The Cassandra Sanction
They skirted westwards, contouring the German side of Lake Constance along twisty and half-empty roads that lost themselves in thick woodland for long periods, then emerged into the open to offer flashes of the great lake and the little towns clustered around its shores. After a dozen kilometres, Ben spotted a layby flashing up on the right, and he braked and pulled in.
Raul woke from the brown study he’d lapsed into, looked out of the window and saw there was nothing around them except grass and shrubs and trees and the empty stretch of road running by, then turned to Ben with his eyebrows raised. ‘Why are we stopping?’
Ben cut the engine. His trouser pockets were bulging. Three phones in the left, another three in the right. He fished out all six and laid them in a row along the top of his thigh. ‘If they could track the car, they can easily track these phones. I want to check them over, but I’m not doing it wherever we hole up for the night. We don’t want any unexpected visitors.’
All six phones were identical in make, model, colour and condition, which was shiny and virtually brand new, apart from the small ricochet dent in the one Ben had taken from the sniper. He activated each in turn, scrolled through its menus and call records, and found exactly the same thing in all six cases. The phones were devoid of any records whatsoever, except for a list of calls made over the last few days, all to the same sole number, at the same times and for the same duration.
Whoever they’d been calling was the boss man. One rank down and immediately answerable to him would be the team leader, and Ben was fairly sure the sniper had been it. Back in the day, Ben had been the kind of team leader who led from the front, right there in the thick of it with his men and first in line to take a bullet. There was also the kind who preferred to hang back from the action and send the others in first while they watched from a safe position. Evidently, the sniper had been one of those. Not that it had done the man much good, in the end.
Ben picked up the sniper’s phone and redialled the number. He relaxed back in the driver’s seat with the phone to his ear as the dial tone rang twice, three times.
The man picked up on the fourth ring.
‘I’ve been wondering why you didn’t call me sooner, Cook. Update me.’
A deep voice, rich and sonorous. He was English, like his crew, but where Ben had heard them talking in rougher, more working-class London accents, this man spoke with what Ben had heard termed the RP accent. Received Pronunciation, the formalised dialect of the cultivated, the privately educated, the moneyed, the prestigious. He sounded cold, remote and fully in control. He sounded unquestionably like the boss. Someone who coordinated strategies and outcomes from afar, and wasn’t happy when he wasn’t kept abreast of all developments. Someone who expected results, and had most certainly paid a lot of money to obtain them.
Ben could play this in two basic ways. He could take a gamble and pretend to be one of the dead gunmen, copying their way of speaking, and hope he could fake the man out long enough to get him to reveal useful information. His name, his location, ideally both. Depending on whom Ben was dealing with, that could have been the right strategy. But not with this one. Ben sensed from the man’s tone that trickery wouldn’t get him far. He knew nothing about his enemy, except that he was far too clever to fall for such an obvious ploy.
So Ben decided on the straight approach.
He said, ‘I’m afraid Cook isn’t available. Not any more. Not unless you’re a spirit medium and can communicate with the other side.’
There was a silence on the phone. Ben said nothing and rode it out.
After ten long seconds the voice said, ‘I see. Then to whom am I speaking?’ Cool, unruffled, unfazed.
‘I’m the guy who made him unavailable,’ Ben said. ‘His friends too. You won’t be hearing from any of them again. Which puts you six men down and at something of a disadvantage. The element of surprise is a valuable thing. Lose it, and you stand to lose entirely.’
‘I know who you are,’ said the voice after another pause.
‘I know you do. That’s why you know to take very seriously what I’m about to say.’
The silence on the other end of the line seemed to intensify. Ben could feel the man listening intently, still composed but tensing up. Gripping the phone tightly, pressing it hard against his ear and his clenched jaw. The strategic mind hard at work.
‘I’m calling to make you a deal,’ Ben said. ‘And to give you a chance. You gave it your best today, and you came away with nothing. Less than nothing. You failed badly. If you try again, you’ll fail worse. Now it’s time to back off and leave these people alone. If you do that, you might live a long and happy life and never hear from me again. If you don’t, this is going to end very badly for you. That’s a promise. A guarantee. I will come for you. If you know who I am, you know what that means.’
‘Are you finished?’ the voice said. Calm and smooth as a millpond on a lazy summer’s afternoon.
‘I haven’t even begun,’ Ben replied.
‘I appreciate your offer,’ the voice said. ‘Regrettably, I must decline. That is to say, regrettably for you, Major Hope. It’s you who needs to back off and walk away, while you still can. Forget these people. You have no idea what you have become involved in.’
‘I never walk away,’ Ben said.
‘Then too bad for you if you get under my feet,’ said the voice. And the man hung up.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ben redialled the number, but as expected all he got was a generic answering service. It would be the last time that number was ever used, and the other guy’s phone was probably already trash. Dead and gone.
Raul’s face was flushed. ‘That was great. Just fantastic. You didn’t get his name, you found out nothing, and all you did was antagonise him.’
