The Cassandra Sanction (16 page)

‘
I … am … sorry … I … lied … to … you … She … tell … me to …
’

‘She told you to lie,’ Raul said.

Kazem nodded weakly, then coughed and spat another gout of blood. It was bright red. Arterial. Not good.

‘
She … knew … they … come … for … her … She … have … to … dis …
’

‘Disappear?’ Raul said. He turned to Ben. ‘She
was running from them. It’s what we thought.’

Now Ben understood the real reason why Kazem had taken flight when he’d seen the two of them arrive earlier. He’d mistaken them for whoever was after his former employer, believing they’d come for him too.

But that was all he had time to think before he heard the fast steps on the other side of the door. The men were back.

Gunfire exploded
from the living room and splinters burst from the inside of the door. The attackers knew where they were hiding, and they were intending to shoot the door down. A few shotgun blasts, and it would separate into firewood. Then they’d be inside.

Ben ran to the door and pressed himself flat against the wall next to it. Thick, solid stone, impenetrable to any kind of small arms fire short of a
big fifty-calibre. He reached out to his side and jammed his pistol against the splintered wood and squeezed the trigger, then again and again until his ears were ringing badly and the gun muzzle was smoking hot and the wood was smouldering.

The gunfire fell silent again. He seemed to have driven the attackers back for now, but it had cost him every round in his pistol. Ben tossed it. All
he had now was the submachine gun with one magazine. Thirty rounds wasn’t as much as it sounded in a weapon that spat out thirteen of them every second.

Kazem coughed more blood. Raul was right beside him, clutching his hand. His trousers were soaked red to the knee.

‘What do these people want?’ Raul was asking. His tone was urgent but he seemed oblivious of the shooting and the danger.
He seemed hardly to notice the blood any more. Kazem was slipping fast, and what he knew was everything that mattered to Raul at this moment. ‘Kazem, talk to me. Why is she in trouble?’

Kazem raised a bloody arm and extended his finger towards the dome above. He was pointing at the observatory.

Ben understood Kazem was trying to say that it had to do with Catalina’s work. But that was
impossible. Her work was studying space. By definition, there was no less worldly occupation. Detached from all human concerns, from politics, from money, from religion, from everything.

Kazem bubbled red from the mouth and a croak came from his lips that to Ben’s ringing ears sounded like ‘core sheet’.

Then Ben realised that Kazem had reverted to his native tongue as his life ebbed away.
It wasn’t ‘core sheet’. It was the Persian word ‘khorshīd’.

Khorshīd was Persian for the sun.

The sun, which had been the main focus of Catalina’s work. Kazem’s fluttering, bloody hand was pointing up at the dome where he’d helped her carry out her solar observation work through the specialist Lunt solar telescope.

But how could that be?

Ben wanted to ask him. He didn’t know if
the dying man could reply, but he opened his mouth to ask him anyway.

His question was drowned out by the shotgun blast that exploded like a grenade the other side of the door. Wood shards blew into the room and a hole the size of a grapefruit appeared in the shattered planks. Then another, and the hole elongated and the door came loose at its top hinge.

Raul threw himself behind the steel
pillar for cover. Ben spun towards the attackers and hosed a stream of automatic fire at the door, turning what was left of it into a colander of nine-millimetre holes. Thirteen rounds a second. Ben kept his finger on the trigger maybe a second and a half. Long enough to drive the enemy back again. Long enough to deplete most of his only magazine.

Now there was little left to fight with, and
only one place to run. Up into the dome.

Cornered.

Chapter Twenty-One

The air was acrid with gunsmoke and the stink of cordite. Ben crushed empty cartridge cases underfoot as he hurried over to Kazem, thinking he’d have to carry the injured man over his shoulder.

But Kazem was already dead. His eyes were a glassy stare and the hole in his neck had stopped sucking air.

‘Leave him,’ Ben said to Raul, who was gaping at the dead man who’d
been his sister’s assistant and possibly the last person to speak to her. Ben grabbed Raul’s arm and shoved him towards the spiral steps.

Behind them, the door crashed in and tore off its second hinge and came apart as it hit the floor. One, two, three men in black ski-masks burst through the doorway.

