The Shadow Project

Chapter Thirty-Three

‘Quiet little spot you’ve found for yourself here, Lenny,’ Ben said.

Salt backed away. His eyes were wide and fixed on Ben as he reached his right hand back and fumbled for something on the Formica top behind him. Then his fingers closed on the wooden handle of the long barbecue fork and he snatched it up and pointed it like a weapon at Ben’s stomach.

‘Stay away from me or I’ll skewer you.’

Ben looked at the fork. ‘I think you’d better put that thing down before you go and hurt yourself.’

‘Who sent you? Who are you working for?’

‘Just myself. Sorry to disappoint.’

‘What do you want?’

‘To talk, Lenny. Nothing more.’

Salt clutched the fork tighter, standing there in a puddle of beer.

‘You look like you’ve pissed yourself,’ Ben said. ‘Aren’t you going to put that fork down?’

‘You’ll kill me.’

‘Lenny, if I’d wanted to kill you, you wouldn’t even have seen me.’

Salt blanched.

Ben reached slowly into his pocket, took out his wallet and handed him a business card. ‘This is who I am and what I do.’ He nodded to the laptop on the bed. ‘Check out the website. There’s a picture of me.’

‘I’m not connected here. No email, no internet.’

‘Scared they might trace you?’

Salt nodded sheepishly.

‘You need to do a better job. It wasn’t hard to find you. And your snap-and-run routine needs work too.’

Salt was still frozen there, clutching the fork. The last of the beer had seeped out of the can and was trickling across the vinyl floor.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Ben said. ‘I haven’t got all day.’ He stepped over, snatched the fork before Salt could react, and threw it out of the open caravan doorway. It whistled through the air and stuck juddering in a tree trunk.

Salt kept gaping speechlessly at Ben.

‘Now clean that beer up, and let’s go outside and talk.’

Salt hesitated, then tore off a length of kitchen roll from a dispenser next to the stove. He used the paper to mop up the puddle on the floor while Ben grabbed two more beer cans from the fridge and led the way outside. Salt joined him, watching him warily, and they sat opposite one another at the picnic table.

Ben snapped open his beer. ‘I’m sorry if I scared you before, Lenny. I didn’t want to.’

Salt grunted in reply, opened his own can with a spit of foam and took a long gulp, keeping his eyes on Ben. The business card was still clenched in his fist, and he scrutinised it carefully, first its printed front, then the blank back, staring at it as though it was the lost map to the secret US Government alien farm at Roswell.

‘No invisible ink,’ Ben said. ‘No holographic cryptograms.’

Salt looked up. ‘Tactical Training Unit? What does that mean?’

‘It’s my business. Just a training school.’

‘Bullshit. It means you’re military.’

‘Was military,’ Ben said. ‘Not any more.’

‘Sure. That’s what you would say, isn’t it?’ Salt sneered. ‘I don’t talk to people like you.’

‘I’m being completely honest with you. I’ve been out of the military for a long time now. I left there to do my own thing, and now I teach people how to do the same. I could give you the phone numbers of a dozen people who’d vouch for that.’

‘Teach them to do what?’ Salt asked suspiciously.

‘To protect vulnerable people and stop bad things happening to them,’ Ben said. ‘And if something bad’s already happened, to help them get out of it. To find people who’ve been kidnapped, or who’ve got into trouble.’

‘So you’re a detective?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘A cop?’

‘Definitely not,’ Ben said.

Salt narrowed his eyes. ‘Are you looking for someone now?’

Ben nodded. ‘Yes, I am. I’m looking for a young woman who might have got herself mixed up in something very dangerous. And I’m hoping you might be able to help me with information. I’ll pay you for your time.’ He dug some notes out of his wallet and held them up so that Salt could count them.

Salt’s eyes flicked down to the money, then back up to meet Ben’s. ‘Cash up front.’

Ben tossed the money across the table. Salt palmed it and stuffed it in his pocket. He smiled. ‘Now, what if I don’t feel like talking?’

‘Then I might feel like snapping your neck,’ Ben said.

Salt swallowed. ‘What information do you want?’

‘I want to know about Kammler.’

Salt gave a dark little chuckle. ‘Of course. Seems like everyone’s getting interested in Kammler all of a sudden. There’s a lot of weird shit going on, man.’

‘Are you saying someone else has approached you?’

‘Not for a while. I’m keeping my head down low.’

‘What about before?’

Silence.

‘The neck-snapping part still applies. I thought we had a deal.’

‘There was the German.’

‘What German?’

‘This crazy German girl.’

