The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Twenty-Three

He hit the floor on his back, looked up and saw Raul standing over him with a clenched fist.

‘You crazy English bastard!’ Raul yelled at him.

Stars were swimming in front of Ben’s eyes. He shook his head to clear them, and touched his fingers to his jaw where Raul had hit him. He blinked a couple of times, then through the haze he saw a black shape rise up behind Raul with something long in its hands.

The man with the shotgun staggered to his feet. Ben’s bullet had caught him too low and hit the body armour, only stunning him. He was bruised, but he was very much alive. He clamped the shotgun’s butt into his shoulder and advanced on Ben.

Ben knew the man had him cold. There wasn’t a thing he could do, lying on his back still dizzy from the punch. This was it. He saw death coming.

Raul spun around, saw the man with the shotgun and shouted something Ben didn’t understand. The man came on another step, trying to elbow Raul out of the way to get a shot at Ben. The shotgun muzzle came up, the big black O pointed right at Ben’s face.

Raul punched him in the neck. The man staggered and fought to keep his balance. The gun went off line. Then Raul hit him again, this time with a monster uppercut that caught him square under the jaw, almost lifted him off his feet and sent him sprawling backwards towards the edge of the dome opening. The man dropped his gun and hit the edge with the backs of his legs and went over backwards with a short scream, disappearing from sight as he fell. There was a frantic slithering as he slid down the curve of the smooth fibreglass. Then a muffled crump as he hit the ground below. Then, nothing.

Ben struggled to his feet and went to the edge, looked down and saw the twisted body lying in the yard in front of the house. His neck looked broken. Ben looked up at the hillside. The sniper was immobile across his rifle, leaking blood over the rocks.

‘Think I broke a knuckle,’ Raul said.

Ben rubbed his jaw. It was tender and beginning to swell. ‘On him, or on me?’

‘You were going to let them shoot me, you bastard. I can’t believe you would do that.’ Raul was ashen and his voice sounded like that of a man who had just woken up, badly shaken, from a horrible nightmare.

‘No,’ Ben said. ‘That wasn’t going to happen.’

‘How can you say that? You can’t know that.’

Ben said nothing. He picked up the fallen pistol and stuck it in his belt, then checked its former owner. The dead man had voided his bowels. The stench mingled with the smell of the blood pooling over the floor and trickling between the cracks in the rubber matting. Ben knelt beside him and searched him for ID, found only a phone that he switched off and pocketed. He removed the guy’s mask and studied his face. Then went and did the same with the body of the man who’d been holding the pistol to Raul’s head, and again with the dead guy in the observation chair. He found two more phones. Switched them off, like the first, and slipped them in his pocket. Aside from that, zero. All three men were nameless, with anonymous faces. They could have been anyone.

Ben listened hard and could hear no sounds from down below. Just the ringing in his ears, the thud of his heart and the exaggerated silence that comes in the aftermath of battle.

‘It’s over,’ Raul said, leaning against his sister’s ruined solar telescope. He looked weak and faint. Shock was kicking in, in the aftermath of the adrenalin rush. Ben had seen it happen a thousand times before.

Ben shook his head. ‘It’s only just beginning.’

‘I killed a man.’

‘You saved me, you saved yourself. Now it’s time to go and save Catalina.’ He took Raul’s arm and found that Raul was shaking. Ben led him back to the hatch and down the steps.

Raul paused to gaze sadly at Kazem’s body, while Ben went through to the living room and checked the two dead bodies there. He wasn’t surprised to find that they had no ID either. Two more phones, making five. He switched them off, like the first three, and added them to the collection in his pockets. He was pretty certain that the headsets the men had all been wearing were keeping them in touch on an open line with whoever had sent them here. Who that might be, he had no idea.

He stepped outside and lit a cigarette. His jaw was aching and he had his own nerves to settle in the aftermath of the fight. He looked at the wrecked Kia, then headed up the slope to where the sniper’s body lay.

Like the others, the sniper had been carrying no ID, just a thick roll of banknotes in his back pocket, and his phone. Number six for Ben’s collection. It was identical to the others, apart from a small dent in the casing where Ben’s first shot had kicked up a stone that had bounced off it. But something about the man was different; the dissimilarity became obvious the moment Ben plucked the ski-mask off his head and saw his face. Even with half his skull blown away by Ben’s last shot.

A few moments later, Raul walked outside, looking stricken. Ben called him over. ‘Come and see this.’

Raul walked reluctantly up the slope and then peered at the corpse with a disgusted frown. At first he didn’t understand what it was Ben had summoned him over to see. Then he got it.

‘I think I know him. Haven’t I seen him before somewhere?’

‘Yes, you have, and so have I,’ Ben said.

The sniper had pale features and receding straw-coloured hair. He was the book-reading stranger from the bar in Frigiliana that Ben had thought looked Danish.

‘They’ve been following you all along,’ Ben told Raul. ‘Since before you left Spain, since before I even met you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Nor me, not yet.’

Ben walked back to the Kia and ran his eye along its bullet-riddled bodywork, thinking. He dropped flat on the ground and peered underneath the car. Then reached under a torn wheel arch, feeling around in the recesses. He walked around the car and tried the other three. There it was. ‘Damn. I should have known,’ he muttered to himself.

‘What are you looking for?’ Raul asked, joining him and looking even more baffled.

‘This,’ Ben said, showing him the small black box he’d found clamped under the wheel arch. ‘It’s a GPS homing tracker. They must have tagged us with it last night, while the car was parked outside Catalina’s place.’

‘They followed us from Spain, to Munich, to here?’

‘Without breaking a sweat,’ Ben said. ‘These boys were professionals. We didn’t spot them behind us on the road, because with this thing they could hang right back out of visual range and still know our exact position to within a metre.’

‘So where’s their car?’ Raul asked.

Ben turned and gazed down the track, then started walking.

The vehicles were parked just out of sight around the corner. A metallic grey BMW 6-Series, a blue Opel Insignia and a black Fiat van. All three vehicles still had the keys in their ignitions. All three had German registration plates. Very likely stolen. Ben checked the two saloons first, but the interesting stuff was what he found inside a zippered bag in the back of the van.

‘That makes sense,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ Raul asked, trying to see inside the bag.

‘I mean that there’s a hell of a lot more to this than either of us thought,’ Ben said. ‘First, it suggests they know who I am. Nobody sends out a hit team so well kitted up to take down one man, unless they’ve reason to believe he might give them their money’s worth.’

‘One man? There’s two of us.’

Ben showed him the contents of the bag. ‘Three rolls of duct tape and a bottle of chloroform. I told you they weren’t going to shoot you. It was obvious from the way they attacked us that they were under strict orders not to harm you. The guns were for my benefit only, to put me out of the way so they could get to their real target.’

‘Their real target?’

‘You, Raul. They were planning on taking you alive.’