The Nemesis Program

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 he found himself staring at the face of the man himself. A pinched, lean, chalky-white face with something of Edgar Allan Poe about him, something perhaps a little bit mad. The hair was oiled and parted in the fashion of the 1920s, the little brush moustache trim and neat. The eyes were sharp and foxy and seemed to bore right out of the screen and into Ben’s.

‘If this is really all about you,’ Ben muttered, ‘you’ve got a lot to answer for, pal.’

He gazed at the image a moment longer, knowing he was only procrastinating. This wasn’t what he’d taken his phone out for.

He swallowed and quickly keyed in Brooke’s number. As he waited for her to reply, he anxiously tried to think of how to express what he wanted to say. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Can’t we just stop? Can’t we just go back to the way things were? Or just I love you. I need you. Let me come home, as soon as this is over.

But there was no simple formula. No backspace key, no erase button. The damage that had been done couldn’t be healed with just a few facile words.

Brooke didn’t even reply. He aborted the call, strangely relieved but dreading when he’d have to try again.

The pain in his body reminded him of the other damage that needed healing, too. Standing up, he painfully unpeeled his jeans far enough down to inspect the large red weal across his left thigh where the Beretta magazine had absorbed the force of the bullet strike earlier that day. Its oblong shape was almost perfectly imprinted on his skin. He touched it and winced. In a day or two it would blossom into a spectacular bruise and a rainbow of colours.

His right side was pretty tender, too, where he’d taken that particularly solid blow from the man now encased several feet deep in concrete. I’m getting too old for this bollocks, he thought as he peeled off his T-shirt to examine his ribs. Another florid, multicolour bruise was on its way there, too, but at least nothing was cracked internally that he could feel.

The bedroom door suddenly opened and he turned to see Roberta standing there.

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