Ben shoved Raul’s back, urging him to go faster. Their racing steps clattered on the
metal staircase. Shots cracked out. A bullet whanged off the steel pillar a few inches from Ben’s head. Another sparked off the metalwork at his feet. Raul stumbled and for an instant Ben thought he’d been shot. Raul’s gun fell from his hand as he grabbed the rail to steady himself. The weapon clattered and bounced past Ben on its way down the steps. No time to try to go back for it. He pushed Raul
harder. Raul kept moving. He plunged up through the hatch. Ben was right behind.

Now they were inside the dark, shady interior of the astronomical dome, and Ben knew that his tactical retreat had turned into a bad mistake. They were trapped in a dead end. You could defend it, if you had enough ammunition. Which they didn’t have. But either way, with the enemy occupying the only exit, you couldn’t
escape from it.

Already, he could hear the voices below as the gunmen took control of the room beneath them. One of them sounded as if he was talking into a radio or phone. Ben caught the words ‘They’re in the tower’.

Speaking English. London accent.

Ben didn’t have time to wonder why. He checked his weapon. Three rounds in the magazine, plus one in the chamber. Not good. Not good
at all.

The darkness inside the dome was their only friend. Ben found the light switch on the wall near the hatch, but he didn’t turn it on. He hit it hard with the butt of the submachine gun, felt the plastic crunch and hit it twice more until the switch was in pieces and dangling uselessly from its wires. He grabbed Raul’s arm again and urged him into the shadows.

Now there were footsteps
ringing on the staircase as the three men headed up towards them. Ben and Raul drew back behind the hulking forms of the telescopes. Ben wondered why the attackers didn’t just fire up through the floor with twelve-gauge slug rounds, or just pop a grenade or two up through the hatch. It was what he’d have done. And these people didn’t seem short of hardware. It wouldn’t take much more firepower
than they’d already demonstrated to blast the whole dome and everything in it to pieces. But there was something reticent about their tactics. Almost as if … The first man emerged through the hatchway. Just a dark outline, dimly illuminated by the daylight shining up from below. Followed by the second, then the third. In turn, each vanished into the shadows. Ben could no longer see them, but he
could sense them splitting up and circling the dome, guns ready. He could picture their relative positions from the tread of their footsteps on the spongy rubber floor. He didn’t dare fire, because the muzzle flash would only give away his position and invite an overwhelming reply of superior force. He quietly transferred the gun to his left hand and drew the knife from his belt. Nudged Raul as if
to say, ‘Stay close to me.’

Ben listened hard in the dark, visualising what his ears told him. One man had moved to the left, one to the right, stalking around the circumference of the dome in opposite directions to flush out their prey. The third man was cutting across the middle, stealthily approaching the telescope mounting in the centre of the floor. Not stealthily enough. His rubber soles
creaking on the rubber floor, under the weight of a large man weighed down with body armour and weaponry and ammunition. He stepped forward another metre, then another. He was close now, close enough that Ben could hear him breathing.

Ben waited, perfectly immobile in the shadow of the telescopes. He silently placed the gun down by his feet. Laid a hand on Raul’s arm, telling him to hold steady.
Three more seconds. Then five.
Creak. Creak.
He could smell the guy’s sweat.

Then Ben struck, with the speed and surprise of an attacking leopard when it explodes out of deep cover to take down an unsuspecting gazelle.

Except that Ben’s enemy was no gazelle. He was a dangerous predator in his own right, and Ben had to put him down hard and fast. He knocked him sprawling backwards into
the operator’s chair attached to the rear of the twin telescope mounting, and used the knife. It was brutal, and it was merciless, and it was exactly what Ben had been trained to do many years earlier.

As the man twitched his last in the chair, Ben was already retreating back into the depth of the shadows, clutching the bloodied blade. He picked up his near-empty weapon. There hadn’t been
time to snatch the man’s gun. The other two, fanned out at opposite sides of the dome, had heard the muffled commotion and come rushing to the centre to investigate, and he’d had to withdraw quickly. Ben heard the rustle of clothing as one of them crouched down to check their fallen companion. It didn’t take them long to tell there was nothing they could do for him. They quickly split up again.

