The Nemesis Program

Chapter Thirty-Six

‘First, what do you know about Claudine’s work?’ Daniel asked, shooting a nervy glance at the door as if someone might be eavesdropping on them out here in the wilderness of Lapland.

‘The number codes in her letter led us to where she’d hidden her research material,’ Roberta said. As she spoke, Ben was unstrapping his bag and taking out the notebook computer along with the remote hard drive they’d retrieved from Germain De Bourg’s tomb. He laid it on the table, connected the drive and powered up the machine. Daniel stood, grabbed a pair of glasses from his desk and approached the computer as Roberta went on.

‘Until we found this,’ she said, ‘I’d expected to find her research on Tesla, nothing more. But there was all this other stuff in there, too. Seismology reports, images of disaster zones. I know it makes sense, somehow. I just can’t put it together in my mind. What was she doing, Daniel?’

Daniel’s grief-stricken face hardened as he accessed the files, clicking from one to the next in rapid succession. ‘Claudine showed how all this was connected,’ he said. ‘The unexplained phenomenon discovered in Mongolia in March is just one example. This is another.’ Opening up the image file that showed the devastated city, he pointed at the screen. ‘You know where this is?’

‘None of the image files are labelled,’ Roberta said. ‘We thought it looked like Latin America.’

Daniel nodded. ‘Taráca, a tiny republic between Bolivia and Paraguay. This image is of San Vicente, its capital city, after the earthquake that devastated the country eighteen months ago.’

‘I heard about it at the time,’ Roberta said, remembering now where she’d come across the name San Vicente before. ‘But I don’t …’

Daniel stared at their puzzled faces and his mouth twisted into a humourless smile. ‘You’re still not getting what this is all about, are you? Tell me, what other hidden items of Claudine’s did you find? Perhaps a small electronic device, metallic, oblong, about seven inches long?’

‘Her Tesla oscillator?’ Roberta said.

Daniel looked gravely at her. ‘You found it, then. I knew Claudine would have hidden it. Do you have any idea what it’s capable of?’

‘We had an interesting taster,’ Ben said.

‘Which is why we don’t have it any more,’ Roberta said. ‘It got buried under a thousand tons of rubble that we only just managed to get out of ourselves.’

‘Then you understand what this is all about,’ Daniel said. ‘Or perhaps you still don’t want to, because it’s too terrible to imagine.’

‘Start from the beginning,’ Ben said. ‘What’s your involvement in all this? Are you a scientist like Claudine?’

Daniel shook his head. ‘I was a freelance investigative journalist. For some time I lived in the States, then for the next several years my investigative work took me from place to place around Europe.’

‘Investigating what?’

Daniel shrugged. ‘Environmental concerns, ecology, green issues, things like that. I spent time with protest groups, demonstrated against motorway construction, hung out with alternative types, anarchists, people with way-out causes. I guess a lot of it rubbed off on me. In time I started getting deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories. I became convinced that the reality the citizens of the modern world are presented with is really no more than a carefully designed tissue of lies intended to hide the truth of what our global ruling elite are really doing, the future they’re creating for all of us. I became involved in a whole network of people who devote themselves to studying and investigating the secret goings-on that most people never hear about. My main interest back then was the global warming controversy and the growing evidence that the entire thing was invented purely to generate massive revenues in so-called green taxes, hijack the ecological movements for purposes of gain and impose more controls on us all. Whatever money I could make I spent travelling around Europe to meet up with like-minded individuals. Unfortunately, that world draws a lot of cranks and crazies.’

‘That’s not such a big surprise,’ Roberta said. Ben had met his fair share of those, too, but he was getting impatient with Daniel’s account. ‘Get to the point,’ he said.

‘I’m coming to it. It was at one of those meetings, an alternative science conference in London, that I met Claudine. I saw right away that she wasn’t one of the crazy ones. She was different, and she was serious. Before long, we found what we had to say to one another more interesting than the conference. So we left. A drink turned into a meal. We talked and talked until the restaurant closed and we went to her hotel to talk some more. I was attracted to her, but that was only part of it. She had so much to tell about the research she’d been doing that I suddenly realised my global warming crusade was like nothing compared to what she was uncovering. I was hooked, even though some of it seemed impossible to believe. She described to me how she had built this machine based on Tesla’s original. I was pretty incredulous at first, but she told me she could show me an actual demonstration. The very next morning I found myself going back to France with her. We stopped in Paris, then she drove me out into the countryside, to where she had come across an isolated, derelict farmhouse.’

Ben remembered the picture of the old house they’d seen on the computer hard drive. He could guess what was coming next.

‘The walls were still standing, though nobody had lived there for years. I stood back and watched as Claudine attached her machine to an outer wall. I didn’t know what to expect. Then she switched it on.’

‘We’ve seen how this works,’ Roberta said. ‘The device auto-tuned to the resonant frequency of the building and started to shake it?’

‘It was unbelievable,’ Daniel said, with a look of awe. ‘One wall fell in, then another. Then what was left of the roof, right before my eyes. If she hadn’t turned the machine off in time, the whole thing would have been turned to rubble. That was when I became completely persuaded that what she had discovered was true, no matter how terrifying it seemed.’

He paused for another long gulp of vodka, swallowed it down and looked at them with a leaden expression. ‘The most terrifying thing of all is what ruthless people could do with a technology like that. Here are the facts. Shortly after Tesla’s death on 7 January, 1943, two US Secret Service agents who may have been one Bloyce Fitzgerald and one Ralph Doty, removed key items from his safe at the New Yorker Hotel as well as safety deposit box 103 at the Governor Clinton Hotel, leaving phoney benign material behind in their place for the investigators of the subsequent Trump Inquiry to find, so that everyone could be satisfied that Tesla wasn’t working on anything of potential military interest to enemy spies at the time of his death. The Trump Inquiry concluded that Tesla had been increasingly eccentric and possibly mentally ill during the last ten years of his life, producing nothing but useless gibberish that had no practical or scientific value.’

‘While the genuine items were being whisked away to some secret government warehouse,’ Roberta muttered.

‘More than a warehouse, a laboratory,’ Daniel replied. ‘Claudine believed that this became the basis for a highly classified and massively funded research and development program to explore and expand the range of Tesla’s discoveries. For over seventy years they’ve been secretly furthering his work, amplifying the powers he discovered, fine-tuning them, perfecting them.’

Daniel paused to drink more vodka, the glass trembling in his hand. ‘Now do you begin to see what this is about? The seismological data, the graphs, the images — Claudine had spent years compiling them, analysing them, searching through them until she was completely certain, beyond reasonable doubt—’

‘Completely certain of what, Daniel?’ Roberta asked, in a tone of dread that showed she already knew the answer.

Daniel’s face turned a little paler. He wiped his mouth. ‘That not all of the large-scale disasters of recent times, the mass destruction, the loss of countless human lives … were necessarily down to such natural causes as we have all been led to believe.’

‘You mean—?’

‘They were caused on purpose, yes,’ Daniel said quietly.