The Cassandra Sanction (8 page)

From the kitchen, he wandered down another passage to what looked like a home office, although it had to be the neatest and least-used home office in the world, entirely clutter-free and a few neat rows of abstruse-looking astrophysics and cosmology titles arrayed on the shelves. One wall
displayed a blown-up framed still of Catalina pictured against the backdrop of an astonishingly resplendent Milky Way. Her face was aglow with enthusiasm, those big brown eyes as incandescent as the heavens. Ben presumed it must be an image from her TV astronomy series. Looking at it, it wasn’t hard to see what her public had loved in her. He gazed at it for a moment, then went on examining the
room.

According to the police report, Catalina’s personal computer had been checked for suspicious emails or anything that could provide leads to contradict the suicide motive. Nothing having been found, the computer had been replaced, unplugged from the monitor on the desk. Ben was confident that the contents of drawers, her address book, phone records and general paperwork would have all
been routinely examined, too, but he had a riffle through the desk just in case anything jumped out at him. It didn’t, although he wasn’t particularly sure what he was looking for. Sometimes you just had to go by instinct. And so far, his instincts weren’t feeding much back to him.

Of the three bedrooms in the big apartment, the first he looked into was a guest room with a huge empty wardrobe
and a timber-framed bed piled high with silk cushions. The second was stripped bare and in the middle of being redecorated, a stepladder against one wall, paint pots, plastic sheeting on the floor. He found that potentially interesting. Suicidal people didn’t tend to care much about the state of their home decor. Then again, it wasn’t much to base a theory on.

The third bedroom was Catalina’s,
the largest of the three with Gustav Klimt on the walls and a broad expanse of glass overlooking Glockenbach district. Her bed was an antique Louis XI kind of affair the size of a Cadillac Fleetwood. Old and modern side by side, the same elegant blending of styles. Ben did a five-minute search of her wardrobe and drawers, feeling as if he was prying. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he walked
into the ensuite.

Despite his experience of domestic life with his ex-fiancée Brooke Marcel, a woman’s bathroom nonetheless remained a world of mystery to someone of Ben’s ingrained spartan ways. Automatic halogen spotlights caught him by surprise as he entered, and he could see about twenty of himself reflected from all angles in the blaze of mirrors covering every vertical surface. A thick
sheepskin rug stretched over the floor near the walk-in shower. Fluffy towels draped thickly over a chrome rail. The biggest vanity unit he’d ever seen held a collection of cosmetics and perfumes and creams and lotions and feminine paraphernalia that could have stocked a small pharmacy. Tools of her trade, he guessed. He had no doubt that being the world’s sexiest scientist must be hard graft.

A walk-in wardrobe led off the ensuite, a whole other room in itself. Ben stepped into it, gazing around him for clues the police might have missed, like a pair of bathroom scissors lying in a red pool on the floor, or a cryptic message daubed in blood by the kidnapper.

What he found instead, he stared at for ten long seconds and then hurried back through the apartment with to show Raul.

Chapter Nine

Raul hadn’t moved from his position on the armchair, and barely glanced up as Ben walked into the room.

‘What’s this?’ Ben said, striding up to him.

‘What’s what?’

‘This.’ Ben tossed it in Raul’s lap. Raul picked it up and gazed at it.

‘It’s fluoxetine,’ Ben said. ‘Any ideas why I might have found a whole stash of it sitting on a shelf in your sister’s walk-in
wardrobe?’ He was trying to keep the anger out of his voice, but it wasn’t easy. His discovery had left him feeling betrayed and made a fool of.

Raul slowly examined the small amber bottle of pills, then turned a blank expression on Ben and shrugged. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘They’re antidepressants,’ Ben said. ‘And they’ve got your sister’s name on the label. And I want to know why.’

‘Anyone can take medicine.’ A flare of defensiveness lit up in Raul’s eyes as he said it.

‘Fine. If her doctor put her on pills for migraine headaches or a dust allergy, that would be one thing, wouldn’t it? But this is something else.’

Raul said nothing. He stared at the bottle in his hand as if he could will it to change into something else.

‘You told me she was a happy person,’ Ben
said. ‘You said she loved her life and filled every room she walked into with laughter and smiles.’

