The Cassandra Sanction (20 page)

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, haven’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.’

‘Thank you,’ Raul said after a beat, looking straight into Ben’s eyes.

‘For what?’

‘For sticking with me. For being here.’

Ben shrugged. ‘What else have I got to do?’

The food arrived, and Ben stopped talking and occupied himself with eating and drinking. The steak was tender and rare in the middle and served with green salad and sautéed potatoes.
The wine was a three-year-old Côtes du Rhône called
Plan de Dieu
. God’s Plan. After studying theology on and off for half his life Ben still had no idea what God’s plan was. His own was simply to polish off the rest of this excellent food and then get on with the task in hand. Which was to get back up to his room and lay out Catalina Fuentes’ stuff and try to figure out exactly what the hell she’d
got herself mixed up in. He’d devoured most of the steak and nearly half the wine when he looked up and saw that Raul was sitting staring at an untouched plate.

‘I don’t think I can eat.’

‘Force yourself,’ Ben said. ‘I can’t have you running on empty. You and I have work to do.’

Ben finished his wine while Raul picked at the fish. By the end of the bottle Ben still wasn’t any the wiser
about God’s plan, but the muscular tension in his neck and shoulders had unknotted itself, and he felt mentally loose enough for what promised to be a long session of combing for whatever clues it might be possible to unearth when neither of them had the first idea what they were looking for.

The night was still young, just before nine o’clock. Ben paid the bill from the roll of notes. Then
they left the dining room and returned upstairs.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Back in his room, Ben emptied all the stuff out of his bag that he’d taken from Catalina Fuentes’ study. He laid the paper files in a stack on the bed, with the laptop next to them.

‘You know anything about computers?’ Raul asked.

‘I know how to turn them on,’ Ben said. ‘I can do the basics of internet searches and such. Beyond that, not really.’

‘I’ll see
what I can do.’ Raul picked up the laptop and carried it over to the little table, pulled up the room’s single chair and flipped open the screen and sat hunched over the keys like a pianist about to launch into a concerto.

Ben let him get on with it, and focused on the files. He found a cheap ballpoint and stuck it in his mouth like a cigarette, ready to make notes. Sitting on the bed, he
made himself comfortable and then opened the cover of the first file in the stack, a thick and heavy one labelled
SOLAR
VARIATIONS
TO
2015
. It was a random choice, the equivalent of closing his eyes and sticking a pin in a map. When you didn’t know where you were going, one road was as good as another.

The top page was penned in the same neat, feminine handwriting as the label on the cover.
Ben spent a moment looking at it, then turned that page and stared at the next one.

He swallowed. This might actually be less easy than he’d imagined.

Because there was an awful lot of science. In fact, there was nothing but science. The pages were black with it, and his brain was instantly swimming.

Ben was modestly aware of the fact that he wasn’t an entirely uneducated or unintelligent
person. His academic record was well above average. At age eighteen he’d burned out his brain sitting in Oxford’s Bodleian Library poring over swathes of ancient Greek and Hebrew texts. Years later in the army, he’d laboured over the complexities of battlefield forensics. Struggled with the complicated concepts of classical mechanics involved in understanding the forces governing projectile
trajectories. Crammed his head with Stokes’ drag and Newtonian drag and gravity and inertia and momentum and the categories of internal and transitional and external and terminal ballistics that described the flight of a missile from muzzle to target; and all kinds of other initially baffling technical information that had ultimately helped him to become that little bit better at his job of destroying
buildings, materiel and human lives, all in the name of Queen and country.

In short, without getting too big-headed about it, and all moral considerations aside, he’d learned that he could grasp pretty much anything he turned his mind to.

But this here was on another level entirely. It would take him fifteen years of study to even begin to get to grips with the brain-numbing forest of
numbers and graphs and charts and equations that seemed to cover every page from top to bottom. Even where the damn stuff was presented in actual words, he could seldom go a quarter of a line without ramming headlong into a wall of specialised terminology that might as well have been the native language of alien creatures on some far-distant planet in another galaxy that humans would never know existed.

In other places, meanings suggested themselves to him, but only in the vaguest possible terms:

2001

Solar wind velocity = 454.7 km/s

Density = 6.0 protons/cm³

2014

Solar wind velocity = 412.8 km/s

Density = 2.1 protons/cm³

Which definitely looked like a comparison of data for different years, telling him that something had decreased during that time period. Something,
being solar wind velocity and density, but that was as far as he could follow it.

Ben ploughed on, or tried to. He spent a few moments trying to decipher a graph that looked a little less complex than some of the others. It was headed
X-RAY FLUX (1 – MINUTE DATA), FEB 2014 150000 UTC
. Its left axis was graduated in meaningless power numbers in watts m
^-
², and down its right side was written
GOES 13 0.5 – 4.0 A / GOES 15 1.0 – 8.0 A
. The graph showed a slightly squiggly red line that was almost flat, and another beneath it in blue that was jagged and wild with peaks and troughs.

Nice colours.

Time to move on.

Here and there, Ben saw disparate words and phrases he was able to latch onto, in the hope they might yield something comprehensible. Comprehensible, being the first
step to significant, being the first step to important. On one page of notes he found a line standing proud of the rest, which read: