The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Sixty-One

That would have been all the tactical advantage the guy ever needed. He could have yelled, ‘Drop the shotgun!’, and Ben would have had no choice but to do exactly that, and then the guy could have shot him, after which he could have shot Catalina if he’d wanted.

But the guy didn’t do any of those things. Instead he whipped the pistol muzzle away from her head and straightened out his right arm at full stretch to aim it at Ben. Which slightly altered the angle of his body to hers. Not by much. But by enough.

In the black arts of combat shotgunning, something taught at the highest levels, to the most elite practitioners, was called the scalloping shot. It was used only in the most down-to-the-wire close quarter battle situations where bad guys using hostages as human shields had to be taken down in short order. It involved aiming off slightly to use the outer edge of a shotgun’s conical spreading pellet pattern to chomp an incapacitating bite out of the visible portion of the bad guy without harming the innocent victim. It was one of the hardest and most high-pressure shots in CQB. Extremely easy to screw up with disastrous results, because if you misjudged the aim-off margin by even an inch or two, you risked destroying both bad guy and hostage in a single blast. Such finesse, coupled with extreme high-speed coordination under stress, was an art that very few people could master.

But Ben Hope was, always had been, one of those people. In the time it took for the pistol to swing his way, for the guy to square his sights up and for his finger to start compressing the trigger against the weight of the gun’s mainspring, Ben pulled the shotgun in tightly to his shoulder, intuited the amount of aim-off, and fired. Even as he felt the backward kick of the recoil, he knew his shot had gone home.

The scalloping shot ripped the pistol out of the man’s hand, and the man’s fingers from their knuckle joints, and most of the flesh and muscle of his arm from the bone, all the way to the shoulder. A high-pitched keening burst from the man’s open mouth. Catalina was pale and blinking, and the right side of her face was spattered with blood. Ben racked another round into the gun, moved in fast, pulled her away from the guy and shot him again, centre of mass. The close-range impact smashed him to the ground, dead before his back hit the flagstones.

‘Ben!’ Catalina opened her arms and slammed into him, embracing him so tightly that he couldn’t breathe. He could feel her body shaking with shock and relief and terror and happiness, all mixed into one surging tumultuous emotional release.

‘You’re safe,’ he said, patting her back. ‘I’ve got you. You’re going to be okay.’ When she let go of him, her eyes were full of tears. He checked her quickly to make sure none of the blood on her was her own. The only damage he could see was the cut to her hand, from climbing the wall.

‘Your mother was wrong about you,’ he said. ‘You’re every bit as crazy as your brother is. What the hell possessed you to come here on your own?’

The tears had stopped as quickly as they’d started. She asked, ‘Is Raul with you?’

‘I left him behind on the island. Took a little persuading.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘Magic powers,’ Ben said. ‘Where’s Grant?’

‘I saw him run inside. He’s wounded.’

‘How many guards are there in this place?’

‘I only counted four,’ she said.

‘I ran into number five back there in the woods. Then it’s just him and us, by the look of it. Stay close. Anything happens to me, you run like hell, okay?’

Together, they doubled back to the doorway inside the villa. The blood trail seemed to thicken as it went, the splots and splashes increasing in size and frequency, smeared here and there as a badly injured man’s running footsteps dragged along the floor. The ragged trail led from the entrance, through the formal lobby and up a marble-floored passage, where its uneven path veered right and disappeared under the bottom edge of a closed door.

‘I know this room,’ Catalina whispered.

Ben took a step back, then a step forward, and the sole of his shoe connected with the solid wood and crashed it inwards.

Maxwell Grant stood alone at the far side of the opulent salon, leaning against the fireplace in the middle of a spreading pool of blood that reflected little rectangles of light from the French window behind him. He was panting heavily, clutching his mangled shoulder.

Catalina stepped into the room. ‘I told you, you should be afraid,’ she said to Grant. Ben stood at her side, pointing the shotgun.

Grant coughed. ‘Go on. Do it. Shoot me, if you dare.’

‘Fine by me,’ Ben said. He squeezed the trigger. The shotgun went click.

‘You teach your guys to only load four rounds?’ Ben said. He dropped the empty gun on the floor. ‘Looks like we’ll have to come up with something else for you, Grant.’

‘Maybe we should let him choose,’ Catalina said. ‘He’s very imaginative that way.’

‘You think you can hand me over to the police?’ Grant said in a hoarse rasp. There was blood on his lips. ‘Just you try it. No court will ever convict me, not with my connections. I’ll never see the inside of a jail. Hear me? I can guarantee it.’

