The Cassandra Sanction: The most controversial action adventure thriller you’ll read this year!

From the kitchen, he wandered down another passage to what looked like a home office, although it had to be the neatest and least-used home office in the world, entirely clutter-free and a few neat rows of abstruse-looking astrophysics and cosmology titles arrayed on the shelves. One wall displayed a blown-up framed still of Catalina pictured against the backdrop of an astonishingly resplendent Milky Way. Her face was aglow with enthusiasm, those big brown eyes as incandescent as the heavens. Ben presumed it must be an image from her TV astronomy series. Looking at it, it wasn’t hard to see what her public had loved in her. He gazed at it for a moment, then went on examining the room.

According to the police report, Catalina’s personal computer had been checked for suspicious emails or anything that could provide leads to contradict the suicide motive. Nothing having been found, the computer had been replaced, unplugged from the monitor on the desk. Ben was confident that the contents of drawers, her address book, phone records and general paperwork would have all been routinely examined, too, but he had a riffle through the desk just in case anything jumped out at him. It didn’t, although he wasn’t particularly sure what he was looking for. Sometimes you just had to go by instinct. And so far, his instincts weren’t feeding much back to him.

Of the three bedrooms in the big apartment, the first he looked into was a guest room with a huge empty wardrobe and a timber-framed bed piled high with silk cushions. The second was stripped bare and in the middle of being redecorated, a stepladder against one wall, paint pots, plastic sheeting on the floor. He found that potentially interesting. Suicidal people didn’t tend to care much about the state of their home decor. Then again, it wasn’t much to base a theory on.

The third bedroom was Catalina’s, the largest of the three with Gustav Klimt on the walls and a broad expanse of glass overlooking Glockenbach district. Her bed was an antique Louis XI kind of affair the size of a Cadillac Fleetwood. Old and modern side by side, the same elegant blending of styles. Ben did a five-minute search of her wardrobe and drawers, feeling as if he was prying. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he walked into the ensuite.

Despite his experience of domestic life with his ex-fiancée Brooke Marcel, a woman’s bathroom nonetheless remained a world of mystery to someone of Ben’s ingrained spartan ways. Automatic halogen spotlights caught him by surprise as he entered, and he could see about twenty of himself reflected from all angles in the blaze of mirrors covering every vertical surface. A thick sheepskin rug stretched over the floor near the walk-in shower. Fluffy towels draped thickly over a chrome rail. The biggest vanity unit he’d ever seen held a collection of cosmetics and perfumes and creams and lotions and feminine paraphernalia that could have stocked a small pharmacy. Tools of her trade, he guessed. He had no doubt that being the world’s sexiest scientist must be hard graft.

A walk-in wardrobe led off the ensuite, a whole other room in itself. Ben stepped into it, gazing around him for clues the police might have missed, like a pair of bathroom scissors lying in a red pool on the floor, or a cryptic message daubed in blood by the kidnapper.

What he found instead, he stared at for ten long seconds and then hurried back through the apartment with to show Raul.

Chapter Nine

Raul hadn’t moved from his position on the armchair, and barely glanced up as Ben walked into the room.

‘What’s this?’ Ben said, striding up to him.

‘What’s what?’

‘This.’ Ben tossed it in Raul’s lap. Raul picked it up and gazed at it.

‘It’s fluoxetine,’ Ben said. ‘Any ideas why I might have found a whole stash of it sitting on a shelf in your sister’s walk-in wardrobe?’ He was trying to keep the anger out of his voice, but it wasn’t easy. His discovery had left him feeling betrayed and made a fool of.

Raul slowly examined the small amber bottle of pills, then turned a blank expression on Ben and shrugged. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘They’re antidepressants,’ Ben said. ‘And they’ve got your sister’s name on the label. And I want to know why.’

‘Anyone can take medicine.’ A flare of defensiveness lit up in Raul’s eyes as he said it.

‘Fine. If her doctor put her on pills for migraine headaches or a dust allergy, that would be one thing, wouldn’t it? But this is something else.’

Raul said nothing. He stared at the bottle in his hand as if he could will it to change into something else.

‘You told me she was a happy person,’ Ben said. ‘You said she loved her life and filled every room she walked into with laughter and smiles.’

‘She did,’ Raul said quietly.

