The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The two men stepped into the room and quickly spread apart to flank the doorway. They were both about the same age, late twenties, early thirties. Both had the dead-eye look and the well-practised moves of professionals. One had the build of a runner, stringy and spare, the other was heavily bulked out from the weight room. A greyhound and a Rottweiler. The guns in their gloved fists were Glock nine-millimetres fitted with long tubular suppressors. A useful apparatus. They didn’t quite silence the high-pressure crack of a nine-millimetre to the soft dooophh you heard in movies, but they did mute the decibels conveniently enough for close-up execution work indoors. The two gunmen could empty their magazines into Ben, Raul and McCauley right here, right now, and not even the closest neighbour would hear a thing.

Raul and McCauley sat there speechless, locked rigid. Ben didn’t move either, but his mind was calm as he lucidly assessed the possibilities. Kitchens were often favourable environments for an unexpected armed confrontation, being generally well equipped with readily improvisable weaponry, and a savagely violent and swift counterattack was nearly always the best means of defence. McCauley had a row of copper pans hanging from hooks over the kitchen counter. Ben had once killed a man with a skillet, and had learned never to underestimate the combat value of high-quality cookware. Also prominent on the kitchen counter was the usual wooden knife block, housing the most effective lethal weapons that every household in Britain possesses, mostly without even realising it. The steel would be Sheffield, not Solingen this time. An academic distinction, under the circumstances.

But Ben knew it wouldn’t do him much good either way. The kitchen counter was a whole ten feet distant, and he was further disadvantaged by the fact that he was sitting down with the table between him and his objective. Even if by some miracle he could leap across to the knives, rip one out and hurl it accurately and fast enough to pin one of the two guys against the wall like a butterfly to a board, all the other one had to do was twitch a finger and the fight would be over as quickly as it had begun.

Ben forgot about the knives and switched his thoughts instead to the coffee mug in front of him. A solid piece of kiln-fired clay, with a bit of heft to it. As good as a cricket ball. A solid impact, well aimed, could shatter a nose or a cheekbone and put one enemy out of commission long enough to focus on the other. But then the other guy would still have ample time to pump four, five, six rounds into Ben. Same result.

So Ben forgot about that too, and considered the possibilities of evasion rather than resistance. The sliding glass door looking out onto the dusky back garden was a metre from his elbow. It had a metal frame and a metal handle with a key in it. No time to open the latch. He wondered how solid the glass was. What kind of an impact it would take to get through it. How badly a person might get cut by the jagged edges of the pane before managing to escape into the falling darkness. And what the odds were of all three of them getting through it before a shot was fired. Not great, that was for certain.

But even before Ben had given up on that option as well, two more men appeared in the back garden and came striding up to the glass window, carrying two more pistols down at their sides. Same make, same silencers. One of them rapped on the glass with the muzzle of his gun.

The Greyhound said to McCauley, ‘Open it.’ He spoke with an American accent. His voice was calm, almost casual. You didn’t need to be jumpy and tense when you were holding all the cards. McCauley stood up and stepped over to the window to turn the key in the metal handle. The gunman who had rapped on the glass opened the latch and slid the door brusquely open, and he and his companion stepped inside.

At which point, whatever ideas Ben might have had about resisting the invasion were reduced to less than zero. In a situation like this, four guns were considerably worse than twice as hard to fight against than two. It wouldn’t even count as a heroic death. It would be about as clever as trying to stop a runaway train by throwing yourself under the locomotive.

‘Sit down,’ the Greyhound said to McCauley, wagging his pistol at the empty chair. McCauley sat, pale-faced. Raul stared at the guns. Ben was perfectly immobile, his hands resting loosely on the table.

‘Stay exactly where you are,’ the Greyhound said. ‘Hands on the table where I can see them. Palms down. Nobody moves. Nobody speaks. Is that understood?’

Ben said nothing. Not because he’d been ordered to be silent, but because there just didn’t seem to be a lot to say. He remained still, and watched, and waited for whatever was going to come next.

The Greyhound stepped up to Ben. For an instant, Ben thought he was going to shoot him and his leg and back muscles tensed, ready to come spinning up out of the chair and trap the gun and break whatever bones were necessary to get it from the man’s hand. He might go down, but he wouldn’t go down alone.

