The Shadow Project, page 12
Her father looked surprised. “Yes, if you want.”
Michael said quietly, “I appreciate that, sir.”
They had moved across to Carradine’s office, and Opal, whose life was apparently under threat from the world’s most dreaded terrorist organization, found herself thinking that the chairs here were more uncomfortable than those in any other office in the building. She sat down in one of them and looked up anxiously at Carradine.
Without so much as a glance toward Sir Roland, Carradine said crisply, “Your father has given me a broad outline of what happened to you and what you saw, but I would like to hear it for myself—everything.”
He might have been about to say something more, but Opal interrupted. “Did Father tell you I saw two men with the Skull—two Western businessmen, I think—doing some sort of deal with him or something?”
Carradine nodded. “Yes.”
Opal took a deep breath. “Well, I’ve just seen them again.”
“What?” her father exclaimed.
“Where?” Carradine asked simultaneously.
“They were on television!” Opal said. “Just before I left the clinic. They were coming off a plane—I think at Heathrow. One’s called Avramides. The other’s called Kanska.” She glanced at her father. “Uncle Guy was meeting them.”
“Who’s Uncle Guy?”
“Guy Manton,” Roland said. “He’s a permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence.” He looked at Carradine, then added, “Friend of the family. The uncle part is honorary.”
There was absolute silence in the room. Then Carradine said, “Did you say Avramides and Kanska?” He reached for the laptop on his desk, typed something. After a moment, he turned the computer around to let her view the screen. “Is that one of them?”
The photograph on screen was black and white and not particularly sharp. It looked as if it might have been taken through a telephoto lens; and possibly some years ago, because the face looked younger than the one she remembered. But for all that she had not the slightest doubt. “That’s Avramides,” she said.
“Christ!” Carradine breathed.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw George Hanover look across at her father. Both had expressions of shock on their faces. Opal glanced at Michael and asked, “Who is he?” It was very clear that they knew.
Carradine took a deep breath. “Greek arms dealer. Kanska is Hungarian, his partner.”
For some reason, Opal felt that he was holding something back. She caught his eye and held it. “And…?”
Carradine said tiredly, “Avramides and Kanska are suspected of trafficking in nuclear weapons.”
“Oh,” Opal could only say, stunned.
“It’s just a suspicion,” George Hanover said. “We’ve never been able to prove anything. But Kanska has contacts in the former Soviet Union—there’s a lot of nuclear material there: outdated Russian warheads and materials. The trouble is that since the Soviets collapsed, security is rubbish—and frankly, some of the governments in the smaller, poorer states aren’t above making dirty little deals. It’s been a massive headache for years now. But we hadn’t seen it as a likely Sword of Wrath connection.”
It was Michael who asked, “Why not, Mr. Hanover?”
Hanover shrugged slightly. “A question of scale. The old Soviets stockpiled what you might call conventional nuclear weapons—the sort of thing you might use if you went to war with another country. You could sell some of that stockpile to another nation state—North Korea, Iran, or where have you—but it’s frankly useless to an organization like Sword of Wrath. They don’t have an air force, they don’t have missile silos or permanent launch bases—they’re just not fighting that sort of war. The only thing that would be of any use to them is a miniaturized tactical atomic, something they could smuggle into a country and hide away in a suitcase, then detonate from a distance to take out a city. But that’s a much more recent technical development, certainly not something the Soviets stockpiled. Contrary to the scare stories you read in the press, tactical atomics are very difficult to get hold of.”
“But not impossible?” Michael put in. “Perhaps what Opal saw—”
Carradine cut through the conversation with just the barest hint of impatience by saying to Opal, “When you saw these men—Avramides and Kanska—with the Skull, was the conversation in English?”
Opal nodded. “Yes.”
“I want you to tell me everything they said. Everything.”
“Actually there wasn’t much,” Opal told him. “The Skull said, ‘It is satisfactory,’ and the older man—”
“What was satisfactory?” Carradine interrupted.
