The Doomsday Prophecy Read Online Free PDF Page B

you.’
    ‘It’s secure. Why haven’t you reported sooner, Kaplan?’
    ‘We’ve had a problem here.’
    A pause. ‘The girl?’
    ‘I’m afraid so.’
    ‘You killed her, didn’t you? You had strict orders to take her alive.’
    ‘She’s alive.’
    ‘Then what?’
    ‘She’s alive but she’s no use to us.’
    ‘You’re trying to tell me you screwed up.’
    ‘We had her, OK? She was right in our hands. But she was hard to catch. She was on a motorcycle. We chased her for about three miles, from the villa up into the hills. Those roads are twisty, and there’s a lot of forest. We tried to head her off, but she panicked. She went off the road, where we couldn’t follow. I left Rossand Parker in the vehicle and took Hudson with me. We went in after her on foot.’
    ‘And she got away.’
    ‘No. We got her. She didn’t get far before she came off the bike.’
    ‘What’s the damage?’
    ‘No serious external damage. A few cuts and grazes. But she suffered a head trauma, and that’s the problem. She was unconscious a long time, nearly thirty hours. Came round yesterday. But she has some kind of traumatic amnesia. She can’t answer our questioning, because her memory has blanked out.’
    ‘You’re sure you got the right person?’
    ‘One hundred per cent sure.’
    ‘How bad is she?’
    ‘We can’t really say. The amnesia might be short term.’
    ‘You’d better hope so. Have you any idea how serious this is?’
    ‘It’s under control.’
    ‘Doesn’t sound much like that from this end, Kaplan. If she doesn’t regain her memory soon, you’ll have to get her back here where there are proper facilities.’
    ‘There’s another small problem.’
    ‘You mean this gets worse?’
    ‘All her things have disappeared from the villa. We went there to collect everything. It’s not there any more. Luggage, papers. All gone. She wasn’t meant to be leaving until morning. It means we have to replan. It can’t look like an accident any more.’
    ‘Nice work, Kaplan.’
    ‘One more thing. There was someone at the party, some boyfriend, we think. He’d been hanging around. We didn’t think anything of it. But then at the party he spilled her drink just after Hudson spiked it. Looked deliberate.’
    ‘So he knows something. Who is he?’
    ‘Just a local guy, as far as we know. One of her many boyfriends. Probably married, so he was real discreet. The villa has a linked garage, and he always parked his Mercedes there where we couldn’t see it. Now we think he took her things away, in the car, earlier on. And we’re pretty sure she was RVing with him when we took her.’
    ‘So he could know everything.’
    ‘Basically. But there was no way we could have known that.’
    ‘You have any information at all on this person?’
    ‘We’re working on it.’
    ‘You’re going to have to rescue this situation quickly. We’re on the clock here. People will start to miss her.’
    ‘We’ll find him.’
    ‘You’d better. And when you do, you contain the situation. There might still be a chance of saving this mess. This goes up in smoke, you’re dead. Understand?’

Chapter Nine
    Oxford
The sixth day
       
    After two solid days of study, Ben felt ready to breathe some air again. The sun was shining through his window, and he felt the tug of the outdoors. Back in Ireland, he made a point of running ten miles every day.
    He put on jogging pants and a T-shirt and walked briskly into town, where he picked his way through the shoppers in Cornmarket and walked down towards his old college, Christ Church. Entering through the main gates, he found himself looking across the vast main quadrangle. He took a deep breath.
    He walked across the quad, gazing around him at the regal old sandstone buildings as they caught the gold of the sun. Distant memories flooded back. In the centre of the quad, surrounded by neat lawns and perched above an ornate stone fountain, stood the familiar statue of Mercury the winged