his instruments, made his final adjustments. Flaps; undercarriage; speed; altitude: everything was in order, or as close to it as need be. The Steiner ST-1 swooped in low over the rickety barbed-wire fence, the disused buildings and the graffiti-covered hangar where local kids loitered to smoke dope, and touched down with a yelp of tyres. Ben instantly eased off the throttle and the plane decelerated on the bumpy strip, rolling to a standstill forty yards short of the sunburned grass beyond. The engine whine died away and the prop came to a halt. Ben pulled off his headset, quickly reset his Omega to French time, then pressed the control to activate the hydraulics for the aircraft’s side hatch.
‘Well, I must say, that came in pretty handy,’ Roberta commented as she stepped down to the cracked concrete. ‘Remind me to put one of these gizmos on my Christmas list.’
Ben used a remote button to close the hatch and set the locks and alarms on the aircraft. The late afternoon was warmer than England. The soft breeze smelled of cut grass and was filled with the chirping of crickets. He looked around and quickly saw that Jeff, trustworthy as ever, had delivered on his promise. The dark blue Alpina B7 was sitting on the stubbly yellowed grass a little way from the landing strip.
‘That our ride?’ Roberta asked, walking over, and Ben nodded. ‘No key in it,’ she observed, peering through the driver’s window.
‘Who needs keys?’ Ben stepped up to the door and said the word, ‘Open’. His voice was one of the four programmed into the car’s sophisticated voice recognition locking system. The locks opened with a clunk and Ben popped the boot lid. Underneath the floor of the boot was a special armoured compartment that VIP close protection personnel could use, where necessary, to carry concealed weapons and other sensitive equipment through border checkpoints. Ben quickly removed the Beretta Storm from his bag and stowed it snugly inside the hidden space, then piled their bags on top.
He climbed behind the wheel. It had been a little while since he’d last driven the Alpina, but the familiar whiff of Gauloises was still faintly detectable inside. There was even one of his old John Coltrane CDs nestling in the map compartment. The Le Val high-speed evasion car felt uncomfortably like home.
Ben said, ‘Start’. The Alpina’s tuned engine instantly burbled into life.
Roberta raised an eyebrow. ‘Very cool.’
‘Special privilege,’ Ben replied. ‘Le Val personnel only.’
‘Even though you don’t work there anymore?’ Roberta said. She thought about it for a moment, then added, ‘Figures.’
He looked at her. ‘What figures?’
‘That your friend Jeff didn’t delete your voice signature from the menu. He must’ve reckoned you’d be back before too long.’
Without a reply, Ben put the Alpina into gear and pulled sharply away. Sensing that she’d said the wrong thing, Roberta quickly changed the subject. ‘How far to Paris from here?’ she asked.
‘A little under two hundred miles,’ he said.
‘Three hours?’
‘In this thing, more like two and a half,’ he said, and put his foot down.
‘That figures too,’ Roberta murmured but Ben was too focused to hear.
The drive to Paris was even quicker than Ben had estimated, and by evening they were filtering through the western approach into the city. He’d been deep in his own thoughts nearly all the way, and was still silent as he negotiated the hectic evening traffic into the centre. As he took a right off Boulevard des Batignolles, heading southwest down Rue de Clichy, Roberta turned to him and said, ‘Montmartre is the other direction, to the north.’
‘I know where Montmartre is,’ he replied. ‘We’ll take a trip up that way later tonight.’
‘So where are we going?’
‘Somewhere these friends of yours can’t find us,’ he said. ‘You’ve been there before.’
‘I wish you’d quit calling them that,’ she said irritably. ‘Then you still have that old place, huh?’
She was talking about the small, simple apartment she and Ben had used as their refuge for two nights the last time they’d been here together. The ‘safehouse’, as he’d called it, had been a gift from a wealthy client whose child Ben had once rescued from kidnappers. There was no paper trail of ownership linking him to it. It was completely secure and so hard to find, tucked away deep in the architectural honeycomb of central Paris, that virtually nobody even knew it existed.
‘Never quite got around to selling it,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe I was hanging on to some crazy notion that it’d come in handy again one day.’
‘Fancy that,’ she said.
Ben headed up Boulevard Haussmann, hung another right onto Boulevard des Italiens, and soon afterwards the Alpina swung sharply off the road and dropped down a steep ramp into the dark echoing cavern of the underground car park that was the only way into his hidden apartment.
They grabbed their stuff, left the car in the shadows and Ben led Roberta through the parking lot to the concrete passage and up the familiar murky back stairway. Someone had sprayed graffiti on the armoured door since he’d last been here, but there was no way even the most dedicated burglar could have broken through the plate steel or the reinforced wall.
The safehouse was dark, the blinds drawn over what few small windows it had. Roberta looked around her and sniffed the air as he led her inside. ‘Smells kind of … uh, closed up,’ she said.
‘It has been, for a while,’ he replied, switching on lights. The luxuries of home were few: a plain desk, an armchair, a no-frills kitchen and bedroom. No decorations, bare floors, no TV. Once upon a time, the safehouse had played a big part in Ben’s Europe-wide freelance operations as a kidnap and ransom specialist, as he’d moved constantly from one scrape to another and lived pretty much the same kind of stripped-down, comfortless existence he’d grown accustomed to with the SAS. Now it only stood as a painful reminder of old times he’d thought he’d left far, far behind.
‘Hasn’t changed a whole lot since I was last here,’ she commented. ‘Same old neo-Spartan shit pit. But, like you said, it’s safe. At least, it better be.’
He glanced at her. He knew she was thinking the same thing he was, feeling the same weird feeling that the two of them should be back here. Even though their stay together had only been for two days and nights, it had been an eventful time that brought back a lot of memories. Tender moments, like his confiscating her phone, making her sleep on the hard floor, and having to shampoo the blood and brains of a dead man out of her hair after she’d been covered in gore during a gunfight on the banks of the Seine. It was shared experiences like that which had cemented their budding relationship.
‘You want a drink?’ he asked her.
‘I could use a shower first,’ she said.
‘You know where it is,’ he said, motioning down the narrow hall towards the bathroom. ‘There should be some clean towels.’
‘Nothing I should know about? No rats or roaches?’
‘Take the gun in with you, if it makes you feel any safer.’
‘I’ll risk it.’
While Roberta was in the bathroom and he could hear the water pittering and splashing, Ben went into the bedroom, shut the door, sat on the edge of the bed and took out his phone. He turned it on and ran a web search using just the name ‘Tesla’. Within moments he was swamped in a welter of scientific and technical hoo-hah that seemed as grandiose as it did improbable.
He switched from text search results to images, and a few seconds later