Ben clambered out of his vehicle and took a few steps up the rise. The Jeep Catalina had used to make her escape was still exactly as it had been before, looking abandoned and forlorn with its doors hanging open and its headlights dimmed to an amber glow as the battery ran down. He turned away and ran for the jetty, heading for the boathouse. If Catalina had taken one of the boats, as he’d mistakenly anticipated, then he might have had a chance of catching up with her as she cut across to Sárla to catch the ferry to Karpathos. As things stood, there was simply no way he’d ever make up for the head start she had on him. He could maybe reckon on crossing the stretch of ocean in an hour, minimum. During which time a Learjet with a cruising speed of around Mach 0.8 would have covered a further nine hundred kilometres or more. And then he’d still have to waste yet more time waiting for the ferry to take him from Sárla to somewhere they had things like aeroplanes.
Not good.
Then a movement caught the corner of Ben’s eye, and he paused in his step to turn to his left and look in that direction. What he’d seen were the mastheads of Keller’s yacht, visible over the rise and drifting gently from side to side on the ocean’s swell.
She’s a breeze to sail, Keller had said. Hell, I could take her around the world single-handed.
‘Hmm,’ Ben said.
Five minutes later, the outboard motor boat was burbling away from the shore, across the shallows to where Shanghai Lady lay at anchor. Up close, the schooner’s sides reflected the crimson dapples of the dawn sun off the water, and her elegant masts and immaculately furled sails towered overhead. Ben brought the motor boat in close to the hull, where a retractable boarding ladder extended down to meet him. He tossed his bag up onto the deck and mounted the ladder, letting the motor boat drift away.
The smooth hardwood deck, all hundred-and-twenty-odd feet of it, pitched and heeled gently under his feet. Shanghai Lady was a thing of beauty, a floating work of art – but Ben was more concerned about his practical ability to sail the thing single-handed. The moment he stepped inside the wheelhouse, he saw that Keller hadn’t been kidding about the electronics. Amid all the expanses of magnificent varnished walnut, there was probably as much technology at his disposal as Avery had on board the Learjet. Multifunction displays boasted everything from smart-control autopilot to sonar fishfinder module, automated sail control, thermal marine cameras, radar and GPS navigation, voyage planner, chart plotting software and plenty more stuff that Ben wasn’t going to need.
‘Now let’s see if we can’t make up a little lost time,’ he said to himself. It was already nearly quarter to seven and the sun was breaking free of the horizon. In minutes, the anchor had been winched aboard, the engines were thrusting at full throttle and Shanghai Lady was tracking away from Icthyios, cleaving through the water with a white bow wave and a foamy white wake curving away behind her. Ben set his course to bypass the island of Sárla and make sail for Karpathos, which his on-board trip computer told him would take just a few hours. He radioed ahead to inform the port harbour master of his arrival, and got his permission to land. Insurance and harbour fees were all magically taken care of, courtesy of Austin J. Keller III.
Keller been right about Shanghai Lady. The schooner could sail itself, and it was much faster than it looked. But not fast enough. Frustrated, Ben paced the deck and wished that he had his cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked a Gauloise since leaving Germany. The way he was going, there was a real risk that he might lapse into a clean and healthy lifestyle.
The morning wore on. Sky and ocean lightened to a glittering azure blue as the sun climbed high overhead. Ben gazed up at the bright yellow ball in the sky, and wondered whether it was his imagination that it didn’t feel particularly warm for the time of year. Catalina’s climate predictions were hard to shake from his mind. He was still musing about them when he spied land on the horizon, dead ahead in the far distance. The wheelhouse instruments confirmed that he was approaching Karpathos.
Seven forty-five a.m. Just over two hours had already passed since Catalina’s escape from Icthyios.
By eight fifteen, Shanghai Lady was sailing into the larger island’s main port of Pigadia, filled with all manner of vessels from tiny fishing boats to giant superyachts, and overlooked by clusters of traditionally whitewashed Greek houses, apartment blocks and hotels. Ben found his allocated mooring point within the harbour, and soon afterwards the schooner was lashed securely into place among a forest of masts. Back on solid ground, Ben made his way through the port and immediately started hunting for a taxi.
