Читать книгу The Cassandra Sanction - Scott Mariani, Scott Mariani - Страница 12

While he was still a young man, Ben had been schooled in the importance of secrecy. Combat-hardened warriors with ferocious glares and strident voices had taught him how to keep his mouth shut even in the face of determined enemy interrogation; and as his instructors quickly discovered, his response to that training was off the charts. In a world of lies where even elected rulers, let alone top military brass, were often kept unaware of the real truth behind political machinations or cloak-and-dagger black ops, it nonetheless behoved a future Special Forces officer to guard such sensitive information as had been confided in him with extreme caution. Once entrusted with a secret, Trooper Hope would let you slice him to pieces before you could extract a single word.

He’d excelled at it from the start, because he had a natural talent for silence. Observe, listen, learn, don’t say more than you have to. As a child his teachers had found him private and reserved to the point of obstinacy. Likewise, when the Bad Things had begun to happen in his life he’d seldom, if ever, spoken of them to anyone. It had been that way ever since. The story of what had happened that terrible day in Marrakech was a secret he’d confided to only a bare handful of people over the years. It went against his inclinations to talk about it, but he felt he owed it to Raul Fuentes.

Raul listened quietly, staring intently and absorbing every word. Finally he asked, ‘Your parents, where are they now?’

‘Both dead. They didn’t last long after what happened.’

Raul’s expression saddened, thinking of his own family. ‘And you? What did you do?’

‘I went a little nuts,’ Ben said. ‘Drank too much, wanted to blow up the world, joined the army, put everything I had into it. For a while, anyway.’

Funny how you could crush thirteen years’ service and a thousand exploits into so few words.

‘Then I left and put what I had into trying to help people who were lost, like Ruth. People who’d been taken. To find them, bring them back.’ Ben talked a little about some of what he’d done in those years, what he’d seen, what he’d learned.

Raul was listening and watching him with such intensity in his eyes that he was almost trembling. ‘But your sister, you never found her?’

The question hung in the air between them until Ben replied, ‘I found her.’

Raul stared at him even harder. ‘She was dead?’ Just a whisper, as if he dreaded the word and saying it too loudly could make it more of a dark reality.

‘She was alive,’ Ben said. ‘A lot of time had passed. She was grown up by then. It’s a long story, Raul. But the point is this. I’d stopped searching for Ruth many years before. I’d stopped believing, in my heart. Whatever faith I’d had that I might ever find her, alive or not, I’d lost it. And it wasn’t by design that I found her. It was just chance. One in a billion, just like it was one in a billion that she’d survived. But it happened. And that’s when I realised that I should never have lost faith. That was the most painful thing of all.’

Raul said nothing. He nodded slowly, processing what Ben was telling him.

‘That’s why I came back,’ Ben said. ‘Because I, of all people, should know better. And because you wouldn’t give up on your sister like I did. I admire you for that, Raul. Even if it turns out that you’re wrong. I just wanted to tell you that before I moved on.’

Raul closed his eyes for a moment. When he reopened them, he glanced at the crucifix on the wall. Then his gaze returned to Ben, looking at him with something like wonderment. ‘I think you must have been sent to me.’

‘I’m not an angel from heaven. I’m anything but.’

‘I didn’t pray for an angel. I prayed for someone who could help me find Catalina, like you found all those other people.’

‘It’s what I used to do,’ Ben said. ‘These days I’m just trying to find myself.’

‘But you know about these things.’ Raul bent forward in his seat with his hands clasped in his lap, his eyes large and liquid and full of pleading. ‘Look at me. I’m just an ordinary man. A schoolteacher. What have I ever done in my life?’ He pulled a face and glanced around him, as if he was disgusted with himself, his world, his whole existence. ‘You must, must help me. I’m completely certain that my sister didn’t do what everyone thinks. But I know she’s in terrible danger. I believe she was kidnapped.’

‘Your sister disappeared. That doesn’t mean she was kidnapped.’

Raul looked at him. ‘You don’t read the papers, do you? You don’t really know who she is.’

