The Cassandra Sanction

  ‘She left behind over six hundred thousand euros in her account.’

  ‘Where’s the money now?’

  ‘My parents refused to accept it, even though legally it passes to them. Said they wanted to donate it all to their church.’

  ‘And nobody’s called in any big debts that you know about?’ Ben asked.

  ‘No debts. If she’d been worried about money, I’d have known about it. She’d have told me.’ Raul narrowed his eyes at Ben, as if he could see where he was going with this line of thinking. ‘You’re wondering why she didn’t just withdraw the money from her account, if she needed it.’

  Ben nodded. ‘There’s always a reason why people do the things they do. A cash withdrawal would have left a paper trail. This looks like a deliberate attempt to cover her tracks. She was nervous, edgy. Something was frightening her.’

  Raul pursed his lips and wrinkled his brow. He was silent for a while, thinking so hard that Ben could almost hear his brain grinding. ‘I know what happened. The bastard was extorting money out of her. Blackmail, for something.’

  Ben had already considered that idea. ‘For what?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it would explain why she needed money without leaving a trace.’ Raul worked it over for a few moments longer, then shook his head. ‘No. Why would someone blackmail her for twenty thousand euros when she was worth so much more? And why would she have to disappear afterwards? The blackmailer suddenly turns kidnapper? That doesn’t make sense either. If they’d simply kidnapped her in the first place, they could have asked whatever ransom they wanted.’

  ‘Or,’ Ben said.

  Raul looked at him again, pale with worry. ‘Or what?’

  ‘There’s another possibility, Raul. One you need to be ready for.’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  Ben took a long draw on the cigarette, and flicked ash out of the crack in the window. ‘Suppose you’re right and there’s some weirdo extorting money from her for some reason we don’t know yet. She doesn’t want anyone to know, and selling her jewellery is the only way she can think of to raise the money quickly and quietly, without leaving a trail. She can’t go to a respectable jeweller, either, not if she wants to avoid any kind of paperwork, records, receipts, official evaluations. That’s why she ends up having to go to a piece of shit like Braunschweiger, even though she knows she’ll get a fraction of what the items are worth. She’s willing to take the loss. So, she gets the twenty thousand cash, passes it straight over to the blackmailer, in the hope that it’ll all go away, but then it turns out the twenty thousand was just the start. Maybe he starts pressuring her for twenty more, or fifty, or a hundred. She refuses.’

  Raul stared at him. ‘And?’

  ‘There’s a confrontation. Maybe he threatens her. She’s defiant. It gets violent. Maybe he never intended to hurt her, but he kills her in the struggle. He makes it look like suicide.’

  ‘I keep telling you, she’s alive,’ Raul said. ‘She’s in danger, but she’s alive.’

  Ben took another draw on the cigarette and blew smoke. ‘That’s what you believe, or what you want to believe?’

  ‘It’s neither. It’s what I know.’

  Ben shrugged. ‘Fine. Then let’s take that as our bottom line. She’s alive, and she’s scared and in danger.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then consider this alternative scenario,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe she didn’t need the money to pay off someone else. Maybe she needed it for herself. We could be getting this all wrong. Imagine the situation from another angle.’

  Raul blinked. ‘What other angle?’

  ‘Stalkers are cowards. They’re also delusional enough to believe that they might actually have a chance of scoring with the person they’re obsessed about. If some creep was hanging around, it’s more than likely he’d have been making a nuisance of himself for a while. Typically, these types of people will try to insinuate themselves into the victim’s life in all kinds of ways before all the rejections, warnings, and finally court exclusion orders, cause them to build up enough rage and resentment to resort to anything as drastic as abduction. If he found out her private email address, he might have bombarded her with messages. Or written her letters. The police found nothing like that. Now, that could mean they weren’t looking thoroughly enough, or it could actually mean they were right. There’s no evidence that she was being stalked. None at all, just like we have no body. The only thing driving that idea is your fear that some nutjob is holding your sister captive in a cellar somewhere.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Go where the evidence points,’ Ben said. ‘Take the stalker out of the equation. What if there is no kidnapper? What if she was just running from something, or someone, who had her so scared that she faked her own suicide?’