‘Go on.’

Salt shrugged. ‘There isn’t that much to say. It was about eight, nine months ago, just before I left Manchester. She emailed me, same as you did. Wanted to talk to me about Kammler. Said her name was Luna, and she was based somewhere in the Black Forest. Offburg, Hoffenburg, something like that.’

‘Offenburg?’ Ben knew of the place. It was close to Strasbourg, near the border between France and Germany.

Salt nodded. ‘That’s it. But I wouldn’t take that too seriously, man. I knew right away she was phoney. Told me she sold ceramics.’ He smiled knowingly. ‘Like someone who sells ceramics would be genuinely interested in this stuff. I tell you, man, the covers they come up with are pretty fucking thin sometimes.’

Ben asked, ‘Did she arrange a rendezvous with you?’

Salt nodded again. ‘St Peter’s Square in Manchester. She was very keen to meet. Flew over the same day. At least, that’s what she said. The woman I saw might not have been the same one. Might have been one of her team, you know?’

‘So you turned up for the RV.’

‘Oh, I turned up, all right. Old Lenny always turns up.’

‘But you didn’t talk to her. You did what you did with me, took her picture from a distance and then buggered off. That’s a very bad little habit, Lenny.’

Salt flushed angrily. ‘Got to protect myself, haven’t I? Can’t be too careful.’

‘Have you still got the picture?’

Salt hesitated a second, then shrugged and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the caravan. ‘Let me see it.’

‘What, now?’

‘Right now, Lenny. It’s important.’

Salt got up and went into the caravan. Ben heard him pottering about for a moment, then he re-emerged carrying a laptop and a battered screw-top tin labelled ‘coffee’. He laid the computer on the picnic table, flipped it open and powered it up. While it was whirring into life he twisted the lid off the coffee tin. Ben caught the smell of ground beans. Salt shoved his hand into the brown powder, spilling a lot of it on the table, and came out with a small object wrapped in a miniature plastic Ziploc bag. He opened it, and Ben saw that the object was a computer USB flash drive.

Salt inserted it in one of the ports on the side of the laptop. ‘You have to look away now,’ he said, turning to Ben.

‘Why?’

‘Because I can’t let you see me typing the password.’

Ben sighed and looked away. Salt rattled the keys, and then said, ‘OK. You can look now.’

Ben turned back towards the computer as the contents of the flash drive came up onscreen. It contained a vertical list of JPG photo files, at least thirty of them.

‘What is this?’

‘Them,’ Salt replied.

‘Them?’

‘My enemies.’

Ben scanned the list up and down. Salt had labelled each one with the date and place the picture had been taken.

‘These are all people who’ve approached you?’

‘Nah, nah. They wouldn’t do that. It’d blow their cover. Most of these were just following me in the street.’

‘So they could be anyone.’

Salt gave him a look. ‘No way, man. I know when I’m being followed. So I take their picture, and then they don’t come back, see, but they always send more. You’ve got to know your enemy.’

Ben didn’t say anything.

Salt scrolled down the list of files, stopped and tapped a finger on the screen. ‘This is her.’ He clicked, and a photo of a woman flashed up.

Ben stared at it.

The photo was of a woman standing on a flight of steps leading up to what looked like a library. She was on her own, and even frozen on the screen she looked tense, as though waiting for someone but not quite sure what she was going to find when they turned up. It had been a dull, cloudy day in Manchester, and she was dressed for cool weather in a dark green fleece. She had the same slight build as the woman he’d chased in Switzerland, about five-eight, with shoulder-length blond hair blowing in the wind. There was just one problem.

Ben looked at Salt. ‘She’s got her back to the camera. You can’t see her face.’

‘Hold on. I got a better shot just after that.’ More clicking, and Salt exchanged the picture for another. Same place, seconds later. Now the woman was turned towards the camera.

Ben’s heart sank again. The definition on the face wasn’t good. All he could see was a blur of features. She could have been anyone.

‘Can you zoom in and sharpen it up?’ Ben said.

Salt tapped a couple of keys and the image expanded. The woman’s face disappeared offscreen, so that Ben got a close-up of the dark green fleece and the designer logo on its breast. Then Salt flicked another couple of keys and her face panned back into view. Salt used the cursor to draw a rectangle around her head, clicked down a sub-menu and the image suddenly sharpened into focus.

Ben was drawn into the screen, so that nothing existed outside of it.

It was her. It was Ruth. If there’d been any doubt in his mind until that moment, now it had been suddenly blown away into spinning fragments like flying debris in a bomb blast.