Scott Mariani - The Cassandra Sanction - The most controversial action adventure thriller you’ll read this year!

‘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.

Ngari Prefecture

Autonomous Region of Tibet, China

Five months earlier

The man stood at the top of the rise and gazed around him in an arc thousands of miles wide. The bleak, windswept wilderness that stretched almost to infinity could have been part of the Martian landscape, if not for the vast dome of blue sky above it and the white-capped peaks in the far distance. On clear days like this, the man imagined that he could see as far as the Trans-Himalayas that bordered the Tibetan plateau to the south and west, and the top of holy Mount Kailash: in the Tibetan language, ‘Kangri Rinpoche’, meaning ‘Precious Snow Mountain’. For Buddhists, the sacred Navel of the Universe; for Hindus, the perpetual abode of Lord Shiva, the destroyer of ignorance and illusion.