‘He sent six professional gunmen to kill me and kidnap you, presumably with a view to torturing you to extract information on the whereabouts of your sister, whom he also most likely wants to eliminate. I’d say he’s already as antagonised as it’s possible for a person to be.’ Ben looked at Raul. ‘Face it. There was no way I was going to get much out of him. What matters is that I got the measure of the kind of person we’re dealing with here. I learned that he’s serious, and that he’s unconcerned enough about the loss of six men to mean he has plenty more at his disposal. He won’t give up. He’s going to keep trying until he finds her, one way or another.’
‘Then we have to find her first,’ Raul said tersely. ‘Which isn’t going to happen while we’re sitting here looking at the countryside.’
Ben started the car again and they took off. He pushed the BMW hard for another seventy kilometres, still avoiding major roads as they threaded through pasture land and forest, villages and small towns. Afternoon was wearing into evening, and the sun was climbing down fast. They passed plenty of places where they could have stopped for the night, but Ben kept going. He could still hear the calm, collected voice resonating inside his head.
The landscape became more rugged and the woodland thickened as they pressed deeper into the Black Forest with the hills and limestone escarpments of the Swabian Jura visible now and then through the gaps in the trees. Eventually, the woods opened up and the road dipped into a valley and a small village that felt right and safe to Ben. The streets were narrow and filled with black and white wood-framed houses. Over a stone bridge that crossed a river, they found a traditional inn that probably looked exactly the way it had three centuries ago.
They parked around the back and climbed out into the falling dusk. Raul grabbed his holdall from the back, and Ben scooped up his bag. It was a good deal heavier now, stuffed with the combined weight of Catalina’s computer, her notes, and a salvaged MP5 along with a pistol and half a dozen assorted magazines bombed up with nine-millimetre full metal jackets.
The dour, unsmiling old guy who ran the inn looked as if he’d been there when it was built. Ben did the talking, and asked for a pair of rooms for the night. Either the old guy ha
d had problems with guests running off without paying, or maybe he was generally of a suspicious disposition, because he insisted on money up front. Ben shelled out some notes from the roll he’d taken from the dead sniper’s pocket. The old guy didn’t balk at the sight of good old-fashioned hard cash, and he didn’t seem interested in seeing their passports either. That must have been the way, back in the 1700s. It was fine by Ben. The less record of their movements, the better.
The old man hobbled and dragged his way up an ancient wooden staircase to the first floor, and showed them their rooms. Ben’s overlooked the narrow street, with a little railed balcony made of black-painted wood. It had a quilted single bed and a threadbare rug, a chair and a table and a couple of lamps. By Ben’s standards, it was wildly opulent luxury. Raul’s looked out into a small garden out back, where a stream wound its way between a stand of trees on its way to feed into the main river. It was a cosy, pleasant kind of place. A little dusty, a little creaky, but safe. Alone in his room, Ben dumped his bag on the single bed, unbuckled the worn leather straps and took out both firearms, which he loaded and made safe and tucked away out of sight underneath the pillow. You could never be quite safe enough. Then he kicked off his shoes and lay down and stared at the ceiling.
He hadn’t been staring at it long when Raul knocked once at his door and came in, shut the door behind him and immediately started pacing the floor.
‘Happy with the accommodation?’ Ben asked.
‘No, of course I’m not happy. I mean, the room is fine. But how long are we going to stay here?’
‘Just long enough to do what we need to do,’ Ben said. ‘We’ll grab some rest, get some food inside us, then we’ll see what we’ve got and figure out our next move.’
‘I’ve been thinking that I should phone my parents. I need to tell them that I think Catalina’s still alive.’
Ben sat up on the bed. ‘That’s a bad idea,’ he said.
Raul stopped pacing and looked at him. ‘You don’t think they have a right to know?’
‘As far as they’re concerned, they’ve buried their daughter. You’re only going to stir all those emotions up again. Let them be in peace.’
Raul knitted his brow and looked flustered. ‘Hmm. Maybe you’re right. I shouldn’t call them until we find her.’
‘Still a bad idea,’ Ben said.
Raul’s frown became a scowl. ‘What are you talking about – I can’t even call them to say I found their daughter they thought was dead? I can’t tell them this terrible nightmare that has torn our family apart is over, and they’re going to see her again? How can I keep something like this from them?’
‘We’re up against people who have a long reach,’ Ben said. ‘We should proceed with caution.’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Raul said defiantly. ‘Cell phone tracking, right? You’re worried they can pinpoint where the call came from?’ He took out his phone and waved it. ‘See? It’s just a cheap prepaid one. I don’t have a contract or anything. I told you I always pay cash for things. I bought it for cash, top up the minutes with cash. It can’t be traced to me.’
‘That’s fine,’ Ben said. ‘But that wasn’t what I was thinking. I’d say there’s a very good chance that your parents’ phone is tapped. They might even be under observation, the way you were. It would make sense to have surveillance on anyone Catalina might contact. Family, friends, former colleagues. Not to mention keeping tabs on her apartment in Munich. They’d have been onto this place too, if she hadn’t managed to keep it secret so well. It was just a fluke that they weren’t already waiting there for us.’
Ben was aware of another reason why Raul shouldn’t tell his parents Catalina was alive, but it wasn’t one he could bring himself to express out loud.