An hour after that, he was buzzing from an overload of thick, dark Greek coffee and sitting twiddling his thumbs in the departure lounge at Karpathos Island National Airport, impatiently counting down the minutes before his flight was called, and still wishing he had his cigarettes.
He kept thinking about Catalina. No way to know what direction she’d flown off in. Impossible to tell where she was now. Not a chance in hell of following her.
That was, if it hadn’t been for one lucky detail.
Ben reached into his pocket to check the phone one more time.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Three hours earlier
At around the same time that Ben was clambering on board Shanghai Lady, Austin Keller’s Learjet was cruising at forty-three thousand feet over the Ionian Sea, approaching the coastline of what was sometimes described as the ‘toe of Italy’. A very unhappy Pete Avery was at the controls. Catalina Fuentes was beside him in the co-pilot’s chair, still holding the pistol she’d taken from Willis.
The argument had been going on since they’d taken off, though it was Avery who had done nearly all the talking. His voice was hoarse from shouting at her. ‘I don’t know how you think this is going to work,’ he was saying now. ‘If you had even the first, tiniest clue about aviation, you’d realise we can’t drop in out of the sky just anywhere we please, unannounced, without permission. There are regulations.’
‘I’m well aware of the regulations,’ Catalina said calmly.
‘That’s wonderful,’ Avery barked back at her. ‘Then you must know that you have to give the Italian authorities at least seven days’ notice before you can enter their airspace. You want a whole division of carabinieri waiting on the tarmac to arrest us the moment we touch down?’
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ she said.
‘You’re right! What do I care? I’m the victim here. You’re the armed hijacker they’ll shoot to pieces the moment they figure out what’s going on!’
Catalina shook her head. ‘Nobody’s getting shot, and nobody’s getting arrested. Not where we’re landing. They won’t even know we’re there.’ Still keeping him covered with the gun, she reached with her free hand into the leather travel bag at her feet and brought out a slip of paper, which she handed to him. ‘Here’s where you’re going to set us down,’ she said.
Catalina hadn’t spent all her time on Icthyios exploring the island or engaged in solar science research. The coordinates written on the slip of paper were the location of an old, abandoned former airfield deep in the heart of rural Calabria in southern Italy, a few kilometres from Serra San Bruno. One of seventy-seven all-but-forgotten airfields in the country, it had been built in August 1943 by the US Army Corps of Engineers ahead of the Allied invasion of Italy in September of that year, and used as a temporary base by the US Air Force 86th Fighter Bomber Group. After their last combat operation was flown in April 1945 and the 86th pulled out, War Department plans to dismantle the base and airfield had never quite materialised and it remained to this day, semi-derelict amid disused farmland behind a rickety perimeter fence.
Catalina had zeroed in on it using Google Earth to ascertain its condition – which she’d concluded was quite usable despite some degradation of the concrete runway – and its dimensions, which provided more than adequate landing distance for a small jet. As usual, she had worked everything out to the last detail.
‘You’re nuts,’ Avery growled
at her when he’d finished entering the coordinates into the on-board navigation computer. ‘There’s nothing but empty farmland. How’m I supposed to bring this thing down there? Catch a rut, bounce over a rock, we’ll flip and crash and burn and that’ll end your little joyride pretty fast, won’t it?’
‘We’ll see,’ she said patiently.
Catalina owed her choice of landing site to the other, and more important, piece of research she’d been engaged in during the last three months. Keller had necessarily been involved in that one, because although she’d never allowed him to know how she was secretly planning on using the information, it was through the kinds of discreet inquiries that only money like Austin’s could make possible that she’d been able to learn the precise location of Maxwell Grant’s favourite of his three homes. The townhouse in Mayfair was generally only a stopover for when his business affairs took him to London, as was the forty-million-dollar Manhattan penthouse for his New York trips. The place Grant liked to spend most of his leisure time was the grand seventeenth-century Villa Callisto, set within a secluded fifty-acre estate an hour and a half’s drive up the coast near the Gulf of Táranto. She had the exact coordinates for that, too.
