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

Ben folded it, replaced it in the envelope and handed it back without a word. He understood now that the letter was what had sharpened the torture of what Raul was going through, and made him want to dive inside a bottle.

‘It’s garbage,’ Raul said. With a sudden flash of anger, he tore the letter apart and hurled the pieces away. ‘So much for the great detective. There goes five thousand euros cash, for nothing.’

‘Should have put it on your credit card,’ Ben said. ‘Pay it off month by month.’

‘I don’t have a credit card. I come from a simple family, where we were taught old-fashioned values. I pay cash for things whenever I can, and if I can’t afford something, then I don’t have it. That five thousand was most of the savings I had.’

Ben didn’t know what to say. He stood, paused for a long time and chose his words carefully.

‘I’m very sorry for what you’re going through, Raul. But I think you’re just going to have to accept that your sister’s dead.’

Raul stared at him. A muscle twitched under his eye.

‘I wish you well,’ Ben said. ‘Try not to get into any more fights. And don’t drink yourself to death.’

He left Raul Fuentes like that and walked back outside into the narrow, sloping backstreet, feeling bad. He shook out a Gauloise and clanged open his Zippo and lit up. Now he could do with a drop or two of the hard stuff himself, but he wasn’t going to. Not right now.

It was early evening, and the warmth of the sun was cooling off quickly. He made his way back through the streets of the old Moorish quarter of Frigiliana until he found the bus station where he’d arrived earlier that day. A queue was forming. He joined it, finished his cigarette and lit up another. A woman in front of him in the queue turned around, sniffing the air, and gave him a look as if he was spraying anthrax spores. He ignored her and carried on smoking.

By the time that one was smoked down to the stub, the bus arrived. The passengers filed on board. Most had tickets. Ben didn’t, and fanned out some banknotes to the driver without saying anything, like some foreigner on holiday who couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. The driver gave him a ticket and change, and Ben wandered up the length of the bus and found an empty window seat towards the rear. He placed his battered old green canvas bag between his feet and leaned back, soaking up the bustle and the snatches of Spanish conversation around him as the bus filled up.

The motion of life. People going places. And he supposed he was one of them.

In truth, he hadn’t even bothered to check the destination of the bus before getting on. His personal compass needle was pointing anywhere but here, and anywhere was good enough for him. You keep moving forwards, you don’t slow down for anything or anyone. You don’t get sidetracked, and that way you stay out of trouble. There’d been enough trouble in this town already to last him a while. The bus was headed somewhere else down the road, and that was good enough for him.

The sticker on the window glass next to him said NO FUMAR, and he didn’t particularly want to antagonise his fellow travellers any more than necessary, so he kept his Gauloises and his Zippo in his pockets. In the olden days he’d have been carrying his well-worn hip flask for company, filled with his favourite single malt scotch, but he’d ditched that a long way back. So with nothing much else to pass the time with, he gazed idly out of the window while waiting for the bus to depart.

And that was when he saw her walking down the street. She was with a group of friends, all around the same age, late teens or early twenties. She was blonde and blue-eyed, wearing jeans and a light denim top, her hair most likely dyed and cropped short, a little spiky, a little punkish, giving her an elfin or pixie kind of look that wasn’t at all typical for a region where most of the girls were of the classic southern raven-haired, dark-eyed variety like the rest of her friends. She stood out, and for Ben she stood out especially. She could almost have been—

The sight of her brought a powerful surge of memories and thoughts into his mind, some of them many years old, some of them very recent. Some of the memories she evoked were the most painful of his life, worse than the terror of war, worse than getting shot, worse than torture and beatings or the hell on earth that was SAS selection training.

He watched her keenly through the glass until she disappeared behind the NO FUMAR sticker and then out of sight altogether, and he felt his compass needle waver, droop and then slew around in a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc.

‘Fuck it,’ he muttered under his breath.

That was when he knew he couldn’t stay on this bus any longer.

He grabbed his bag and strode back down the aisle to the door before the driver pulled away.

‘You just paid for a ticket,’ the driver said.

‘I changed my mind,’ Ben replied in Spanish.

‘You want a refund?’

‘Keep it.’

The driver shrugged. He stabbed a button on his dash and the door slapped open and Ben stepped out into the evening coolness. He hitched his bag over his shoulder and started walking.

‘It’s you,’ Raul Fuentes said when he opened the door and saw Ben standing there on the step. He was clutching a fresh mug of coffee and looking a good bit more sober. ‘Why did you come back?’

‘Like I said, I don’t have anywhere else to be,’ Ben replied. ‘And because of what you told me. I know what it’s like to lose a sister. I’ve known it a long time.’

Morocco

A long time ago

It is the spring of ’85 and he has never been to such a place before. Through the shimmering heat and the glare and the insane buzz of dusty cars and motorcycles, they enter the Medina of Marrakech, the ancient walled city within a city. A thousand years old, and at its labyrinthine heart lies the souk.

The street market is like nothing the young Ben has ever seen or imagined, with its dazzling arrays of meats and fish and fruits and exotic spices heaped in baskets; hanging displays of tapestries and rugs and ornate clothing and shoes and scarves and carvings and glittering lamps that seem to go on and on forever. The air is filled with the jabber of vendors and customers haggling and bargaining in a language he does not yet understand; he can have no way of knowing that one day he will speak it fluently. The merchants of the souk are the sharpest salesmen on earth, but the intricacies of buying and selling are concepts that the boy has yet to encounter in his overprotected middle-class life. Men who look like characters from the Bible walk the narrow street, yelling, ‘Balak! Balak!’ as a warning to get out of their way as they lead their overladen donkeys through the crowd, the animals’ flanks swaying with everything from garbage to goods for sale in the souk. All around him Ben sees veiled women in kaftans, bearded men wearing long, embroidered robes and skullcaps.