The Nemesis Program_Ben Hope by Scott Mariani

Author:Scott Mariani [Mariani, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-06-04T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Four

The sun had been up a long time when Ben awoke to find himself still on the bed, fully clothed, with Roberta’s hair tickling his face and her arm draped over his shoulder. Without waking her, he delicately lifted the arm off him and rose to peer out of the window. It was almost 7 a.m. and the village was coming to life.

An hour later, true to his word despite the heavy night’s drinking, Dolph turned up outside in his delivery lorry and honked the horn. By then, Ben and Roberta were downstairs, revitalised with black coffee and waiting for him.

As they clambered into the cab, Dolph greeted them with a grin and a thumbs-up, and the lorry rumbled off. The road was long and meandering, and carried them northwards through beautiful birch woods and over misty mountain passes. Along the way, Ben showed Dolph the address that had been on Claudine’s letter to Daniel, saying that this was an old friend he hadn’t seen in a long time and to whom he was thinking of paying a visit.

‘Your friend live in a hole in the ground, huh?’ Dolph asked, amused. When Ben asked what he meant, the lorry driver explained that the words ‘Hand om’ on the second line meant ‘care of’ in Swedish. The address was in fact that of the local post office, while it appeared that Herr Lund had none of his own, or at least none that he wanted to reveal.

‘No worry, I drop you right there,’ Dolph said, saying that their route passed through the place on the way to his delivery drop. ‘You find your friend, no problems.’

The hamlet lay deep in the forests of the Pieljekaise National Park and centred on a cobbled square overlooked by a store, a tiny café and the quaint wooden post office to which Claudine’s letter had been sent. Dolph dropped them off in the square and waved cheerfully from his window as he rumbled off in a cloud of diesel smoke.

The post office was completely quiet except for the ticking of a large wooden clock on the wall, and smelled of beeswax and brass polish. Standing at the old-fashioned counter, a skinny middle-aged woman with glasses on a chain around her neck and her steely hair scraped back into a bun was efficiently sorting piles of mail and other documents. There was no computer in sight. On the wall behind her were rows of neatly alphabetised pigeon-holes, some of them with letters and small packages inside. She looked up as Ben and Roberta walked in.

‘Best you handle this,’ Roberta whispered to him. ‘I have no idea what to say.’

After establishing that she could understand English, and in fact prided herself on her ability to speak it, Ben told her that he was trying to make contact with an old friend, Herr Daniel Lund, who lived in these parts but for whom he only had this address. The postmistress assessed the two of them with a sharp eye.

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