The Nemesis Program_Ben Hope

by Scott Mariani

  Ben stepped across to peer out of the smaller window. The alley pulsed blood-red from the neon hotel sign. He craned his neck upwards, scanned this way and that, then withdrew from the window and thought for a moment or two.

  ‘I don’t think she opened the door to anyone,’ he said. Before Roberta could reply, he added, ‘Wait here,’ and turned towards the head of the stairs.

  ‘What? Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said.

  Knowing there was little point in pressing him for an explanation, Roberta reluctantly stayed where she was. She listened to his footsteps padding down the stairs, wondering where he was going all of a sudden, and at the same time thinking how lightly and silently he could move.

  After a minute or two she suddenly felt very alone, and as more minutes went by she was beginning to feel resentful towards Ben for leaving her. She didn’t understand what his game was, slipping away like that with barely a word. It was typical of him, his whole damn ‘I work alone’ routine, the infuriating way he had of not telling her what he was thinking. He hadn’t changed a bit.

  Roberta paced up and down outside Claudine’s door and tried to contain her restlessness, but it was no use. Within moments, thoughts of the brutal stalker began to invade her mind. She didn’t believe for an instant that he was the psychopathic maniac the police claimed, but the idea of a cold-blooded paid assassin was no less terrifying.

  She couldn’t stop imagining him standing right here on this very spot, just days ago, preparing to enter Claudine’s apartment and snuff her out as if she were nothing. What kind of monster would do such a thing? Why would anyone slaughter poor Claudine? What harm had she ever done to a living soul? It made Roberta shake with rage and want to cry, all at once.

  Another question crept into her mind. Her ingrained scientific instinct screamed out ‘Irrational!’, but her flesh couldn’t help but crawl at the idea. What if the killer came back?

  But there it was, gnawing at her as she waited there in the darkness. What if he was still watching the place, keeping an eye out for anyone who came snooping after clues? Or what if he decided to revisit the scene of his crime, looking for something he might have missed the first time around? And here she was, all alone …

  She glanced nervously into the long, eerie shadows on the landing and froze, her stomach knotted in fear, suddenly convinced she’d seen a movement there.

  Nothing more than her foolish imagination. She breathed. Just then, the unexpected whoop of a car alarm in the street far below made her jump. ‘Jesus, Ryder, get it together,’ she muttered irritably to herself. The car alarm stopped. She clasped her arms around her and went on pacing, shivering despite the warmth of the night. ‘Where the hell are you, Ben?’ she said out loud, and hated herself for the worry she could hear in her voice.

  The door of Claudine’s apartment suddenly swung open with a rattle of the latch chain.

  Roberta spun round with a gasp.

  A figure stood silhouetted in the doorway.

  A man’s figure, his face in shadow, looking right at her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Roberta backed away. ‘Wh-who’s that?’ she stammered, her voice coming out as a strained croak of fear.

  ‘It’s me,’ the figure in the doorway said with a touch of irritation. ‘Who did you think it was?’

  ‘Ben?’

  Ben ripped down a few strands of police tape and beckoned. ‘Stop making so much noise and come inside.’

  ‘How the hell did you get in here?’ she asked, bewildered, as she entered the apartment. Once the door was locked behind them, Ben turned on the lights.

  ‘Same way the killer did.’ He pointed upwards. ‘Through the roof. There’s a skylight panel over the bathroom with its fasteners missing. Glove marks in the dirt on the frame. Either he undid the screws, or someone else did it before him. Whichever it is, the police haven’t twigged it. It was a tidy job.’

  ‘But how did you—?’

  ‘The hotel across the alley,’ Ben explained. ‘It’s got an external fire escape, same as this building. From the top floor it’s only a five or six foot jump across. Nobody would see you in the dark. At least, nobody saw me.’

  She looked at him. ‘You’re telling me you just leaped between two buildings, at night, with nothing between you and concrete except a long drop?’

  ‘What about it?’ he said blankly.

  ‘You really are nuts, you know that?’

