The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Fifteen

Motorways radiated from the city of Munich like the arms of a starfish, E52 to the northwest towards Augsburg, E53 to the northeast in the direction of the Czech border, E54 to the west heading to Landsberg and the River Lech, and E45 and E533, forking southwards in opposite directions east and west for Liechtenstein and Austria. The location punched into the Kia’s satnav lay two and a half hours’ drive to the west, in the Alpine foothills on the Bavarian side of Lake Constance.

‘I was one of the only people who even knew about the place,’ Raul was saying as they left Munich behind. ‘The last thing she wanted was a bunch of reporters showing up there, or fans. She bought it under a company name and only told people she absolutely knew she could trust. It was like a hideaway for her. She used to stay there often.’

‘You said it was an observatory.’

Raul nodded. ‘Yes, with a small house attached. Not much more than a cottage, together with a few other buildings. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, about five kilometres from the nearest village, so it was ideal for privacy as well as astronomy. No light pollution. Although she did a lot of observing during the day, too.’

Ben looked at him. ‘What kind of telescope can see the stars during the daytime?’

‘Just the one kind, and just the one star,’ Raul said. ‘Our star. The sun, viewed through a solar scope. Catalina is a specialist in solar physics. That has always been the biggest part of her work. Have you ever seen the sun up close?’

‘Not that I can recall,’ Ben said.

‘The one time I went to visit her observatory, she took me into the dome and let me look through the solar telescope. Some piece of equipment, I can tell you. I’ve never seen anything so amazing in my life as this giant ball of fire, more huge and powerful than we can even imagine.’

Giant balls of fire were something Ben could take or leave. Even the small ones he’d come into contact with, usually in the form of enemy incendiary devices, had been more than hot enough for him. ‘So this place of hers is out in the middle of nowhere and you’ve been there only the once?’ he said to Raul. ‘What are the chances you can find it again?’

‘I’ll find it.’

‘Why didn’t you tell anyone about this place before?’ Ben asked him. ‘Why not the police? Why not Klein?’

Raul shook his head. ‘Everything has changed since then. Before, I wasn’t thinking she might have gone back there. I wasn’t really thinking at all. I only knew she was alive, and that while she was alive I was betraying her trust in me if I told her secret. I kept telling myself that one day, everything was going to be normal again, and her life would go on as it had before. Then later, when I started to think she’d been kidnapped, I never thought about the place. She wouldn’t be there, she’d be in some place the person had taken her. I imagined the worst places. A cellar, full of rats and filth. A box buried deep under the ground with just an air hose to breathe through. All these awful images in my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about her trapped, frightened, calling for help.’

He stared ahead, his eyes fixed on the road as if he could reel in the horizon and bring them instantly to their destination. ‘But she is there. I know that’s where we’re going to find her. Frightened, and in terrible trouble. But safe and unharmed. I know it.’

‘Maybe,’ Ben said.

Raul glanced at him sharply. ‘Yes, maybe. But maybe is good enough for me right now. Maybe is all I have. Faith, remember?’

‘Faith,’ Ben repeated. They were still over two hours from finding out whether that faith would be justified or not.

The long road carried them westwards past towns and lakes. Landsberg, Buchloe, Mindelheim, Memmingen. Some time during the drive, it occurred to Ben that this must be the most miles he’d ever clocked up on a rental car without being personally responsible for getting it destroyed, pulverised, burned, blown up or shot to pieces in the process. Touch wood, he thought, and looked around the Kia’s plastic interior for anything resembling wood.

When he couldn’t see any, he abandoned such weak-minded superstitious notions, lit another of his dwindling pack of Gauloises instead and went back to thinking about Catalina Fuentes. Whichever way he tried to arrange the pieces of the puzzle in his head, he couldn’t make any sense of what was going on. Something crucial was missing from the picture, and if they didn’t find Catalina lying low in her astronomical bolthole in the mountains, they’d have to hope they dug up more to go on — or else Ben had no idea where they could turn to next.

He hated it when the success or failure of the mission depended on just a single scrap of a lead. Funny how it never seemed to be any other way.

The first half of the afternoon had ticked past by the time they finally reached Catalina Fuentes’ observatory in the Alpine foothills, two hundred and forty kilometres west of Munich. The motorway was far behind them, the road having grown progressively narrower and quieter as they neared their destination near the small town of Klosterkirche. Raul’s memory proved just a little less precise than he’d given Ben to believe, and it was only after getting lost three times in the forest roads bordering Lake Constance that they finally stumbled on the right path and Raul started to recognise the landmarks. ‘This is it, I’m certain,’ he said.

After turning off the road onto a stony trail that looked like no more than a farm track, they wound and snaked uphill for nearly ten minutes through empty hillside before the place came into view at the top of a rise. The first thing that caught Ben’s eye was the white fifty-foot dome that stood like a temple overlooking the forested valley below and the blue lake waters in the distance, seventy kilometres from end to end and smudging the boundaries of three countries. Adjoining the dome was a rambling single-storey cottage. Nothing ostentatious, just a simple stone building with ivy trailing up its whitewashed walls and small, cottagey windows. It looked clean and maintained, but the message was clear: all the money had gone into the dome. The dwelling itself was secondary, like a bunkhouse.

A cluster of smaller buildings stood behind the house, looking like old storerooms and animal pens converted from their original use. The property was fronted by a beaten-earth yard that ran off to patchy grass and then to a wooden fence that ringed the perimeter. Faded grass and the last wildflowers of the year waved in the breeze. As the land sloped up towards the hills the terrain became rougher, strewn with rocks. There were stumps where trees had been cut down. Trees being, Ben supposed, the universal bane of astronomers everywhere.