‘As long as the drugs were doing what they were supposed to do?’ Ben said, pointing at the bottle. ‘And what about the rest of the time?’

Raul fell silent. He closed his eyes. Maybe he thought that by shutting out the light, all his problems would vanish in the darkness. Ben glared at him, wanting to grab him by the neck and shake him.

‘Answer me, Raul. Did you know about the pills?’

‘Yes!’ Raul burst out. ‘I knew, all right? She went through a phase of feeling anxious and low when she was in her teens, and was on medication for it then. She was mostly fine, then every now and then she’d have a relapse when there was too much stress in her life. It happened again when that whoreson Austin Keller broke her heart. It hit her hard and she needed medical help to get over it.’

Ben didn’t bother to ask who Austin Keller was. He shook his head in disbelief at what he was hearing. ‘She was prone to depression and you knew about it all along, but you didn’t see fit to mention it?’

‘But it doesn’t mean anything,’ Raul insisted. ‘That was all in the past. She got over it. She always has.’

‘Read the label, you idiot. Look at the date. What does it say?’

Raul read it and sighed. ‘It says July eleventh.’

‘This year. Not last year, or the year before. It says she was prescribed this latest treatment five days before her car went over the cliff. And more than a third of them are gone. In less than a week? She must have been popping them like sweets.’ Ben could hear his voice getting tighter with anger. His stomach felt knotted and there was a beating in his temples that was growing into a dull ache. He took a deep breath to try to settle his pulse.

Raul waved his arms in frustration. ‘Fine. All right. But if she was taking them, then she wasn’t depressed, was she? Isn’t that the whole idea of antidepressants?’

‘Happy pills don’t always work that way, Raul. Sometimes they take away sadness and replace it with rage and hatred and all kinds of other emotions instead. They can make a perfectly ordinary, gentle person with mild anxiety decide to take an axe to their family. Or take a jump off a high building, whichever way the brain chemistry happens to lead them. There have been thousands of proven cases. They call it the paradoxical effect. I call it mind-altering garbage that screws people’s heads up.’

Raul frowned, a line appearing between his brows. ‘How come you know so much about it?’

Ben pointed again at the bottle. ‘Because my mother was prescribed some kind of crap just like that the year after Ruth disappeared, to help her cope with the loss. Over the next few months my father and I saw her degenerate into a total stranger. One day when I was eighteen years old, she wandered like a zombie into her bedroom, locked the door, lay on the bed and swallowed a jar of sleeping pills and never woke up. That’s how I know so much about it, okay? Because I made it my business to find out what those things can do to a person.’

The breathing control wasn’t working. The thumping in his temples was amping up into a full-blown headache. He’d never told anyone that much about his mother’s suicide before, and he didn’t enjoy revisiting the feelings it raised up in him.

Raul lowered his eyes and said nothing.

‘Look at me, Raul. Tell me the truth. You knew Catalina was still on these drugs, didn’t you? But you hid it from me, because of how I might react. That’s why you didn’t show me the full copy of the police report, because her antidepressant use would have been mentioned there as corroborative evidence to back up the coroner’s suicide verdict. You removed those pages so I wouldn’t see them.’

Raul’s face twitched as he stared hotly at Ben, like a child caught with its fingers in the pie. ‘Okay, I admit it. I did know, and you’re right, it was in the police report. It came out at the inquest that she’d gone to her doctor not long before her disappearance, worried she was slipping back into depression, because of work-related stress and other private matters. The lawyers pulled strings to keep the details out of the media, but that’s what happened. There. I’ve said it. I should have known you’d find those pills in her things, but my head’s been so fuzzy with all this nightmare that I didn’t think about it. I should have told you the truth. I screwed up. Are you satisfied now?’

Ben glowered at him. ‘No, I’m not, Raul. Don’t you see how this changes things?’

Raul paused, then pursed his lips as a new thought seemed to come to him. ‘It would … if it was for real.’

‘What? How can it not be for real?’

‘It could all be part of the set-up. Kind of makes sense, actually.’

Ben couldn’t believe what kind of wildly twisted logic Raul was throwing at him. ‘Let’s think about that for a moment, shall we? The kidnapper made her go to her own doctor for antidepressants, so that they could then plant them here in her apartment as phony evidence that she killed herself.’

