The Cassandra Sanction (27 page)

‘Sit down,’ the Greyhound said to McCauley,
wagging his pistol at the empty chair. McCauley sat, pale-faced. Raul stared at the guns. Ben was perfectly immobile, his hands resting loosely on the table.

‘Stay exactly where you are,’ the Greyhound said. ‘Hands on the table where I can see them. Palms down. Nobody moves. Nobody speaks. Is that understood?’

Ben said nothing. Not because he’d been ordered to be silent, but because there
just didn’t seem to be a lot to say. He remained still, and watched, and waited for whatever was going to come next.

The Greyhound stepped up to Ben. For an instant, Ben thought he was going to shoot him and his leg and back muscles tensed, ready to come spinning up out of the chair and trap the gun and break whatever bones were necessary to get it from the man’s hand. He might go down, but
he wouldn’t go down alone.

But the Greyhound didn’t shoot. He bent quickly and picked up Ben’s green bag. Carried it over to the kitchen counter, undid the straps and checked inside. He gave Catalina’s science files and computer a cursory look-over, appeared satisfied that he had what he wanted, then strapped the bag shut and slung it over his shoulder.

‘Be careful with that,’ Ben said.
‘It’s a valuable antique.’

‘Shut up,’ one of the others said.

The Rottweiler had his phone out and had stepped back towards the hallway to make a call. All he said was, ‘S’done.’ He stood with his big shoulders hunched over the phone for a moment as he listened, then ended the call and stepped over to the Greyhound. They had a brief whispered conversation. The Rottweiler pointed at McCauley
and shook his head. The Greyhound shrugged impassively, then turned back towards the table and wagged his gun first at Raul, then at Ben.

‘You and you, on your feet. Let’s go. Not you,’ he added for McCauley, who was confusedly getting up from his chair. ‘You stay put.’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Raul said. ‘You sons of whores will just have to shoot me.’ The one who’d told Ben to shut
up made a grab for Raul’s shoulder. Raul slapped his hand away. ‘Get your fucking paws off me.’

The Greyhound walked up to Raul and pressed the business end of his Glock silencer against his temple. ‘You’ll do as we say, or you’ll die. Your choice.’

Raul hesitated for a second, then glanced at Ben. Ben was ninety-nine percent certain that they wouldn’t shoot Raul. They wanted him for something.
But a one percent chance was still a one percent chance. He gave Raul a look that said ‘Be cool’. Raul seemed to understand. He stood up.

‘You,’ the Greyhound warned McCauley. ‘Stay in that chair for ten minutes without moving. Call the police at any time, breathe a word to anyone about what you have seen here today, we will know about it and will come back for you. Am I clear?’

The last
Ben saw of McCauley was a blanched face staring at them in bewilderment from the kitchen table as he and Raul were marched out of the room with gun muzzles in their backs. Ben was wondering why they’d been singled out from McCauley. But more than that, he was wondering why he himself was still alive. In Germany, the strategy had been clear: Ben was the expendable one, to be taken down. Suddenly,
it seemed that they wanted him, too. Something had changed, but Ben couldn’t imagine what.

Two of the men brushed past them in the hallway. One opened the front door, the other stepped outside to check the coast was clear, then motioned for the rest to follow. Ben and Raul were walked outside. Night was falling and the air was cold and heavy with dampness that swirled and drifted in amber
haloes around the street lights and the lit-up windows of the street. Outside McCauley’s garden gate was parked a plain black Hyundai crew-cab van that hadn’t been there earlier, with a fifth man waiting at the wheel and the engine running.

Ben hesitated when he saw the van. The Rottweiler’s big hand pressed against his back and shoved him forwards. Ben could have twisted the hand and snapped
the bones in the man’s forearm quicker than it took to jerk a trigger. He let himself be pushed towards the gate. The Greyhound opened up the crew-cab side door and tossed Ben’s green bag inside. The one with the German accent walked to the back of the van and opened the rear doors. ‘Inside,’ the Rottweiler said, and this time it was hard steel Ben felt pressing against his back.

The cargo
area of the Hyundai was bare metal inside, with nowhere to sit but the two facing wheel arches. Ben had ridden in the back of plenty of vans before. He should be used to it by now. ‘This is the worst limo service I’ve ever seen,’ he said to the Rottweiler.

The man didn’t seem amused as he waved them inside with his gun. Ben sat on the hard, cold wheel arch. Now might be the time to light up
one of those Mayfairs. Have a smoke, wait for them to get moving, then start planning a way to break out of the van and make their escape while it was stopped at a red light. It wasn’t much of a plan.

And it turned out to be even less of a plan a second later, when the Rottweiler and one of his buddies clambered into the back of the Hyundai with them and produced two black cloth hoods. Ben
sat and let himself be hooded. He heard Raul mutter a curse in Spanish. Then a gun was pressed to his temple as his hands were grabbed and his wrists fastened quickly and expertly together with something thin and strong that felt like a plastic cable tie.

So much for escape. Ben felt the rear suspension lighten as their captors jumped out, leaving them alone in the back. The doors slammed
shut with a resonating clang. More noises as the men all piled into the van, doors closed and then they were speeding away.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

For the first half hour of the journey, the van’s stop-start motion, bouncing and jolting over potholes and swaying left and right through frequent twists and turns, told Ben they must be cutting through the city. Then their progress smoothed out, the jerking and lurching stopped, and the vehicle maintained a steady speed.

It was cold in the back. Ben and Raul couldn’t
talk to one another easily, their voices muffled by their hoods and drowned out by the road and transmission noise that resonated through the bare metal shell. Like hostages and prisoners always do sooner or later, each man lapsed into the silence of his own separate world. Ben could only imagine what Raul must be thinking. He had plenty to ponder himself.

Ben’s head was buzzing with questions,
and a lot of them involved Mike McCauley. Was it just a coincidence that the armed men had turned up at the house at that particular moment? Was it safe simply to assume they’d been watching the place, or was there more to this? What if the journalist set a trap for them? Had he known they were going to turn up in London, and if so, how could he have known that? Was he more deeply involved in
this thing than he was letting on? These people could have got to him. Or he could have been one of them, from the start. That could explain why they’d let him go. Ben could think of no other reason; and yet none of it seemed to add up.

He was still trying to make sense of the situation when the van finally slowed and braked to a halt. The engine went silent. Everything seemed very still.

‘We’ve stopped,’ said Raul’s indistinct voice, sounding far away.

Ben listened and heard doors opening, and voices, and the sound of footsteps. Boots on concrete. Gusts of wind were buffeting the side of the van.

‘Where are we? What’s happening?’ Raul said. His muffled voice was tinged with panic.

The rear doors squeaked open, and the van’s suspension juddered with the weight of
men clambering into the back. Rough hands grabbed Ben’s arms and jerked him upright, hurting his tethered wrists. He didn’t resist them. The sharp night air swirled over him as he was hauled out of the van. Hard ground under his feet. Through the heavy material of the hood, he could make out bright lights and formless shapes. Some kind of building loomed up behind the van, large and square and squat.
More light shone out from inside, but he couldn’t tell whether it was a house, or an office block, or an agricultural building.

He’d been wondering why they hadn’t shot him yet. Maybe the time for that was now. He steeled himself for it. Every man had to die some time. It was just a question of why, and how, and when. The truth was, he’d always been ready. But he wouldn’t die alone. That was
the silent, grim promise he made to his captors.

But still they didn’t shoot him. He could sense Raul’s presence close by as the two of them were led from the van.

And he could hear something. A distinctive high-pitched whistling whoosh that seemed to grow in volume and drowned out the voices around him and the sound of the wind. It filled his ears and became deafening as he was led closer
to it.

It was the noise of jet turbines.

The wide open space Ben and Raul had been delivered to was some kind of private airfield. The building was a hangar.

The blinking nose-, wing- and taillights of the stationary aircraft were visible through Ben’s hood, as well as the interior glow from its single line of windows and open fuselage door. He could see it wasn’t a large plane. A
medium-sized business jet, like a Gulfstream G200 or a Learjet 85. And it appeared to be waiting for them.