So this was where Catalina Fuentes had been in the habit of escaping to from the pressures of celebrity. Now they were about to find out whether her remote hideout was an escape from something else.

There was no lock on the wooden gate, despite the sign that said in German, PRIVATE PROPERTY — KEEP OUT. Raul got out of the car to open it, and Ben drove through. He paused for Raul to dive back into the passenger seat, then bumped up the rest of the uneven track, which widened out into the dirt yard in front of the house. There were no other vehicles in sight, but one of the buildings could have been a garage.

‘Pull up here,’ Raul said urgently, thirty yards short of the house. ‘I don’t want to scare her.’

Ben was concerned that Raul was taking a little too much for granted, but he said nothing and stopped the car. Raul kicked open his door and almost fell out in his eagerness. He ran towards the house, waving his arms and calling out in Spanish.

Ben killed the engine and stepped out of the Kia. The air was crisp and fresh, the view magnificent and unbroken in a sweeping vista that didn’t stop until it reached the faraway peaks of Switzerland. He could see why a person would choose this spot to admire the heavens. He lit a cigarette and began walking towards the house.

Raul had already reached the door and found it unlocked, pushing his way inside still calling out in Spanish to his sister. ‘Catalina, it’s me, Raul. It’s okay. I’m here.’

Ben followed, still saying nothing. The doorway was set deep into the thick stone walls and the lintel was low, cottage-style. He had to duck an inch to walk inside. The front entrance opened straight into a small, beamed living room that was simply furnished and very different in style from the apartment in Munich. To his left was a pine slat door. Straight ahead, another door that Raul had already gone through, into a kitchen.

‘She’s here,’ he said, turning back towards Ben and pointing at a small pine table, on which rested a china mug and a plate with the remnants of a sandwich. Raul felt the mug, and his face glowed excitedly. ‘Still warm. See? Didn’t I tell you?’

He burst out of the kitchen and hurried to the other door. It led through to a small office, from whose far side climbed a flight of wooden steps that Ben realised was the entrance to the observatory dome. The office was even less like Catalina’s apartment: not a penny spent on designer chic, as functional and utilitarian as any military HQ Ben had ever seen. The view from the window was of the unpretty storage buildings outside. Metal shelving lined the walls, heavy with files and textbooks and heaps of paperwork. More of the same cluttered the little desk space that wasn’t taken up with her computer.

Ben was sensing a very different Catalina Fuentes from the party-going, bejewelled and fashion-conscious celebrity whose walk-in wardrobe in the city was bigger than a lot of people’s homes. This was the real her, the serious hard-grinding scholar she’d been before the circus of fame and fortune had entered her life. The place was the nerve centre of her work. No frills, just science.

Raul stepped quickly through the room and called up the stairs, ‘Catalina! It’s me, Raul!’ Glancing back at Ben, he said, ‘She could be in the dome.’

Ben followed him through the door into a bare-block, concrete-floored space about a dozen metres square, its main feature a massive steel pillar bolted to the floor via a thick circular plate and disappearing up through the ceiling, the height of the roof of the house it was attached to. Raul was clattering up a metal staircase that coiled around the pillar, leading to a circular hatch through to the level above. Ben climbed the steps after him.

The observatory was dark inside, sealed off from the sunlight with the roof closed. Raul found a light switch near the hatch entrance and flipped it on. Now Ben saw that the dome consisted of sections bolted together like the segments of an orange sliced into a hemisphere, insulated on the inside with some kind of space-age silver material. The dome stretched the same dozen metres across at its widest point, a dozen more from its rubberised floor to the apex of its arched ceiling.

The space was filled with a bewildering array of rack-mounted electronics, computers and optical equipment that was dwarfed by the pair of giant white aluminium telescopes that stood in the centre of the circular floor. They were mounted on a massive pivot atop the steel pillar and trained upwards in parallel like twin artillery pieces. Ben wondered why she needed two, then remembered what Raul had said about his sister’s solar observations. One scope for night, the other for day. Each more than twelve feet long and hooked up to a spaghetti of curly multicoloured wiring for motor drives and banks of digital readouts at whose function Ben could only guess, their bulk was steadied by a counterbalance weight like an Olympic powerlifter’s barbell, on which was mounted a padded operator’s chair. Just the thing for those long hours spent gazing into space, Ben thought.

The dome ceiling curved smoothly above the upward-pointing twin telescopes. Noticing a complex arrangement of cables and pulleys connected between the centre of the roof and a large electric motor with a control panel, Ben realised that a whole section of the dome could be opened up at the flick of a lever to expose a vast expanse of sky. A separate motorised system allowed the upper section of the dome to rotate, running on tracks like the gun turret of a tank, so that the telescopes could be swivelled around to cover the entire firmament in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle over the tops of the racks of electronics and computer equipment.

The inside of the dome was an impressive sight. It was also empty. No sign of Catalina Fuentes, or of anybody else.

Refusing to admit defeat, Raul headed back for the spiral stairs, switching off the light as he went. He clattered back down the steps, and again Ben followed. They returned inside the house, which seemed strangely rustic now in comparison to the high-tech wizardry of the observatory. Raul was calling ‘Catalina! Come on out, it’s me! It’s Raul!’

As Ben wandered back through the study towards the living room, he was thinking that the still-warm coffee mug on the table downstairs had to belong to someone.

Then he stopped. Stepped back a pace, looked out of the study window overlooking the back of the house, and realised he hadn’t imagined the sudden, furtive movement he’d glimpsed out of the corner of his eye.

There was a man outside.