The Cassandra Sanction (40 page)

The pistol was ugly and black. The part you held, and the part where the trigger was, were made of some kind of very tough plastic, rubberised in places for a better grip. The upper metal part, which to her untrained eye appeared to house the barrel, was square in profile and GLOCK 19 – AUSTRIA was stamped on its left side. Which meant very little to her, except that she supposed that anything
manufactured in Austria must probably be well-made and reliable.

A sudden thought made her anxious. It had never occurred to her until now that she should check whether the weapon was loaded. What if it wasn’t? How did you tell? She vaguely remembered that the part that held the bullets was separate to the gun and went inside the handle. She’d seen actors in films slamming the thing in there
to reload the weapon. After some searching, she found the button that released it, and it dropped out of the handle into her hand: a simple oblong box made of black metal, containing some kind of spring-loaded mechanism that she could see held the bullets in place. There was a name for it – a
magazine
, that was it. It was heavy, and to her relief, it appeared to be fully loaded. Just to make sure,
she prised the rounds out one at a time by sliding them forward with her thumb, and they popped out under spring pressure and dropped into her lap. Fifteen of them, each marked in tiny letters on its circular base WIN – 9mm LUGER. They looked small, and it perplexed her that something so tiny could hold enough energy to kill a person. She remembered what Ben had said to her on the island, about
the fragility of human life.

Thinking of Ben distracted her for a moment. She sensed that she liked him, even though they’d only just met. He had depth, and intelligence, and an inner strength tempered by a warm tenderness none of the men in her life had shown. Under other circumstances, she’d have liked to have got to know him better. But that wasn’t going to happen now. Like a lot of things.

She broke her thumbnail squashing the bullets back into the magazine against the stiff spring tension, then slotted the loaded magazine into the gun and felt it click into place. Fifteen seemed like a lot of shots, and she reasoned that she should hold back twelve and use the remaining three for practice, to familiarise herself with how the gun worked. It took a minute or two before she figured
out that to chamber a round from the magazine you needed to grip the handle in your right hand with your finger clear of the trigger, while using your left hand to rack back the metal slide, which had serrations to enable a firm hold. The weapon’s cold, efficient Austrian functionality and ergonomic perfection were like something that had been designed in a lab, and appealed to her scientific
mind. This was a precision instrument she could trust, however much she might have feared and loathed it in any other situation but the one she faced.

All she needed now was to fire it at something. Looking around, her eye landed on the wrecked old car, and she decided it would make a suitable practice target. She stood ten metres away from it and raised the gun two-handed more or less the
way she’d seen it done in movies. There was no safety catch to click off. Everything was simple. The sights lined up intuitively and easily. She curled her finger around the trigger. Her heart thumped. Her hands were shaking.

She squeezed. The gun fired, jolting her hand. It was much louder than she’d expected, with a sharp report that hurt her ears. Lowering the gun, she saw the small, clean
hole that had appeared in the door skin of the car, more or less where she’d been aiming. She raised the gun again and fired twice more, using the first bullet hole as an aiming mark.

After three shots, there was a high-pitched ringing in her ears. Taking her finger carefully off the trigger and keeping the gun pointed at the ground, she walked over to the car and discovered to her amazement
that all three shots had hit inside a circle she could cover with her hand. She saw how cleanly the bullets had punched through the metal, a silver ring around each hole where the paintwork had been knocked away. Creaking the car door open on its rusty hinges, she found that the shots had gone right through the internal plastic and buried themselves deep in the front seats.

The gun’s power
and ease of use were a little alarming, but pleased her as well, on a scientific level. If it could tear through solid metal like that, it would have no problem penetrating the skull of the evil man who had murdered her friends.

Three rounds gone, twelve to go. Twelve would be plenty. Catalina replaced the gun inside her bag, and then took out her phone to check her GPS bearings one last time.

Maxwell Grant’s villa was just a couple more kilometres away. She picked up her bag and started walking back towards the road.