Raul spread his hands. ‘Does that sound so crazy?’

‘Yes, Raul, it does. It makes it sound as if you’re doing everything you can to deny the truth about what happened to Catalina.’

Raul’s face paled to an ashen grey, as if Ben had punched him. ‘What are you telling me, that now you believe all that bullshit story about her killing herself? I thought you were on my side.’

‘There’s no other way to see it, not now.’

‘Listen. Ben. I know how it looks, you finding the pills, me lying to you.’

‘Good. Then you understand why I’m thinking you brought me here on false pretences.’

‘Yes. And I know you’re thinking you want to walk away from all of it. I’m begging you, don’t. I need your help. Never give up hope, remember? That’s what you said, remember?’

‘There’s faith, Raul, and then there’s self-delusion.’ Ben turned away from him and went to the window, stood there for a moment looking down at the street. Night had fallen and the drizzle had returned, spitting diagonally from a charcoal sky and haloed in the street lamps. One of them was flickering intermittently. Further down on the opposite side, light flooded across the slick pavement from the windows of a café-restaurant. The street was empty apart from the parked vehicles that lined the kerbs and the occasional passing car.

‘Please,’ said Raul’s voice behind him.

Ben went on gazing out of the window for a while. His jaw was wound so tight that his teeth hurt. But under all his anger was a thread of sympathy for Raul that he couldn’t so easily let go of. He knew he should, and he knew he was being stupid and weak, but there it was.

He turned from the window to face Raul and said, ‘All right. One more chance. But I’m warning you. Any more surprises, and you’re on your own. I mean it.’

‘There won’t be,’ Raul said, brightening. ‘Thank you. From my heart.’ He gave a weak smile.

Ben grunted and did not return the smile. ‘In the morning we’ll go and talk to Klein. Now let’s eat.’

Down in the street below, bathed in the intermittent glow from the flickering street lamp, the watcher sat perfectly still inside the plain black Fiat panel van with an easy view of the apartment windows. He had been sitting there since not long after the silver Kia had parked at the opposite kerb outside the apartment building and its two occupants had disappeared inside. The van’s smoked glass hid him from passersby and allowed him to use the compact but powerful Canon 8x25 image-stabilising mini-binocs that were part of his kit. Another part was the Walther PPX nine-millimetre handgun nestling in its Kydex concealment holster on his belt. Those weren’t all that he had brought with him.

Seeing a figure appear at one of the apartment’s windows that overlooked the street, he picked up the binocs. The man at the window was the blond one who’d hooked up with Raul Fuentes over the last couple of days. They knew all about him, his name, his former occupation, his level of expertise. Hence the Walther PPX. What they didn’t yet know, and were keen to discover, was how and why he’d suddenly appeared in the picture.

The watcher went on watching. Ben Hope was half-silhouetted in the light from the apartment, but enough showed of his face to make out his grim expression through the image-stabilised field of view. His hair was a little longer than in the photograph in the file the watcher had been shown. After a few moments, Ben Hope turned away from the window and his lips moved as though he were speaking, then he disappeared from sight. He could only have been talking to Fuentes. That would be confirmed by the watcher’s teammates who were monitoring the bugged conversation back at base.

The watcher lowered his binoculars, satisfied that neither of the men inside the apartment was about to emerge to disturb the next phase of the operation.

He zippered up his black nylon jacket and pulled the woollen beanie hat tight down over his ears, partly to keep the rain off, partly to hide his features. Picking up a small black backpack from the passenger seat, he opened the van door and stepped quietly out. A quick upwards glance at the apartment windows to ensure nobody was watching him; then he moved quickly and silently across the street and slipped between the silver Kia and the Audi parked behind it. He took the small unit from the backpack and knelt beside the Kia as if he needed to tie a loose shoelace.

The unit clamped without a sound to the inside of the car’s rear wheel arch. The watcher checked that it was secure, then continued walking down the street until he was out of sight of the building. He crossed the road and doubled back on himself, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, like an ordinary pedestrian walking fast to get out of the rain.

When he returned to the van, he made his call. Soon afterwards, he started up the van and drove away into the night.

