The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Thirty-Two

The university email addresses for the first two had made them simple to identify. Numbers three and four wouldn’t be so easy, with generic email providers and common names that would throw up a million false results. Ben ditched the search on Lockhart and keyed in ‘Steve Ellis scientist’, which he decided might even the odds in his favour.

It did.

If he was the same guy Catalina had been in contact with, Steve Ellis was indeed a scientist — albeit a retired one, as Ben discovered from the man’s personal website. Images there showed him as much older than Sinclair and Lockhart, pushing seventy with a snow-white beard that looked as if he’d been growing it since around the time Ben had left school. According to the short résumé on the site, he’d been an astronomer like Catalina back in the day. Quite a celebrated one, too — having, at the tender age of twenty-eight, won the 1975 Copley Medal for his research on solar physics: a highly prestigious award, as far as Ben could make out. After going on to teach at several different universities Ellis had taken early retirement in 1997, and now supported himself by making custom-built astronomical telescopes for private clients in his own workshop in Brecon in the Welsh borders, not far from where Ben had once upon a time endured the hell of 22 SAS selection training.

The website displayed images of Ellis’s telescopes, which looked to be of extremely fine quality. Ben wondered whether maybe Ellis had built equipment for Catalina’s observatory. Why else might they have known each other?

‘So? Is the guy dead or what?’ Raul asked tersely from the other end of the room, where he was still pacing up and down.

Ben saw there was a news page, and navigated to it in case he might find anything of note there, such as a helpful recent entry saying ‘I am dead’ or an announcement from a distraught relative saying that Steve had suffered a bizarre accident in his workshop. He found neither. Instead, right at the bottom of the webpage, was a paragraph in large block font declaring:

‘Ellis is alive,’ Ben said. ‘Or was, when he suddenly closed up his business in a real hurry. July tenth.’

Raul froze mid-pace. ‘The same day as Lockhart was killed.’

Ben nodded. ‘Another coincidence?’

‘No way,’ Raul said. ‘This makes it certain.’

‘And it tells us that they all knew each other,’ Ben said. ‘Catalina and the other four. They were like some kind of group.’

‘Friends?’

‘Or associates,’ Ben said. ‘Two astronomers, two climatologists. That can’t be a coincidence.’ He paused to think for a moment. ‘New Zealand is thirteen hours ahead of the UK. So news of Lockhart’s death on the evening of the tenth could have reached Ellis the same day in Wales. On receiving the news, Ellis immediately suspends his business and goes off the radar indefinitely. At exactly the same time, your sister is putting together her own contingency plans. They were hitting the panic button.’

‘Panic over what? What could they have been into?’

‘You tell me,’ Ben said.

‘Do you think there’s any possibility of contacting this Ellis?’

‘I doubt he’s even within fifty miles of home,’ Ben said. ‘That’s if they haven’t already got to him.’

They were silent for a moment. Both thinking the same thing: that their options were running dangerously thin again.

‘Just one name left on the list,’ Raul said. ‘McCauley. Another scientist, you can be sure.’

‘Only one way to find out,’ Ben said, and returned to his phone to start searching.

There were Mike McCauleys all over the internet. A platinum-selling country and western singer from Tennessee who’d developed Tourette’s Syndrome. The managing director of a Scottish pipe fitting firm based in Inverness. An Australian arsonist who’d attempted to burn down a government building in New South Wales as a protest over shark culling. None of those seemed especially likely candidates. Nor did the fourth, or the fifth, or the sixth Mike McCauley Ben checked out.

Ben finally scored on the seventh. ‘Got him,’ he said to Raul once he was certain. ‘This is our guy. Lives in London. He has a webpage and the email address is the same as the one Catalina was using.’

‘Let me see,’ Raul said, grabbing the phone and scrutinising the screen for a second or two before he looked up at Ben in surprise. If he’d been expecting to find another esteemed professor of astronomy, his expectations had been wildly off the mark.

‘He’s a reporter for some independent British newspaper called The Probe.’

‘He’s a little more than that,’ Ben said.

‘I see it,’ Raul said, reading. ‘Voted by the Press Gazette as the top investigative journalist of 2010 for his work unmasking corporate corruption in the wake of the BP Macando Prospect oil spill disaster. Then again in 2012, for being the first to expose a hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar money-laundering scam involving four major British banks. It says here, “Heroic and unstoppable, Mike McCauley’s relentless lone crusade as the scourge of greedy capitalist fatcats and rogue bureaucracies everywhere marks a return to the 1970s glory days of investigative journalism and is living proof that not everyone in his profession is fixated by the private lives of media stars and footballers.”’

‘Definitely not a fellow scientist, then,’ Ben said.

Raul blinked. ‘Why would my sister be in contact with a man like this?’

‘Not to give him the scoop on the latest celebrity gossip, presumably.’ Ben took the phone back from Raul and glanced at his watch. They’d been at it for two hours. ‘We’re done for tonight. You should get back to your room and catch some sleep, because we’ll have an early start in the morning.’

‘Why? Where are we going?’

‘First flight we can grab to London,’ Ben said.

‘On a plane? With these people following us everywhere we go?’

‘Then we’ll have to stay one step ahead of them,’ Ben said.

‘They could be a step ahead of us already, like before. I mean, they could already know about this McCauley. They could be waiting for us there. We could be walking right into a trap.’

‘Could be,’ Ben said. ‘But this time we won’t be surprised.’