The Cassandra Sanction (23 page)

But as it turned out, Ben and Raul were both wrong.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The university email addresses for the first two had made them simple to identify. Numbers three and four wouldn’t be so easy, with generic email providers and common names that would throw up a million false results. Ben ditched the search on Lockhart and keyed in ‘Steve Ellis scientist’, which he decided might even the odds in his favour.

It did.

If he was the
same guy Catalina had been in contact with, Steve Ellis was indeed a scientist – albeit a retired one, as Ben discovered from the man’s personal website. Images there showed him as much older than Sinclair and Lockhart, pushing seventy with a snow-white beard that looked as if he’d been growing it since around the time Ben had left school. According to the short résumé on the site, he’d been an astronomer
like Catalina back in the day. Quite a celebrated one, too – having, at the tender age of twenty-eight, won the 1975 Copley Medal for his research on solar physics: a highly prestigious award, as far as Ben could make out. After going on to teach at several different universities Ellis had taken early retirement in 1997, and now supported himself by making custom-built astronomical telescopes
for private clients in his own workshop in Brecon in the Welsh borders, not far from where Ben had once upon a time endured the hell of 22 SAS selection training.

The website displayed images of Ellis’s telescopes, which looked to be of extremely fine quality. Ben wondered whether maybe Ellis had built equipment for Catalina’s observatory. Why else might they have known each other?

‘So?
Is the guy dead or what?’ Raul asked tersely from the other end of the room, where he was still pacing up and down.

Ben saw there was a news page, and navigated to it in case he might find anything of note there, such as a helpful recent entry saying ‘I am dead’ or an announcement from a distraught relative saying that Steve had suffered a bizarre accident in his workshop. He found neither.
Instead, right at the bottom of the webpage, was a paragraph in large block font declaring:

JULY 10TH: DUE TO A CHANGE IN PERSONAL CIRCUMSTANCES, I REGRET THAT I AM NO LONGER TAKING ORDERS FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE. ALL OPEN ORDERS WILL BE REFUNDED IN FULL.

I WILL BE UNAVAILABLE TO CONTACT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

‘Ellis is alive,’ Ben said. ‘Or was, when he suddenly closed up his business
in a real hurry. July tenth.’

Raul froze mid-pace. ‘The same day as Lockhart was killed.’

Ben nodded. ‘Another coincidence?’

‘No way,’ Raul said. ‘This makes it certain.’

‘And it tells us that they all knew each other,’ Ben said. ‘Catalina and the other four. They were like some kind of group.’

‘Friends?’

‘Or associates,’ Ben said. ‘Two astronomers, two climatologists.
That can’t be a coincidence.’ He paused to think for a moment. ‘New Zealand is thirteen hours ahead of the UK. So news of Lockhart’s death on the evening of the tenth could have reached Ellis the same day in Wales. On receiving the news, Ellis immediately suspends his business and goes off the radar indefinitely. At exactly the same time, your sister is putting together her own contingency plans.
They were hitting the panic button.’

‘Panic over what? What could they have been into?’

‘You tell me,’ Ben said.

‘Do you think there’s any possibility of contacting this Ellis?’

‘I doubt he’s even within fifty miles of home,’ Ben said. ‘That’s if they haven’t already got to him.’

They were silent for a moment. Both thinking the same thing: that their options were running dangerously
thin again.

‘Just one name left on the list,’ Raul said. ‘McCauley. Another scientist, you can be sure.’

‘Only one way to find out,’ Ben said, and returned to his phone to start searching.

There were Mike McCauleys all over the internet. A platinum-selling country and western singer from Tennessee who’d developed Tourette’s Syndrome. The managing director of a Scottish pipe fitting
firm based in Inverness. An Australian arsonist who’d attempted to burn down a government building in New South Wales as a protest over shark culling. None of those seemed especially likely candidates. Nor did the fourth, or the fifth, or the sixth Mike McCauley Ben checked out.

Ben finally scored on the seventh. ‘Got him,’ he said to Raul once he was certain. ‘This is our guy. Lives in London.
He has a webpage and the email address is the same as the one Catalina was using.’

‘Let me see,’ Raul said, grabbing the phone and scrutinising the screen for a second or two before he looked up at Ben in surprise. If he’d been expecting to find another esteemed professor of astronomy, his expectations had been wildly off the mark.