  He shrugged as he walked into the apartment’s modestly-sized living room. ‘So people keep telling me,’ he muttered.

  ‘What if you broke your stupid neck?’

  ‘Thanks for caring.’

  ‘Seriously. Where would I be then?’

  ‘Don’t fuss. You sound exactly like Winnie. I got you in here, didn’t I?’

  ‘Who the hell’s Winnie?’ she asked, frowning, but he didn’t reply as he went over to the window and eased back an edge of the drawn curtain to peer down to the street. He saw no police, and nothing else to worry about, but it wouldn’t be wise to hang around here too long. He turned away from the window and ran a practised eye over the details of the crime scene. The place wasn’t a great deal larger than his safehouse across town, and it looked exactly like what it was: the cluttered workspace of a busy science academic who had probably spent far too much of her time poring over books and papers. The shelves were crammed tight with hundreds of volumes, box files and folders full to bursting point.

  ‘You said nothing was stolen?’ he asked.

  Roberta nodded unhappily. ‘That’s what the cops figured, that he just killed her and left. If that’s true, then it must mean her Tesla material was never here.’

  ‘Or that we’re up a blind alley with this whole thing,’ Ben said silently to himself.

  ‘All the same, now that we’re here I have to check.’ Roberta hauled down an armful of thick files, laid them on the sofa and started riffling quickly through the papers they contained. ‘This is awful,’ she sighed as she scanned and discarded one sheet after another. ‘I feel like I’m digging up someone’s grave.’

  Ben’s gaze landed on Claudine’s cluttered desk. ‘Her computer’s gone.’

  ‘The cops told me they’d taken it away.’ Roberta looked up from the file she was going through. ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘To go through her emails and other files that might throw up a lead to the murderer,’ Ben said. It wasn’t an unintelligent procedure. Killers often stalked their victims online for weeks, even months, before closing in on them, using the handy information-gathering platform of social media sites to form a profile of their routines and lifestyles in order to plan their attack more efficiently, while posing as ‘friends’ to harvest yet more useful details from their soon-to-be prey. Bless the internet, manna from heaven to freaks and villains the world over.

  In this case, though, Ben had a feeling the cops would hit on no such leads.

  He slid open the desk’s only drawer and rummaged around inside, finding all the usual things, pens, paper clips, some odd change, bills, receipts, and some personal papers including Claudine Pommier’s driving licence, birth certificate and passport. He flicked through it. ‘Quite a traveller, your friend.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right? She always said she hated flying.’

  ‘Can’t have hated it that much,’ Ben said. ‘There are more visa stamps on her passport than on mine. She’s been all over the place in the last couple of years.’

  Roberta frowned. ‘Was she going off to scientific conferences, maybe? But I’m sure she’d have told me about that.’ Still frowning, she began searching the next folder off the shelf, the first having yielded nothing of interest.

  Ben left her to it and went to explore the other rooms in the apartment, starting with the kitchen and then the bedroom. He checked more drawers, cupboards. Clothes were hanging on hangers. Small, delicate shoes lined up in the bottom of a wardrobe. Everything seemed perfectly nor
mal, as though the place’s tenant might walk in any minute. The forensic examiners had left very little trace of their passing. And the killer had covered his own tracks equally well. Nobody now would have guessed a horrific murder had recently taken place in the bedroom.

  Ben returned to the living room to find Roberta standing in a sea of papers and empty files. Her face was set tight as she struggled to contain her emotions. ‘There’s nothing here,’ she said. ‘Not a single mention of her work on Tesla. I didn’t think there would be, and I don’t think she had anything on the computer the cops took away, either. She knew these people were onto her. She was way too smart to leave anything for anyone to find.’ Roberta shook her head. ‘The worst thing is, it’s almost as if whoever killed her knew that. I don’t think they even tried searching the place.’

  ‘Let’s put everything back as it was and get out of here,’ Ben said. ‘We’ve seen all there is to see.’

  ‘And learned nothing. Shit.’

  ‘Not quite nothing,’ he said.

