Ben Hope 05 - The Shadow Project Read Online Free PDF

Shannon to the hospital at Valognes, a few miles away.
    There was nothing left to do except wait. Ben slumped on a low wall and lit up a cigarette. Storm, his favourite of the German Shepherds, and more of a pet than a guard dog, came running over and licked his face. Ben ran his fingers through the dog?s fur, genuinely grateful for the company.
    He sat on the wall and smoked as Shannon?s team came filing past about thirty yards away, firing hostile looks across the yard at him and muttering among themselves in low voices. They disappeared one by one into the trainee block. Neville was the last to go in, shooting a long stare at Ben before slamming the olive-green door shut with a bang that echoed around the buildings. Paul and Raoul had repaired to the office, maybe awaiting his instructions.
    He couldn?t think of any to give them. They might as well go home now.
    He blew out a cloud of smoke and ruffled the dog?s ears.
    ?Well, Storm, that surely was a fine morning?s work.?

    Chapter Five
    The 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