‘He’s a reporter for some independent British newspaper
called
The Probe
.’

‘He’s a little more than that,’ Ben said.

‘I see it,’ Raul said, reading. ‘Voted by the Press Gazette as the top investigative journalist of 2010 for his work unmasking corporate corruption in the wake of the BP Macando Prospect oil spill disaster. Then again in 2012, for being the first to expose a hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar money-laundering scam involving four
major British banks. It says here, “Heroic and unstoppable, Mike McCauley’s relentless lone crusade as the scourge of greedy capitalist fatcats and rogue bureaucracies everywhere marks a return to the 1970s glory days of investigative journalism and is living proof that not everyone in his profession is fixated by the private lives of media stars and footballers.”’

‘Definitely not a fellow
scientist, then,’ Ben said.

Raul blinked. ‘Why would my sister be in contact with a man like this?’

‘Not to give him the scoop on the latest celebrity gossip, presumably.’ Ben took the phone back from Raul and glanced at his watch. They’d been at it for two hours. ‘We’re done for tonight. You should get back to your room and catch some sleep, because we’ll have an early start in the morning.’

‘Why? Where are we going?’

‘First flight we can grab to London,’ Ben said.

‘On a plane? With these people following us everywhere we go?’

‘Then we’ll have to stay one step ahead of them,’ Ben said.

‘They could be a step ahead of us already, like before. I mean, they could already know about this McCauley. They could be waiting for us there. We could be walking right into a trap.’

‘Could be,’ Ben said. ‘But this time we won’t be surprised.’

Chapter Thirty-Three

Late that night, long after Raul had gone to bed, Ben stood out on the little wooden balcony overlooking the quiet street below, looked across the sleepy rooftops and up at the stars, and spent a while wondering about the depths of space that scholars like Catalina Fuentes devoted their lives to studying. Ben was no astronomer, but even his meagre knowledge of just how
vast that big dark sky out there was left him shaking his head.

There was an awful lot of space out there, that was for certain. No wonder that astronomers had to specialise in just one limited area, or else they’d only end up spending their whole careers skimming the surface.

He thought about Catalina’s celestial body of preference, that vastly gigantic nuclear blast furnace at the centre
of the solar system, and the insignificantly minuscule little planet called Earth that was spinning round and round it. To him, the sun was, had always been, just the sun. To be sure, there had been times when he’d cursed it, often when he’d found himself baking inside the infernal pizza oven of an SAS Land Rover in the roiling heat of a desert somewhere. Just as there had been plenty of other
times he’d craved to feel just a tiny touch of its warmth, when he’d been freezing his arse off trudging over some mountain, numb as deadwood inside his boots with the weight of pack and rifle threatening to drag him down into the snow.

But hate it or love it, it occurred to him how little he really knew about it. Which was strange, when he stopped to consider how vital to life that big old
fireball up there in the sky actually was. Its eternal cycle was the hub of all things for every warm-blooded creature that had ever lived, and ever would. And billions of people just took it every bit as much for granted as the blood in their veins and the air in their lungs, while only a minute fraction of the world’s population ever bothered to take the time to try to understand how it worked,
what made it keep on ticking, and the future of its relationship with the trillions of life forms under its fiery dominion.

As Ben’s contemplations slowly descended back to earth, he leaned on the balcony rail and lit up the first of his last four cigarettes to help him think. Raul might be right about walking into a trap. That was a potential worry, but Ben was almost equally worried about
the possibility of not finding Mike McCauley in London. Guys in that line of work, especially of the hungry lone-wolf variety such as McCauley obviously was, tended to spend most of their time out in the field chasing down stories. He could be in Papua New Guinea for the next two months, for all Ben knew. Or, like Sinclair and Lockhart and possibly Ellis too, he could already be a dead man.

The fourth-last cigarette didn’t seem to last long, so Ben lit up the third-last. By the time that one was smoked to its stub, it was after two in the morning and he was fairly sure he wasn’t going to get a lot of sleep that night. He walked back through the dark room to sit on the bed, and pulled out the phone he’d taken from Raul earlier. Paid for in cash, no traces. He dialled a familiar number
and waited. After five rings, a sleepy-sounding voice answered, ‘Hello?’

