The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Fifty-One

When Ben and Keller returned to the ground-floor lighthouse living area a few moments later they were met by a dishevelled and hungover Raul, who had finally been roused by all the commotion and come stumbling downstairs, clad in only his boxer shorts. The instant Ben saw his face, he knew something was wrong.

Raul was clutching a note. ‘It’s from her,’ he muttered in a cracked voice. ‘I found it on my pillow just now, when I woke up. It says, “I’m sorry. For the second time, I ask that you try to understand that I had no choice, and forgive me. Love to you and our dear parents, Catalina”.’

‘No choice?’ Keller yelled, veins standing out all over his forehead. ‘That’s a joke. Do you know what your maniac sister just did? Oh, nothing serious, just a small matter of hijacking my damn plane. Gone. Whoosh. Out of here. Disappeared into the night. Her and my pilot, with a frigging gun to his head. Get the picture?’

Raul turned to Ben, speechless.

‘It’s true,’ Ben said.

‘What am I supposed to do now?’ Keller said, pointing a finger upwards at the sky. ‘That crazy fucking bitch has got my Learjet.’

Raul darkened a shade at the insult. ‘Watch your mouth, Keller. You don’t talk about my sister that way.’

‘You people are all the same,’ Keller went on loudly, jabbing the finger at Raul. ‘Deep down, she’s just another Spanish hothead like you are. Christ, what was I even thinking, getting mixed up with her?’

Raul clenched his jaw and showed Keller a balled-up fist, four white knuckles under his nose. ‘You say one more word, pendejo, and you’ll get this right in your teeth.’

‘What did you call me?’ Keller said, stiffening.

‘You’ve had it coming for a long time,’ Raul said. ‘Don’t push me, understand?’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Keller exploded. ‘I’ll push you, Fuentes. I’ll push you right off my fucking island. All the way back to fucking Spain.’ He shoved Raul in the chest.

By the time Ben had had time to think, Here we go again, it had already happened. Raul seemed to coil like a snake, and then his fist lashed out too fast for the eye to follow. It caught Keller square in the side of the jaw, with a sound like a cleaver chopping into a bony shoulder of mutton. Keller’s head snapped back. He seemed to hang in space for an instant, unconscious on his feet. Then he collapsed into an armchair and lay slumped with his chin on his chest and his arms hanging limply by his sides.

‘That was constructive,’ Ben said. ‘At least you didn’t set him on fire.’

‘To hell with him,’ Raul said, with a gesture of contempt. ‘Now let’s go. We have to find her, and stop her.’

‘No, Raul,’ Ben said.

Raul looked at him.

‘I have to find her and stop her,’ Ben said. ‘You’re not coming with me. I almost let you get yourself killed the first time. That’s not an option any more.’

Raul blinked.

And in the instant that he blinked, Ben punched him. It had to be fast, because Raul had the reflexes of a panther. And it couldn’t be a tickle, either, because the Spaniard could probably take the knocks as well as he could deliver them, and Ben wasn’t much inclined to get into a protracted toe-to-toe fistfight with the guy. Then again, it had to be well judged. If there was one thing that separated someone of Raul’s training from someone of Ben’s, it was that not everyone was taught how to inflict a lethal single blow. And fewer people still had had occasion to practise it for real.

So Ben hit him as suddenly and as hard and as square as he could without killing him or doing lasting damage. Raul didn’t see it coming. The punch knocked him out cold and he hit the floor at the feet of the unconscious Keller, still clutching his sister’s note.

Ben felt bad about it, but he would have felt worse if it had been any other way. He hauled Raul’s limp body into a facing armchair, wondering which of the two would wake up first.

‘I won’t let anything happen to her, Raul,’ he said. ‘That’s a promise.’

Every second that counted down, the jet plane with Catalina on it was approximately sixteen kilometres further away. Ben ran up to his room and grabbed his jacket and bag, then raced back downstairs and outside to the Jeep.

The first light of dawn was approaching, a blood-red glow on the eastern horizon. Bauer and the other five of Keller’s remaining crew were hanging around the buildings, looking variously sheepish and ready for war. Griggs and Spencer were nursing pistols, as though somehow the situation could be remedied with firepower. Ben suspected that Willis would have been clutching his, too, if Catalina hadn’t got it now.

‘Where’s the chief?’ Bauer asked Ben.

‘Indisposed,’ Ben said. ‘I’d leave him to get over it, if I were you. That’s if I wanted to hang onto my job.’

Without another word, Ben got back into the Jeep, roared it into life and accelerated away, leaving them all standing there watching him. For the third and last time, he did the ninety-second high-speed drive between the lighthouse and the beach, and skidded to a halt at the foot of the pebbly rise. The breaking dawn was bleeding through a morning mist that shrouded the coastline of Sárla in the distance.

