The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Sixty

Ben left the hot, ticking Lamborghini at the roadside and checked the GPS one last time. The little red dot still hadn’t moved. Its location was almost exactly the same as his own. Whatever else that meant, this was definitely the place.

Judging by the length of the perimeter wall, there was a very sizeable estate on the other side. Ben walked over to the tall iron gates. They were locked shut. He thought about getting back in the Lamborghini and using that to ram his way through. But lightweight mid-engined sports cars with flimsy carbon-fibre bodywork didn’t make the best assault breacher vehicles. Plus, he couldn’t think of a noisier, less unsubtle way to telegraph his arrival to the people inside.

He walked along the wall, inspecting it for ease of climbing. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was not being seen. Which was what drew his eye to the trees a few metres the other side of the gates, screening part of the wall from the road. The perfect place to scale the wall. And Ben now realised that someone else had had the same idea. A leather travel bag was lying there in the grass. It looked expensive, and familiar. He unzipped it, felt in the lining and found the homing device still exactly where he’d hidden it.

Ben started climbing. When he reached the top of the wall, he guessed that the same someone who’d left the bag had also used some kind of tool to chip away all the shards of broken glass set into the mortar. The butt of a pistol would do the job fine. There were specks of dried blood on the stonework. He could only hope nothing worse than a cut finger had happened to her since.

On the other side of the wall, Ben dropped down among the trees that lined the estate’s perimeter. He stood very still, listening. He could hear the sound of a helicopter motor in the distance, the unmistakable rhythmic whoosh-whoosh of rotor blades beginning to spin and the rising note of the turbine powering up in preparation for takeoff.

Then Ben heard another sound, this time much closer by. The crack of a twig. He wasn’t alone among the trees.

Ben saw the guard before the guard saw him. He was in his thirties, nondescript, dressed in dark clothes. His main feature of interest, as far as Ben was concerned, was the Colt M4 carbine dangling from his shoulder on a tactical sling. Ben wondered if Maxwell Grant always had armed men patrolling the perimeter, or whether this was a special security measure that might have something to do with Catalina being there. And the chopper, possibly.

Ben stepped out from behind a tree and said, ‘Hey, have you got a light?’

Before the guard had time to react, Ben hit him a powerful snapping punch to the chin that knocked him instantly unconscious. Ben caught him as he fell, lowered him gently to the grass, then knelt beside him and compressed the veins and arteries in his neck to choke off all the blood to and from his brain. He held the blood choke for a full minute, counting off the seconds and listening to the chopper growing louder as the rotor neared takeoff speed.

When the guard was dead, Ben picked up his rifle. Standard 5.56mm NATO chambering, thirty-round capacity, Trijicon ACOG optical sight with fixed 4× magnification. The kind of military combat rig not generally found in any old Italian country estate. He jacked a round into the chamber and crept through the trees until he could see the lawns and the house beyond.

The villa and its manicured gardens were all that Ben had expected them to be, given its owner’s evident wealth. He took in the layout at a brief glance, and focused instead on what he could see between him and the house. In the foreground, the chopper was still resting on the grass, but not for much longer. Closer to the house, standing in a low-walled courtyard a few metres from a parked Rolls limousine and a black panel van with its back doors open, stood a group of figures. Ben dropped into a sniper’s prone position at the edge of the trees and observed them through the rifle scope.

One of the figures was Catalina. There were two men with her. One was taller and broader and in his fifties, in beige slacks and a navy blazer. Ben was fairly certain he was Maxwell Grant. The other was small, wizened and white-haired, maybe late seventies, maybe older. He was standing nearest to the waiting chopper, and seemed to be saying a last word to Catalina before leaving by air. Whatever he was saying to her, she didn’t look happy. It seemed safe to presume that the old man wasn’t one of the good guys.

Behind them, it looked as though the two armed guards standing at the rear of the black van, and the two more sitting up front, were waiting for her to get in. It had all the makings of a situation in flux. Something was about to happen.

So Ben decided to move things along. He let the gunsights centre on Grant, then changed his mind and altered the angle of the rifle a minute degree to take aim at the old man. He made the range about a hundred and seventy-five yards.