  ‘Like what? Like who?’

  ‘I don’t know. But that would explain why she couldn’t withdraw cash from the bank. Like you said, money’s not on a suicidal person’s priority list. You can’t take it with you. And twenty thousand euros isn’t exactly a fortune, especially not by Catalina’s standards. But for someone on the run, someone scared and desperate, someone who’s mentally switched to survival mode and thinking only in the short term, it’s plenty to be getting on with.’

  All kinds of thoughts and emotions were playing behind Raul’s eyes, which were jacked wide open and staring into the middle distance.

  ‘If she’s alive, she didn’t just drop off the face of the planet,’ Ben said. ‘Where would she go? Where would you go?’

  Raul shook his head.

  ‘I know where I’d go,’ Ben said. ‘To ground, somewhere wild and remote where nobody could find me. Where I could stay hidden for as long as necessary to figure out my options and decide on my next move. I could live in a dugout burrow in the woods if I had to. I’d be able to make a habitable shelter in a cave, hunt my own food, live on nothing, disappear so completely that not even a professional could ever track me down. Because that’s who I am, and that’s what I was trained to do. But I’m not Catalina. You know her better than anyone. So think.’

  Raul was silent for a long minute. Then a dawning light appeared in his eyes and the tension seemed to drop from his face.

  ‘There’s one place she could have gone,’ he said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘I’m on them. Looking at them right now,’ said the man behind the wheel of the dark grey BMW 6-Series Gran Coupé that was parked down the street. From where he was sitting, he had an oblique view of the pawnshop doorway through the rain-splatted windscreen, and he could see the two targets inside the silver Kia. The one called Hope was in the driver’s seat as before. The watcher could see intermittent wisps of cigarette smoke drifting from the inch-wide crack in the window.

  Cars hissed past on the wet road. Some workers from nearby offices were out on their eleven-o’clock break, munching pastries in the street and trying to soak up what anaemic rays of sunshine were struggling to reach down from the damp sky.

  The watcher and his colleagues had been monitoring the targets’ movements all that morning, ever since before nine when they’d left the apartment and driven north through the city to see the private investigator, Leonhard Klein. That visit hadn’t taken long. From Klein’s, a different car had shadowed them back to the bar on the edge of Glockenbach district and then reported back to base when, not long after, Fuentes and Hope had come running out of the place as if they were onto something.

  When Hope had suddenly veered to the side, for an anxious moment the watchers had thought they were blown. They knew he was good; very, very good; but they were experts and extra-careful about constantly switching between the three cars in the chase, keeping in constant contact via their mobile phone conference network that worked like unlimited-range two-way radio and also allowed them to keep the Boss informed of their movements. Nobody was that good. After that false alarm, they’d dropped back and followed the silver Kia straight here. The two men
in the grey BMW watched from a distance as Fuentes and Hope entered the pawnshop.

  ‘Are they still inside?’ asked the Boss on the phone.

  ‘Negative. They’re out and back in their car. Engine’s off. Just sitting talking. Fuentes looks agitated.’

  ‘They know something,’ the Boss said.

  That was how it looked to the watchers, too.

  ‘Time to make a move.’

  ‘Negative,’ the watcher said, eyeing the office workers. Another car hissed past. ‘It’s too public here.’

  ‘First chance you get. Take them down as planned.’

  ‘Roger that,’ the watcher said. ‘Hold it. They’re on the move again.’ He’d seen fumes spurt from the Kia’s exhaust as its engine started. Its indicator started flashing to pull out into the traffic.

  ‘Stay with them,’ the Boss said. ‘Hacker, Ruddock, move into position.’

  ‘We’re on it,’ said Hacker’s voice.

  ‘Copy,’ Ruddock came in. ‘We’re circling the area.’

  Cook, the driver of the BMW, checked his mirror as he waited for a yellow minivan to pass, then pulled out. The silver Kia was two cars ahead, moving as if Hope was eager to press on. Cook followed, with the dogged, flat-eyed look of a man just doing his job. The tools of his trade were in a case on the back seat. He’d be using them soon enough, but the thought didn’t leave him much moved.

