The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Forty-Three

‘Car?’ Raul said.

Catalina nodded. ‘Following me, in the street.’

‘What colour was it?’ Ben asked her.

‘Dark. Metallic grey, I think.’

‘What make?’

‘I don’t really know cars that well. It might have been a BMW. It was a big saloon car. Why are you asking?’

‘Go on,’ Ben said.

‘They weren’t the usual photographers chasing me around. This was different, and I was scared. I ran down an alley that was too narrow for the car. Two men got out and started walking fast after me. I ran. My heart was thumping like crazy. I was certain they were coming after me. For what purpose, I didn’t even want to imagine. Then, by a miracle, I spotted an empty taxicab coming by and I managed to wave it down, and got the driver to drive randomly around half of Munich before I finally let him bring me home. Even then, I kept thinking about what Maxwell had said. By now, I was absolutely sure that something sinister was going on, and somebody was bugging my apartment. How else could Grant have known all that about my guitar playing?’

‘But why?’ Raul said, bewildered. ‘Why would anybody bug your apartment? And what’s this guy from the party, this Grant, got to do with it?’

Catalina held up a hand to shush him. ‘Just listen, okay? I’ll explain. I was so freaked out, I didn’t know what to do. I kept thinking about Grant and what he’d said to me. Was it just a coincidence that he was at the party? Or was he there because I was? What could that mean, that I was being followed? Targeted? Had someone sneaked into my apartment when I wasn’t there, and planted listening devices? Hidden cameras, even? I spent the whole day searching, but I couldn’t find anything. I felt as if I was being watched all the time. It was so creepy, I couldn’t bear to be there alone at night, so I packed a bag and slipped out. If anyone was following me, I had to give them the slip. I’ve never ridden in so many buses and taxicabs in my life. Place to place, all over the city, until I was sure nobody was behind me. Hours later, I turned up at the Mandarin Oriental wearing my blonde disguise, and took a room under the name Carmen Hernandez. They probably thought I was a high-class prostitute, looking like that. The next day I called a firm in Munich who specialise in surveillance detection, and arranged for one of their experts to sweep my apartment for bugs.’

‘This was July sixth,’ Ben said. He was counting off the days. There were only ten of them to go before Catalina’s car dropped into the Baltic Sea.

She nodded. ‘But the bug people said they didn’t have anyone available until the eighth. Talk about German efficiency. The same day, I contacted Mike McCauley at his newspaper offices.’

‘Posing as Carmen Hernandez again,’ Raul said.

‘I suppose he told you about our meeting three days later in Munich?’

‘He told us everything.’

‘It was a long time to wait. I kicked my heels the whole of the seventh in my hotel room. Then, late morning on the eighth, I was just about to set off to meet the bug people at my apartment when I got the call from Jim Lockhart, telling me…’ Her words trailed off and she took another quick sip of whisky.

‘Telling you that your mutual colleague, Dougal Sinclair, and his entire expedition team had just been killed in Greenland,’ Ben said.

Catalina looked at him. ‘You know a lot.’

‘All except what this is about,’ he replied.

‘Does Mike McCauley have no idea?’ she asked.

‘If he does, he’s the best liar I’ve ever come across.’

‘I could have revealed everything to him that day in Munich, but I chose not to. By then I was beginning to understand what was going on. I knew we were in danger.’

‘Then the next day, Lockhart was killed,’ Ben said.

‘And when I tried to call Steve Ellis, he wouldn’t answer his phone. First I thought the worst had happened to him, then I saw the message on his website and realised that he’d run. That’s when I knew I was going to have to do the same. They were hunting us down one by one. My only hope of cheating them was to disappear. So I started making my plans, working them out down to the finest detail. I had to be extremely careful, to make it work and not to get caught in the process. The first thing I did was leave my Porsche hidden in an underground car park, where nobody would find it.’

‘Next you went to your doctor,’ Ben said. ‘You told him the old feelings of depression were coming back, and that you needed medication.’

Catalina cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘You do know a lot, mystery man. That’s right. I put on quite a show for him, too. So many tears, he was almost weeping too. How could he resist filling out a nice prescription for the damsel in distress? Then I sneaked back to my apartment. That was the scariest part. I was terrified one of them would be there waiting to murder me. But nobody was. I slipped inside and planted the drugs, where I knew they would be found by the police. Of course, first I flushed a lot of pills down the toilet, to make it look as if I’d been taking them like there was no tomorrow, literally. What better way to lend credence to my suicide?’

‘I can’t believe you could plan it like this,’ Raul said. ‘It was so cold, so detached.’

‘I’m a scientist,’ Catalina replied. ‘Cold and detached is what I do. But don’t think this was easy for me. While I was trying so hard to be methodical, at the same time it ripped my heart out, knowing the step I was about to take. Next, I knew I was going to need money. But for my scheme to work, I couldn’t afford to leave a glaring clue like a large bank withdrawal just days before my death. There had to be another way to raise some cash.’

‘That’s the easy part,’ Keller cut in, grinning.

