Vortex

Ben found himself momentarily transfixed. That was it, he told himself. That was Vortex. It had to be.

It was a beautiful object. Slick and shiny. But it was capable of so much terror.

He dragged his eyes from the device and looked back at Lucian. He noticed that his gun hand was trembling slightly, so he did his best to steady it, then spoke in as firm a voice as he could muster. 'Turn round slowly, Lucian, and put your hands on your head.'

Lucian didn't move.

'I said, turn round!' Ben instructed more firmly. 'Now!'

With infinite slowness, Lucian's body creaked to its full height like a snake rising from the ground. He refused to put his hands on his head, instead looking at Ben and Annie over his round glasses with an expression half of amusement, half of dislike.

'Your hand is shaking, boy,' he whispered.

Ben cursed himself inwardly for allowing his nerves to show, but he did not let his aim waver.

'Put your hands on your head,' he repeated. 'I mean it, Lucian. I'm not messing around.'

Lucian's lined face moulded itself into a sneer. 'How old are you, boy?' he practically whispered.

'That doesn't matter. Put your hands on your head.'

'Oh, I don't think I'll be doing that. I can tell a bluff when I see one. I know perfectly well that you don't have the faintest idea how that gun works. Put it down before you hurt yourself.' He took a confident step towards them.

Ben narrowed his eyes. The old man in front of him had a look of such supreme arrogance it was all he could do to suppress his anger. Their eyes locked, and Ben stared at him emotionlessly before it became clear what he had to do to get Lucian's attention.

The old man took another step forward. 'Ben…' Annie breathed urgently.

Ben didn't reply. Slowly he lowered his arm so that the gun was pointing towards the floor. Lucian smiled unpleasantly. 'Good boy,' he said, as though he were talking to an obedient dog.

But before he could take another step towards the two of them, Ben raised the gun again. This time he was not pointing it at Lucian; he was pointing it at the metal canister on the table between them. 'Let's see if I can't guess how this gun works, shall we?' he said with a half-smile.

And with a squeeze of the trigger, he fired.

Almost instantaneously, there were two noises: the loud crack of the gun, and a more tinny ring as the bullet ricocheted off the metal device, leaving a small dent in the sturdy metal exterior. Annie stifled a scream as the bullet whistled past them to embed itself in the wall. Lucian's reaction could not have been more extreme. The lazy arrogance fell from his face and he stepped forward towards the device, almost caressing it. 'What do you think you're playing at?' he demanded, aghast. 'Do you have any idea what you could have done?'

'Yeah,' Ben replied. 'Actually, I do.' He aimed the gun back in Lucian's direction. 'Now put your hands on your head like I told you. We're going to have a little chat.'

'What could we possibly have to chat about?' Lucian spat. All the colour had drained from his face the moment Ben had shot at the device on the table, and although he still sounded contemptuous and superior, he looked like half the man he had when they had first walked in.

'Joseph, for a start. Where have they taken him?'

'It's no concern of yours, boy.'

Ben aimed the gun back at the device.

'No!' Lucian shouted. 'Stop. Wait.'

Ben raised an eyebrow. 'You'd better start talking,' he said, 'because I will shoot again.'

'OK, OK,' Lucian stuttered. 'He's being escorted off the premises.'

Immediately, Ben fired another shot at the device. This time it caused an even bigger dent towards the centre and, once again, the ricocheting bullet shot into the wall — on the other side of the room this time. 'Don't lie to me, Lucian,' he said. 'I overheard that Russian man telling you to kill him, and I don't believe for a minute that you'd just let him go, not after everything you've done to keep us out of the way.'

Lucian's eyes narrowed. For some reason he glanced up to the ceiling, but then he stared back at Ben and moistened his lips with his tongue before speaking again. 'Very well,' he whispered. 'If you think you're old enough to ask the question, then you'd better be prepared to hear the answer. My idiot brother is being taken to a target range, much like the one where you were discovered snooping around. There is a training exercise at dawn. The principal target there is a newly constructed hut. Joseph is being locked in there, and it will definitely be destroyed during the training exercise.'

'You're sick,' Annie declared.

'I'm not sick, missie,' he retorted with sudden anger. 'I'm a pragmatist.'

'You're a nutter, more like,' she replied. 'What's with all this James Bond stuff? Why didn't you just shoot him while you had the chance?'

'I wouldn't expect you to understand, little girl,' he said as insultingly as he could.

'Oh, we understand all right,' Ben said quietly. 'You're doing it this way because you don't want his blood on your hands. If he's killed during a training exercise, everyone will think it's just a terrible accident caused as a result of him nosing around in a place where he shouldn't be.'

Lucian smiled again. 'Very good,' he whispered.

'How could you do that to him?' Ben asked in shock. 'He's your brother. First you put him in a mental asylum all his life, now this.'

'Ah.' Lucian's eyes widened. 'Is that what he told you?' He turned round and walked away from them back towards the wall, before spinning back to look at them angrily. 'Well let me tell you,' he said waspishly, 'that my brother was heading for a life in and out of mental institutions from before he was even your age.'

'We've seen the room where you did it, Lucian,' Ben countered. 'We've seen the place where you made your brother's mental instability ten times worse.'

'He was going to blow the whistle!' Lucian shouted. 'He was going to ruin important research.'

'Some things are more important than research,' Ben told him.

'Don't be so naive. People had tried to put a stop to our experiments before dear Joseph had the idea. Every single one of them disappeared. I was doing Joseph a favour, stopping the authorities from killing him. He should be thanking me, but he's too crazy to know any different.'

'Funny, isn't it,' Annie observed as though to herself, 'that after fifty years in psychiatric hospitals, he doesn't quite see it that way. And you know another thing that's funny? That for all this talk of what a big favour you did him, you're happy to let him die now.'

Annie's barbed comment seemed to echo all around the room.

'He knew what he was doing, interfering with my work once again,' Lucian told her.

'I thought you said he was crazy. If he's crazy, surely he doesn't know what he's doing.'

'It hardly matters,' Lucian spat. He pointed at the metal cylinder. 'Some things are more important. Do you have any idea how many lives my invention could save?'

'What?'

Ben and Annie said in unison.

'Of course!' Lucian hollered, waving his arms slightly maniacally in the air. 'If the North Koreans — or whoever — get their hands on it, it will stop them from resorting to nuclear weapons. They won't need to go nuclear, because they'll have a far more effective weapon at their disposal.' As he spoke, his eyes betrayed the light of a zealot.

'Really?' Ben asked, his voice trembling though he did his best to keep it level. 'Well, try telling that to the people who'll die when their planes fall out of the sky as a result of your toy.'