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

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 (#ulink_9e4efa56-2ca2-585f-9234-317d1a37fafb)

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.