  As they stepped out into the dim hallway minutes later, Ben pulled the door quietly shut and heard the latch click home, then rearranged the police tape across the doorway. Sensing that Roberta was upset, he gently touched her shoulder. She pressed into his touch as if she really needed the human contact, then looked up at him with a sad smile. He could see the tears in her eyes reflected in the red light from the landing window. He didn’t know what to say to her.

  They were making their way back towards the stairs when there was the crash of a door bursting open. Before they could react, they were blinded by a bright torch shining in their faces.

  ‘Who are you?’ screeched a shrill voice in French. ‘Don’t you move, or I’ll shoot.’

  Ben slowly raised his hands. Even more slowly, he used one of them to flick on the old toggle light switch on the wall behind him, so that he could see their attacker.

  It was the old woman, Claudine’s neighbour. Her spindly frame was wrapped in a dressing gown, and she wore slippers and curlers. The steel torch she was shining at them was thicker than her arm. The small black pistol in her other hand was the kind of effective little personal tear-gas defence weapon that offered peace of mind to elderly, vulnerable French ladies in their homes while British ones were required to let themselves be robbed and beaten to death before the justice system did anything about it.

  ‘Who are you?’ she repeated in her warbly high pitch. ‘Stay right where you are, or I’ll spray this in your eyes and call the gendarmes.’

  One part of Ben was filled with admiration and sympathy for the old woman. The other part of him didn’t much relish getting a faceful of tear gas, even if it was just the dilute stuff allowed for the civilian market. Several options flashed through his mind for ways of getting the weapon out of her hand that didn’t involve snapping osteoporosis-riddled bones or causing permanent tissue damage. He was on the verge of making a move when Roberta quickly stepped in.

  ‘Madame Lefort? It’s all right, we were friends of Claudine’s,’ she said in French. Having lived and worked in Paris for years prior to her move to Canada, she spoke the language perfectly.

  At the mention of her own name and that of Claudine, the old woman hesitated but kept the pistol levelled at them.

  ‘I flew here from Canada,’ Roberta said. ‘She sent me a letter.’

  Now Madame Lefort’s steely look of suspicion softened. She slipped the gun into the pocket of her dressing gown and put down the long metal torch, which was obviously very heavy for her. ‘I was the last to see the poor dear alive, you know,’ she said sadly. ‘And it was me who found her.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Roberta said. ‘I’m so sorry. It must have been terrible for you.’

  ‘That’s why I bought this gadget.’ Madame Lefort patted her pocket. ‘And this hearing aid.’ She pointed at her ear. ‘You can’t be too careful nowadays, with all these filthy degenerates and maniacs on the loose everywhere. They should bring back the guillotine for them, I’ve said it for years and now look what’s happened …’

  ‘We didn’t mean to disturb you,’ Roberta went on apologetically in French. ‘We only came to pay our respects. This is my friend, Monsieur Hope, and my name’s Roberta, Roberta Ryder.’

  ‘Ryder,’ the old woman repeated the name, then chewed it over for a moment before asking, ‘Then the Docteur Ryder, he must be your husband?’

  Roberta blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The letter was addressed to Docteur Ryder in Canada,’ the old woman said.

  ‘That’s me. I’m Dr Ryder,’ Roberta explained, pointing at herself, much to Madame Lefort’s astonishment, as if she’d never heard of such a thing as a woman with a professional title. ‘But how did you know who the letter was addressed to?’ Roberta asked her.

  ‘Because I’m the one who sent it,’ the old woman replied, with a mixture of sadness and pride. ‘The last time I saw Claudine alive, she asked me to go to the post office for her. One letter for Canada, the other for Sweden. Very important, she kept saying. That’s all she’d tell me. Very important.’

  Ben and Roberta exchanged glances. ‘Sweden?’ Roberta asked Madame Lefort. ‘Are you sure?’

  The old woman nodded earnestly. Absolutely sure.

  ‘Madame Lefort,’ Ben said gently. ‘Did you post the Swedish letter by registered mail, like the Canadian one?’

