The Cassandra Sanction by Scott Mariani Read Free Book Online

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 neededto 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 himselfa 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.

Chapter Six
    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.
    What total, utter bollocks. The man did not believe in such things, and felt only contempt for the poor benighted suckers who did.
    The man’s name was Maxwell Grant. He turned to face north, the wind slapping him in the face and clawing at his suit. It was an Ermenegildo Zegna three-piece, and far too good for sitting around in helicopters and getting covered in dust, but it was tailoredto hide his bulk well and made him look every bit as important as, in fact, he was.
    He smiled as he surveyed the industrious scene in the giant, desolate bowl of rock and earth below. After twenty years in the business, the sight still impressed him. From up here on the rise, it looked like an ants’ nest of fantastic proportions as a battalion of labourers in khaki uniform swarmed and toiledaround the edges of what looked like a monstrous volcanic crater, or the remnants of a cataclysmic asteroid impact. The hole was hundreds of metres across and went down at least as deep, waiting to swallow up the container loads of drums that were Grant’s responsibility to make disappear. The dust from the diggers rose up in huge clouds that were whipped away by the wind and caked the clothes,faces and hair of the workers. What the heavy plant didn’t dig out of the hole was hacked and shovelled and dragged out of there by hand by the mass of men, working like slaves in a scene from ancient history. Others scurried back and forth from the trucks, rolling out the cargo and placing it on wooden pallets ready to be lowered into the pit. They were Chinese prisoners brought here aboard the samemilitary train as the cargo itself, and the eighty or more People’s Army soldiers standing guard with assault rifles to ensure the job was done. Grant’s own private army, mostly ex-military themselves, were there to supervise the soldiers. It was a slick operation that Grant had witnessed many times before, in many parts of the world.
    This , Grant believed in. And for good reason. It had madehim a very rich man. With a personal net profit close to nine figures over the last year, he was doing even better out of this enterprise than from his other main business interest, the one he could talk about, Grantec Global.
    The cargo had been shipped from a location in western Europe aboard a superfreighter called the MV Charybdis , under false papers that in no way could be traced