Secrets of the Last Nazi Read Online Free Page B

a match between your brain and your behaviour …’ The doctor could see Myles was unsure about the idea. ‘…Oh, and we’d pay you.’
    The offer of money had no impact on Myles. ‘Would I have to come back here?’
    ‘Probably,’ confirmed the doctor. ‘Yes.’
    Myles started shaking his head. ‘Then, Doctor, the answer is no.’
    The doctor nodded his understanding. ‘You’re probably still in shock from your accident. Let me know if you change your mind. It’s actually quite amazing that you’ve not had problems before. Anyway, I think you’re booked for another examination in about half an hour, in the fracture unit in the east wing, ground floor. I’ll check.’ The doctor retreated from the room, humbled.
    Alone again, Myles thought more about the doctor’s offer. Research – Myles did enough of that in his university job. But research for him meant reading – or at least trying to read, since he was not very good at it. Myles would dig up old military facts from obscure sources and try to make sense of them. He’d never been the subject of research before. Apart from that one time, when the media had decided to research everything about him.
    Although Myles was usually curious, nothing made him curious about himself. There were so many more interesting things to discover.
    But deep down, Myles knew the real reason he didn’t want to be ‘researched’.
    He looked up at the hospital ceiling. It was antiseptic white. Dead white.
    He remembered coming to a room just like this one when his mother was thin. Deathly thin, like all those concentration camp survivors liberated from the horrors in 1945. His mother had died just a few days later – at the hands of the medical establishment. Cancer. They had said it was treatable. All the statistics, all the odds, all the numbers said she should have survived. It was a minor cancer – treatable, removable. Curable.
    Yet they had all failed.
    They’d put her on a drug trial. A double-blind, randomised control trial – funny pills twice a day, given to her and lots of other desperate people. Only after his mother was dead did Myles learn her pills were only placebos. Fakes. Had her death helped to prove something? Had she helped the numbers? To the teenage Myles, it seemed more like his mother had been sacrificed for the statistics.
    No calculus of chance and statistics was going to dictate his life. Not any more – the drug trial had already dictated his mother’s death, and that was enough. As the nurses came to collect his trolley, Myles knew he would refuse to take part in the research.
    And if the doctors really could use a scan of his brain to predict his behaviour, then they should have predicted his answer already.

Eight
    Quai D’Orsay,
    Paris, France
    2.15 p.m. CET (1.15 p.m. GMT)
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    F light Lieutenant Jean -Francoise Pigou exhaled in disgust, shaking his head and tutting loudly at the TV. The only customer in the café, he raised his hand at the screen, inviting the café manager to red card the referee with him.
    The café owner smiled: Pigou might not be the most gifted military secondee ever to stride through the ornate halls of France’s Foreign Ministry, the Quai D’Orsay, but he could be relied upon to keep everyone up-to-date with the progress of the Paris St Germain football team. The flight lieutenant’s enthusiasm for the game had filled the whole café more than once. He had charm, even if he was completely undiplomatic. It would be a pity when Pigou’s secondment ended, and the officer would return to his normal work, with the French air force.
    Jean-Francoise’s anger at the referee’s decision evaporated when a young, professional-looking woman came towards him, a thin folder of papers in her hand. Jean-Francoise stood up to meet her. ‘Carine – you’ve come to watch with me?’
    Carine smiled, but sat down with her back to the TV. ‘No, but I knew I could find you here. Is the game over yet?’
    ‘Not yet,’ said