The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Forty-One

Ben stared at Catalina Fuentes. She was wearing jeans and a navy jumper, a far cry from the photos he’d seen of her. She was also about six times more attractive in real life. Her hair was trimmed a few inches shorter and dyed a few shades lighter, as if she’d been trying to alter her appearance. Most noticeably of all, it appeared that she certainly wasn’t dead. Raul had been right all along.

‘You’re alive!’ Raul yelled in Spanish, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘Oh my God you’re alive!’

Ben watched him run up the path towards her. She’d stopped walking and was just looking at her brother. Instead of embracing him, she suddenly lashed out with the flat of her hand and slapped him hard across the cheek with a sound that reached Ben’s ears like the crack of a whip.

‘Eres un estúpido!’ she shouted.

Raul drew back as if he’d touched a high-voltage fence. He touched his fingers to his cheek where she’d slapped him. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘You shouldn’t have come looking for me!’ Catalina yelled at him in Spanish, taking an angry step towards him. ‘Now you’ve ruined everything, you fool!’

It wasn’t exactly the welcome Raul had expected. He was speechless with shock. Ben was almost as taken aback as he was. Raul stood blinking at her for a few seconds, then his shock burned away into anger and he started shouting back.

‘I’ve ruined everything?! What the hell is all of this about? Have you any idea what you’ve done to our family, to your parents? You broke their hearts. Are you crazy? Tell me!’

‘I’m not crazy,’ Catalina said, tight-lipped. ‘If you knew, you’d understand.’

‘Then tell me!’ Raul yelled. ‘To begin with, tell me what the hell you’re doing here on this rock in the middle of the ocean!’

Catalina’s gaze shifted away from Raul and landed on Ben. ‘Who’s this with you?’ she demanded.

Ben walked towards them and was about to introduce himself, but Raul did it for him. ‘His name is Ben. He’s been helping me to find you. It’s thanks to him that I’m here.’

‘Then he’s a stupid idiot as well,’ Catalina said. ‘Does he speak Spanish?’

‘Sí,’ Ben said.

She crossed her arms and gave Ben a hostile glower. She looked a million miles from the terrified, furtive victim Ben had observed on the pawnbroker’s security video footage back in Munich.

At that moment, a second figure emerged from the lighthouse and started making his way down the path towards them. He was ten or a dozen years older than Catalina, slim and well-groomed with a thick head of hair going elegantly silver. He was dressed as if he’d been about to take in a leisurely nine holes before breakfast, in chinos and a silk shirt with a V-necked cardigan to keep out the morning chill.

Raul raised an accusing finger at him. ‘Oh, no. Please tell me I’m dreaming. Keller? What’s he doing here?’

‘This is his island,’ Catalina said. ‘He owns it.’

‘I should have known that slimy bastard was behind this,’ Raul growled, clenching his fists.

‘You don’t understand,’ Catalina said. ‘You have absolutely no idea, Raul.’

Keller reached them. The four stood facing one another, Ben at Raul’s shoulder, Keller at Catalina’s. Up close, Keller’s face was lined, but tanned and handsome. His eyes were cool blue. They passed over Raul and he looked at Ben. ‘Austin J. Keller the Third,’ he said confidently, putting out his hand. His accent was Canadian, softened by years in Europe. ‘And you are?’

Ben ignored the hand. ‘Interested in hearing some explanations,’ he said.

Keller stiffened, and the confidence in his eyes wavered momentarily. Catalina and Raul were still bristling at one another. Raul was shaking his head in disbelief, his face dark. Catalina looked ready to slap him again. Behind them, Keller’s crew had got out of the Jeeps and were clustered beside them, watching from a distance and ready to intervene if needed.

‘You already met my guys,’ Keller said. Pointing at the Greyhound, he added, ‘That’s Bauer. He’s my chief of security.’ Then he pointed at the pilot. ‘Avery, he’s my Top Gun. Then there’s Spencer, Willis, Emmert, Fulton and Griggs. They’re all good guys.’

‘You can tell the Magnificent Seven not to get any closer,’ Ben said.

Keller stared at him for a second, then waved a discreet signal to his men, telling them to stand down. ‘I think we’d all better go inside.’

The interior of the lighthouse was adapted into one of the most luxurious homes that Ben had ever seen, a circular open-plan mansion on numerous floors that must have cost millions to convert. The art and antiques were worth probably as much again. But then, Ben realised, millions were clearly nothing to a man who owned private islands and jets and could sail the world in his magnificent twin-masted schooner. So this was Austin Keller. The man whose name Raul Fuentes couldn’t utter without the prefix ‘That bastard’. The man who’d broken Catalina’s heart. And now, it appeared, the man Ben and Raul had to thank for bringing them here. Ben was beginning to realise how mistaken his assumptions had been — but the truth seemed even stranger.

‘So this is where you’ve been all along, is that right?’ Raul said, still speaking Spanish and looking around him as if he could spit on the priceless Persian carpet under his feet. ‘How nice for you.’ Eyeing Keller with open dislike, he then switched to English to snort, ‘Are we allowed to know where we are, exactly?

‘The island of Icthyios, west of the Southern Sporades,’ Keller said with something of a flourish. ‘Karpathos a little to the south of us, Rhodes a touch further to the east. Our own little private haven, right where the Aegean meets the Sea of Crete. Eight and a half square kilometres. Mentioned in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.’