‘Not for me, not in that moment,’ she said, firing him a look. ‘Coming to you for help wasn’t part of my plan then. So,’ she resumed, ‘while I was in the apartment I gathered my most valuable pieces of jewellery. The following day, I slipped out of the hotel for the last time and took a very roundabout route to this pawnshop I remembered passing, where I got what pathetic sum of money that nasty little man would give me for my beautiful things. I couldn’t even afford to pay the hotel bill. From the pawnshop, I took another roundabout route in more buses and taxis back to where my car was hidden, and drove away from Munich without anyone seeing me. Four days later, I was standing on the edge of a cliff on Rügen Island, watching the car fall into the sea with me supposedly inside it. And then I was alone. More alone than I’d ever been in my life before.’

‘You didn’t have to be,’ Raul said. ‘You could have come to me. Instead you went to him.’ He pointed again at Keller.

‘In case you hadn’t noticed,’ Keller said, ‘I have the manpower and the resources to keep her safe.’

Raul glared at him. ‘I’m her brother. Nobody would protect her like her own family. Not even you.’

‘Oh, Raul,’ Catalina said. ‘You know I wanted to. But how could I bring danger to you? Austin’s right. His men are all experienced security personnel.’

Ben could see Raul was getting angry. The last thing anyone needed was Keller laid out flat on the floor from one of the Spaniard’s formidable punches. Keller, least of all. Putting a hand on Raul’s shoulder he said, ‘Go easy. She panicked, nothing more. Don’t take it personally.’

Catalina threw up her hands. ‘It’s true, I admit it. Everything had happened so fast, I hadn’t had time to even begin to imagine what it would feel like afterwards. It didn’t hit me until I was walking away from the cliff. Suddenly here I was, except I wasn’t me any more. I was completely cut off from everything I’d been, everything I had, everyone I knew. Heartbroken and frightened, a fugitive, having to hide my face from the world. I spent my first night in a cheap hotel, worrying whether anyone would recognise me through my disguise. I was even afraid to eat a proper meal, because I kept thinking about how long my money was going to have to last. I didn’t sleep for a second that night, even though I was exhausted. I kept working all those questions over and over in my head. Would these people fall for my ploy? Had I missed anything? Had I made any mistakes, left any evidence? The tiniest error, and they might see right through it, and all this would have been for nothing. If they came after me, they’d catch me even more easily than before. I couldn’t hide out in expensive hotels any longer. I didn’t even have a car. I was still alive, but—’

‘But you were beginning to regret your actions,’ Ben said. ‘You’ve been regretting them ever since.’

Catalina eyed Ben curiously, as if wondering how he could see inside her thoughts. ‘Yes, I admit that too,’ she answered after a beat. ‘I rushed into it all too fast. I was too busy planning the details to see the bigger picture. In retrospect, it could have been a mistake.’

‘No, babe, you did the right thing,’ Keller said.

Ben saw the irritated flash in her eye at being called ‘babe’, and wondered about the relationship between the two. He considered Keller for a moment. The Canadian didn’t seem like a bad guy. He was obviously highly protective of her. Then again, all this was working out nicely for him.

Ben turned to Keller and said, ‘So — these expert security guys of yours. You had them watching McCauley’s place in London in case the bad guys would turn up there, didn’t you? He was the bait.’

Keller was about to reply, but Catalina did it for him. ‘I didn’t mean it to be that way. It was Austin’s idea. He convinced me that it was the only sure way to tell if Grant’s people believed I was dead or not. If they hadn’t fallen for the deception, then sooner or later they’d come for him.’

Ben smiled. ‘Then what, you’d have let them kill the guy?’

‘My men are better than to let that happen,’ Keller said.

‘Don’t count on it,’ Ben replied.

‘The idea was to try and gather some kind of incriminating evidence to use against Grant,’ Catalina said. ‘It was the only way to prove for certain he was involved, and why.’

‘Flimsy,’ Ben said. ‘For a start, it’s unlikely that hired hitters would even know who was paying them. Did you see that work in some third-rate movie you produced, Keller?’

‘You have any better ideas?’ Keller demanded.

‘In the event, it turned out differently,’ Catalina said. ‘When they saw two men turn up at McCauley’s place they photographed you on your way in, and emailed the images to us here. I couldn’t believe it was Raul, searching for me and putting himself in danger. I had to do something to get you away from there.’

Raul gave Keller a dark grin. ‘You’re lucky you’re not having to recruit another bunch of goons right now.’ He pointed at Ben. ‘This guy here, he could have taken them out, just like—’

‘All right,’ Ben interrupted him, then turned to Catalina, who was watching him with the same intense curiosity as before. ‘So here we are in protective custody on Austin’s cosy island retreat. Safe as houses. And you still haven’t told us what this is all about, but I can guess.’

‘Then guess,’ she said.

‘I think you already have a pretty clear idea why this Maxwell Grant is involved,’ Ben said.

Catalina smiled. ‘So do you, by the sound of it.’

‘Two astronomers, one a solar physicist and one an astroglaciologist, ganged up with a climatologist and an Antarctic oceanography expert. Just a little rag-tag team of maverick scientists, apparently under fire from one of the richest and most powerful players in the environmentalist lobby. That’s what you’re suggesting, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘You don’t have to be a genius to figure it out, do you? Did I forget to mention that Grant is also the founder and chairman of ISACC, the International Society for Action on Climate Change, which attracts gigantic funding from governments all over the world?’

‘The four of you must have stirred things up quite a bit.’

‘That would be an understatement,’ she said. ‘When you consider what’s at stake. Our future. The fate of our planet. Not to say the multi-billion-dollar industry run and promoted by the likes of Maxwell Grant. And the biggest scientific fraud of all time.’