The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Thirty-One

It was everything they had, but it wasn’t much. Only four names had been entered into the webmail address book. A closed circle, all right. All four were men. Their names were listed alphabetically by first name: Dougal Sinclair, James Lockhart, Mike McCauley and Steve Ellis.

‘Who are they?’ Raul said.

‘Obviously, people whose correspondence was important enough for your sister to want to erase every last word,’ Ben replied. ‘Now all we have to do is figure out what that correspondence was.’

‘And how do we do that?’

‘We could always email these four blokes and ask them straight out.’

‘You think that would work?’

‘Maybe.’ Ben slid the cursor up to the top name on the list. The small white arrow morphed into a small white pointing hand as it touched, and the alchemy of software conjured up another little box that showed the corresponding email address. Ben grabbed his pen and snatched a file from the bed, and wrote both the name and email down on the back of the cover.

The suffix of the email address puzzled him a moment or two before he understood what it signified. It wasn’t a regular @joebloggs.com or .co.uk. It was ed.ac.uk. Odd, until Ben realised that he’d seen similar in the past. As a mature student returning to finish his theology degree at Oxford — an undertaking that had been cut short in typical fashion by the kinds of events that governed his life — his primary contact there had been a don with the memorable name of Vaughn Goss-Custard, whose email address was v.goss-custard@ox.ac.uk: ox, for Oxford; ac, for academia.

Ox, ed. Oxford, Edinburgh. Which made Dougal Sinclair some kind of lecturer or professor at Edinburgh University.

Ben did the same thing with the second name on the list, James Lockhart. This time, the email suffix that popped up at the touch of the cursor was auckland.ac.nz. University of Auckland.

Germany, Scotland, New Zealand. Three academics, three countries. It might have meant nothing, or maybe it meant everything.

The pattern broke at the third name in the list. Mike McCauley had a regular email with one of the big providers in the United Kingdom. Which at least narrowed the field down to a specific country, but didn’t tell Ben anything more. Steve Ellis, the fourth name on the list, was another Brit with another generic email.

‘That’s a start,’ Ben said to Raul as he wrote it down with the others. ‘Now let’s refine what we know.’

Ben went back to sit on the edge of the bed, picked up his phone again and used it to jump back online and run a search on each of the four men, starting again from the top of the list. Raul sat backwards on the chair to face him, resting his chin on his forearms along its backrest and watching Ben intently as he worked.

It didn’t take Ben long to start finding information. But what he found wasn’t good.

Dougal Sinclair had been born in the Scottish town of Kirkcaldy in 1972, and earned his PhD in climatology in 1999. After a two-year stint as a senior researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Science Center in Silver Springs, Maryland, Sinclair had quit NOAA to return to his native Scotland, joining the faculty at Edinburgh University’s School of Geosciences. He had published various books and papers and won a number of academic awards for his research work.

‘But I don’t think he’ll be winning too many more of them,’ Ben said.

Raul asked, ‘Why?’

‘Because he’s dead.’

Ben passed the phone over to Raul, who reached out an arm to grab it. The news item hadn’t taken a lot of digging to find online, given its recency. According to BBC News Scotland, the tragic accident had occurred somewhere over northern Greenland on July eighth, when the light Piper aircraft chartered by the independent R.I.C.R. Reykjavik Ice Core Research science expedition, had lost control and flown into a glacier. All four people on board had been killed, including the pilot, the expedition leader Dr Sinclair himself, and his two research assistants, Kerry Holder and Mark Linton, both graduate students at Edinburgh.

Ben watched Raul’s face darken as he read. Raul handed the phone back. ‘July eighth,’ he muttered.

Ben said nothing, but they were both thinking the same thing. The dates were clustering together like bullet holes in the ten ring of a marksman’s target. Returning to his search engine, this time Ben entered the name James Lockhart.

‘Here we go,’ he said a few moments later when the search had thrown up its results. ‘Professor James F. Lockhart, departmental head at the Faculty of Earth Sciences, University of Auckland.’

‘New Zealand,’ Raul said. ‘That fits with the email address.’

‘Looks like our man, all right. Says here he’s a leading oceanography expert and authority on Antarctic climate conditions, and a former advisor to the New Zealand government on environmental issues.’

Raul buried his face deeper into his arms and frowned. ‘Ice core research, meteorology, climate. I get the connection between these people. But what’s that all got to do with a solar astronomer like Catalina?’

‘William Herschel,’ Ben said. ‘That’s what links her to them. The reason she was interested in his work. Something to do with the sun, solar energy and Earth weather.’

‘Solar power? Clean energy resources? Is that what this is all about?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ben said. ‘This Herschel stuff is two centuries old. I don’t think people were too worried about green issues back then.’ He scrolled a little further down his search results, then stopped. His shoulders felt suddenly heavy, and a pain started biting into the muscles of his neck.

‘Shit,’ he said.

‘What? What did you find?’ Raul asked, jerking his chin up off the back of the chair.

This was getting worse. Ben heaved a sigh. ‘From a website called “stuff.co.nz”. Listen to this. “A man who suffered gunshot wounds during what police believe was a serious aggravated burglary at his home in Tamaki Drive, Auckland, has been identified as university lecturer Professor James Lockhart, 53. He was found unconscious following the incident, and despite the efforts of paramedics who attempted CPR for twenty minutes, he died at the scene. A woman named as the victim’s wife, Mrs Patricia Lockhart, 46, was taken to hospital with severe head trauma. Today a police cordon remains at the scene as detectives continue to investigate Professor Lockhart’s death. Tributes are being paid…” etc., etc.’

Raul had gone rigid and pale. ‘Oh, my God. When did this happen?’

‘July tenth,’ Ben said. ‘This year.’

‘But that’s—’

‘A very big coincidence, that’s for sure,’ Ben said, nodding. ‘Two deaths, two days apart, both victims in email contact with your sister, who deleted their correspondence just four days before she apparently killed herself.’

‘It’s not possible these were unrelated incidents, is it?’

‘It’s possible,’ Ben said. ‘But I wouldn’t put money on it.’

Raul jumped up from his chair and started pacing up and down the room, teeth clenched, burning up with nervous energy. ‘It’s unbelievable. It’s just incredible. My God, it’s so obvious. Completely transparent. They’re not even trying to hide it. How could anyone not see what’s going on here?’

‘It’s only obvious if you know what connects them,’ Ben said. ‘Catalina’s email is the common denominator. Without that, it just looks like random incidents, scattered across the world. Shit happens all the time. Planes crash, people get murdered, folks kill themselves, every second of every day. No particular reason why anyone should ever put it together.’

‘How many names left on the list?’ Raul asked.

‘We’re two down. Literally. With two to go. Steve Ellis and Mike McCauley.’

‘Two more scientists, do you suppose?’

‘It would fit the pattern,’ Ben said.

Raul grunted. ‘Yeah. And what are the chances they’re dead as well?’

Ben said nothing, but he was willing to bet that Raul was right, and that the next two searches would turn up two more corpses. Accidental drowning, maybe. Food poisoning. Chemical asphyxiation. Falling asleep drunk on a railway line. Anything was possible.

But as it turned out, Ben and Raul were both wrong.