Chapter Ten

The private investigations offices of Leonhard Klein were situated to the north of the Glockenbach district, in an area called Maxverstadt close to the heart of Munich. After hustling through early morning traffic under a blanket of drifting rain, Ben and Raul arrived there shortly before nine. The nondescript cream-coloured modern building off Schellingstrasse stood back from the road, with a small cordoned parking area in front and a polished steel sign above the door that said L. KLEIN, DETEKTEI – NACHRICHTEN as on his official letterhead. Two cars were parked outside, a bright green VW Polo and a big black S-Class Mercedes. It wasn’t hard to tell which belonged to the man himself, Klein.

The building was warm inside and smelled of flowers and fresh paint. A short hallway led to a tastefully appointed reception area, where a middle-aged woman with bobbed platinum hair was fiddling around behind the desk. Her handbag and a set of car keys with a Volkswagen fob were lying on the desktop next to her, as if she’d only just arrived for work. She peered over her spectacles as Ben and Raul approached, arched her eyebrows and glanced at the clock.

‘You have an appointment?’ she asked in German, in a tone that made it clear she knew perfectly well they didn’t.

‘He’s a client,’ Ben replied in German, jerking a thumb at Raul. Switching back to English he said to Raul, ‘That’s his office. Follow me,’ and pointed at a door to the right. Raul nodded.

The receptionist scurried out from behind the desk as Ben moved towards the door. ‘You can’t go in there. Herr Klein is in a meeting.’

Ben ignored her, opened the door and stepped inside. It was a large, comfortable office, thickly carpeted, nicely furnished. Leonhard Klein was alone behind a broad desk that was empty apart from a cordless phone and the newspaper he was reading. He looked quickly up as Ben entered the office, then his expression of surprise turned to one of wary recognition as Raul stepped into the room at Ben’s shoulder.

The detective closed the newspaper and stood up behind his desk. He was a tall, thin man with grey hair carefully combed over a freckled scalp and close-set eyes the same washed-out, warmthless colour of the ocean off Rügen Island. His nose and cheeks were florid with broken veins. Behind him on the wall hung a framed photo of a much younger version of himself, mean and moody in the uniform of the old West German Bundespolizei, peaked cap pulled low, a pistol riding on his hip and sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve.

Klein smiled, but it was a thin smile and his eyes were narrowed with suspicion. Ben could have spotted the ex-cop in the man even without being told. Klein didn’t look like someone you could slip too much past.

‘Herr Fuentes. To what do I owe this unexpected visit?’

‘I got your letter,’ Raul said. ‘I have a few questions.’

‘I see.’ The pale eyes turned towards Ben, shrewdly looking him up and down and obviously wondering who he was and what he was doing there.

Raul said, ‘This is my associate, Mr Hope. He’s aware of all the details of my sister’s case.’

‘I’m sure that it was unnecessary for you and your, ah, associate to travel all this way to discuss your questions in person,’ Klein said. ‘I only have a very few minutes before I’m due to see a client.’

A client. Not another client, Ben noticed. As if to say, your case is yesterday’s news. ‘This won’t take long, Herr Klein,’ Ben said, reverting back to German. The detective’s eyes grew smaller and one eyebrow twitched in surprise.

‘Very well. Please, take a seat.’ He guided them to a pair of handsomely upholstered chairs facing the desk, waited until they were seated and then sat in his own plush leather swivel. He slid open a drawer of his desk and took out a notepad and a pen. ‘Is there anything in my letter that was unclear to you?’

Ben leaned back and let Raul do the talking.

‘Mr Klein, I still believe that my sister is alive,’ Raul said, cutting straight to the chase.

A small ripple passed over Klein’s face and his lips tightened. He seemed about to protest, then just spread his hands and said, ‘Go on.’

‘I’m here to ask you whether it’s possible, with all respect to your professionalism, that you might have missed something.’

Klein began tapping the pen on the desk. ‘I’ve been in this business a long time, Herr Fuentes.’

‘I appreciate that. But please listen to me. I now believe she might have been abducted.’

Klein looked at him unwaveringly. ‘Have you heard from the kidnapper?’

‘No. No contact, no ransom demand, nothing like that.’

‘Then may I ask what makes you think this is the case?’

Ben was inwardly cringing, knowing what Raul was going to say next. He badly wanted to be somewhere else.

‘I have no evidence,’ Raul said. ‘Not yet. That’s why I’m here.’