Ben shook his head, not understanding. Before he could reply, Raul stood up and went over to the bookcase. He lifted out a stack of magazines, came back and dumped them in Ben’s arms. Ben had no idea why, until he recognised the woman on the cover of the top magazine in the pile. It was one of those tabloid glossies that always filled the racks nearest the checkouts in stores and supermarkets, offering to spill the latest exclusive scoop or scabrous gossip about fifteen-minute celebrities Ben had never heard of and truly didn’t want to. This was the first time he’d ever recognised the face on the cover, as the perfect smile of Catalina Fuentes shone up at him from the glossy page. The tagline next to her picture said: IS THIS THE WORLD’S SEXIEST SCIENTIST?

He frowned up at Raul. ‘Your sister is this famous?’

‘Turn to page four,’ Raul said.

Ben flipped the magazine open to a double-page spread featuring more photos of her. The article began: ‘Who says you can’t have good looks and brains? Stunning Catalina Fuentes has them both by the bucket load.’

If Raul was surprised that Ben had never heard of his famous sister, he didn’t make a big deal of it. Even the biggest celebrity on the planet would have to be a stranger to someone. Or maybe something about Ben made it obvious that he didn’t exactly keep up with current trends.

Ben put the magazine aside and sifted through the rest of the pile. They were in date order, and the latest two had splashed all over their cover the shocking revelation of the suicide of one of the media’s best-loved personalities. HOW COULD SHE HAVE DONE IT? one proclaimed, almost indignant in tone. SECRET AGONY OF TRAGIC CATALINA, the other wailed, below an image of a wrecked Porsche Cayenne being winched from the sea at the foot of sheer white cliffs.

‘I had no idea,’ Ben said. He laid the magazines at his feet. ‘You told me she was a scientist.’

‘An astronomer,’ Raul said. ‘I also told you she was a little bit more than that. It was the television show that really started the whole celebrity thing. Until then, she was devoted to her work. She taught astrophysics and cosmology for a year in Madrid, then decided she wanted to broaden her horizons. She always had an incredible talent for languages, and could speak four of them fluently by the time she was twenty-one. She had no problem teaching herself German in six months so she could take the lectureship at the University of Munich. She was always a genius, ever since we were kids. She was chairperson of this science board and that, and wrote all these books on solar physics. Then five years ago she became the youngest ever, and only female, winner of the Kilosky Astrophysics Prize. It’s like a more specialised version of the Nobel Prize. Won lots of teaching awards, too. Her students loved her.’

Raul paused sadly for a moment, then went on. ‘Anyway, four years ago, a British television producer asked her if she’d present this six-part series on astronomers in history. Not the ones everyone’s heard of, like Galileo and Newton. Ones like the female American astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, who have been kind of overstepped and forgotten but are still really important. You know?’

Ben just spread his hands. He knew how to navigate by the constellations when GPS went down, but that was about the sum total of his astronomical knowledge.

‘She was young, beautiful, intelligent and as well qualified for the job as anyone, and she thought it was a worthy project to get involved in. She had no idea what great TV it would make and how popular she’d become as a result. She took a sabbatical from her teaching and writing, and travelled all over with the film crew. A year later, the first episode aired on BBC, then RTL in Germany and all around Europe. Suddenly, she was this big media celebrity. It just kind of exploded, not because of the subject matter – I mean, who really cares about a bunch of dead astronomers? It was her the people loved. She set the screen on fire. Next thing, she was getting offers from all over the place for more mainstream shows, and had to start cutting her teaching down to part-time just to fit all the work in. You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing her.’

‘I haven’t watched it in a while,’ Ben said truthfully. His last place of residence of any duration had been a monastery in the French Alps, where the monks had barely even heard of TV. His being there was another long story, one he didn’t intend to share.

Raul went on, ‘And magazines like this one couldn’t get enough of her. She was the darling of the media. She used to laugh about it all, this science academic getting to rub shoulders with movie stars and pop singers, like she couldn’t take it too seriously and was just enjoying the ride while it lasted. And the money, too.’

‘Okay,’ Ben said. He was soaking up information fast, but he still didn’t understand why Raul Fuentes thought his celebrity sister had been kidnapped. Rich people got kidnapped all the time. The motive was almost invariably financial, which meant the victim’s family could generally expect to receive a ransom demand within hours, sometimes within minutes of the abduction. But that hadn’t happened in this case.