Pete Avery might have been a deeply unhappy man that morning, but he was a skilled pilot, especially with a gun pointed at him. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he breathed some time later when they swooped down out of the clouds and spied the old airfield in the distance, like a ghostly apparition bathed in the light of dawn. There was nothing but open countryside around it for kilometres. No sign of habitation, and certainly no sign of Italian Air Force fighters coming to intercept them.
Avery made two passes over the deserted airfield before he determined the best angle of approach. On the third pass, he brought the plane down in a steep descent. The Lear was as agile as an airborne Ferrari. They overshot the perimeter fence by fifty feet to make a bumpy but successful landing on the cracked, weed-strewn runway. Exactly as she’d calculated, they had been in the air for just under ninety minutes.
‘I still think you’re nuts,’ he grumbled at her as he started powering down the engines.
‘That was a very good landing,’ she replied, getting out of the co-pilot’s chair. ‘Thank you for your help.’
Before he could reply, she hammered him over the head with the butt of the pistol, twice. Avery went out like a light and slumped in his chair.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the unconscious pilot. ‘I hope you’ll be all right.’
Catalina reached again into her bag, and brought out the last length of the rope she’d taken from the storage shed on Icthyios. She carefully looped it around Avery’s chest and arms and tied him into the pilot’s seat. His bonds weren’t intended to hold him indefinitely, because she didn’t want him to die of dehydration out here with nobody to rescue him. She just needed to hold him up for a while. By the time he got loose and called for help, she’d be far away.
She opened the exit hatch and hurried away from the aircraft carrying her travel bag. Once she was the other side of the hole she found in the perimeter fence, she started walking. The fields were rutted and hard going, but after a couple of kilometres she reached a road and checked the GPS app on her phone to make sure she was heading in the right direction.
Some kilometres further down the road a friendly old Calabrian farmer called Giuseppe pulled up in his battered pickup truck to offer a lift to the lone female hitchhiker. With her complexion she easily passed for southern Italian, and it also happened to be one of the languages Catalina spoke to perfection. She introduced herself as Lucia Verde, explaining that her car had broken down and that she absolutely needed to get to Serra San Bruno for her sister’s wedding later that morning. Giuseppe was only too happy to oblige, and regaled her all the way there with stories about his seven grandchildren.
After Giuseppe dropped her off with a cheery goodbye in the town of San Bruno, she made her way to the bus station, via a coffee bar where she stopped for a light breakfast. Nobody recognised her, which was one of the few parts of her plan she’d had to leave to chance. Either the hairstyle was working, or her fame had never quite reached rural southern Italy. Either way, it was a relief.
By eight fifteen, Catalina had boarded a bus that was headed all the way up the coast to Táranto. It wasn’t too crowded, and she sat alone near the back. As the bus wound its twisting way northwards up the Calabrian coast, she ignored the spectacular ocean views. She’d seen enough pretty beaches to last her the rest of her life. Instead she sat clutching her leather bag on her lap and gazed into space, working over and over her plan.
The desire to avenge the murders of Jim Lockhart and Dougal Sinclair had been burning inside her even before she’d arrived on Icthyios. So many times she’d visualised herself going after the man she was certain was responsible, picturing the whole thing in detail, working out exactly how it could be done. Then so many times she’d vacillated, thinking that she must be mad: that she was a scientist, not an assassin; that revenge was out of her grasp, and that she was going to drive herself mad if she didn’t put all such notions out of her head and do her best to move on.
And she’d very nearly succeeded in dropping the whole insane idea, until Raul had found her and told her that Kazem was dead too. That had been the tipping point, making her realise that she had no choice. She had to cut the head off the snake. Kill it before it killed everyone she knew, everyone she loved.
