The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Sixteen

The man was young, dark, and thin; Ben didn’t get a clear look at him as he made a break from one of the smaller buildings and darted out of sight around the corner, throwing a glance at the parked-up Kia as he went. One thing was for sure. Whoever he was, he hadn’t been expecting company, and he wasn’t happy about the unexpected arrival of two strangers.

Ben froze, but what seemed to him like a hesitant pause before he exploded into action was less than three-quarters of a second. Before another second had gone by, he was already racing out of the study and sprinting for the door. As he burst outside, the layout of the property was burned into his mind and he was locked on and calculating the quickest route to his target. He turned left from the doorway, skirted the length of the house, turned again and the outbuildings came into view ahead. He ran faster, dust and gravel flying from his feet. He couldn’t see the man. He chased around the corner of the outbuilding.

Then, suddenly, there he was. This time, Ben got a better look at him. He was maybe twenty-four or — five, with the black hair and olive complexion that could have made him anything from Spanish to southern Italian to Middle Eastern. He was wearing faded jeans and a scuffed old leather jacket.

A motorcycle was parked around the back of the building. It was old and had seen better times, with peeling chrome and red paintwork and a big metal TRIUMPH badge on the tank. The man was grappling it off its sidestand by both handlebars as he desperately stamped on the kickstart lever to fire up the engine.

Ben ran straight for him.

The bike coughed and failed to start. The man lashed at it again with his foot, but this time the lever kicked back with the compression of the piston and he let out a grunt of pain as it jolted up and raked his shin.

By then, Ben was six fast strides away from him and closing. The man let the bike go and it fell over on its side. He took off as if a pack of pitbulls were snapping at his heels. Ben hurdled the fallen motorcycle and chased him, running hard. The man was young and fast, but Ben had been faster at that age, and he was still just as fast now.

Where the guy was heading, Ben had no idea. But it was clear there was no escape. He seemed to be aiming for the rocks, as if he thought he could scramble up the hillside like a goat, and away. He hammered over the long grass and hit the boulder-strewn incline at a bounding sprint. His toe caught the edge of a rock and he stumbled, and Ben came up behind him and jerked him backwards off his feet in a choke-hold that cut off the carotid artery feeding the brain.

The guy struggled hard for three seconds, but it was chaotic and untrained struggling that did him no good at all in Ben’s iron grip. By the count of five, he was as limp as a sack of clothes.

Ben lowered him to the ground, rolled him on his back and checked him for weapons. He was unarmed. Finding a slim wallet in the inside pocket of his jacket, Ben counted thirty-five euros in cash. There was no driver’s licence or other form of identification, not even a bank card. Ben had frisked the pockets of dozens of dead or unconscious bad guys, and nearly all of them had had that much in common with this one. Bad guys didn’t turn up ID, unless it was fake, or unless they were incredibly stupid, or it had been planted on them for a reason — usually after they were dead.

Except this one didn’t appear to be a bad guy, in any real sense. He didn’t look like a particularly threatening individual, and he certainly was less of a fighter than he was a runner.

Ben thought about the still-warm coffee Raul had found in the kitchen. Bad guys didn’t sit around drinking coffee in a victim’s home, least of all unarmed when they couldn’t handle themselves with their bare hands. And they especially didn’t turn up on prehistoric 1970s Triumph Daytonas with old-fashioned carbs you had to tickle and an engine you couldn’t fire up without jumping up and down on a kickstart lever.

So who was he, and what was he doing in Catalina’s secret sanctuary?

Ben grabbed the collar of the leather jacket and dragged the guy back to the house. He didn’t weigh too much. Raul stood in the doorway, watching anxiously.

‘What’s happening? Who is he? Where’s Catalina?’

‘That’s what we’re going to find out.’ Ben hauled him through the entrance into the living room and dumped him on the floor. ‘Grab an arm, will you?’ he said to Raul, and together they heaved the guy up into a chair. By now, Ben already knew that the man wasn’t a threat. But he was scared enough to run, and sometimes to make a scared man talk you had to scare him a little more.

‘I’ll watch him. Go and see if you can find something to tie him up with.’

Raul nodded and hurried off. Ben heard him rooting about in the kitchen, then a few moments later he returned with a roll of silver duct tape. One of the most useful and versatile household items ever conceived, with applications most honest, law-abiding citizens could never begin to dream of. ‘Found this under the sink,’ Raul said.

Ben nodded. ‘Perfect.’

Two minutes later, the prisoner was securely trussed up and going nowhere, his head lolling forwards with his chin on his chest. Ben slapped him softly across the cheek a few times to waken him.

The man’s eyes opened slowly, unfocused, then suddenly snapped wide open as he registered Ben. He began to struggle again, straining against the tape that held his wrists and ankles to the chair, his head twisting from side to side in panic as he poured out a stream of words.

Raul stared at him in incomprehension, but Ben knew the language. Farsi was the same thing as Persian, spoken across a wide-ranging area covering Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and parts of Russia. Ben had worked in a lot of those places. He snapped out a command in the man’s language, a very vulgar expression meaning ‘Be quiet’. Along with a warning glare and a raised finger, it had the desired effect. The guy stopped thrashing in the chair, and looked up at Ben like a beaten dog.

‘Are you going to behave yourself?’ Ben asked him in Farsi.

The man nodded.

Still in Farsi, Ben asked, ‘What are you doing here? Where are you from?’

The man seemed surprised that Ben didn’t already know. ‘I am from Tehran,’ he blurted. ‘I came to Germany for work.’ They were making progress, but Ben was still wondering why they’d come here looking for a Spanish female scientist and found an Iranian man in her place.

‘Please,’ the Iranian muttered, his mouth half numb with fear. ‘Don’t send me back. I can’t go back.’

‘I’m not here to send you back,’ Ben said.