It was that she might not still be alive by the time they found her. If they ever did. It would just be cruelty for Raul to wipe away his parents’ grief at a stroke, only to redouble it again when he had to tell them she was dead after all. He would have tormented them for nothing, broken their spirit completely. And if they were the kind of principled, dignified and traditionally minded people Raul had painted them to be, Ben was pretty sure they would never forgive their son for it. What little they had left as a family would be irreversibly destroyed.
Raul had no clue as to Ben’s thoughts. He was still focused on the immediate threat, and he looked bewildered by what Ben was telling him. ‘Can they really be so well organised?’ he asked.
‘They could be even more organised than we think,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe they knew the moment we’d landed in Germany. They could have had someone sitting right behind us on the plane. Basically, we have no way of knowing how big an operation this could be. Therefore, no way of knowing what kinds of financial backing and other resources they might have at their disposal. Therefore, we need to proceed with extreme caution. If we’re going to stay under the radar, that means no calls. Okay?’
Raul digested the information, then grunted his acceptance of Ben’s point. ‘Okay, I understand.’
Ben stood up from the bed and walked over to him, holding out his hand. ‘May I see that phone for a minute?’
Raul shrugged, and held it out. Ben snatched it and dropped it in his own pocket.
‘Hey, what are you doing? I thought you just wanted to see it.’
‘Why would I?’ Ben said. ‘You’ve seen one phone, you’ve seen them all.’
‘Then let me have it back.’
Ben shook his head. ‘Consider it a gesture of kindness and friendship. Sparing you from the evils of temptation.’
‘You don’t trust me one little bit, do you?’
Ben said, ‘Let’s get something to eat.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The inn’s dining room was a more recent add-on to the ancient building, housed in a conservatory overlooking the little garden that was visible from Raul’s window above. Except that now it was dark outside, and all that could be seen in the glass were the reflections of the few diners scattered about the little restaurant’s mostly empty tables.
Ben automatically scanned each face and assessed the threat. He wasn’t going to be caught out the way he had been in Frigiliana. A solitary middle-aged man in a wrinkled suit who looked like a stressed-out salesman or low-flying business executive stopping over for the night on his way somewhere bigger and more important: threat level, zero. A young couple, maybe newly-weds, all rapt and dewy-eyed with adoration for one another. Threat level, ditto.
Ben relaxed, smelled the cooking aromas wafting through from the kitchen and realised how hungry he was. When the waitress appeared, he ordered the biggest sirloin steak on the menu and a bottle of red wine. Raul opted for grilled fish in a butter and parsley sauce, and a glass of good Riesling.
‘Just a glass?’ Ben said.
‘I don’t like to drink too much.’
‘If you were always this sober, I would never have got to know you,’ Ben said.
‘Anyway, it’s too expensive by the bottle.’
‘We’re not paying,’ Ben said, patting his pocket where the roll of cash nestled. ‘Like the rooms, this meal is all on our generous departed acquaintances. Spoils of war.’
Raul frowned. ‘Thanks. I was trying to forget about today, and now you have to remind me about this nightmare. Maybe you’re right. One glass of wine isn’t enough.’
‘You can always have some of my red,’ Ben said.
‘It wouldn’t be appropriate, not with fish.’
‘That’s the difference between you and me,’ Ben said. ‘If I want to drink, I’ll drink. If I don’t, then I don’t.’
‘You don’t worry about much, do you?’ Raul said.
‘Not those kinds of things,’ Ben said.
‘What about the kinds of things we did today?’
‘I don’t worry about those, either,’ Ben said. ‘You do what you have to do. Then you forget it and move on with a clear conscience.’
‘You’ve done it a lot, ha
ven’t you?’
Ben looked at Raul. Anyone listening in to this conversation would have found it very odd indeed.
‘I’ve done my fair share. More than some, less than others.’
‘And that’s okay with you?’ Raul asked.
Ben shrugged. ‘There have been times when it wasn’t okay. Times when I was under orders to do things I didn’t agree with. But other times, it was plenty okay. Today being one of them. Today was one of those days when I wouldn’t think twice.’
‘It seems so simple to you.’
‘Some things in life are,’ Ben said.
‘Not for me. I’m just a teacher. I live in a different world from yours.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Ben said. ‘We all live in exactly the same world, because we’re all human beings, and the human condition we created for ourselves is fundamentally a cruel, violent and brutal state of affairs that shapes the world accordingly. Some of us are used to dealing with the reality of that. While others hide behind the veil, insulate themselves from reality and try very hard to fool themselves with high ideas about civilisation and progress in the kind of safe, cosy modern society they want to believe protects them from all the bad and dark things they’d rather not think about. I don’t blame them, in principle. But now and then they get a peek through the veil, like you did today, and it’s a shock to the system. More than most people can handle. All you can do is keep telling yourself that you came through it. You survived. You get to move on to the next stage. Which is to find your sister. Or die trying.’
Raul sighed. ‘Damn it. I am going to get drunk.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Ben said. ‘You’re doing a pretty good job of holding it together so far, and you’re going to keep it that way. Suck it up. Deal with it. We’re going to find Catalina.’