It had been a while since they’d spoken. The last time hadn’t been pleasant.

‘Hello, sister,’ he said.

Ruth treasured her privacy almost as much as her elder brother did. Maybe it was a Hope family trait. Her personal mobile number was known to barely four people in the world; Ben reckoned that if the bad guys
were tapping her phone, it would be the company line.

‘
Ben?
’

‘I know it’s late,’ Ben said.

‘My God. Where
are
you?’

Ben heard a rustling sound on the line as Ruth propped herself up against the pillow. The sleepiness was quickly disappearing from her voice.

‘I was thinking of you the last few days,’ he said. ‘Felt like talking.’

‘I was thinking of you, too. I haven’t heard
from you for so long. What are you doing now?’

‘Now, I’m sitting on a hotel bed waiting for the morning to come.’

‘Right. I meant generally.’

‘Walking, eating, sleeping. The usual things.’ He decided it was time to change the subject, before she started asking difficult questions. ‘How’s life for you? I heard that Steiner Industries was bidding for a buyout of the Lufthansa Group.’

She laughed. ‘That’ll be the day. Maybe we’ll start with Swiss Global and work up to it. Shouldn’t take more than about twenty years to clinch the deal.’

‘That’s your whole problem,’ Ben said. ‘No ambition.’

‘Have you spoken to Brooke?’ Ruth cut in, with typical directness. Good old Ruth. Straight to the point.

Ben was silent.
Here come the difficult questions
, he thought. Hearing
Brooke’s name spoken out loud brought a wash of uncomfortable emotions.

‘I spoke to her a couple of months ago,’ Ruth said. ‘She told me you never call her.’

‘Why would I call her?’ he said. He heard the cold detachment in his own voice, and wondered if it sounded as artificial to Ruth as it did to him.

‘I think she’d like you to. She misses you.’

‘You know what happened between
us,’ he said stiffly. ‘There’s nothing left to miss.’

‘As a friend, then.’

Ben said nothing.

Ruth said, ‘Nobody knows where you are or what you’re doing. You worry people.’

‘Did Brooke say she was worried about me?’

‘She didn’t
have
to say. You could be dead, and we wouldn’t even know.’

‘We?’

‘There are people who care about you, Ben.’ Ruth paused for a few moments
and Ben could hear her moving about, plumping up the pillow, sitting up in bed.

‘I’m sorry I woke you. Maybe I shouldn’t have called.’

‘It’s okay, I’m alone anyway.’

‘I won’t ask.’

‘It wouldn’t do you much good if you did,’ she said. ‘Listen, have you talked to Jude? Your son. Remember him?’

Ben ignored the sarcasm. ‘Not lately.’

‘He and Brooke keep in contact. She said
he’s quit university.’

‘I thought he might.’

‘And how hard did you try to talk him out of it?’

‘I can’t force him to do what he doesn’t want to do,’ Ben said. ‘Once his mind’s made up, that’s it.’

‘Sounds like someone else I know,’ Ruth said.

‘Did she say what he’s doing now?’
She.
It hurt him to say Brooke’s name.

‘Not much, apparently. Sounds like he’s kind of drifting.
He needs direction in his life, Ben. He needs a father to guide him.’

‘I don’t think I’m much of that,’ Ben said, then fell silent. He wanted to ask what Brooke was doing now, but didn’t.

‘Where are you?’ Ruth asked again.

‘I told you. I’m in a hotel. Actually it’s more of an inn.’

‘That tells me a lot. You could be anywhere from Albuquerque to Znamensk.’

‘Germany. Somewhere
near Freiburg, I think.’

‘You’re kidding me. Then you’re almost in Switzerland. Just a hop over the border. Why don’t you come and see me here in Zurich? Spend some time?’

‘I’m sure you’re busy running your corporate empire.’

‘Never too busy for my big brother, you know that.’

‘You’ve forgiven me for crashing your plane in that lake in Indonesia?’

‘Hey, these things happen.
I bought a new one. Don’t change the subject. Are you coming to see me, or what?’

‘Some time, I will. I’m in the middle of things at the moment.’

‘Business?’

‘I’m retired from business.’

Ruth’s tone grew firm. ‘Ben, are you in trouble again?’