Ben realised his location estimate was off, but only by about five hundred or so miles. ‘And nobody lives here?’

‘Nobody but us,’ Keller said, proudly sweeping his arm.

‘Icthyios,’ Raul said. ‘Isn’t that some kind of skin disease?’

Keller flushed a shade darker and cleared his throat. He glanced at Catalina, then smiled and in a breezy tone said, ‘You must be hungry. Some breakfast, perhaps?’

‘Let’s go,’ Raul said to Catalina. ‘We’re getting out of this place.’

‘Go where?’ Keller asked, eyes widening.

‘I was talking to my sister, if you don’t mind.’

‘I’m sorry things are like this,’ Catalina said to Raul. ‘What more can I say to you?’

‘You could tell me what happened. That would be a start.’

‘I wasn’t in the car,’ Catalina said.

‘Obviously. I gathered that.’

‘I drove all the way to Rügen Island, making sure nobody followed me. I took the car up onto the cliff path and parked a little way from the edge with the gearbox in neutral. Then I got out, and reached back in and put it back in drive, took off the parking brake, and I stood back and watched it roll off the edge.’

Catalina’s eyes clouded thickly with tears as she spoke. ‘You want to know the last thing I said before I did it? I said, “Forgive me, Raul.” Because I knew how badly I was going to hurt you, and everyone else that I love. I can hardly stand the guilt, living with what I did to you all. But I did it for a reason, Raul. You weren’t supposed to come looking for me. This is all messed up. You’ve compromised my whole plan.’

Raul was crying, too, as mixed emotions of relief and anger finally got the better of his self-control. ‘Your plan? What kind of plan is it to pretend to your family that you didn’t even want to go on living? Was that your idea, or do we have this guy to thank for it?’ Raul jabbed a finger towards Keller without looking at him. ‘I mean, we all know he’s this oddball recluse or whatever he’s supposed to be, and he was always pressuring you to run off and hide away someplace in one of his retreats with him. I thought that was all over and done with, years ago. I thought you were stronger than this. How could you do it?’

‘I am not an oddball recluse,’ Keller said, indignant. ‘I just value my privacy, is all.’

‘You’re getting this completely wrong, Raul,’ Catalina said. ‘Austin had nothing to do with it. Nothing at all. I’d never intended to involve him, but then I needed a safe place to go, and he offered to bring me here. Up until that moment I acted alone, just me, nobody else, and it was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. You have to believe that hurting you, hurting our parents, was the last thing on earth I would ever have chosen to do. But I had no choice.’

‘You trusted him,’ Raul said, throwing a look at Keller. ‘But you couldn’t trust me, your own brother?’

‘I did what I had to do,’ Catalina said.

‘What have you got yourself into? Who are these people who are after you?’

Catalina turned a little pale. ‘You know about them?’

‘Of course I know about them.’

‘How? Why?’

‘Because they tried to kill me too,’ Raul said. ‘They had guns. They kill people, that’s what they do.’

Catalina was too stunned to reply, so Ben spoke to her for the first time. ‘Actually, that’s not quite what happened,’ he said. ‘Whoever these people are, they were trying to kidnap your brother, to extract information from him that would help them find you. You’re in a lot of trouble, Miss Fuentes.’

Catalina stared at Ben as if seeing him for the first time. ‘They tried to kidnap Raul?’ she asked in a shaky voice.

‘They were professional gunmen,’ Ben said. ‘The best money can buy.’

‘Then how—?’

‘How did we get away?’ Raul said. ‘Because they weren’t the best. Ben is the best. I would be dead now, if he hadn’t been there.’

Catalina didn’t take her tear-filled eyes off Ben. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. Who are you? How do you know my brother?’

‘He’s just a guy I met in a bar,’ Ben said.

Catalina stared a little longer, then another thought hit her. ‘Oh, God. And this happened—?’

‘In Germany,’ Raul said. ‘At your observatory. We had some problems there.’

‘Your friend Kazem is dead,’ Ben told her. He couldn’t think of a gentler way to break it. ‘I’m sorry. He didn’t suffer,’ he added.

Whether Catalina believed his lie or not, the news left her winded. Suddenly looking years older, she staggered to the nearest armchair and fell into it. Keller hurried to her side and clutched her arm as she buried her face in her hands and didn’t move for a long minute. Then she looked up, her eyes wet with tears and pain etched deeply into the beauty of her face. She looked at Raul, and in a steady voice she said, ‘It’s because of you that Kazem is dead. If you hadn’t come looking for me, everything would have been all right. I had everything planned. That place was a secret, Raul, and you must have led them there.’

Raul’s face fell. ‘What was I supposed to do?’ He muttered it a couple of times, then went quiet.

Catalina stood up and took his hands in hers. Squeezing them tightly, she kissed his cheek where she’d slapped him. ‘You’re my twin brother. I love you, and I forgive you, like I’d forgive you for anything. You weren’t to know what would happen. It’s as much my fault as it is yours.’ Turning to Ben, she said, ‘I thank you for protecting Raul, whoever you are. I can never repay you for that.’

‘If it’s money you want—’ Keller began.

Ben silenced him with a look. He said to Catalina, ‘I don’t want your money. I want just one thing. I need you to tell me what this is about.’