The Cassandra Sanction (44 page)

Ben stepped out from behind a tree and said, ‘Hey, have you got a light?’

Before the guard had time to react, Ben hit him a powerful snapping punch to the chin that knocked him instantly unconscious. Ben caught
him as he fell, lowered him gently to the grass, then knelt beside him and compressed the veins and arteries in his neck to choke off all the blood to and from his brain. He held the blood choke for a full minute, counting off the seconds and listening to the chopper growing louder as the rotor neared takeoff speed.

When the guard was dead, Ben picked up his rifle. Standard 5.56mm NATO chambering,
thirty-round capacity, Trijicon ACOG optical sight with fixed 4× magnification. The kind of military combat rig not generally found in any old Italian country estate. He jacked a round into the chamber and crept through the trees until he could see the lawns and the house beyond.

The villa and its manicured gardens were all that Ben had expected them to be, given its owner’s evident wealth.
He took in the layout at a brief glance, and focused instead on what he could see between him and the house. In the foreground, the chopper was still resting on the grass, but not for much longer. Closer to the house, standing in a low-walled courtyard a few metres from a parked Rolls limousine and a black panel van with its back doors open, stood a group of figures. Ben dropped into a sniper’s
prone position at the edge of the trees and observed them through the rifle scope.

One of the figures was Catalina. There were two men with her. One was taller and broader and in his fifties, in beige slacks and a navy blazer. Ben was fairly certain he was Maxwell Grant. The other was small, wizened and white-haired, maybe late seventies, maybe older. He was standing nearest to the waiting
chopper, and seemed to be saying a last word to Catalina before leaving by air. Whatever he was saying to her, she didn’t look happy. It seemed safe to presume that the old man wasn’t one of the good guys.

Behind them, it looked as though the two armed guards standing at the rear of the black van, and the two more sitting up front, were waiting for her to get in. It had all the makings of
a situation in flux. Something was about to happen.

So Ben decided to move things along. He let the gunsights centre on Grant, then changed his mind and altered the angle of the rifle a minute degree to take aim at the old man. He made the range about a hundred and seventy-five yards.

It wasn’t going to be very subtle. And it was certainly going to be loud enough to get their attention.

Fuck it
, he thought. And let off the shot.

The rifle went off with a high-decibel crack that punched his ears. The 5.56 bottlenecked round fires a comparatively light bullet at an extremely high velocity, producing very little recoil. Which meant that at virtually the same instant the shot left the barrel, the lack of muzzle flip enabled Ben to see the bullet impact blow the old man’s head
half away in a mist of pink spray.

Not too subtle at all. But they had to know he was here sooner or later.

The old man’s body slumped to the ground. For a frozen moment that seemed to drag longer than it really lasted, both Maxwell Grant and Catalina stood and gaped at the headless corpse at their feet.

And then all hell broke loose.

The two guards in the van flung open their
doors and burst out, while the other two shouldered their weapons, pointing left and right in full-on panic while retreating towards the cover of the balustrade wall. Grant made a grab for Catalina’s arm and started dragging her, kicking and struggling, back towards the villa. Ben panned the rifle sights across and lined up on Grant, but Grant was a moving target at two hundred yards and Ben was worried
about hitting Catalina, and his hesitation made him jerk the shot. Through the scope he saw the bullet hit Grant in the left shoulder, low and left from what should have been a perfect head shot.

Grant stumbled and nearly fell, and Catalina tore out of his grip and took off at a run. Ben lost sight of her as she disappeared behind the hedge. One of the guards made to run after her. Ben caught
his intention, flipped the M4’s fire selector to full-auto and drove him back with a rattle of gunfire that ricocheted off the balustrade wall and shattered one of the headlamps of the Rolls. The guards ducked behind the wall and the back of the van.

Ben leaped to his feet and started sprinting towards the villa, firing as he ran to keep them pinned down. The chopper pilot was gunning his
throttle to the maximum and taking off in a panic. He was thirty feet in the air when Ben aimed upwards and squeezed off another burst. One second, fifteen high-velocity rounds, straight into the tail rotor. The blades shattered and the helicopter went into a spin as the pilot suffered an immediate and catastrophic loss of control. The wildly gyrating chopper managed to stay airborne for a few seconds;
then it careered straight for the courtyard of the villa and crashed into the parked vehicles.

Both the van and the limo were instantly engulfed in flames as the helicopter’s fuel tanks ruptured on impact and it exploded. Burning wreckage was hurled in all directions. Two of the guards, too slow to get away in time, were caught up in the incendiary blast. The force of the explosion threw one
of them ten feet in the air and slammed him down over the bonnet of the blazing Rolls-Royce. The other bolted from behind the van, arms and torso and head ablaze, made it a few metres and then collapsed.

Ben still couldn’t see Catalina. What worried him even more was that he couldn’t see the other two guards, either. He sprinted past the burning vehicles, turning his face away from the scorching
heat as he ran by. Smoke was pouring thick and black from the blaze. Ben kept running. Between the two lions and through the archway and up the stepped path to the house. There was a heavy blood trail on the ground, splashes and dribbles of bright red leading towards the entrance.

Ben was momentarily distracted by the blood trail when a loud shot blasted out to his left and a crater of masonry
blew out of the wall just inches away, stinging him with stone chips. He spun round and saw the guard, face half-blackened, teeth bared in rage and fear, crunching the pump action of a combat shotgun to chamber another twelve-gauge round. Ben fired back from the hip, without aiming. The M4 stitched a ragged line of holes diagonally across the man’s chest and sent him spinning and crashing back
against the wall of the house, blood spotting the stonework like the flick of a paintbrush. The man slid down the wall, still clutching his shotgun. As his muscles began to twitch in terminal shock, the gun went off, pointing harmlessly into the air. Then it clattered from his hands and his eyes rolled over white, and he slumped over on his side.

Ben threw away his empty rifle, snatched up
the dead man’s shotgun. Pumped out the spent shell and chambered the next. It was a Mossberg Persuader with a cut-down barrel and a five-shot magazine. Two rounds gone.

Then he stepped around the corner of the villa and saw Catalina. And the other guard, too. He had an arm around her throat and was holding her tightly against his chest as she fought him and lashed back with her feet and tried
to grapple his arm away from her. In his other hand was a pistol, pressed to her head.

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.