The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Fifty-Two

At around the same time that Ben was clambering on board Shanghai Lady, Austin Keller’s Learjet was cruising at forty-three thousand feet over the Ionian Sea, approaching the coastline of what was sometimes described as the ‘toe of Italy’. A very unhappy Pete Avery was at the controls. Catalina Fuentes was beside him in the co-pilot’s chair, still holding the pistol she’d taken from Willis.

The argument had been going on since they’d taken off, though it was Avery who had done nearly all the talking. His voice was hoarse from shouting at her. ‘I don’t know how you think this is going to work,’ he was saying now. ‘If you had even the first, tiniest clue about aviation, you’d realise we can’t drop in out of the sky just anywhere we please, unannounced, without permission. There are regulations.’

‘I’m well aware of the regulations,’ Catalina said calmly.

‘That’s wonderful,’ Avery barked back at her. ‘Then you must know that you have to give the Italian authorities at least seven days’ notice before you can enter their airspace. You want a whole division of carabinieri waiting on the tarmac to arrest us the moment we touch down?’

‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ she said.

‘You’re right! What do I care? I’m the victim here. You’re the armed hijacker they’ll shoot to pieces the moment they figure out what’s going on!’

Catalina shook her head. ‘Nobody’s getting shot, and nobody’s getting arrested. Not where we’re landing. They won’t even know we’re there.’ Still keeping him covered with the gun, she reached with her free hand into the leather travel bag at her feet and brought out a slip of paper, which she handed to him. ‘Here’s where you’re going to set us down,’ she said.

Catalina hadn’t spent all her time on Icthyios exploring the island or engaged in solar science research. The coordinates written on the slip of paper were the location of an old, abandoned former airfield deep in the heart of rural Calabria in southern Italy, a few kilometres from Serra San Bruno. One of seventy-seven all-but-forgotten airfields in the country, it had been built in August 1943 by the US Army Corps of Engineers ahead of the Allied invasion of Italy in September of that year, and used as a temporary base by the US Air Force 86th Fighter Bomber Group. After their last combat operation was flown in April 1945 and the 86th pulled out, War Department plans to dismantle the base and airfield had never quite materialised and it remained to this day, semi-derelict amid disused farmland behind a rickety perimeter fence.

Catalina had zeroed in on it using Google Earth to ascertain its condition — which she’d concluded was quite usable despite some degradation of the concrete runway — and its dimensions, which provided more than adequate landing distance for a small jet. As usual, she had worked everything out to the last detail.

‘You’re nuts,’ Avery growled at her when he’d finished entering the coordinates into the on-board navigation computer. ‘There’s nothing but empty farmland. How’m I supposed to bring this thing down there? Catch a rut, bounce over a rock, we’ll flip and crash and burn and that’ll end your little joyride pretty fast, won’t it?’

‘We’ll see,’ she said patiently.

Catalina owed her choice of landing site to the other, and more important, piece of research she’d been engaged in during the last three months. Keller had necessarily been involved in that one, because although she’d never allowed him to know how she was secretly planning on using the information, it was through the kinds of discreet inquiries that only money like Austin’s could make possible that she’d been able to learn the precise location of Maxwell Grant’s favourite of his three homes. The townhouse in Mayfair was generally only a stopover for when his business affairs took him to London, as was the forty-million-dollar Manhattan penthouse for his New York trips. The place Grant liked to spend most of his leisure time was the grand seventeenth-century Villa Callisto, set within a secluded fifty-acre estate an hour and a half’s drive up the coast near the Gulf of Táranto. She had the exact coordinates for that, too.

Pete Avery might have been a deeply unhappy man that morning, but he was a skilled pilot, especially with a gun pointed at him. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he breathed some time later when they swooped down out of the clouds and spied the old airfield in the distance, like a ghostly apparition bathed in the light of dawn. There was nothing but open countryside around it for kilometres. No sign of habitation, and certainly no sign of Italian Air Force fighters coming to intercept them.

