he sensed they must be nearing their destination, that he looked out of the window and saw a completely altered landscape of rolling hills, lakes and alpine forest. The afternoon was slowly moving into evening, the sinking sun turning redder as it sank towards the misty mountain skyline.

Tommy brought the plane steadily down over a thickly wooded cleft between the hills, banked tightly around the base of a steep rise, and then Ben caught sight of the complex of white buildings perched high up above the valley, at the end of a single twisting road he could barely see through the trees. A little distance away, an area of woodland had been cleared to make way for a small airstrip. Tommy expertly brought the Cessna round, lining up their course and dropping the landing gear. ‘Here we go,’ he called cheerfully over his shoulder. ‘Welcome to sunny Schwarzwald. Bet you’re glad to be back.’

‘No rest for the wicked,’ Ben called back, and Tommy grinned.

Soon afterwards, the plane was rolling to a stop on the landing strip. Tommy shut down the prop, opened up the hatches and the two of them disembarked. ‘Be seeing you,’ Tommy said as he jumped down from the wing, and headed at a trot towards some buildings. He seemed like a decent kind of guy, with probably no idea of what really went on in this place.

Ben hoped he wouldn’t have to kill him.

Now what? he thought, looking around him. The white buildings were just visible through the trees, and appeared to be connected to the airstrip by a little curving road. He stood and waited, the late Dr Simonsen’s briefcase dangling from his hand. Moments later, a black Mercedes four-wheel-drive came speeding up the little road.

This must be the taxi, Ben thought as it halted near the parked aircraft. He slipped on the glasses, smoothed his hair and adopted the body language of the expert consultant on just another routine visit. The driver barely glanced at him as he got into the back with the briefcase across his knees. The Mercedes U-turned and sped off towards the buildings.