Klein went on tapping the pen on the desk, the way a cat switches its tail back and forth when irritated. ‘To find evidence?’

‘To find Catalina,’ Raul replied firmly. ‘And to ask you to think very hard about what could have been overlooked. There’s something we’ve missed. I know there is.’

‘We?’

‘You. And me. Both of us.’

Klein’s face was hardening. Something flickered in those cold eyes. Tap. Tap. Tap. He glanced again at Ben. ‘And does your associate share your belief that Fräulein Fuentes is the victim of an elaborate and cleverly disguised kidnap plot?’

‘Mr Hope has extensive experience in the field,’ Raul said.

Ben cringed even more. Great, Raul. Thanks.

Klein gave Ben a long, searching look. Then he dropped the pen and reclined in his chair. ‘I find it somewhat insulting, Herr Fuentes, to have my professional capabilities brought into question in this way, especially in front of a third party. I have done everything that is possible with your sister’s case, both here in Munich and at the scene of the incident, where I spent two entire days scouting the location and speaking with local residents as well as the police. I have spent a great many hours investigating the matter, and my conclusions are definitive. I’m afraid there is simply no doubt, in my mind or in fact, that Fräulein Fuentes was a deeply unhappy young woman who tragically took her own life. Her history of mental instability and her ongoing treatment for severe depression are compelling evidence in themselves. The lack of a body was the only reason I agreed to take your case on in the first place, which I now must say I regret. If you and your associate can do a better job, then I wish you the very best of luck, gentlemen.’

Klein stood up, leaning his knuckles on the desktop. ‘Now, Herr Fuentes, I have much better things to occupy my time. At this point our business is terminated, and I must ask you to leave my office.’

‘You didn’t say a word,’ Raul muttered as he and Ben stepped out of the building and walked back towards the Kia. The rain was falling harder. ‘Not a single damn word to back me up in there.’

Ben remained silent as they got into the car. He was still smarting from embarrassment, angry with Raul for dragging him into this and even angrier with himself to have allowed it to come this far.

So wrapped up in his own dark thoughts that he failed to sense the eyes watching his back and the metallic grey BMW that followed at a distance as he pulled the Kia out into the traffic.

Chapter Eleven

By the time they were nearing Glockenbach district, the rain had worsened into a deluge and Ben had made the decision to walk away from the whole situation. He could have been sitting on a beautiful lonely hilltop in southern Spain at this moment. Climbing in the Sierra Nevada or trekking along the Costa de Almeria in search of a deserted white-sand beach or cove where he could maybe rent a little place next to the sea and spend a while figuring out where his life was going. Not hacking through dirty traffic on a cold wet day in a city he had little love for and no longer any reason for remaining in.

‘Klein’s right,’ Ben said at last.

‘I knew you were going to say that,’ Raul muttered.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What are you going to do?’

Ben shrugged. ‘What can I do?’

‘I need a drink,’ Raul said.

‘Yeah, why not,’ Ben agreed. One for the road. Then he was out of here. Maybe by train or bus, back down south to where it was warmer. Maybe to Italy. He had friends there. He could drop in and see his old army comrade Boonzie McCulloch, the most ferocious grizzled wardog of a sergeant the SAS had ever unleashed upon the world, now retired to a cosy life growing tomatoes and basil with his Neapolitan wife Mirella in their tranquil smallholding up in the hills near Campo Basso.

‘There’s a place up ahead,’ Raul said sullenly, pointing through the rain-spattered windscreen. ‘Pull up here. I can’t face going back to the apartment yet.’

They hurried from the car and went inside. It was one of those kinds of upmarket café-wine-bars that Ben found a little too precious for his tastes, the sort of place they charged three times the going rate for a measure of ordinary scotch, just for the privilege of planting your arse on one of their dainty chairs and being served by some disdainful prick with an attitude problem. They took a table at the back and Raul ordered a stein of beer that came in a litre tankard shaped like a jackboot. Hello, Bavaria. Ben bypassed the local traditions and asked for a double whisky, straight, no ice. The waiter was a malnourished-looking guy in his twenties, stooped and bald-headed and brusque in his ways, at least with Ben and Raul. Maybe he disapproved of whisky drinkers at ten in the morning.