Ben clambered out of his vehicle and took a few steps up the rise. The Jeep Catalina had used to make her escape was still exactly as it had been before, looking abandoned and forlorn with its doors hanging open and its headlights dimmed to an amber glow as the battery ran down. He turned away and ran for the jetty, heading for the boathouse. If Catalina had taken one of the boats, as he’d mistakenly anticipated, then he might have had a chance of catching up with her as she cut across to Sárla to catch the ferry to Karpathos. As things stood, there was simply no way he’d ever make up for the head start she had on him. He could maybe reckon on crossing the stretch of ocean in an hour, minimum. During which time a Learjet with a cruising speed of around Mach 0.8 would have covered a further nine hundred kilometres or more. And then he’d still have to waste yet more time waiting for the ferry to take him from Sárla to somewhere they had things like aeroplanes.

Not good.

Then a movement caught the corner of Ben’s eye, and he paused in his step to turn to his left and look in that direction. What he’d seen were the mastheads of Keller’s yacht, visible over the rise and drifting gently from side to side on the ocean’s swell.

She’s a breeze to sail, Keller had said. Hell, I could take her around the world single-handed.

‘Hmm,’ Ben said.

Five minutes later, the outboard motor boat was burbling away from the shore, across the shallows to where Shanghai Lady lay at anchor. Up close, the schooner’s sides reflected the crimson dapples of the dawn sun off the water, and her elegant masts and immaculately furled sails towered overhead. Ben brought the motor boat in close to the hull, where a retractable boarding ladder extended down to meet him. He tossed his bag up onto the deck and mounted the ladder, letting the motor boat drift away.

The smooth hardwood deck, all hundred-and-twenty-odd feet of it, pitched and heeled gently under his feet. Shanghai Lady was a thing of beauty, a floating work of art — but Ben was more concerned about his practical ability to sail the thing single-handed. The moment he stepped inside the wheelhouse, he saw that Keller hadn’t been kidding about the electronics. Amid all the expanses of magnificent varnished walnut, there was probably as much technology at his disposal as Avery had on board the Learjet. Multifunction displays boasted everything from smart-control autopilot to sonar fishfinder module, automated sail control, thermal marine cameras, radar and GPS navigation, voyage planner, chart plotting software and plenty more stuff that Ben wasn’t going to need.

‘Now let’s see if we can’t make up a little lost time,’ he said to himself. It was already nearly quarter to seven and the sun was breaking free of the horizon. In minutes, the anchor had been winched aboard, the engines were thrusting at full throttle and Shanghai Lady was tracking away from Icthyios, cleaving through the water with a white bow wave and a foamy white wake curving away behind her. Ben set his course to bypass the island of Sárla and make sail for Karpathos, which his on-board trip computer told him would take just a few hours. He radioed ahead to inform the port harbour master of his arrival, and got his permission to land. Insurance and harbour fees were all magically taken care of, courtesy of Austin J. Keller III.

Keller been right about Shanghai Lady. The schooner could sail itself, and it was much faster than it looked. But not fast enough. Frustrated, Ben paced the deck and wished that he had his cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked a Gauloise since leaving Germany. The way he was going, there was a real risk that he might lapse into a clean and healthy lifestyle.

The morning wore on. Sky and ocean lightened to a glittering azure blue as the sun climbed high overhead. Ben gazed up at the bright yellow ball in the sky, and wondered whether it was his imagination that it didn’t feel particularly warm for the time of year. Catalina’s climate predictions were hard to shake from his mind. He was still musing about them when he spied land on the horizon, dead ahead in the far distance. The wheelhouse instruments confirmed that he was approaching Karpathos.

Seven forty-five a.m. Just over two hours had already passed since Catalina’s escape from Icthyios.

By eight fifteen, Shanghai Lady was sailing into the larger island’s main port of Pigadia, filled with all manner of vessels from tiny fishing boats to giant superyachts, and overlooked by clusters of traditionally whitewashed Greek houses, apartment blocks and hotels. Ben found his allocated mooring point within the harbour, and soon afterwards the schooner was lashed securely into place among a forest of masts. Back on solid ground, Ben made his way through the port and immediately started hunting for a taxi.

An hour after that, he was buzzing from an overload of thick, dark Greek coffee and sitting twiddling his thumbs in the departure lounge at Karpathos Island National Airport, impatiently counting down the minutes before his flight was called, and still wishing he had his cigarettes.

He kept thinking about Catalina. No way to know what direction she’d flown off in. Impossible to tell where she was now. Not a chance in hell of following her.

That was, if it hadn’t been for one lucky detail.

Ben reached into his pocket to check the phone one more time.