The Cassandra Sanction (39 page)

‘We’ll see,’ she said patiently.

Catalina owed her choice of landing site to the other, and more important, piece of research she’d been engaged in during the last three months. Keller had necessarily been involved in that one, because although she’d never allowed him to know how she was secretly planning on using the information,
it was through the kinds of discreet inquiries that only money like Austin’s could make possible that she’d been able to learn the precise location of Maxwell Grant’s favourite of his three homes. The townhouse in Mayfair was generally only a stopover for when his business affairs took him to London, as was the forty-million-dollar Manhattan penthouse for his New York trips. The place Grant liked
to spend most of his leisure time was the grand seventeenth-century Villa Callisto, set within a secluded fifty-acre estate an hour and a half’s drive up the coast near the Gulf of Táranto. She had the exact coordinates for that, too.

Pete Avery might have been a deeply unhappy man that morning, but he was a skilled pilot, especially with a gun pointed at him. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he breathed
some time later when they swooped down out of the clouds and spied the old airfield in the distance, like a ghostly apparition bathed in the light of dawn. There was nothing but open countryside around it for kilometres. No sign of habitation, and certainly no sign of Italian Air Force fighters coming to intercept them.

Avery made two passes over the deserted airfield before he determined
the best angle of approach. On the third pass, he brought the plane down in a steep descent. The Lear was as agile as an airborne Ferrari. They overshot the perimeter fence by fifty feet to make a bumpy but successful landing on the cracked, weed-strewn runway. Exactly as she’d calculated, they had been in the air for just under ninety minutes.

‘I still think you’re nuts,’ he grumbled at her
as he started powering down the engines.

‘That was a very good landing,’ she replied, getting out of the co-pilot’s chair. ‘Thank you for your help.’

Before he could reply, she hammered him over the head with the butt of the pistol, twice. Avery went out like a light and slumped in his chair.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the unconscious pilot. ‘I hope you’ll be all right.’

Catalina
reached again into her bag, and brought out the last length of the rope she’d taken from the storage shed on Icthyios. She carefully looped it around Avery’s chest and arms and tied him into the pilot’s seat. His bonds weren’t intended to hold him indefinitely, because she didn’t want him to die of dehydration out here with nobody to rescue him. She just needed to hold him up for a while. By the
time he got loose and called for help, she’d be far away.

She opened the exit hatch and hurried away from the aircraft carrying her travel bag. Once she was the other side of the hole she found in the perimeter fence, she started walking. The fields were rutted and hard going, but after a couple of kilometres she reached a road and checked the GPS app on her phone to make sure she was heading
in the right direction.

Some kilometres further down the road a friendly old Calabrian farmer called Giuseppe pulled up in his battered pickup truck to offer a lift to the lone female hitchhiker. With her complexion she easily passed for southern Italian, and it also happened to be one of the languages Catalina spoke to perfection. She introduced herself as Lucia Verde, explaining that her
car had broken down and that she absolutely needed to get to Serra San Bruno for her sister’s wedding later that morning. Giuseppe was only too happy to oblige, and regaled her all the way there with stories about his seven grandchildren.

After Giuseppe dropped her off with a cheery goodbye in the town of San Bruno, she made her way to the bus station, via a coffee bar where she stopped for
a light breakfast. Nobody recognised her, which was one of the few parts of her plan she’d had to leave to chance. Either the hairstyle was working, or her fame had never quite reached rural southern Italy. Either way, it was a relief.

By eight fifteen, Catalina had boarded a bus that was headed all the way up the coast to Táranto. It wasn’t too crowded, and she sat alone near the back. As
the bus wound its twisting way northwards up the Calabrian coast, she ignored the spectacular ocean views. She’d seen enough pretty beaches to last her the rest of her life. Instead she sat clutching her leather bag on her lap and gazed into space, working over and over her plan.

The desire to avenge the murders of Jim Lockhart and Dougal Sinclair had been burning inside her even before she’d
arrived on Icthyios. So many times she’d visualised herself going after the man she was certain was responsible, picturing the whole thing in detail, working out exactly how it could be done. Then so many times she’d vacillated, thinking that she must be mad: that she was a scientist, not an assassin; that revenge was out of her grasp, and that she was going to drive herself mad if she didn’t
put all such notions out of her head and do her best to move on.