  Some men fixed cars for a living. Others paid their bills by frying their brains sitting behind computer terminals all day. Cook and his colleagues hurt and killed people. It was no big deal. Today would be no different, except it meant they could get out of this German shit hole. Fucking Germans. Cook hated the food, hated the language, hated the people. Then again, Cook hated just about everything, and his employer most of all.

  The BMW stayed with the Kia for three kilometres with Cook hanging carefully back and Lewis in the passenger seat maintaining phone contact. They peeled off as Ruddock and Dean in the black Fiat panel van took over for a stretch, Ruddock driving, Dean on the phone. Ideally, they’d have air backup and a couple of motorcycles to fill out the surveillance team. It wasn’t as if their employer couldn’t afford them. But his resources were scattered elsewhere in pursuit of this mission, and in any case six on two was considered ample to get the job done. Which Cook had to agree it was, more or less.

  Cook followed a parallel course as Dean reported the Kia’s progress. It was clear that Hope was returning to Catalina Fuentes’ apartment. The strike could take place there.

  As the Kia hit Glockenbach, Nicholson and Hacker in the Opel Insignia picked up the chase. When the Kia parked outside Fuentes’ building, Hacker pulled up fifty metres down the street, and Nicholson phoned in to say that Hope and Raul Fuentes had gone inside.

  The Boss said, ‘Do it.’

  The six-man team closed in from three directions and positioned their vehicles close to the building with the Fiat panel van parked near the entrance, two spaces behind the silver Kia where the frontage of the building blocked its view from the apartment windows. Cook and Lewis left the BMW and joined Hacker and Nicholson, and the four of them stepped quickly into the back of the van, where Ruddock and Dean had already opened up the kit bags and started laying things out.

  They togged up in silence. Body armour under black nylon jackets, thin gloves. The ski-masks would go on at the last minute, before the assault. Lastly, they checked their weapons. Pistols only, for this kind of urban work. The hollow shell of the van resonated to the metallic noises of magazines being snicked home, actions being jacked, locked and loaded. None of them had a problem with doing a job like this in a busy city environment. They’d done it plenty of times before, for this employer and others in the past. If there was any tension in the air, it was because all six of them knew what they were going in against.

  If Fuentes had been on his own, this would have been an easy one, straight in, get it done, clear out and gone. It wasn’t going to be so simple. Even unarmed and caught off guard, Hope was dangerous. Whatever his involvement, his presence made Fuentes a hard target. For that reason, the team had come doubly prepared.

  Cook clipped his pistol into its concealed holster, zipped up his jacket and stuffed the ski-mask into a hip pocket ready for use. He scanned the five serious faces and said, ‘Okay?’ Nods and grunts all round. Nicholson leaned over the front seats so he could peer out of the passenger window at the entrance of the building.

  ‘We’re clear,’ Nicholson said.

  Cook picked up the phone and said, ‘Moving in.’ He signalled to Hacker. Hacker went to open the back doors. Once they committed themselves, speed was going to be everything.

  ‘Wait,’ Nicholson said from the front, raising a hand. ‘Hold it. They’re out.’

  Cook shoved Nicholson out of the way to look out of the window, just in time to see Hope and Fuentes stepping out of the building and walking fast to the silver Kia. Fuentes was carrying a holdall, Hope had a green canvas bag slung over his shoulder, old-spec British military issue. The two climbed into the Kia, Hope taking the wheel once more.

  They hadn’t been inside the apartment five minutes. Cook noticed the way Fuentes looked jumpy and on edge. This could be it.

  Cook reached again for the phone. ‘Standing down. Targets are in motion. Looks like something’s happening, for sure.’

  ‘Stay with them,’ said the Boss. ‘Do not bugger this up.’

  Cook snapped off the phone.