‘I know,’ Ben said. ‘But jail’s not what we had in mind.’ Stepping over to the fireplace, he reached up and lifted down one of the long, curved swords that were mounted crosswise in an X over the mantelpiece. It was lighter than it looked, beautifully balanced in his hand, and still sharp after so many years. ‘Italian cavalry sabre,’ he said, admiring it. Then he handed it to Catalina, hilt first.

‘You must have read my thoughts,’ she said to Ben. She clutched the sabre tightly and looked at Grant.

Ben said, ‘Now do what you came here to do, and let’s get out of here.’

Grant shrank away as Catalina walked slowly towards him. ‘No! No!’ he protested, his voice rising to a shrill cry as she kept coming. He staggered back until he was up against the wall and could go no further. ‘Please!’

‘This is for my friends,’ Catalina said. What she did next, she did without hesitation. Grant screamed as she plunged the curved blade of the sabre deep into his gut. She used both hands to push and twist it in all the way, then let go of the hilt and stepped back. Grant’s eyes were almost popping from their sockets. Red foam bubbled at the corners of his mouth. He staggered sideways a step, leaving a smear of blood down the silk wall covering. Then he fell to the marble floor, kicking and twitching and clutching at the steel with both hands and trying to pull it out.

Catalina spat on him. ‘Rot in hell, you bastard.’

Grant opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a glut of dark blood and a gurgling croak. His eyes were already glazing over. His spasmodic movements became weaker and slower, until he went limp and lay still with the sword hilt pointing up like a flag planted on some conquered battleground.

‘I think it’s time we made our exit,’ Ben said, touching her arm. She nodded. They turned away from the dead man and followed his blood trail out of the room, out of the villa.

The crashed chopper was still burning intensely, and the fire had spread all along the hedge. If the wind picked up in the right direction, it might reach the house. Ben walked over to the smoking, blackened body of one of the guards, picked up his fallen pistol and slipped it into his jeans pocket.

‘Are we expecting more trouble?’ Catalina said.

‘Not from these guys,’ Ben replied.

Crossing the courtyard, they paused at the corpse of the old man. ‘Who was he anyway?’ Ben asked.

‘One of the secret rulers of the world,’ Catalina answered.

Ben looked down at the twisted body. ‘Why are these Masters of the Universe types always little blokes?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m an astronomer, not a psychologist.’

‘Come on, let’s go. I have a car outside the gate.’

The two of them walked slowly, side by side, almost like lovers. To face danger and death together was to share the most intimate things. Ben found the Camel soft pack in his pocket, fished out a cigarette and lit up. Maybe he could get used to these.

‘What will you do now?’ he asked her.

‘I have a lot of decisions to make,’ she said, frowning. ‘Like what to say to my family when I see them again. I lied to them and broke their hearts. It’s not going to be easy. And I’ll have to decide what on earth to do with the rest of my life. I have no job. I have very little money. I don’t know what I’ll do. Play guitar in the streets for coins, maybe. Actually, right now, that sounds pretty good to me.’

‘What about TV stardom?’ he said. ‘The big revelation to the world?’

She smiled. ‘We’ll have to see about that. Maybe the world isn’t yet ready for the return of Catalina Fuentes. Maybe I’m not, either. One day, perhaps. There’s time.’ She paused a beat, then asked him, ‘Will you call Raul for me? I don’t suppose Austin wants to hear my voice, after what I did to him.’

‘Of course I will,’ he said.

‘I might go to stay with him in Frigiliana for a while.’

‘I think that’s a great idea,’ he said. ‘Raul will be happy.’

‘What about you?’ she asked.

‘Me?’ He shrugged. ‘I gave up trying to make plans.’

‘Maybe,’ she said tentatively, ‘maybe you’d like to come to Frigiliana with us. With me, I mean. I’d like that, too.’

He said nothing. They were reaching the gates at the end of the driveway.

‘Ben? Did you hear what I said?’

‘Cover your ears,’ he said. He took out the pistol, shot out the lock and kicked the gates, and they swung heavily open on their iron hinges. The road was quiet and empty, apart from his car parked up on the verge. He walked out of the gate and went to fetch her leather bag from its hiding place at the foot of the wall.

Catalina was gazing at the bright yellow, slightly travel-stained, Lamborghini. ‘This is yours?’

‘It belongs to a friend,’ he said, stowing her bag in the small luggage space in the nose. ‘Hop in. Let’s take you home.’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said, getting into the passenger side. ‘You said you have no plans. I thought, maybe…’

Ben just smiled. He tossed away his cigarette, got behind the wheel and started the car.