Her heart was no longer thumping. Her hands had stopped shaking.

She was ready.

Chapter Fifty-Four

The road was quiet and lined with trees. The first fallen leaves of autumn littered the verges, and more drifted down from the branches as she walked, like snowflakes. Catalina felt strangely detached, emotionally numb. Empty of thought, as if she were a machine that existed only to carry out this single purpose. As if nothing existed beyond it. As if this moment was the
definitive and final act of her whole life.

It was after eleven a.m. when she eventually came to the high, ivied stone wall that seemed to stretch forever along the roadside, and knew that it marked the boundary of Maxwell Grant’s estate.

Several minutes later, she arrived at the main gate. Set between tall stone gateposts, the ornate black and gilt cast ironwork loomed over her like the
forbidding entrance to a Gothic castle. Brushing aside the ivy that half-covered a plaque set into the wall, she saw the carved lettering that read VILLA CALLISTO. Beside the plaque was a small intercom unit for visitors to announce themselves at the gate. Catalina had no desire to be announced. She pushed at the gate. It was heavy. And locked.

She walked on another few metres, skirting the
wall until it half-disappeared behind roadside foliage. She glanced to make sure no cars were coming, then squeezed herself in behind the trees where she couldn’t be seen. She laid her bag on the ground at the foot of the wall, taking only the gun which she stuck firmly into the back of her jeans. The wall was at least twice her height, but its rough stonework offered plenty of handholds and footholds.
Concealed from the road, she began to climb. It wasn’t difficult.

Until she reached a grasping left hand over the top of the wall to haul herself up, and let out a cry of pain and shock as she felt something lacerate her fingers. Managing to heave herself a little higher, she saw that the entire length of the wall was topped with broken glass set into the mortar.

She gritted her teeth
and clung on with her bleeding hand while she pulled the pistol out of her jeans and used its butt as a hammer to knock away as many of the jagged spikes as she could reach. It took a lot of hammering to clear an area wide enough to clamber over without disembowelling herself. She hated Maxwell Grant more than ever.

The climb down was much easier, even with just one good hand, and once back
on solid ground she found herself at the edge of the villa’s heavily wooded estate. Her gashed left hand was bleeding. She tore a strip from her blouse to bind it up, clenched her fist tight to stem the blood and set off through the trees.

The estate was as peaceful as a country park. Now she saw lawns beyond the trees; moments later she caught her first glimpse of the house itself. It was
a fabulous place, regal and imposing.

Catalina reached the point where the woods thinned out to nothing and the gardens began, and paused. Leaving the cover of the trees made her feel naked and far too easily visible, but she had no choice but to walk straight up to the house. Her cut hand was throbbing badly. The shakes returned as she set out across the lawns, every muscle trembling and
rigid. It was just adrenalin kicking in, she told herself. The body preparing itself for the coming fight. Nothing to worry about. She needed to embrace it, use it.

Closer. And closer still. The house growing larger and more ominous with every step, windows like eyes watching her. Her heart beating faster, her breath coming in short gasps.

The long driveway cut up between the formal lawns
and terminated in a classically styled courtyard that ran the width of the villa’s facade, surrounded on three sides by a low stone balustrade and tall decorative urns filled with the last of the season’s flowers. There was a Rolls-Royce limousine parked in the courtyard, an old model with gleaming coachwork, all sweeping curves and as big as a barge. The house stood majestically at the end of
a broad, stepped path that passed between perfectly trimmed ornamental hedges and through an archway flanked by a pair of carved lions on marble pedestals, bigger than life-size, that seemed to follow her with their eyes as she approached.

Catalina reached the villa. She leaned her back against the cool stone wall and closed her eyes.

‘Forgive me, Raul,’ she said, not for the first time.

Then she took out the gun.

She moved around the side of the house. Froze, hearing a voice.

His
voice.

It was coming from inside the villa, and sounded as if he was talking on the phone. She couldn’t make out the conversation, because his words were muffled through a window.