Ben and Raul pulled deeper into the darkness. Ben felt the edge of one of the racks of high-tech astronomical equipment against his elbow and slowly, silently moved around the back of it.

A mechanical click caught his ear. Followed by the hum and whirr of an electric motor, the taut jerk of a steel cable taking up slack, the sound of wheels turning, pulleys rolling.

One of the men had
found the controls for the dome. The whole upper section was rotating on its base, like some kind of gigantic artillery emplacement or a missile silo bearing towards the direction of its target. There was a muted rumble that resonated through the whole dome as the huge fibreglass construction swivelled around on roller tracks inset into the rim of the perimeter. The rumbling continued for several
seconds, then it stopped.

What was he doing?

Then Ben heard another click, and he knew the answer.

Shit.

The man had activated the control to open the roof. The electric motor kicked in again, and this time the mechanical sounds came from directly overhead as the cables and pulleys bore on the sliding section of ceiling that could be pulled right back for observing the sky. A bright
crack of daylight appeared, three metres in length and growing quickly wider. The pale afternoon sunlight flooded the inside of the dome, dazzling in its suddenness.

The cover of darkness was suddenly gone. Ben blinked, feeling as naked and exposed as a fugitive caught in a search beam.

Then it got worse.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Cook had listened to the whole thing unfolding through his headset, but he hadn’t moved from his vantage point in the rocks overlooking the front of the house.

Their opponent, this Hope guy, had proved even tougher to kill than they’d anticipated. The Boss was tearing his hair out and ready for an apoplexy on the other end of the phone. Hope had first taken out Ruddock,
then Nicholson. Now, as the dome opened like the top of a giant egg and filled with light, Cook could see through his rifle scope the bloodied corpse of Phil Dean sprawled in a chair that was part of the astronomical telescope mounting. Three men down. Half their force. But now the show was over, because nothing could compete with what he was about to bring to the deal. His field of fire was
laid wide open. A sniper’s delight.

Cook panned the rifle to the left and his crosshairs picked out the fleeting shape of a man who wasn’t one of his team, and wasn’t Raul Fuentes. Hope.

Cook didn’t need to call it in this time. As fast as he locked his sights on target, he squeezed the trigger.

Ben felt the shockwave of the incoming rifle bullet before he heard the thunderous crack
of its report. It missed him, but not by much as it slammed past and punched a clean round hole through the fibreglass wall behind him. Ben caught a momentary glimpse of the sniper eighty metres away among the rocks, about level with the roof of the house and angling his rifle up at the dome.

As another shot cracked out, Ben was already diving out of the line of fire. Moments ago, he’d been
groping about in darkness. Now every detail of the dome was lit up bright and clear. He retreated behind a metal table covered in computer equipment. He had lost sight of Raul, and that worried him. What worried him even more were the sniper outside, and the two enemies still in the house. Four rounds left. He could afford a single miss. The rest had to count, one for one.

A deafening blast
came from inside the dome. A spread of twelve-gauge buckshot blew the computers on the table to pieces and showered Ben with debris. The masked man holding the shotgun was hunkered down behind the telescope mounting, and Ben didn’t have a clear shot at him. He inched around the side of the table. Too late, he saw that the sniper in the rocks had moved position, climbing higher so he could command
a better view into the dome.

There was nothing reticent about their tactics now. Ben scrambled away as the sniper opened up with fully automatic fire and the high-velocity rounds chewed through the metal table as if it were made of cheese. Whatever kind of battle rifle the guy was equipped with, it could shred the whole dome apart in no time.

But the sniper could only climb so high, and
the bottom sill of the dome’s aperture was higher. Which meant that as long as Ben stayed pressed down close enough to the floor, he couldn’t be seen. That couldn’t prevent him from being seen by the two heavily armed men left inside the dome, though. He wedged himself as far as he could into the side of the observatory, behind a latticework of metal struts that supported the weight of the roof.
He was pinned, and he couldn’t move, and he still couldn’t see Raul.