“I don’t know,” Opal said. “Obviously something they’d been talking about before I arrived.”
“Okay,” Carradine said. “So the Skull said something was satisfactory. What did Avramides or Kanska say?”
“Avramides asked about payment, and the Skull said his men were loading bullion onto their helicopter.”
“Payment in gold,” Hanover murmured. “The bastards were supplying him with something.”
“Anything else?” Carradine asked.
Opal shook her head. “They had coffee after that, and Avramides said it was a pleasure doing business with him. And then he asked what the Skull was going to do with it.”
“Do with what?” her father asked.
Opal looked at him. “Whatever they’d sold him.”
“But there was no mention of what it was?” Carradine asked.
Opal shook her head. “No.” She glanced down at the floor. “Sorry.”
“It could be anything,” George Hanover muttered half to himself. “Even nuclear.”
“But you said the sort of bomb they’d need would be, you know…” The talk of nuclear weapons was making Opal nervous. She kept thinking what would happen if a nuclear device was detonated in London.
“It may not be a tactical miniature,” Hanover said soberly. “They may be opting for a dirty bomb—conventional explosive surrounded by radioactive material. Not much in the way of property damage, but widespread fallout, so the death toll would be high. Avramides could certainly supply Sword of Wrath with radioactive material.”
“It’s not that,” Michael said bluntly.
Hanover blinked at him. “How do you know?”
“Because the men were loading gold bullion onto a helicopter,” Michael said. “And it didn’t sound like it was a quick job, if they were having coffee while they waited. That sort of payment is far more than you’d need for a few containers of enriched uranium.”
Carradine turned to look at him with an expression of admiration. “Got it in one, Mike,” he said. He glanced at Hanover, who had asked the question, and raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe it was more than a few,” George Hanover said, sounding defensive.
“If it was a massive amount—enough to justify a helicopter load of bullion—then you have to ask yourself how it was delivered. Avramides certainly didn’t bring it with him, and the Skull is hiding in the middle of a war zone. You’d need a convoy of trucks, and what are the chances of their getting through without us spotting them?” Carradine tapped the casing of his laptop. “Besides, there’s the threat to Opal.”
There was silence in the room as everyone looked at him.
Carradine glanced from one face to the other, then said, “Put it together. The Skull discovers he’s been spied on. Forget about how—that’s another problem. He captures the spy temporarily, then she escapes.” He hesitated, frowning suddenly. “How did you escape, Opal? Your father hasn’t told me.”
“It was ridiculous,” Opal said. “They left me, and while they were away, a woman came to clean the room. She unplugged the electricity to the cage.”
Carradine stared at her in astonishment, then gave the barest ghost of a smile. “Are you serious?”
Opal nodded. “She couldn’t see me, of course. She unplugged the cage to plug in a funny little vacuum cleaner. I came back at once.”
“Well, well,” Carradine said. Then his smile faded. “In any case, you escaped. Now MI5 tells us they have information that Épée de la Colère plans an assassination attempt. You have to ask yourself why. Nobody goes to the trouble of sending a team to Britain just to get revenge—that’s playground behavior. They have to be worried that you know something they badly want to keep secret. It’s not their location, since that changes all the time; besides, they’d already moved on by the time we sent in the bombers. It’s nothing obvious in their camp: everything you saw was routine military hardware. Which leaves the fact that the Skull was involved with two Western businessmen. Granted they were arms dealers, but it’s hardly news to anybody that he buys arms. So it wouldn’t trouble him that we’d discovered details of a conventional arms deal. Which only leaves the nuclear option. If he is planning a tactical nuclear strike against the States or over here, he’s going to go a long way to keep it secret until it happens.”
“Impressive reasoning, Gary,” Hanover said. “But there’s a flaw in your logic.”
“Which is what, George?”
“Once they discovered Opal had escaped, they’d know their secret was out. By the time they got someone in place to kill her, it would be too late.”