  Managing to recover from the shock of two French-speaking foreigners when one would have been incredible enough, Madame Lefort insisted that yes, she had.

  ‘Then do you still have the customer receipt?’ Ben asked. ‘You see, we may need to contact Claudine’s friend in Sweden, in case they don’t know about what’s happened …’

  The old woman nodded eagerly, plainly distraught and only too glad to be of service. ‘Attendez.’ She disappeared into her brightly-lit, flower-filled apartment and they could hear her fussing about for a few moments before she returned clutching two small slips of paper, which she thrust at Ben. ‘I never got the chance to give these to the poor, sweet child,’ she said, on the verge of tears. ‘After … it happened, I forgot I even had them.’

  Ben thanked her graciously and examined the receipts. The post office teller had filled in the recipients’ names and addresses by hand, one on each slip. The first one was addressed to Roberta in Ottawa. The second letter, mailed by registered international delivery at the same time and date, had been sent to a Herr Daniel Lund to an address near Jäkkwik, Sweden.

  ‘So the big question is, who’s Daniel Lund?’ Roberta asked as they left the apartment building and headed back down the street towards the parked BMW.

  ‘I don’t think he’s Claudine’s pen pal,’ Ben said.

  ‘A boyfriend?’

  ‘Someone she must have felt she could trust, at any rate.’

  ‘You think she told him the things she told me?’

  ‘It can’t be a coincidence that she wrote to the two of you at the same time,’ Ben said. ‘From what she told the old woman, the letters were both equally important. So it’s not impossible that they each contained much the same information.’

  ‘Strange that she never mentioned this Daniel guy to me.’

  ‘Seems like she never mentioned a lot of things.’ Ben spoke his word command to unlock the Alpina, and got behind the wheel.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Roberta asked as she climbed into the passenger seat. ‘Phone him? His number might be listed in an international directory online.’

  ‘First let’s check out Fabien’s place,’ Ben said. ‘Then we’ll worry about Herr Lund.’ He told the car to start, and the engine burst into life.

  ‘I’ll never get used to that thing,’ Roberta said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  As the Alpina roared off down Rue des Trois Frères, one of the two occupants of the dark Peugeot 508 parked across the street reached for his phone and made a call. ‘Target is on the move. The Priest’s still with her.’

  The person on th
e other end of the secure line had the luxury of not having to spend endless mind-numbing hours on surveillance detail inside a cramped car. Those days were long behind him now. Perched on an enormous chair at his desk in a comfortable office far, far away with a delicate china cup of cocoa at his elbow, the man most people called simply ‘the Director’ gazed through half-moon spectacles at the expanded high-definition onscreen image of the black-clad, blond-haired surveillance target they’d codenamed ‘the Priest’, photographed along with the Ryder woman on the park bench in Little Denton moments before the incident that had taken place there.

  Since then, and in the light of that highly unexpected development, the image of ‘the Priest’ had been run through sophisticated facial recognition software and analysed against classified records to produce an identity match. The name that had emerged was Ben Hope.

  The Director belonged to an organisation whose reach was extremely wide. Now they knew exactly who they were dealing with, down to the last detail. Details that explained a lot about why what should have been a simple clean-up operation in a sleepy corner of England had turned so messy and resulted in the loss of one of their valuable people. It had been an error of judgement, albeit one they couldn’t entirely be blamed for making. Nonetheless, the Director was still suffering the fallout, and he wasn’t about to let it happen to him a second time.

  Two things he’d yet to figure out: first, how the person on his screen had become involved in this situation to begin with. It was hard to see how he could be in any way implicated. Second, the Director was still perplexed as to how exactly their two targets had managed to abscond into France undetected. If it hadn’t been for the surveillance on Pommier’s apartment building, they wouldn’t have picked them up at all. Clever, this Priest.

  But then, you’d expect someone with such a background to be very clever indeed. Resourceful, capable and hard to kill, however many years might have gone by since the peak of his operational training. These men didn’t lose their edge. This one, this Hope, least of all.