The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Fifty-Three

Around nine forty-five that morning, Catalina stepped off the bus in a small coastal town some way east of Rossano, on the southern edge of the Gulf of Táranto. Checking her bearings once more, she ascertained that she was exactly 17.2 kilometres from her destination. Now it was time to address the first of her two main concerns.

She was walking down a narrow street away from the bus stop when she spotted the group of teenagers hanging around on the corner. They were aged around fourteen or fifteen and should have been in school. Noisy and unruly, but they were exactly what she’d been looking for. She smiled as she walked up to them, and they all turned to stare at her. ‘Hey, guys,’ she said breezily in Italian, and plucked a banknote out of her purse. ‘Any of you feel like making a quick hundred euros? Won’t take you more than a minute.’

Which got them all clamouring to be the one who got the cash, even before they knew what the job entailed.

‘You,’ she said, picking out the tallest one of the bunch. He looked the most adult, with dark eyes that looked sharp and quick. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Luca,’ he said. His voice was mature enough to pass for an eighteen-year-old’s, or even older. Perfect.

‘Do you have a phone, Luca?’

Silly question. They all had phones, and eagerly whipped them out of their pockets to show her, nobody wanting to be out of the money. Catalina took out the private business card that she’d been carrying around in her purse ever since July third, the night of the party in Kensington. She showed the card to the tall kid. ‘See this number here? Then I want you to call it and ask to speak to Signor Grant. That’s his name on the card.’

‘Grant,’ Luca repeated. ‘Okay. What do I say to him?’

‘Say that you’re calling from the offices of the Gruppo Poste Italiane, and that the satellite dish package he ordered is due for special delivery to Villa Callisto this afternoon. You’re checking that the householder will be there to sign for it. Can you remember all that?’

‘I think so.’ Luca repeated it all back. ‘A hundred euros? Are you sure?’

‘Easy money,’ she said. ‘I want you to switch your mobile to speaker phone mode, so I can hear.’

‘Fine,’ Luca said with a laconic shrug. ‘Who is this guy, anyway?’

‘Just a friend,’ she said. ‘It’s kind of a trick I’m playing on him. He’s very suspicious, so you have to sound really grown-up and convincing. And he might answer in English, but don’t let that put you off. Just say exactly what I told you. Can you handle it?’

‘Sure, no problem,’ Luca said. His friends were all clamouring round him. He cuffed a couple of them over the head, told them to shut the fuck up, then cleared his throat and dialled with his phone on speaker. Catalina moved close so she could hear. If Grant wasn’t there, she’d already planned to find a cheap place to rent locally and keep trying until he was.

The teenagers fell into a hush, all grinning and loving the prank. Loving the hundred euros even more. She pressed a finger to her lips to warn them to stay quiet.

Grant’s dial tone rang five long, tense times before a man’s voice answered. ‘Pronto?’ His voice was rich and deep, sonorous and smooth. Unmistakably Maxwell Grant’s. He spoke Italian with a strong British accent, but he wouldn’t have been speaking it at all if he’d been in London or New York. Catalina felt her stomach tighten with excitement, mingled with fear.

Luca must have really wanted the hundred euros, because he played the part perfectly. Grant appeared genuinely flummoxed by the call. ‘What are you talking about? I never ordered a satellite dish.’

‘I’m afraid you still have to sign for it, even if you don’t want it,’ Luca said, sounding exactly like an infuriatingly anal-retentive low-level bureaucratic robot. Maybe he was related to one.

‘Now listen to me. If you cretins have screwed up, and it’s not the first time, it’s none of my responsibility and I have no intention of signing for anything. I don’t expect to receive any such delivery here today. Sort out your own bloody mess. Is that understood?’ And Grant ended the call.

‘Nice guy,’ Luca said.

‘Nice job.’ Catalina handed over the hundred-euro note, and the rest of the teenagers all resumed their clamouring and clowning around.

‘Is that it?’ Luca said.

She smiled at Luca. ‘That’s it. Spend it wisely. Ciao.’

Luca was in love. ‘Ciao,’ he replied, and stared at her as she walked away.

One less thing to worry about. Maxwell Grant was definitely where Catalina wanted him to be, seventeen short kilometres to the southwest. Now to attend to the other small concern on her mind — but that wasn’t something she could do in the middle of town. A few streets away, she managed to flag down a passing taxi driver, who saw the dark-haired beauty waving from the kerb and almost crashed his Fiat stopping for her.

Men.

‘Where to, Signorina?’ He was unshaven and looked a little crass, but there probably weren’t too many other taxis in town and it didn’t pay to be fussy.

‘Out of town. That way,’ she said, pointing southwest.

‘You don’t know the name of the place?’ he said, grinning.

‘I’ll know it when I see it.’

‘Fine by me. Jump in.’

The taxi hadn’t gone more than a kilometre past the town limits before the driver was trying to chat her up. Some people were just painfully predictable, she thought, as she listened to his patter. ‘Are you from around here? Haven’t seen you before, and I’d remember. I’m Roberto. What’s your name? You don’t talk much, do you? Come on, don’t be like that. How about a smile?’ Catalina didn’t respond to any of it, and kept her eyes on the road. Roberto eventually got the hint, and drove on in moody silence, throwing her the occasional look that she pretended not to notice.

As they travelled inland, the terrain rose rapidly up into the hills and the scenery alternated between patches of thick autumnal forest and open farm country. They passed a couple of villages, and the ruins of an ancient church high on a hill. The mountains of Calabria loomed in the distance. At last, some fifteen kilometres inland, she pointed through the windscreen and said, ‘This is fine. You can drop me off here.’