‘She did,’ Raul said quietly.

‘As long as the drugs were doing what they were supposed to do?’ Ben said, pointing at the bottle. ‘And what about the rest of the time?’

Raul fell silent. He closed his eyes. Maybe he thought that by shutting out the light, all his problems would vanish
in the darkness. Ben glared at him, wanting to grab him by the neck and shake him.

‘Answer me, Raul. Did you know about the pills?’

‘Yes!’ Raul burst out. ‘I knew, all right? She went through a phase of feeling anxious and low when she was in her teens, and was on medication for it then. She was mostly fine, then every now and then she’d have a relapse when there was too much stress in
her life. It happened again when that whoreson Austin Keller broke her heart. It hit her hard and she needed medical help to get over it.’

Ben didn’t bother to ask who Austin Keller was. He shook his head in disbelief at what he was hearing. ‘She was prone to depression and you knew about it all along, but you didn’t see fit to mention it?’

‘But it doesn’t mean anything,’ Raul insisted.
‘That was all in the past. She got over it. She always has.’

‘Read the label, you idiot. Look at the date. What does it say?’

Raul read it and sighed. ‘It says July eleventh.’

‘This year. Not last year, or the year before. It says she was prescribed this latest treatment five days before her car went over the cliff. And more than a third of them are gone. In less than a week? She must
have been popping them like sweets.’ Ben could hear his voice getting tighter with anger. His stomach felt knotted and there was a beating in his temples that was growing into a dull ache. He took a deep breath to try to settle his pulse.

Raul waved his arms in frustration. ‘Fine. All right. But if she was taking them, then she wasn’t depressed, was she? Isn’t that the whole idea of antidepressants?’

‘Happy pills don’t always work that way, Raul. Sometimes they take away sadness and replace it with rage and hatred and all kinds of other emotions instead. They can make a perfectly ordinary, gentle person with mild anxiety decide to take an axe to their family. Or take a jump off a high building, whichever way the brain chemistry happens to lead them. There have been thousands of proven cases.
They call it the paradoxical effect. I call it mind-altering garbage that screws people’s heads up.’

Raul frowned, a line appearing between his brows. ‘How come you know so much about it?’

Ben pointed again at the bottle. ‘Because my mother was prescribed some kind of crap just like that the year after Ruth disappeared, to help her cope with the loss. Over the next few months my father
and I saw her degenerate into a total stranger. One day when I was eighteen years old, she wandered like a zombie into her bedroom, locked the door, lay on the bed and swallowed a jar of sleeping pills and never woke up.
That’s
how I know so much about it, okay? Because I made it my business to find out what those things can do to a person.’

The breathing control wasn’t working. The thumping
in his temples was amping up into a full-blown headache. He’d never told anyone that much about his mother’s suicide before, and he didn’t enjoy revisiting the feelings it raised up in him.

Raul lowered his eyes and said nothing.

‘Look at me, Raul. Tell me the truth. You knew Catalina was still on these drugs, didn’t you? But you hid it from me, because of how I might react. That’s why
you didn’t show me the full copy of the police report, because her antidepressant use would have been mentioned there as corroborative evidence to back up the coroner’s suicide verdict. You removed those pages so I wouldn’t see them.’

Raul’s face twitched as he stared hotly at Ben, like a child caught with its fingers in the pie. ‘Okay, I admit it. I did know, and you’re right, it was in the
police report. It came out at the inquest that she’d gone to her doctor not long before her disappearance, worried she was slipping back into depression, because of work-related stress and other private matters. The lawyers pulled strings to keep the details out of the media, but that’s what happened. There. I’ve said it. I should have known you’d find those pills in her things, but my head’s been
so fuzzy with all this nightmare that I didn’t think about it. I should have told you the truth. I screwed up. Are you satisfied now?’

Ben glowered at him. ‘No, I’m not, Raul. Don’t you see how this changes things?’

Raul paused, then pursed his lips as a new thought seemed to come to him. ‘It would … if it was for real.’

‘What? How can it not be for real?’

‘It could all be part
of the set-up. Kind of makes sense, actually.’

