The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Thirty

Prior to that moment, all Ben had ever known about the astronomer called Herschel was that Catalina Fuentes had named her pet moggy after him. As he opened the file and began to scan the first page, he saw he was about to learn some more about the man.

The contents of the file were distinctly unlike the rest of the papers Ben had taken from the observatory. The first difference was that, to his relief, they were written in language he could understand, free of dense number equations and technical graphs and charts. The second was that the text was typed up and printed off, rather than handwritten, although it was heavily edited in green pencil, with crossings out and underlinings and asterisks scattered liberally everywhere. The margins were crammed with rephrasings and insertions, and arrows pointing here and there to indicate how certain lines and paragraphs should be reordered. It looked like an essay, or a first draft of an article written by a self-critical author striving to get the wording exactly right. With the corrections in place, the first paragraph began:

Ben paused reading and thought about the tone of the piece. For a start, he was struck by the fact that he could understand it at all. Which clearly meant it wasn’t intended to be a serious piece of academic writing, but accessible to be read by a wider audience.

Audience. That sparked off another thought in Ben’s head. Maybe the text wasn’t intended to be read at all. It had a certain kind of ring to it that suggested to his ear that maybe it was intended to be heard.

‘How’s it going?’ Ben called over to Raul, who was still at the table, hunched over the laptop as if he could will it to yield its secrets by staring hard enough at it.

‘Like shit,’ Raul said.

Which Ben didn’t want to get into at that precise moment. He had something else on his mind. ‘Listen, did you say she presented an episode of her series all about this guy Herschel?’

‘William Herschel? Yes, that’s right,’ Raul replied distractedly, without turning away from the screen. ‘She did lots of research into his work. Said it was incredible and revolutionary. Why, what have you found?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ Ben muttered, and fell silent again as he went back to reading what he now understood was an early version of what had later become a television script.

At which point Ben decided he’d read enough, and gave up.

Okay, he thought, so he’d learned about some bygone astronomer’s claimed, and apparently debunked, connection between these sunspots and the price of wheat in nineteenth-century England. Riveting, no doubt, for those who were interested in such titbits of science history. But to someone trying to figure out why a modern-day solar scientist was in the firing line of dangerous people, somewhat less so. What might have seemed revolutionary over two hundred years ago was hardly about to set the world on fire now, less still get anyone into trouble for researching or writing about it. And even if some deranged villain took exception to what Catalina had said about Herschel’s wheat theory, the time to do anything about it was four years ago, when the TV programme had aired. Not now.

Ben had absolutely no doubt by then that he was wasting his time.

He slipped the papers back inside the file and closed it, with no intention of ever reading more. The agricultural economic history of 1800s England would just have to manage without him.

He stood up and walked over to Raul’s table, where he quickly realised things hadn’t been going much better. Raul turned to Ben with a defeated look. ‘Anything?’

‘Not exactly what you’d call anything useful to us,’ Ben said. ‘You?’

‘The same,’ Raul said. He motioned at the screen. It was filled with a more or less blank window that said ‘Documents’. Ben looked. He couldn’t see any.

‘I thought there might be all kinds of document files here,’ Raul explained. ‘But I’ve searched everywhere in both the laptop’s own drive and the external hard drive, and they’re each virtually empty apart from the default programs and stuff already stored in them. It’s as if she never used the machine at all.’

Ben was no expert, but the laptop didn’t look to him like a brand-new item freshly unwrapped from its factory packaging. It bore the typical marks and scratches of a machine that had been in occasional, if not everyday, use for maybe a year or more. It had to have been used for something.

‘Or else she deleted whatever documents were stored on there,’ he said. ‘Alternatively, she could have called Kazem from Munich and told him to do it.’

‘We can’t exactly confirm that with him either way, though, can we?’ Raul said unhappily.

Ben thought for a moment, then pointed at the screen. ‘You’ve checked the recycle bin? Deleted items could still be stored there.’

‘I’m not an idiot. Of course I’ve checked it. And backup files, and everything else. I’m telling you there’s nothing here.’

Ben rubbed his chin. ‘What about emails?’