Closer. Closer again. Her injured hand had stopped hurting. It was the adrenalin response flooding the
body with hormones like dopamine, one of the most effective natural painkillers known to science. But the shakes were worse, uncontrollable, as if she could no longer govern her own body. Her legs felt as if they were going to wash out under her. Panic was just a hair’s breadth away. Every molecule of her wanted to take flight, run away and never stop running.

Oh, my God, I can’t do this.

Then she saw him, and all her resolve came rushing back into tight, hard focus. He was standing with his back to the window, a broad, wide-shouldered figure in a well-cut silk shirt, talking on the phone inside a room that looked like a study.

She thought, I am going to kill you.

All Grant had to do was turn around, and he would see her standing there on the other side of the window,
gun in hand. For a few anxious seconds that felt like minutes, she thought about finding a way inside the house. Then she thought,
No
. Easier just to shoot him from right here. One bullet to shatter the glass. Then the next one, two, three, four, five, whatever it took, for him.

Grant was still talking, apparently so absorbed in his conversation that he was completely unaware of her presence.
Catalina willed herself to breathe calmly. She raised the pistol and took aim at him through the window. Her finger curled around the trigger. She lined up the sights, fighting to control the tremors in her hands.

Then a voice close behind her said, ‘Drop the weapon.’

Catalina felt something hard and cold press against the side of her head.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Catalina felt her knees go weak and her stomach flip.

‘Drop it. Or you die.’

She opened her fingers and the gun fell from her hand. One of the two armed guards who’d come up behind her quickly stooped to pick it up, while the other kept his weapon pointed against her temple.

She bowed her head in defeat and closed her eyes as they grabbed her and yanked her
arms forcefully behind her back. Opening her eyes, the room Grant had been in was suddenly empty.

The guard who’d taken her weapon produced steel handcuffs and used them to fasten her wrists behind her. He squeezed the bracelets tight. ‘Move it,’ he commanded, shoving her. The whole time, the second guard’s pistol was still trained right on her.

They marched her along the outside of the
villa until they came to a side entrance. Catalina was shoved through it, and into the house. It was cool inside. The furnishings were of the same palatial ilk as those with which Austin Keller filled all his homes. The walls were lined with fine silk and hung everywhere with old oil paintings in grand gilt frames. Their footsteps echoed off mosaic floors of black and white marble. The guards yanked
her roughly to a halt outside a door. The first guard rapped on it.

A voice –
the
voice – said from inside, ‘Come in.’

The first guard opened the door. The second pressed a strong hand against her back and pushed her through it.

The room was a large, magnificent salon. Maxwell Grant was leaning nonchalantly against a tall fireplace. He broke into a generous smile as Catalina entered.
‘Miss Fuentes. I must say, this was an unexpected pleasure.’ He waved a discreet signal to the guard who’d handcuffed her. The guard unlocked and removed the cuffs, then he and his colleague turned and smartly left the room, shutting the door behind them.

Catalina glanced all around the room. Her eyes locked onto the wall-mounted display of crossed sabres that hung over the fireplace. For
an instant, her imagination clouded over with the mental image of her making a rush for one of them, pulling it down and sticking it through Grant’s guts before the guards came bursting in and gunned her down.

Grant greeted her like an old family friend. ‘Welcome to my humble home. I’d ask to what I owe this surprise visit, but I think we already know the answer to that one, don’t we?’

Catalina rubbed her wrists and said nothing. The blood was still seeping through the material wrapped around her injured hand.

‘Satellite dish, indeed,’ Grant chuckled. ‘A worthy effort. Although I’m sorry to say I’m a little disappointed by your lack of knowledge of basic security. You don’t imagine the villa would be so vulnerable to intruders, do you? I was watching you from the moment you
climbed the wall. How’s the hand? I can have it seen to, if you like.’

‘Why, does the sight of a little blood bother you?’ she fired back at him. ‘I didn’t realise murderers were so squeamish.’