outskirts of Dublin shrank away in the Saab’s rearview mirror as Adam O’Connor drove southwards into the green countryside. A choral air by the medieval composer Thomas Tallis filled the car from the six-speaker CD player, but Adam hardly heard the music. He was thinking about the deaths of his old friends, and feeling sad. And just a little guilty, too, that he’d allowed himself to lose contact with them.
Michio and Julia and him. Part of Adam missed those days. The three of them might have seemed an unlikely bunch of friends – the sober American professor quietly going crazy with his marital problems, the ebullient, fun-loving Japanese planetary scientist and the brilliant, hard-driving young head of the Applied Physics Department at Manchester University – but it had been great for a while, a refreshing antidote to the daily drag of teaching and research, lectures and seminars and department politics. There’d been a kind of innocent camaraderie between them, almost like schoolkids. From the outside, it might have seemed even stranger that what had drawn the trio together from across the world was their shared interest in an obscure, all-but-forgotten, wartime Nazi engineer and SS general. Hans Kammler had been personally appointed by Adolf Hitler in 1943 to work on some very, very strange things indeed.
Their first meeting had been a chance encounter at a physics conference in Cambridge, just about the driest and most uninspiring series of lectures Adam had ever listened to. He’d actually fallen asleep in the middle of the morning session, until he’d been prodded awake by the grinning little Japanese guy sitting next to him and he’d realised with a flush of embarrassment that he’d been snoring.
When the lecture ended, Michio had laughed about it all the way to the delegates’ lunch. Adam liked him right away, and sat with him. Across from them had been a bright-eyed, attentive and switched-on young British physics PhD who introduced herself as Julia Goodman.
Instant friends. Just one of those moments in life when people seemed to chime with one another. They’d endured the rest of the afternoon’s lectures as a threesome, then got together again for the evening in the bar at the hotel where many of the delegates were staying.
That had been when the ever-smiling Michio had first mentioned the name Kammler to them. He’d kept them up until after midnight in the bar, babbling on about his discoveries. The little guy’s almost hyperactive enthusiasm had been infectious, and it hadn’t taken him long to persuade them that this obscure piece of science history was more than just bizarrely compelling. Adam could still remember the rush of amazement he’d felt, and the look on Julia’s face, when Michio had told them what he reckoned the Nazis had really been into. If you were even half-alive, if academia hadn’t yet dried out your soul, it was the kind of physics that could turn your blood to wine just thinking about it.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Adam had asked Michio. Sometimes the most exciting theories were nothing more than a cool idea waiting to be destroyed by an ugly, inconvenient truth. But even as he’d asked the question, the sparkle in Michio’s eyes told him this was no fanciful notion.
‘I’m more than sure. I know they could make it work.’
‘But the implications of what you’re saying—’ Julia cut in.
‘Blows your mind, doesn’t it?’ Michio had grinned. ‘Get used to it. There’s more.’
And there was. The more Adam and Julia listened to what Michio had to say, the more incredible it seemed. This was pure, beautiful, intoxicating science. Nothing to do with politics or ideology. Science the way it was meant to be. It was easy to forget that the man behind it all was an SS general, one of the minds behind the building of Hitler’s death camps and, in the closing days of World War II, one of the top five figures in the dying Third Reich. Adam had found himself almost obsessively consumed with the Kammler theories, as the months went on. The three of them had started meeting up whenever they could – London, Tokyo, New York – and staying in touch via email in between, mulling over ideas, postulating what-if scenarios. It had become a little gang of three, and they’d even made up a fun name for it. The Kammler Krew. Almost as much as his relationship with his boy Rory, it had been what had sustained Adam through the dark times of his break-up with Amy.
About a year into their friendship, the trio had become a foursome with the arrival of Lenny Salt. Lenny liked to tell people that he was a physicist, but in fact he’d just been Julia’s lab assistant at Manchester, doing basic routine jobs that any decent first-year student could do. Adam hadn’t been too sure about his coming on board, and had thought that Julia was too soft in letting him join. She’d said that Lenny was deeply interested in the subject and that he’d be happy to do some research for them to help out. By the time they’d discovered he was unable to contribute much to their discussions except his own brand of conspiracy paranoia, it had been too late to say anything for fear of offending Julia.
Lenny Salt’s arrival had cooled Adam’s enthusiasm for the Kammler Krew. After another year and a couple more meetings, he could feel himself drifting away from the group. By that time the whole smart house thing had begun to take over Adam’s life in any case; he’d been winding up his teaching career, heavily involved in buying the plot of land in Ireland and designing, and subsequently building, Teach na Loch. With all that going on, he’d had less and less time to keep in touch with his fellow Krew members.
What nobody knew was that, though he’d slackened his involvement with the gang, Adam hadn’t lost his interest in the Kammler research. He’d still often sit up late into the night, day after day, working feverishly on his ideas, even after setting up in business and moving to Ireland. He had a bunch of notes on four CD-ROMS that he kept locked away in his safe at the house. Sometimes he’d think about it, when he was supposed to be working on his smart house business, and the possibilities would start to flood his mind all over again, coming so thick and fast he was almost choking.
The worst thing had been having to keep quiet. This stuff was just too hot, and not just because it derived from the work of a Nazi. It was hot because of its incredible, almost limitless implications. Never mind making millions from smart homes. If anyone could make the Kammler theories work, they’d be talking billions. Money on tap.
And maybe, Adam thought now as he drove, that was also the problem. With Julia and Michio dead and Lenny’s warnings still echoing in his ears, he could feel his heart beating and an icy chill run down his spine.
He glanced in the rearview mirror. Had that black Mercedes been following him all the way from Dublin? He started to worry as he watched it, taking his eyes off the road so long that he had to hit the brakes hard to avoid crashing into the back of a slowing truck. He overtook the truck, glanced nervously in the mirror and saw the Mercedes indicate and move out to follow him.
Shit. They are tailing me.
Don’t be ridiculous.
He drove faster nonetheless, and the Mercedes kept pace with him. Then, just as he was getting really edgy, a straight opened up ahead and the black car flashed by him, doing at least ninety. Adam laughed shakily to himself.
A couple of miles further on, he spotted the Mercedes in a fuel station forecourt and saw that the driver was a young woman with a small child.
He cursed Lenny Salt for putting daft ideas in his head. What a weirdo the guy was. What an insult to their poor friends to come out with such a cockamamie story and cheapen the tragedy of their deaths like that. It was typical of the conspiracy theory mindset. Pure ego. Like anyone would even think to come after a pathetic old fart who thought he was a real scientist.
Adam’s thoughts wandered back to Julia and Michio. The coincidence was terrible; but surely a coincidence all the same.
Just then, his mobile ringtone chimed through the car’s sound system.
It was the housekeeping agency. Adam frowned as he listened to the woman informing him that the new housekeeper wouldn’t be able to come until tomorrow, due to a minor road accident.
‘Nothing serious, I hope?’
‘She just had a bit of a shock,’ said the woman. ‘She’ll be right as rain in no time, and with you tomorrow afternoon.’