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

Raul turned triumphantly to Ben and showed him. Up close, the exquisite craftsmanship of the piece was unmissable. It was a beautiful thing. The glittering white diamonds radiated in an elliptical spiral from the bluer stones in the centre, the outer jewels delicately mounted on tiny silver arms to give the impression that they were floating freely in space. You could almost see the galaxy slowly rotating on its axis.

As Raul flipped the piece over on the palm of his hand, Ben could clearly see the fancy engraved lettering on the backplate.

All my love

A.J.K.

Ben looked sharply up at Raul. The Spaniard was grinning a nasty grin and his eyes were glittering almost as brightly as the stones. ‘How did I know that, hmm? How did I know that? This bitch took it from her, that’s how.’ He wheeled back to glare at the woman.

Unless Raul Fuentes was clairvoyant, Ben couldn’t see any other explanation either. In the blink of an eye, the situation had totally reversed.

Two men from nearby tables had eased from their seats and were slowly advancing. Ben gave them another warning stare and said in German, ‘Easy. Nobody’s getting hurt here.’

Raul was still questioning the woman. Now that she realised she wasn’t about to be murdered, she was coming out more freely with answers.

‘Ich habe es mir gerade gekauft … I – I buy it!’

‘When?’ Raul demanded.

‘She says recently,’ Ben said. She looked too frightened to be lying. In a gentler tone than Raul’s, he asked her in German to tell him exactly when and where she had purchased the piece of jewellery.

‘Not long ago … I think three weeks. I saw it in a window for sale … A pawnshop. I wouldn’t normally go into those places but it was so beautiful I—’

Ben said to Raul, ‘She says she bought it from a pawnshop three weeks ago.’

‘Bullshit!’ Raul spat, enraged. ‘Now, listen, you—’

‘Cool it, Raul.’ Ben was still holding up a hand to warn away the heroes from the nearby tables. It wasn’t easy to smile reassuringly in that position, but he needed to put the woman at her ease. ‘Please, Fräulein, tell me the name of the shop where you found it.’

The woman gave an address, and Ben repeated it back to her twice. She was crying, partly from shock and fear, and probably also partly because she thought she’d lost her precious pendant.

‘Let her have it,’ Ben said.

‘No way she’s getting it back. It’s Catalina’s.’

‘You can’t steal it from her. She’s telling the truth. For Christ’s sake, look at her. She’s scared to death.’ Ben held out his hand. Reluctantly, after a beat, Raul dropped the pendant into his palm. Ben returned it to the woman. ‘There. Everything’s fine. Please sit down and finish your tea. We’re leaving.’ He repeated it more loudly for the rest of the room to hear. ‘Okay? No problems here. We’re going now.’ He pulled a few euros from his pocket to pay for their drinks and left them on an empty table as they retreated towards the door. Then they spilled back out into the rainy street and ran for the car before the police arrived.

‘This is getting to be a habit since I met you,’ Ben said as he accelerated the Kia up the street.

Around the corner, Ben squealed the car sharply into the kerbside and punched the address the woman had given him into the on-board satnav.

‘I was right,’ Raul was saying over and over. ‘I was right. Something happened to her.’

‘Let’s take this one step at a time, okay?’ Ben said.

Raul turned to face him with liquid eyes. ‘You see I was right, don’t you?’

‘About the diamonds,’ Ben said. ‘That’s all we know for now. Stay calm.’

‘How can I stay calm, damn it? A pawnshop. Can’t you see? It proves she was kidnapped. Whoever took her sold the jewels for some quick cash. Bastards!’ Raul punched the dash so hard that he cracked the plastic and left a smear of blood.

‘Don’t wreck the car,’ Ben said.

The address was just a few blocks away. If the woman lived in the area, it increased the chances of her frequenting both the shop and the café. Which meant it wasn’t the impossible coincidence Ben had first thought. How Catalina Fuentes’ pendant had ended up there, and what this turn of events signified, were questions still to be answered.

As they pulled up outside ten minutes later, Ben could see why a respectable middle-class denizen of Munich might not readily admit to shopping in the place. He’d seen shabbier pawnshops, but he really couldn’t remember when.

‘Are you coming in?’ he said to Raul.

‘Are you joking with me?’

‘Fine. Then try not to beat the guy up, all right? I’ll handle it.’

A bell tinkled as Ben pushed open the door, and a hanging sign saying GEÖFFNET slapped against the glass. There were no other customers. The pawnshop smelled stuffy inside, and there was so much clutter in the windows that it blocked much of what little light the grey sky was throwing down. Ben wondered if the murky ambiance was also meant to camouflage the crappy quality of most of what was on sale in the place. The usual assortment of golf clubs and hockey sticks and electric guitars and saxophones and exercise machines and dinner sets and racks of clothing and air rifles and a thousand other dingy-looking items traded for ready cash by their former owners stood, hung or were stuffed inside crowded shelves around the walls. A closed office door marked PRIVÄT lay behind the counter, which housed a glass-topped display cabinet that constituted the pawnshop’s jewellery wares not displayed in the window, consisting mainly of watches, along with a few brooches and earrings, bracelets and strings of fake pearls nestling in velvety little presentation boxes.

Whoever Catalina Fuentes’ ex-boyfriend Austin J. Keller was, Ben thought, he’d have to be pretty seriously rich to be able to afford a bobby dazzler like the spiral galaxy pendant. All the weirder, then, that it should have ended up in a dump like this, sitting among a pile of third-rate trinkets. Either Catalina must have hated the guy so much after they split up that she didn’t give a damn, or else she had to be desperate. Desperation oozed from every crack of this place.

Ben was gazing at the jewellery when the office door opened and a squat man with a scrappy beard, a flowery shirt and a pronounced leg length discrepancy limped through it.

Ben decided to skip the preliminaries. ‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’

The guy shrugged, like saying, ‘So-so.’

Switching from German, Ben asked him, ‘Are you the owner?’

The guy’s eyes narrowed to slits. ‘I am the proprietor. What is this concerning?’