  The silver Kia started up and pulled out sharply and moved off fast into the traffic. Cook waited three seconds, watching the car disappear into the distance, then he and Lewis burst out into the street and raced for their BMW and Nicholson and Hacker ran to the Opel while Ruddock and Dean clambered into the front of the van.

  The BMW took the lead, chasing fast up the street in the direction the Kia had gone. The targets were out of sight by now, but they wouldn’t get away. Strategically, Cook faced a decision whether to concentrate all his forces on going after Hope and Fuentes or to send Nicholson and Hacker to check out the pawnshop connection.

  He decided to leave that for later. If the hit went smoothly, they could forget about the pawnshop. And for now, they needed the numbers to take down Ben Hope.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Motorways radiated from the city of Munich like the arms of a starfish, E52 to the northwest towards Augsburg, E53 to the northeast in the direction of the Czech border, E54 to the west heading to Landsberg and the River Lech, and E45 and E533, forking southwards in opposite directions east and west for Liechtenstein and Austria. The location punched into the Kia’s satnav lay two and a half hours’ drive to the west, in the Alpine foothills on the Bavarian side of Lake Constance.

  ‘I was one of the only people who even knew about the place,’ Raul was saying as they left Munich behind. ‘The last thing she wanted was a bunch of reporters showing up there, or fans. She bought it under a company name and only told people she absolutely knew she could trust. It was like a hideaway for her. She used to stay there often.’

  ‘You said it was an observatory.’

  Raul nodded. ‘Yes, with a small house attached. Not much more than a cottage, together with a few other buildings. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, about five kilometres from the nearest village, so it was ideal for privacy as well as astronomy. No light pollution. Although she did a lot of observing during the day, too.’

  Ben looked at him. ‘What kind of telescope can see the stars during the daytime?’

  ‘Just the one kind, and just the one star,’ Raul said. ‘Our star. The sun, viewed through a solar scope. Catalina is a specialist in solar physics. That has always been the biggest part of her work. Have you ever seen the sun up close?’

  ‘Not that I can recall,’ Ben said.

  ‘The one time I went to visit her observatory, she took me into the dome and let me look through the solar telescope. Some piece of equipment, I can tell you. I’ve never seen anything so amazing in my life as
this giant ball of fire, more huge and powerful than we can even imagine.’

  Giant balls of fire were something Ben could take or leave. Even the small ones he’d come into contact with, usually in the form of enemy incendiary devices, had been more than hot enough for him. ‘So this place of hers is out in the middle of nowhere and you’ve been there only the once?’ he said to Raul. ‘What are the chances you can find it again?’

  ‘I’ll find it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone about this place before?’ Ben asked him. ‘Why not the police? Why not Klein?’

  Raul shook his head. ‘Everything has changed since then. Before, I wasn’t thinking she might have gone back there. I wasn’t really thinking at all. I only knew she was alive, and that while she was alive I was betraying her trust in me if I told her secret. I kept telling myself that one day, everything was going to be normal again, and her life would go on as it had before. Then later, when I started to think she’d been kidnapped, I never thought about the place. She wouldn’t be there, she’d be in some place the person had taken her. I imagined the worst places. A cellar, full of rats and filth. A box buried deep under the ground with just an air hose to breathe through. All these awful images in my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about her trapped, frightened, calling for help.’

  He stared ahead, his eyes fixed on the road as if he could reel in the horizon and bring them instantly to their destination. ‘But she is there. I know that’s where we’re going to find her. Frightened, and in terrible trouble. But safe and unharmed. I know it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ben said.

  Raul glanced at him sharply. ‘Yes, maybe. But maybe is good enough for me right now. Maybe is all I have. Faith, remember?’

  ‘Faith,’ Ben repeated. They were still over two hours from finding out whether that faith would be justified or not.

  The long road carried them westwards past towns and lakes. Landsberg, Buchloe, Mindelheim, Memmingen. Some time during the drive, it occurred to Ben that this must be the most miles he’d ever clocked up on a rental car without being personally responsible for getting it destroyed, pulverised, burned, blown up or shot to pieces in the process. Touch wood, he thought, and looked around the Kia’s plastic interior for anything resembling wood.