And she’d very nearly succeeded in dropping the whole insane idea, until Raul had found her and told her that Kazem was dead too. That had been the tipping point, making her realise that she had no choice. She had to cut the head off the snake. Kill it before it killed everyone she knew, everyone she loved.

Just two things
bothered her. The first was the very real possibility that when she got to the Villa Callisto, Grant wouldn’t be there. He led a hectic life and could easily be away on business, just about anywhere in the world. It was a concern, but only a minor and not insurmountable one.

The second thing that worried her, as much as it reassured her, was nestling inside her travel bag. But that, too, was
a matter that could be addressed. Everything in its own time.
Stay calm
, she told herself. It was no different from a complex astronomical calculation. Method and attention to detail were everything. Once you knew your formula was sound, it was just a matter of following the logical steps through, clear-headed and systematically, until you achieved your result.

She didn’t care what happened
after that. If she didn’t make it out alive, then so be it. At least then she would have met her end doing something good, instead of running and hiding like a coward. There couldn’t be a better way to atone for the shame she felt.

And, anyway, Catalina Fuentes was already dead.

Chapter Fifty-Three

Around nine forty-five that morning, Catalina stepped off the bus in a small coastal town some way east of Rossano, on the southern edge of the Gulf of Táranto. Checking her bearings once more, she ascertained that she was exactly 17.2 kilometres from her destination. Now it was time to address the first of her two main concerns.

She was walking down a narrow street
away from the bus stop when she spotted the group of teenagers hanging around on the corner. They were aged around fourteen or fifteen and should have been in school. Noisy and unruly, but they were exactly what she’d been looking for. She smiled as she walked up to them, and they all turned to stare at her. ‘Hey, guys,’ she said breezily in Italian, and plucked a banknote out of her purse. ‘Any
of you feel like making a quick hundred euros? Won’t take you more than a minute.’

Which got them all clamouring to be the one who got the cash, even before they knew what the job entailed.

‘You,’ she said, picking out the tallest one of the bunch. He looked the most adult, with dark eyes that looked sharp and quick. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Luca,’ he said. His voice was mature enough
to pass for an eighteen-year-old’s, or even older. Perfect.

‘Do you have a phone, Luca?’

Silly question. They all had phones, and eagerly whipped them out of their pockets to show her, nobody wanting to be out of the money. Catalina took out the private business card that she’d been carrying around in her purse ever since July third, the night of the party in Kensington. She showed the
card to the tall kid. ‘See this number here? Then I want you to call it and ask to speak to Signor Grant. That’s his name on the card.’

‘Grant,’ Luca repeated. ‘Okay. What do I say to him?’

‘Say that you’re calling from the offices of the Gruppo Poste Italiane, and that the satellite dish package he ordered is due for special delivery to Villa Callisto this afternoon. You’re checking that
the householder will be there to sign for it. Can you remember all that?’

‘I think so.’ Luca repeated it all back. ‘A hundred euros? Are you sure?’

‘Easy money,’ she said. ‘I want you to switch your mobile to speaker phone mode, so I can hear.’

‘Fine,’ Luca said with a laconic shrug. ‘Who is this guy, anyway?’

‘Just a friend,’ she said. ‘It’s kind of a trick I’m playing on him.
He’s very suspicious, so you have to sound really grown-up and convincing. And he might answer in English, but don’t let that put you off. Just say exactly what I told you. Can you handle it?’

‘Sure, no problem,’ Luca said. His friends were all clamouring round him. He cuffed a couple of them over the head, told them to shut the fuck up, then cleared his throat and dialled with his phone on
speaker. Catalina moved close so she could hear. If Grant wasn’t there, she’d already planned to find a cheap place to rent locally and keep trying until he was.

The teenagers fell into a hush, all grinning and loving the prank. Loving the hundred euros even more. She pressed a finger to her lips to warn them to stay quiet.