‘She didn’t talk much about the dark side of it all,’ Raul went on. ‘Like all those damn photographers always hanging around, trying to get a shot of her, so many she started having to sneak out of the house in disguise. I think she accepted it, like it just went with the territory. But then the Lukas Geerts thing happened.’

‘Lukas Geerts?’

The corners of Raul’s mouth downturned and he looked as if he’d just got a whiff of something out of a sewer. ‘A Belgian IT consultant and amateur astronomy nerd who’d become fixated on her after watching her on TV. This creep somehow managed to convince himself he was in love with her, and that he could make her love him too, if only he could meet her. He travelled to Munich, hung around the university and followed her home. It was easy for him to find out where she lived, and somehow got her personal mobile number too. Next thing, he was turning up there the whole time. He’d sit outside her place in his car and phone her, ten, twenty times a day. I mean, he had her face tattooed on his arm. Can you believe that?’

Ben had once pursued a child abuser and kidnapper who’d tattooed the names of his victims in Gothic script on every part of his own body, including his genitals. Ben could believe more or less anything.

‘Catalina was freaked out by him and wouldn’t have anything to do with him, of course, but on his Facebook page he was making out that he and she were an item. He created images on Photoshop showing them holding hands. I kept telling her she should report it to the police, but she actually felt sorry for him because he was mentally deranged. Then it got even worse, with the porn stuff he was doctoring to make it look like them together, and putting up online. In the end, she had to get the police involved and there was a restraining order and criminal charges. It was only then it turned out he was guilty of the attempted rape of some poor girl in Zeebrugge a year earlier, and he ended up sentenced to eighteen months behind bars.’

‘I understand. So you think Geerts has come back after her, except now he’s angry and prepared to go to extremes to make her his.’

Ben wasn’t liking the sound of it. Suddenly, the idea of foul play entered the scenario and sounded plausible enough to be a concern. If the motive was about revenge or possession rather than money, a ransom demand became immaterial.

Raul shook his head. ‘No, because Geerts is dead. A few months into his sentence, one of his fellow prisoners stuck a shank between his ribs. I wasn’t exactly sorry.’

‘That would tend to rule him out of the equation,’ Ben said.

‘Him, but not a hundred others. Who’s to say some other lunatic hasn’t turned up there in Munich with a delusional fixation about her? There are crazy people everywhere.’

Ben had been expecting a little more substance to Raul’s kidnap premise. ‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Have you mentioned this to the German police? To the investigator, Klein?’

Raul shook his head. ‘Not yet. It’s a new theory. The only one that makes sense to me.’

‘That’s not a theory, Raul. It isn’t even a hypothesis. It’s more like a guess, based on nothing but the emotions you’re feeling.’

‘That’s why I need someone to help me,’ Raul said.

‘Help you do what?’

‘Prove that she’s not dead. Find who took her, and get her back. I want you to come with me to Germany. I’ll pay for the flight and all expenses. I still have a little bit of savings left over. Whatever we don’t spend on the trip, you take as a fee.’

‘I don’t want your money,’ Ben said tersely.

‘You have to help me. You’re the only person I’ve met who can.’

Ben took out his cigarettes and Zippo, fished out a Gauloise and bathed its tip in the lazy orange flame of the lighter. He puffed for a few moments as he reflected. Thinking that Germany was a long way away, and that he’d come back here to offer Raul moral support, not to get involved in what was almost certain to be a dead-end undertaking that would only cause further heartache. Raul might soon find himself wishing he’d attended his sister’s funeral, after all.

Raul was watching him, worriedly trying to read his thoughts. ‘You told me never to give up. You said those words to me.’

Ben went on smoking. He thought about the girl he’d seen from the bus. Thought about the real reason he’d come back here. If he was honest with himself, maybe it hadn’t been just to offer moral support. Maybe he needed to do more than that, for his own sake as much as that of a stranger he’d met in a bar only that day.

He knew he couldn’t turn away, any more than he could have sat back and let Raul take a bad beating in there.

‘I don’t want you getting your hopes up,’ he said. ‘You have to be ready for the worst. The odds are slim.’

For the first time since Ben had met him, Raul Fuentes allowed himself a smile of relief. ‘One in a billion. But it wouldn’t be the first time those odds paid off, would it?’

Ben looked at him.

‘So you’ll help me?’ Raul said.