Ben was held back as the men led Raul ahead of him to the boarding steps. The roar of the engines was building steadily. Evidently, someone was in a hurry to get out of here. Someone grabbed Ben’s hands and he felt something hard and slim pass between his wrists; a quick sawing motion
and the knife had sliced through the plastic tie. His hands were free. He rubbed his wrists where the bonds had bitten into the flesh. Then someone shoved him onward, and he gripped the handrail of the boarding steps and climbed up into the warmth of the aircraft. The roar of the engines was muted to a softly vibrating thrum as the fuselage hatch was closed behind him.

‘Sit here, please,’
said a voice.

Please?
A few moments earlier, Ben had been getting ready for a bullet in the back of the head. He wondered at the sudden courtesy as he felt his way to the seat he was being guided towards, and lowered himself into it. Next, his hood was removed and he blinked at the sudden dazzle of the plane’s brightly lit interior. The private jet was plushly done out in tan leather and highly
figured wood panels. Something of a contrast to the inside of the van. This kidnapping had taken a turn for the stylish.

Gazing around him, Ben recognised the figures of the four men who’d taken them from McCauley’s house. The fifth man who’d been at the wheel of the van seemed to have vanished. As had the guns that had been pointing at Ben and Raul earlier. If the men were still armed, the
weapons were concealed under their jackets. Raul was already seated across the narrow aisle, hoodless and blinking in confusion. He and Ben exchanged looks.

‘If this is the magical mystery tour, which one of you is Ringo?’ Ben asked the four men.

‘I apologise for the roughness of your treatment,’ the Greyhound said. ‘Please try to see it from our point of view. I’m afraid it was the only
possible way of carrying out our orders.’

‘Who are you people?’ Raul demanded.

‘All will be explained to you, when we land,’ the Greyhound said.

Raul stared at him. ‘Where are we being taken, asshole?’

‘Again, that’s not for me to say. You’ll see for yourselves, a few hours from now. In the meantime, I’m instructed to make your flight a pleasant one. Can I offer you some refreshments?’

Ben laughed at the absurdity of it. None of this was doing much to answer the questions that had been filling his head since leaving McCauley’s house. Something had changed, all right. He was completely without a clue as to what was happening.

‘Go to hell,’ Raul said, still staring.

The Greyhound smiled thinly. ‘Fine. Then can I please ask you to buckle your seatbelts, as we’re due
to take off at any moment.’

Chapter Forty

They flew deep into the night. The Greyhound brought them each a plate of mixed cheese and tuna sandwiches, and a bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water. Ice and a thin slice of lemon. It was without a doubt the classiest abduction Ben had ever been a party to.

While Raul barely touched his food out of protest, the military spirit of ‘eat when you can, sleep when you can’
was too deeply ingrained in Ben for him not to finish everything on his plate. The water was pretty good too, although he might have relished something a little stronger.

The two of them communicated nothing between them above the occasional glance, conscious of the presence of the four men sitting a little way behind them towards the rear of the plane. Some time around midnight, the Greyhound
got up and dimmed the cabin lights. Knowing that they’d get no more information out of their escorts and not wasting energy on trying to understand that which couldn’t be understood, Ben sat quiet and still and gazed out of the dark window, seeing nothing but his own shadowy reflection in the glass. There was no way of knowing what direction they were flying in, or where they might be headed.

Glancing across the aisle, he saw that Raul was slumped over in a fitful sleep. He closed his own eyes and let himself drift. Some time during the night, he had a long dream that consisted of an involved conversation with his sister Ruth. When he awoke, the dream was gone like a burst bubble, but it had left a tinge of strange emotions in him. Faint light was filtering into the cabin, the first
glimmer of dawn ahead of them on the horizon. Ben looked at his watch and saw that it was still only 4 a.m., London time. To have skipped ahead a couple of time zones meant they were travelling east, chasing the rising sun.

The plane was flying low over an ocean that looked from above to be as dark and smooth as a lake of wine, just the occasional ripple flecked with crimson reds and golds
of the approaching sunrise. To the east, Ben could see a cluster of small islands in the distance, still untouched by the light and nothing more than a featureless mound against the glow on the horizon. The seascape looked Mediterranean. A rough calculation of flight duration, times estimated cruising speed, taking into account their approximate direction, could have put them anywhere in an arc stretching
from the Libyan coast off Tripoli, to Malta, to somewhere just beyond the heel of Italy.