‘You’re kidding, right? It’s miles from anywhere.’

‘No, this is the place,’ she insisted. ‘My fiancé is coming to pick me up.’

Roberto made a face. ‘Whatever you say, lady.’ He pulled over to the side of the road, waited for her to get out, then took her money and drove off with a last wistful glance and a puff of burnt oil smoke.

It was just after ten thirty in the morning.

Catalina waited until the car was out of sight, then climbed up the grassy verge and over a rickety wooden fence that bounded the field next to the road. Whatever kind of crops had been planted were razed down into a brittle yellowed stubble that crackled underfoot as she made her way over the field perpendicular to the road. Beyond the far side was a patch of woodland that offered the right kind of cover for what she was about to do. There wasn’t a house or a living soul anywhere to be seen, but all the same she preferred to avoid prying eyes.

Reaching the trees, she came across the stripped-out shell of an old car that had been abandoned there long ago. She laid her bag on the ground nearby and knelt down to unzip it and take out the gun. Now it was time to allay the other concern that had been nagging at her mind.

Catalina didn’t care for guns, or weapons of any sort that could be used to inflict pain and death. She’d never handled one before, until that morning. Still less ever fired one. Even though she’d obviously made a convincing show of pointing it at Avery, she had little idea how it worked, and wished now that she’d paid more attention to all those stupid action films on TV. There was always something to be learned from anything.

The pistol was ugly and black. The part you held, and the part where the trigger was, were made of some kind of very tough plastic, rubberised in places for a better grip. The upper metal part, which to her untrained eye appeared to house the barrel, was square in profile and GLOCK 19 — AUSTRIA was stamped on its left side. Which meant very little to her, except that she supposed that anything manufactured in Austria must probably be well-made and reliable.

A sudden thought made her anxious. It had never occurred to her until now that she should check whether the weapon was loaded. What if it wasn’t? How did you tell? She vaguely remembered that the part that held the bullets was separate to the gun and went inside the handle. She’d seen actors in films slamming the thing in there to reload the weapon. After some searching, she found the button that released it, and it dropped out of the handle into her hand: a simple oblong box made of black metal, containing some kind of spring-loaded mechanism that she could see held the bullets in place. There was a name for it — a magazine, that was it. It was heavy, and to her relief, it appeared to be fully loaded. Just to make sure, she prised the rounds out one at a time by sliding them forward with her thumb, and they popped out under spring pressure and dropped into her lap. Fifteen of them, each marked in tiny letters on its circular base WIN — 9mm LUGER. They looked small, and it perplexed her that something so tiny could hold enough energy to kill a person. She remembered what Ben had said to her on the island, about the fragility of human life.

Thinking of Ben distracted her for a moment. She sensed that she liked him, even though they’d only just met. He had depth, and intelligence, and an inner strength tempered by a warm tenderness none of the men in her life had shown. Under other circumstances, she’d have liked to have got to know him better. But that wasn’t going to happen now. Like a lot of things.

She broke her thumbnail squashing the bullets back into the magazine against the stiff spring tension, then slotted the loaded magazine into the gun and felt it click into place. Fifteen seemed like a lot of shots, and she reasoned that she should hold back twelve and use the remaining three for practice, to familiarise herself with how the gun worked. It took a minute or two before she figured out that to chamber a round from the magazine you needed to grip the handle in your right hand with your finger clear of the trigger, while using your left hand to rack back the metal slide, which had serrations to enable a firm hold. The weapon’s cold, efficient Austrian functionality and ergonomic perfection were like something that had been designed in a lab, and appealed to her scientific mind. This was a precision instrument she could trust, however much she might have feared and loathed it in any other situation but the one she faced.

All she needed now was to fire it at something. Looking around, her eye landed on the wrecked old car, and she decided it would make a suitable practice target. She stood ten metres away from it and raised the gun two-handed more or less the way she’d seen it done in movies. There was no safety catch to click off. Everything was simple. The sights lined up intuitively and easily. She curled her finger around the trigger. Her heart thumped. Her hands were shaking.

She squeezed. The gun fired, jolting her hand. It was much louder than she’d expected, with a sharp report that hurt her ears. Lowering the gun, she saw the small, clean hole that had appeared in the door skin of the car, more or less where she’d been aiming. She raised the gun again and fired twice more, using the first bullet hole as an aiming mark.

After three shots, there was a high-pitched ringing in her ears. Taking her finger carefully off the trigger and keeping the gun pointed at the ground, she walked over to the car and discovered to her amazement that all three shots had hit inside a circle she could cover with her hand. She saw how cleanly the bullets had punched through the metal, a silver ring around each hole where the paintwork had been knocked away. Creaking the car door open on its rusty hinges, she found that the shots had gone right through the internal plastic and buried themselves deep in the front seats.

The gun’s power and ease of use were a little alarming, but pleased her as well, on a scientific level. If it could tear through solid metal like that, it would have no problem penetrating the skull of the evil man who had murdered her friends.

Three rounds gone, twelve to go. Twelve would be plenty. Catalina replaced the gun inside her bag, and then took out her phone to check her GPS bearings one last time.

Maxwell Grant’s villa was just a couple more kilometres away. She picked up her bag and started walking back towards the road.

Her heart was no longer thumping. Her hands had stopped shaking.

She was ready.