But Carradine shook his head. “That assumes Opal knew the men the Skull was dealing with. She didn’t. It’s only by the sheerest chance we know who they are. In a full-scale debriefing she might have found them in a photo lineup, but that could take several days, maybe weeks. The Skull could reasonably assume that he had time to mount an assassination attempt. In any case it would obviously be better to try than not to try. Besides, he may have had someone already in place.” He looked from one face to another.
“Do you have someone in mind?” Sir Roland asked quietly.
“Young Lipman,” Carradine said.
“Danny?” Opal whispered. “Why Danny?” She felt Michael’s hand tighten on hers.
Carradine shrugged. “He just killed Fran, didn’t he?”
36
Danny, the Shadow Project
They bandaged his neck and leg and put him in jail.
Fortunately they locked him in the same old cell.
Danny wandered casually to the door and examined the lock. They’d taken away his lockpicks, of course…except for the one he’d concealed above the lintel. Danny grinned to himself. Hiding a pick was an old habit, in case he got interrupted and his stuff was confiscated. Last time he got out of this cell, he’d been so intent on escape, he forgot to take the hidden pick with him. Lucky lapse.
You had to look closely to see the way he’d sabotaged the lock. The door still closed properly, the key still turned, but if you tickled it with the pick, like so… it was even easier than the first time. All he had to do was turn the handle and step outside. But first he had to find out what guards they’d posted this time.
Danny walked back to the bunk bed and lay down. Although his insides had settled a bit since poor Fran had switched on that standing wave, they still felt shaky and his stomach was queasy. His instinct was to ignore it and hope that it would pass. But now he began to concentrate on it. The feeling of unease grew worse.
What was it Nan always said? “What can’t be cured must be endured”? Let’s see how well he could endure this lot. Danny closed his eyes and fixed his attention even more firmly on the discomfort inside him. Almost at once, the shakiness turned into a vibration. Danny lay there, letting it all happen. He felt as if his whole body was shivering, but not actually moving. It didn’t make sense, but he’d been here before so he didn’t waste time trying to make sense of it. He waited while the vibration became almost unbearable. Then, just as he thought it was going to shake him to pieces, it stopped.
Suddenly he couldn’t move a muscle. But instead of fighting, he willed himself to relax and waited for the bats. After a few minutes they arrived, flitting briefly near his head, then the paralysis vanished as abruptly as it had come, and the bats disappeared again.
Danny sat up, swung his feet onto the floor, and walked across the cell, leaving his body stretched out on the bunk.
It felt different from the way things worked with the psychotronic helmet. His second body felt a whole lot lighter, for a start, and when he looked back at his physical body laid out on the bunk, it was positively spooky. The thing lying there looked just like him, only dead. He could see his chest rise and fall with his breathing, but he still looked dead.
Danny turned away and floated through the wall of his cell. If there were guards, it didn’t matter: he could see them, but they couldn’t see him.
There was somebody in the corridor outside, but it was definitely not a guard.
The gray-haired man had his back to Danny and was dressed in robes and turban. If he was a guard, that made him the oddest guard Danny had ever seen. But he probably wasn’t a guard, probably a visitor, or possibly an MI6 operative in disguise for an overseas mission, although that didn’t make much sense since the missions here were all RV so far as Danny understood it, and—
The man walked through a wall, and Danny stood there, mouth open, staring at the spot where he disappeared.
After a moment Danny’s mind started to work again. This guy was out of his body! He could project exactly the way Danny could. But he wasn’t a Shadow Project operative—they only used teenagers. This was somebody with special talents wandering around the Project complex, and you could bet he was up to no good. Danny’s mind raced. If he couldn’t break out for any reason, or got caught and brought back like the last time, then maybe he could bargain information that somebody was spying on MI6, exactly the same way MI6 was spying on the bad guys. Danny dove for the wall and followed the stranger.