But the Greyhound didn’t shoot. He bent quickly and picked up Ben’s green bag. Carried it over to the kitchen counter, undid the straps and checked inside. He gave Catalina’s science files and computer a cursory look-over, appeared satisfied that he had what he wanted, then strapped the bag shut and slung it over his shoulder.

‘Be careful with that,’ Ben said. ‘It’s a valuable antique.’

‘Shut up,’ one of the others said.

The Rottweiler had his phone out and had stepped back towards the hallway to make a call. All he said was, ‘S’done.’ He stood with his big shoulders hunched over the phone for a moment as he listened, then ended the call and stepped over to the Greyhound. They had a brief whispered conversation. The Rottweiler pointed at McCauley and shook his head. The Greyhound shrugged impassively, then turned back towards the table and wagged his gun first at Raul, then at Ben.

‘You and you, on your feet. Let’s go. Not you,’ he added for McCauley, who was confusedly getting up from his chair. ‘You stay put.’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Raul said. ‘You sons of whores will just have to shoot me.’ The one who’d told Ben to shut up made a grab for Raul’s shoulder. Raul slapped his hand away. ‘Get your fucking paws off me.’

The Greyhound walked up to Raul and pressed the business end of his Glock silencer against his temple. ‘You’ll do as we say, or you’ll die. Your choice.’

Raul hesitated for a second, then glanced at Ben. Ben was ninety-nine percent certain that they wouldn’t shoot Raul. They wanted him for something. But a one percent chance was still a one percent chance. He gave Raul a look that said ‘Be cool’. Raul seemed to understand. He stood up.

‘You,’ the Greyhound warned McCauley. ‘Stay in that chair for ten minutes without moving. Call the police at any time, breathe a word to anyone about what you have seen here today, we will know about it and will come back for you. Am I clear?’

The last Ben saw of McCauley was a blanched face staring at them in bewilderment from the kitchen table as he and Raul were marched out of the room with gun muzzles in their backs. Ben was wondering why they’d been singled out from McCauley. But more than that, he was wondering why he himself was still alive. In Germany, the strategy had been clear: Ben was the expendable one, to be taken down. Suddenly, it seemed that they wanted him, too. Something had changed, but Ben couldn’t imagine what.

Two of the men brushed past them in the hallway. One opened the front door, the other stepped outside to check the coast was clear, then motioned for the rest to follow. Ben and Raul were walked outside. Night was falling and the air was cold and heavy with dampness that swirled and drifted in amber haloes around the street lights and the lit-up windows of the street. Outside McCauley’s garden gate was parked a plain black Hyundai crew-cab van that hadn’t been there earlier, with a fifth man waiting at the wheel and the engine running.

Ben hesitated when he saw the van. The Rottweiler’s big hand pressed against his back and shoved him forwards. Ben could have twisted the hand and snapped the bones in the man’s forearm quicker than it took to jerk a trigger. He let himself be pushed towards the gate. The Greyhound opened up the crew-cab side door and tossed Ben’s green bag inside. The one with the German accent walked to the back of the van and opened the rear doors. ‘Inside,’ the Rottweiler said, and this time it was hard steel Ben felt pressing against his back.

The cargo area of the Hyundai was bare metal inside, with nowhere to sit but the two facing wheel arches. Ben had ridden in the back of plenty of vans before. He should be used to it by now. ‘This is the worst limo service I’ve ever seen,’ he said to the Rottweiler.

The man didn’t seem amused as he waved them inside with his gun. Ben sat on the hard, cold wheel arch. Now might be the time to light up one of those Mayfairs. Have a smoke, wait for them to get moving, then start planning a way to break out of the van and make their escape while it was stopped at a red light. It wasn’t much of a plan.

And it turned out to be even less of a plan a second later, when the Rottweiler and one of his buddies clambered into the back of the Hyundai with them and produced two black cloth hoods. Ben sat and let himself be hooded. He heard Raul mutter a curse in Spanish. Then a gun was pressed to his temple as his hands were grabbed and his wrists fastened quickly and expertly together with something thin and strong that felt like a plastic cable tie.

So much for escape. Ben felt the rear suspension lighten as their captors jumped out, leaving them alone in the back. The doors slammed shut with a resonating clang. More noises as the men all piled into the van, doors closed and then they were speeding away.