Grant’s dial tone rang five long, tense times before a man’s voice
answered. ‘
Pronto?
’ His voice was rich and deep, sonorous and smooth. Unmistakably Maxwell Grant’s. He spoke Italian with a strong British accent, but he wouldn’t have been speaking it at all if he’d been in London or New York. Catalina felt her stomach tighten with excitement, mingled with fear.

Luca must have really wanted the hundred euros, because he played the part perfectly. Grant appeared
genuinely flummoxed by the call. ‘What are you talking about? I never ordered a satellite dish.’

‘I’m afraid you still have to sign for it, even if you don’t want it,’ Luca said, sounding exactly like an infuriatingly anal-retentive low-level bureaucratic robot. Maybe he was related to one.

‘Now listen to me. If you cretins have screwed up, and it’s not the first time, it’s none of my
responsibility and I have no intention of signing for anything. I don’t expect to receive any such delivery here today. Sort out your own bloody mess. Is that understood?’ And Grant ended the call.

‘Nice guy,’ Luca said.

‘Nice job.’ Catalina handed over the hundred-euro note, and the rest of the teenagers all resumed their clamouring and clowning around.

‘Is that it?’ Luca said.

She smiled at Luca. ‘That’s it. Spend it wisely.
Ciao
.’

Luca was in love. ‘
Ciao
,’ he replied, and stared at her as she walked away.

One less thing to worry about. Maxwell Grant was definitely where Catalina wanted him to be, seventeen short kilometres to the southwest. Now to attend to the other small concern on her mind – but that wasn’t something she could do in the middle of town. A
few streets away, she managed to flag down a passing taxi driver, who saw the dark-haired beauty waving from the kerb and almost crashed his Fiat stopping for her.

Men.

‘Where to, Signorina?’ He was unshaven and looked a little crass, but there probably weren’t too many other taxis in town and it didn’t pay to be fussy.

‘Out of town. That way,’ she said, pointing southwest.

‘You
don’t know the name of the place?’ he said, grinning.

‘I’ll know it when I see it.’

‘Fine by me. Jump in.’

The taxi hadn’t gone more than a kilometre past the town limits before the driver was trying to chat her up. Some people were just painfully predictable, she thought, as she listened to his patter. ‘Are you from around here? Haven’t seen you before, and I’d remember. I’m Roberto.
What’s your name? You don’t talk much, do you? Come on, don’t be like that. How about a smile?’ Catalina didn’t respond to any of it, and kept her eyes on the road. Roberto eventually got the hint, and drove on in moody silence, throwing her the occasional look that she pretended not to notice.

As they travelled inland, the terrain rose rapidly up into the hills and the scenery alternated
between patches of thick autumnal forest and open farm country. They passed a couple of villages, and the ruins of an ancient church high on a hill. The mountains of Calabria loomed in the distance. At last, some fifteen kilometres inland, she pointed through the windscreen and said, ‘This is fine. You can drop me off here.’

‘You’re kidding, right? It’s miles from anywhere.’

‘No, this
is the place,’ she insisted. ‘My fiancé is coming to pick me up.’

Roberto made a face. ‘Whatever you say, lady.’ He pulled over to the side of the road, waited for her to get out, then took her money and drove off with a last wistful glance and a puff of burnt oil smoke.

It was just after ten thirty in the morning.

Catalina waited until the car was out of sight, then climbed up the
grassy verge and over a rickety wooden fence that bounded the field next to the road. Whatever kind of crops had been planted were razed down into a brittle yellowed stubble that crackled underfoot as she made her way over the field perpendicular to the road. Beyond the far side was a patch of woodland that offered the right kind of cover for what she was about to do. There wasn’t a house or a living
soul anywhere to be seen, but all the same she preferred to avoid prying eyes.

Reaching the trees, she came across the stripped-out shell of an old car that had been abandoned there long ago. She laid her bag on the ground nearby and knelt down to unzip it and take out the gun. Now it was time to allay the other concern that had been nagging at her mind.

Catalina didn’t care for guns,
or weapons of any sort that could be used to inflict pain and death. She’d never handled one before, until that morning. Still less ever fired one. Even though she’d obviously made a convincing show of pointing it at Avery, she had little idea how it worked, and wished now that she’d paid more attention to all those stupid action films on TV. There was always something to be learned from anything.