Ben couldn’t believe what kind of wildly twisted logic Raul was throwing at him. ‘Let’s think about that for a moment, shall we? The kidnapper made her go to her own doctor for antidepressants, so that they could then plant them here in her apartment as phony evidence that she killed herself.’

Raul spread his hands. ‘Does that sound so crazy?’

‘Yes, Raul, it does. It makes it sound as if you’re doing everything you can to deny the truth about what happened to Catalina.’

Raul’s face paled to an ashen grey, as if Ben had punched him. ‘What are you telling me, that now you believe all that bullshit story about her killing herself? I thought you were on my side.’

‘There’s no other way to see it, not now.’

‘Listen. Ben. I
know how it looks, you finding the pills, me lying to you.’

‘Good. Then you understand why I’m thinking you brought me here on false pretences.’

‘Yes. And I know you’re thinking you want to walk away from all of it. I’m begging you, don’t. I need your help. Never give up hope, remember? That’s what you said, remember?’

‘There’s faith, Raul, and then there’s self-delusion.’ Ben turned
away from him and went to the window, stood there for a moment looking down at the street. Night had fallen and the drizzle had returned, spitting diagonally from a charcoal sky and haloed in the street lamps. One of them was flickering intermittently. Further down on the opposite side, light flooded across the slick pavement from the windows of a café-restaurant. The street was empty apart from
the parked vehicles that lined the kerbs and the occasional passing car.

‘Please,’ said Raul’s voice behind him.

Ben went on gazing out of the window for a while. His jaw was wound so tight that his teeth hurt. But under all his anger was a thread of sympathy for Raul that he couldn’t so easily let go of. He knew he should, and he knew he was being stupid and weak, but there it was.

He turned from the window to face Raul and said, ‘All right. One more chance. But I’m warning you. Any more surprises, and you’re on your own. I mean it.’

‘There won’t be,’ Raul said, brightening. ‘Thank you. From my heart.’ He gave a weak smile.

Ben grunted and did not return the smile. ‘In the morning we’ll go and talk to Klein. Now let’s eat.’

Down in the street below, bathed in
the intermittent glow from the flickering street lamp, the watcher sat perfectly still inside the plain black Fiat panel van with an easy view of the apartment windows. He had been sitting there since not long after the silver Kia had parked at the opposite kerb outside the apartment building and its two occupants had disappeared inside. The van’s smoked glass hid him from passersby and allowed him
to use the compact but powerful Canon 8x25 image-stabilising mini-binocs that were part of his kit. Another part was the Walther PPX nine-millimetre handgun nestling in its Kydex concealment holster on his belt. Those weren’t all that he had brought with him.

Seeing a figure appear at one of the apartment’s windows that overlooked the street, he picked up the binocs. The man at the window
was the blond one who’d hooked up with Raul Fuentes over the last couple of days. They knew all about him, his name, his former occupation, his level of expertise. Hence the Walther PPX. What they didn’t yet know, and were keen to discover, was how and why he’d suddenly appeared in the picture.

The watcher went on watching. Ben Hope was half-silhouetted in the light from the apartment, but
enough showed of his face to make out his grim expression through the image-stabilised field of view. His hair was a little longer than in the photograph in the file the watcher had been shown. After a few moments, Ben Hope turned away from the window and his lips moved as though he were speaking, then he disappeared from sight. He could only have been talking to Fuentes. That would be confirmed
by the watcher’s teammates who were monitoring the bugged conversation back at base.

The watcher lowered his binoculars, satisfied that neither of the men inside the apartment was about to emerge to disturb the next phase of the operation.

He zippered up his black nylon jacket and pulled the woollen beanie hat tight down over his ears, partly to keep the rain off, partly to hide his features.
Picking up a small black backpack from the passenger seat, he opened the van door and stepped quietly out. A quick upwards glance at the apartment windows to ensure nobody was watching him; then he moved quickly and silently across the street and slipped between the silver Kia and the Audi parked behind it. He took the small unit from the backpack and knelt beside the Kia as if he needed to
tie a loose shoelace.

The unit clamped without a sound to the inside of the car’s rear wheel arch. The watcher checked that it was secure, then continued walking down the street until he was out of sight of the building. He crossed the road and doubled back on himself, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, like an ordinary pedestrian walking fast to get out of the rain.