It wasn’t going to be very subtle. And it was certainly going to be loud enough to get their attention.

Fuck it, he thought. And let off the shot.

The rifle went off with a high-decibel crack that punched his ears. The 5.56 bottlenecked round fires a comparatively light bullet at an extremely high velocity, producing very little recoil. Which meant that at virtually the same instant the shot left the barrel, the lack of muzzle flip enabled Ben to see the bullet impact blow the old man’s head half away in a mist of pink spray.

Not too subtle at all. But they had to know he was here sooner or later.

The old man’s body slumped to the ground. For a frozen moment that seemed to drag longer than it really lasted, both Maxwell Grant and Catalina stood and gaped at the headless corpse at their feet.

And then all hell broke loose.

The two guards in the van flung open their doors and burst out, while the other two shouldered their weapons, pointing left and right in full-on panic while retreating towards the cover of the balustrade wall. Grant made a grab for Catalina’s arm and started dragging her, kicking and struggling, back towards the villa. Ben panned the rifle sights across and lined up on Grant, but Grant was a moving target at two hundred yards and Ben was worried about hitting Catalina, and his hesitation made him jerk the shot. Through the scope he saw the bullet hit Grant in the left shoulder, low and left from what should have been a perfect head shot.

Grant stumbled and nearly fell, and Catalina tore out of his grip and took off at a run. Ben lost sight of her as she disappeared behind the hedge. One of the guards made to run after her. Ben caught his intention, flipped the M4’s fire selector to full-auto and drove him back with a rattle of gunfire that ricocheted off the balustrade wall and shattered one of the headlamps of the Rolls. The guards ducked behind the wall and the back of the van.

Ben leaped to his feet and started sprinting towards the villa, firing as he ran to keep them pinned down. The chopper pilot was gunning his throttle to the maximum and taking off in a panic. He was thirty feet in the air when Ben aimed upwards and squeezed off another burst. One second, fifteen high-velocity rounds, straight into the tail rotor. The blades shattered and the helicopter went into a spin as the pilot suffered an immediate and catastrophic loss of control. The wildly gyrating chopper managed to stay airborne for a few seconds; then it careered straight for the courtyard of the villa and crashed into the parked vehicles.

Both the van and the limo were instantly engulfed in flames as the helicopter’s fuel tanks ruptured on impact and it exploded. Burning wreckage was hurled in all directions. Two of the guards, too slow to get away in time, were caught up in the incendiary blast. The force of the explosion threw one of them ten feet in the air and slammed him down over the bonnet of the blazing Rolls-Royce. The other bolted from behind the van, arms and torso and head ablaze, made it a few metres and then collapsed.

Ben still couldn’t see Catalina. What worried him even more was that he couldn’t see the other two guards, either. He sprinted past the burning vehicles, turning his face away from the scorching heat as he ran by. Smoke was pouring thick and black from the blaze. Ben kept running. Between the two lions and through the archway and up the stepped path to the house. There was a heavy blood trail on the ground, splashes and dribbles of bright red leading towards the entrance.

Ben was momentarily distracted by the blood trail when a loud shot blasted out to his left and a crater of masonry blew out of the wall just inches away, stinging him with stone chips. He spun round and saw the guard, face half-blackened, teeth bared in rage and fear, crunching the pump action of a combat shotgun to chamber another twelve-gauge round. Ben fired back from the hip, without aiming. The M4 stitched a ragged line of holes diagonally across the man’s chest and sent him spinning and crashing back against the wall of the house, blood spotting the stonework like the flick of a paintbrush. The man slid down the wall, still clutching his shotgun. As his muscles began to twitch in terminal shock, the gun went off, pointing harmlessly into the air. Then it clattered from his hands and his eyes rolled over white, and he slumped over on his side.

Ben threw away his empty rifle, snatched up the dead man’s shotgun. Pumped out the spent shell and chambered the next. It was a Mossberg Persuader with a cut-down barrel and a five-shot magazine. Two rounds gone.

Then he stepped around the corner of the villa and saw Catalina. And the other guard, too. He had an arm around her throat and was holding her tightly against his chest as she fought him and lashed back with her feet and tried to grapple his arm away from her. In his other hand was a pistol, pressed to her head.