Just two things bothered her. The first was the very real possibility that when she got to the Villa Callisto, Grant wouldn’t be there. He led a hectic life and could easily be away on business, just about anywhere in the world. It was a concern, but only a minor and not insurmountable one.
The second thing that worried her, as much as it reassured her, was nestling inside her travel bag. But that, too, was a matter that could be addressed. Everything in its own time. Stay calm, she told herself. It was no different from a complex astronomical calculation. Method and attention to detail were everything. Once you knew your formula was sound, it was just a matter of following the logical steps through, clear-headed and systematically, until you achieved your result.
She didn’t care what happened after that. If she didn’t make it out alive, then so be it. At least then she would have met her end doing something good, instead of running and hiding like a coward. There couldn’t be a better way to atone for the shame she felt.
And, anyway, Catalina Fuentes was already dead.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Around nine forty-five that morning, Catalina stepped off the bus in a small coastal town some way east of Rossano, on the southern edge of the Gulf of Táranto. Checking her bearings once more, she ascertained that she was exactly 17.2 kilometres from her destination. Now it was time to address the first of her two main concerns.
She was walking down a narrow street away from the bus stop when she spotted the group of teenagers hanging around on the corner. They were aged around fourteen or fifteen and should have been in school. Noisy and unruly, but they were exactly what she’d been looking for. She smiled as she walked up to them, and they all turned to stare at her. ‘Hey, guys,’ she said breezily in Italian, and plucked a banknote out of her purse. ‘Any of you feel like making a quick hundred euros? Won’t take you more than a minute.’
Which got them all clamouring to be the one who got the cash, even before they knew what the job entailed.
‘You,’ she said, picking out the tallest one of the bunch. He looked the most adult, with dark eyes that looked sharp and quick. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Luca,’ he said. His voice was mature enough to pass for an eighteen-year-old’s, or even older. Perfect.
‘Do you have a phone, Luca?’
Silly question. They all had phones, and eagerly whipped them out of their pockets to show her, nobody wanting to be out of the money. Catalina took out the private business card that she’d been carrying around in her purse ever since July third, the night of t
he party in Kensington. She showed the card to the tall kid. ‘See this number here? Then I want you to call it and ask to speak to Signor Grant. That’s his name on the card.’
‘Grant,’ Luca repeated. ‘Okay. What do I say to him?’
‘Say that you’re calling from the offices of the Gruppo Poste Italiane, and that the satellite dish package he ordered is due for special delivery to Villa Callisto this afternoon. You’re checking that the householder will be there to sign for it. Can you remember all that?’
‘I think so.’ Luca repeated it all back. ‘A hundred euros? Are you sure?’
‘Easy money,’ she said. ‘I want you to switch your mobile to speaker phone mode, so I can hear.’
‘Fine,’ Luca said with a laconic shrug. ‘Who is this guy, anyway?’
‘Just a friend,’ she said. ‘It’s kind of a trick I’m playing on him. He’s very suspicious, so you have to sound really grown-up and convincing. And he might answer in English, but don’t let that put you off. Just say exactly what I told you. Can you handle it?’
‘Sure, no problem,’ Luca said. His friends were all clamouring round him. He cuffed a couple of them over the head, told them to shut the fuck up, then cleared his throat and dialled with his phone on speaker. Catalina moved close so she could hear. If Grant wasn’t there, she’d already planned to find a cheap place to rent locally and keep trying until he was.
The teenagers fell into a hush, all grinning and loving the prank. Loving the hundred euros even more. She pressed a finger to her lips to warn them to stay quiet.
Grant’s dial tone rang five long, tense times before a man’s voice answered. ‘Pronto?’ His voice was rich and deep, sonorous and smooth. Unmistakably Maxwell Grant’s. He spoke Italian with a strong British accent, but he wouldn’t have been speaking it at all if he’d been in London or New York. Catalina felt her stomach tighten with excitement, mingled with fear.