Avery made two passes over the deserted airfield before he determined the best angle of approach. On the third pass, he brought the plane down in a steep descent. The Lear was as agile as an airborne Ferrari. They overshot the perimeter fence by fifty feet to make a bumpy but successful landing on the cracked, weed-strewn runway. Exactly as she’d calculated, they had been in the air for just under ninety minutes.

‘I still think you’re nuts,’ he grumbled at her as he started powering down the engines.

‘That was a very good landing,’ she replied, getting out of the co-pilot’s chair. ‘Thank you for your help.’

Before he could reply, she hammered him over the head with the butt of the pistol, twice. Avery went out like a light and slumped in his chair.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the unconscious pilot. ‘I hope you’ll be all right.’

Catalina reached again into her bag, and brought out the last length of the rope she’d taken from the storage shed on Icthyios. She carefully looped it around Avery’s chest and arms and tied him into the pilot’s seat. His bonds weren’t intended to hold him indefinitely, because she didn’t want him to die of dehydration out here with nobody to rescue him. She just needed to hold him up for a while. By the time he got loose and called for help, she’d be far away.

She opened the exit hatch and hurried away from the aircraft carrying her travel bag. Once she was the other side of the hole she found in the perimeter fence, she started walking. The fields were rutted and hard going, but after a couple of kilometres she reached a road and checked the GPS app on her phone to make sure she was heading in the right direction.

Some kilometres further down the road a friendly old Calabrian farmer called Giuseppe pulled up in his battered pickup truck to offer a lift to the lone female hitchhiker. With her complexion she easily passed for southern Italian, and it also happened to be one of the languages Catalina spoke to perfection. She introduced herself as Lucia Verde, explaining that her car had broken down and that she absolutely needed to get to Serra San Bruno for her sister’s wedding later that morning. Giuseppe was only too happy to oblige, and regaled her all the way there with stories about his seven grandchildren.

After Giuseppe dropped her off with a cheery goodbye in the town of San Bruno, she made her way to the bus station, via a coffee bar where she stopped for a light breakfast. Nobody recognised her, which was one of the few parts of her plan she’d had to leave to chance. Either the hairstyle was working, or her fame had never quite reached rural southern Italy. Either way, it was a relief.

By eight fifteen, Catalina had boarded a bus that was headed all the way up the coast to Táranto. It wasn’t too crowded, and she sat alone near the back. As the bus wound its twisting way northwards up the Calabrian coast, she ignored the spectacular ocean views. She’d seen enough pretty beaches to last her the rest of her life. Instead she sat clutching her leather bag on her lap and gazed into space, working over and over her plan.

The desire to avenge the murders of Jim Lockhart and Dougal Sinclair had been burning inside her even before she’d arrived on Icthyios. So many times she’d visualised herself going after the man she was certain was responsible, picturing the whole thing in detail, working out exactly how it could be done. Then so many times she’d vacillated, thinking that she must be mad: that she was a scientist, not an assassin; that revenge was out of her grasp, and that she was going to drive herself mad if she didn’t put all such notions out of her head and do her best to move on.

And she’d very nearly succeeded in dropping the whole insane idea, until Raul had found her and told her that Kazem was dead too. That had been the tipping point, making her realise that she had no choice. She had to cut the head off the snake. Kill it before it killed everyone she knew, everyone she loved.

Just two things bothered her. The first was the very real possibility that when she got to the Villa Callisto, Grant wouldn’t be there. He led a hectic life and could easily be away on business, just about anywhere in the world. It was a concern, but only a minor and not insurmountable one.

The second thing that worried her, as much as it reassured her, was nestling inside her travel bag. But that, too, was a matter that could be addressed. Everything in its own time. Stay calm, she told herself. It was no different from a complex astronomical calculation. Method and attention to detail were everything. Once you knew your formula was sound, it was just a matter of following the logical steps through, clear-headed and systematically, until you achieved your result.

She didn’t care what happened after that. If she didn’t make it out alive, then so be it. At least then she would have met her end doing something good, instead of running and hiding like a coward. There couldn’t be a better way to atone for the shame she felt.

And, anyway, Catalina Fuentes was already dead.