‘There’s a shortcut on the desktop that takes you to a webmail service she could have accessed from anywhere,’ Raul said. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ He clicked out of the files menu he was in, and the desktop appeared. Catalina had replaced the default image with one that looked like the curved edge of a blazing golden disk set against a black backdrop. Ben realised it was a close-up of the sun. It was a stunning image that he could almost feel the heat from.

Raul moved the little white arrow cursor over the sun’s face to double-click on a desktop icon. The sun disappeared abruptly and was replaced by a blank window with a blinking cursor that asked for the access password. He said, ‘I’m scared it will shut itself down if we get too many wrong guesses.’

‘How many have you tried so far?’

‘Five. First I tried “Amigo”. That was the name of the little mongrel dog we had when we were children. She loved that dog. Then I tried “Marisol”, the name of our maternal grandmother, who Catalina was closest to out of all the family. Then I tried—’

‘I get the picture,’ Ben said.

‘I can’t think what else she might have used. I mean, it could be absolutely anything.’

‘Try “Herschel”,’ Ben said. It was the first thing that came into his head, but it had as much chance of being correct as anything else they might come up with.

Raul looked at him. ‘Come on. Based on what?’

‘Just try it.’

Raul shrugged. ‘Okay. It’s on you if the program closes down and shuts us out forever.’ He used one finger to prod out the letters H-E-R-S-C-H-E-L, and then hit Enter.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Raul muttered as the email program opened up and a new window appeared in front of them.

‘Told you,’ Ben said.

The website flashed up on the screen, with a ‘welcome back’ message. In the top corner was a little red icon labelled WEBMAIL. Raul clicked on it, and a box appeared with the heading MY TODAY PAGE, with the current date. Down the left side was a vertical menu for Inbox, Sent Messages, Deleted Messages, Drafts and Trash. Over to the right was a subheading that said UNREAD MESSAGES (0). Beneath that was CALENDAR, which had no entries, then LATEST RSS ITEMS, of which there were none, then right at the bottom, DATE LAST ACCESSED.

Proof that the last time Catalina had visited her webmail account was July twelfth. The same day she went to the pawnshop. Four days before her car plummeted into the Baltic.

‘Let’s see what we have,’ Raul said, and flashed the cursor over to click open the Inbox.

There weren’t just no unread messages. There were no messages at all.

‘Damn.’ Raul tried Sent Items.

Empty.

He clicked on Deleted Items, then on Drafts, then on Trash.

Same result each time. The folders were all completely blank.

‘It’s just like what we found before,’ Raul muttered. ‘She must have deleted everything.’

‘She wouldn’t have needed to call Kazem to do it, either,’ Ben said. ‘She could have erased the emails herself back in Munich, from her desk at work, or at home, or anywhere.’

It was bad news. Raul stared sullenly at the screen. He looked as if he wanted to punch it. ‘This leaves us with nothing. Zero. No way even to tell who she was in touch with, let alone what about or why.’

‘One thing we do know,’ Ben said. ‘She didn’t give this email address out to many people. Only to a closed circle, or else the inbox would have been flooded with messages since her last visit.’

‘A very closed circle,’ Raul said bitterly. ‘And we’re closed right out of it.’

‘Hold on,’ Ben said. He reached past Raul’s shoulder and went to place his finger on the laptop’s touchpad.

‘What are you doing?’

‘We can assume that the last time she logged onto her webmail is the same day she deleted whatever messages were on here,’ Ben said. ‘Yes?’

Raul shrugged, nodded. ‘That sounds logical.’

‘And we know that was the same day she visited Braunschweiger. You remember how edgy she looked on the security video. She was anxious and had a lot on her mind, with a whole list of things to take care of before she disappeared, and not much time.’

‘Yes. So?’

‘So people running scared and looking over their shoulder don’t always remember to tidy up every loose end,’ Ben said. ‘That’s usually how they get caught. Even someone as organised and methodical as your sister can miss something under pressure.’ His finger on the touchpad, he steered the cursor back up to the inbox and clicked it open. CREATE NEW MESSAGE. Click. The new message appeared, a blank sheet with an empty space inviting him to enter the address he wanted to email. But Ben had no intention of writing anyone a message. In the top corner of the message box, there now appeared the thing he’d been hoping to find.

The address book.

Ben clicked again, and smiled as a drop-down list of names opened up on the screen. In her haste, Catalina had been too flustered to remember to delete them.

‘Loose ends,’ he said.