Danny emerged on the other side of the wall into a second corridor. The man had only to turn his head to catch sight of him, but Danny kept his distance and, as it happened, the man did not turn around. It obviously never occurred to him that he could be followed.
When they left the building, the stranger took to the air. Danny looked up after him with a sinking feeling. Carradine had told him about flying, but didn’t explain how. What had he said? “Gravity can’t hold you?” What sort of instruction was that? Danny tried to launch himself in the air and stayed firmly on the ground. He tried again, concentrating hard this time, and still nothing happened. Above him, his quarry was getting smaller in the sky. Danny imagined himself as a airplane. Nothing. The man was getting away. In a moment of mad panic, Danny tried jumping, and to his astonishment, took off like a bird. In a moment he was at the same altitude as the flying man, keeping his distance. The stranger, fortunately, still didn’t look around.
In minutes they’d left the Project far behind. Eventually they came to a run-down house along a lonely road. The man swooped in like a ghost, and Danny slid down directly after him…
…and stumbled on something that made him wish he’d never left his cell.
37
Opal, the Shadow Project
Gary Carradine pushed the laptop forward. “Is that the man who trapped you?”
The photograph had been taken at some sort of formal function, and most of the men in it looked like Saudis with a scattering of Westerners in well-cut suits. The Skull was in the Western group. Carradine tapped the image of the man beside him, an elderly Lusakistani with staring eyes.
“That’s him,” said Opal at once. She leaned forward to look more closely, but there was never any doubt. “Who is he?”
“Exactly who you said he was,” Carradine told her. “Hazrat Farrakhan, the Skull’s chief adviser. We’ve a file on him six inches thick. Sounds bizarre, but before he joined Épée de la Colère he was a marabout.”
“What’s a marabout?” Michael asked.
Carradine frowned. “It’s a sort of holy hermit—we’ve no exact equivalent term in the West. The Russians would call him a starets, like Rasputin. The thing is, he’s a devotee of ilmu al-hikmah, Middle Eastern occultism.”
Opal’s eyes widened. “He told me he was a student of ilmu al-something. I thought it was a person.”
Carradine shook his head slowly. “No, not a person.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” George Hanover asked.
The phone on the desk began to ring, and Carradine picked it up. “Yes?” After a moment he said, “We’ll be right up.” He cradled the receiver. “Lab’s finished work on the surveillance tapes.” He pushed himself to his feet. “They’re set up, waiting for us.” As he headed for the door he paused. “Apparently we may have been a little hasty about young Danny.”
The lab technicians had cleared out by the time they reached the viewing room. Roland clicked a remote control, and the screen on the wall lit up. “I’m afraid this may prove rather disturbing,” he said, glancing at Opal.
Opal fumbled for a chair, only vaguely aware of Michael sliding into a seat beside her. On screen she recognized G.R. 1. The G.R. stood for generating room in Project jargon, and G.R. 1 was where the Project kept its collection of historical devices. At first the room looked exactly as she remembered it, everything neatly displayed on tables or in cabinets like a museum exhibit. Then her father fast-forwarded, and Fran Hitchin came in with Danny, both walking like Charlie Chaplin because the tape was speeded up. Opal felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. She couldn’t believe Fran was dead.
There was a slight picture jolt, then Danny looked around at normal speed and said, “What’s this, then—the Project Museum?”
“Looks a bit like a museum, doesn’t it?” Fran said. Then the picture speeded up again, the voices high and squeaky. Roland slowed it again at random. “—standing wave,” Fran Hitchin said.
George Hanover frowned. “You don’t think she decided on a standing-wave experiment, do you?”
“Might have,” Carradine said, frowning. “See if you can find any more references, Roland.”
“Do my best,” Sir Roland murmured. He speeded the tape again, but in staccato bursts now, through a conversation between Danny and Fran. Only short phrases broke through “…threshold…vibration…wave…” Danny was seated in a chair in the middle of the room. Fran was by the control panel.
