The Nemesis Program

Chapter Twenty-One

The terrifying vibration seemed to threaten to tear everything apart. It felt as though they were aboard some vast rocket ship taking off. Ben’s blurred vision could just about make out the chapel’s blazing timbers through the gaping hole in the ceiling of the tomb.

Roberta clung tightly to him. He heard her frightened gasp in his ear as another incoming onslaught of searing heat and flame rolled across the narrow mouth of the recess.

This was it. They were about to be roasted alive.

In a deafening chaos of noise and fire, the chapel timbers came crashing inwards amid an avalanche of roof slates, bringing down the rest of the tomb ceiling. It felt like being caught in a direct hit from a bomb.

Then … nothing.

Ben opened his eyes. Something was different. The terrible vibration had stopped. He turned his face towards the opening of the recess and realised he could taste air, fresh air, on his dry lips.

He could breathe again.

Still coughing from the smoke, he struggled out of the hole, stood uncertainly and gazed around him. ‘What the …’ he muttered to himself, blinking as if he were seeing things.

The whole building had fallen in on itself, extinguishing the blaze. Where the chapel had stood, there was nothing left but a circle of ruined walls and heaps of rubble. The bronze cross that had earlier adorned the steeple now lay blackened and half-buried under a ton of smouldering timber. A hundred small fires were still burning all around, and a vast column of orange-lit smoke was towering upwards to blot out the stars.

Ben glanced sideways and saw that Roberta was standing at his shoulder. Her face was glowing by the firelight. One cheek was blackened and her hair was almost white with dust. She couldn’t stop grinning shakily as she squeezed his arm. ‘Hey, looks like we made it after all,’ she said in a raspy chuckle.

‘… What happened?’ was all he could say. His own voice sounded hollow and deathly.

‘I couldn’t see the controls in the dark,’ she explained, talking fast. ‘Just by chance I must have pressed the right button, then I rammed it into a crevice in the wall there.’ She pointed to a pile of smoking rubble.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The device must’ve been set up to automatically attune to the natural frequency of the building, instead of the manual analogue system Tesla used,’ she went on. ‘I guess we’ll never know now, even if we could dig out whatever’s left of it. Least we know it worked, huh?’

Ben stared at her. ‘Hold on. Surely even you wouldn’t be trying to tell me that that thing — that little tin pot piece of crap machine — did this?’

Roberta’s excited grin dropped and she returned his fierce stare. ‘Why, you think it was a miracle or something? God heard your prayers and sent down an earthquake to rescue us in our moment of need? That what you’d rather believe, Ben?’

He couldn’t reply. The alternative seemed wild, insane. But there was no other way to accept what he’d just witnessed.

‘You know it’s true,’ she said. ‘So much for pie in the sky, hmm?’

He surveyed the devastation and shook his head. ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘He had nothing to do with it.’

‘I’m supposed to be the crazy one,’ he muttered. ‘You almost got us killed.’

‘I got us out, didn’t I?’ Her grin returned. ‘Then you do believe me.’

‘Principle of resonance,’ he grunted reluctantly.

‘Principle of resonance. You got it, Hope. You ought to trust me a bit more by now, after all we’ve been through together.’

‘You’re going to tell me everything you know about this stuff,’ he said.

‘With pleasure. And once we get home, with any luck we’ll both be able to learn exactly what Claudine was doing and what she knew, which you can be damn sure was a lot more than I do.’

Roberta tried to shake the worst of the dust out of her hair and cleaned up her sooty face as best she could while Ben searched for his bag. He found it among a pile of wreckage, rather more battered now than before and partly singed from the fire. Its contents were warm to the touch. He could only pray that the heat hadn’t affected the remote hard drive inside. He took out the machine carbine, checked it over and kept it handy as they clambered over the rubble that covered the tomb steps and picked their way through the ruins of the chapel.

‘You think they’d still be hanging around?’ Roberta asked nervously, glancing at the trees.

‘Better not be, for their sake,’ Ben replied. ‘I don’t much appreciate some joker trying to stonebake us.’

But whoever it was, they were long gone. The grounds were deserted as Ben and Roberta walked towards the gates, both happily filling their raw lungs with the wonderfully fresh night air.

‘Alive again,’ she said.

‘For now,’ he replied.

‘That’s what I always loved about you,’ she said. ‘That cheery optimism just never goes away.’

Everything was as they’d left it. The gates were still locked, the Alpina still in the same spot. It was as if nobody else had been there that night.

They climbed the gate. Ben was the first to drop down to the other side. He walked up to within a few yards of the car and halted, eyeing it suspiciously. ‘They knew we were here,’ he said. ‘Nobody followed us from Paris, but they were able to pinpoint us exactly in the middle of nowhere.’

‘How could they do that?’

‘There are a thousand ways,’ he said. ‘None of them very reassuring from our angle.’

Roberta considered. ‘Maybe they were there, in Montmartre. Watching us as we checked out Claudine’s apartment. Maybe they didn’t want to make a move, draw attention to themselves in a public place. But they could have stuck some kind of tracking device on the car, couldn’t they?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ he conceded.

‘Then if we could find it, we could just detach it and leave it here in the bushes to make whoever’s monitoring our whereabouts from a distance think the car was still here, while we drive back to Paris. Or else we could stick it on the back of a truck heading for Germany or somewhere. Throw the assholes right off our trail.’

Ben glanced back over the trees at the smoke rising into the sky, still visible for miles even now that the flames had died down. ‘Someone’s bound to have reported the fire. Emergency services and police will be here any time soon, and they’re going to know this was an arson attack. If the car’s still here when they arrive, they’ll start asking questions and it’ll be reported in the media, which you can be sure our friends will be watching.’

‘So?’

‘So if we leave the car where it is, as far as anyone’s concerned there’s a couple of fresh corpses buried in the remains of that tomb back there,’ he said. ‘Mission accomplished. Which is what we need them to think, if we want to buy some time before they catch up with us again.’

‘You think they will?’ she asked anxiously.

‘It’s what I would do.’