The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Thirty-Six

‘All right,’ McCauley said a few minutes later when the three of them were sitting around the table in his tiny kitchen, by a sliding glass door that looked out onto his even smaller million-pound back garden. McCauley’s hair was combed and he’d put on a denim shirt and a pair of baggy green chinos. The kitchen table had the look of being handcarved by indigenous people of somewhere or other. The coffee was Fairtrade stuff from Guatemala, served in stoneware mugs. McCauley had fouled his with soya milk. Raul hadn’t wanted any. He was already wound up enough. Ben took it black. It tasted pretty good.

McCauley took a deep breath and looked at Raul. ‘On July sixth, a woman calling herself Carmen Hernandez called the Probe offices and said she wanted to speak to me. When she was put through to my personal line, she apologised for the deception and said that her real name was Catalina Fuentes. Naturally, due to her celebrity, I already knew who she was. It’s not unheard of for famous people to go by false names now and then, but I was surprised that she had contacted me. I was even more surprised when she said she wanted to meet, somewhere we could talk confidentially. She said she was aware of the kind of journalism I did, had been following my work and so on and so forth, and that she had something to tell me that would be of great interest to me. I could tell right away that something odd was going on, and that she was deeply afraid.’

‘So you met with her?’ Raul asked.

McCauley nodded. ‘In Munich, three days later, on July ninth. She set the whole thing up, paid my travel expenses by wire transfer. A car turned up to collect me from the airport, drove me to a dingy hotel in a less salubrious part of town, and dropped me off with instructions to go to room 22. A little weird. Not exactly what I’d expected.’ McCauley gave a tight smile. ‘As you might imagine, unorthodox and clandestine meetings are hardly unusual in my line of work. But those are normally with crooks, whistleblowers or informants, not with glamorous television stars. After I’d been waiting alone in the room for ten minutes, wondering what the hell this was about, she arrived. I wouldn’t have recognised her. She was wearing a blond wig and dark glasses. That’s when I knew she really was serious. And scared out of her wits.’

Ben sipped coffee. ‘Go on.’

‘It took her a while to compose herself. I got the impression that she was nervous of me, at first. I mean, here she was meeting this total stranger in a seedy hotel room. Evidently not the kind of thing she was used to. I could sense that she was having second thoughts about the meeting, and was verging on running off at any moment. I did my best to put her at her ease, and after a few minutes she began to open up to me.’

‘What did she say?’ Raul asked.

‘First, she apologised for having made me come all the way to Germany. Said it wasn’t because she considered herself so important that people had to come to her, but rather that she was nervous about coming to London to see me because she believed she was being followed, and she didn’t want to implicate me. She was convinced that someone was trying to do her harm, because of something she’d become involved in through her work.’

‘Her scientific work?’ Ben said. ‘Solar physics?’ His green bag was propped against his feet, full of Catalina’s solar research notes and the William Herschel file. He’d been half hoping that McCauley could shed some light on this stuff.

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ McCauley said, killing Ben’s optimism at a stroke. ‘She didn’t elaborate, and it was a short meeting. Nor did she reveal to me specifically who was apparently threatening her, or what reason they might have had for doing so. A very cautious woman.’

‘Didn’t she tell you anything at all?’ Ben asked.

McCauley shrugged. ‘Like I say, we didn’t talk for long. I think she just wanted to see me face to face that one time to sound me out. Like a preliminary interview, to decide whether she could trust me enough to tell me more. She kept asking me if I thought I could help her. Offered to pay me whatever price I wanted, as long as it could be strictly secret. I replied that I didn’t want money, and there was little I could do, without more information. She said she was sorry for being so secretive, and that when I knew the rest I’d understand why it had to be that way, and why she’d chosen me to confide in, and how much of a huge deal this was. We exchanged private email addresses, and then she was gone. We hadn’t been together for thirty minutes. An hour later I was getting on a flight back home to London.’

Ben raised an eyebrow. ‘What kind of a huge deal are we talking about?’

‘What can I tell you?’ McCauley said. ‘But think about it. Why come to me? My job is to expose corruption in high places. That’s what I’m known for, and it’s fairly safe to assume that’s why she chose me out of a thousand other guys. I could only assume this was something very big indeed, involving the kind of major high-profile players I have a record of chasing after. That’s as much as I was able to glean, reading between the lines.’

‘What about the emails?’ Raul cut in.

‘There was only one,’ McCauley said. ‘When I got back to London I found a message from Catalina in my inbox. She thanked me for my time, apologised once again for the strangeness and brevity of our meeting, and promised to be in touch soon. I didn’t feel the need to reply to it, and I never heard from her again.’

Ben had the timeline firmly in his mind. In the three days between contacting the journalist and the meeting taking place, Catalina must have heard about Sinclair’s death in the Greenland light aircraft crash, making whatever anxieties she already had even worse. Then, the day after their meeting, Lockhart had been murdered at home in New Zealand and Ellis had apparently gone on the run. That news must have been the tipping point, after which events had started rolling so fast that she hadn’t had time to contact McCauley again. Within a week of the hotel room rendezvous, she’d disappeared herself.

‘And that’s all you know?’ Ben said.

‘That’s all she told me,’ McCauley replied. He paused a beat, seemed about to add more, then clammed up again.

‘There’s more, isn’t there?’ Ben said.

‘She might have mentioned a couple of names to me,’ McCauley said.

‘Names?’

‘Of people who were also involved. Three, to be more precise.’

‘Names like Sinclair, Lockhart and Ellis?’ Ben said.

McCauley went silent for the longest time. Like Catalina in the Munich hotel room, he looked as if he was trying to decide whether or not he could trust these strangers. Finally, he looked at Raul and said, ‘You don’t believe your sister committed suicide.’

‘Of course I don’t,’ Raul said.

McCauley shook his head.

‘Neither do I,’ he said.