The Cassandra Sanction by Scott Mariani Read Free Book Online Page B

freely.A few years back, a group of Green campaigners from Lhasa had tried to infiltrate the operation but the silly bastards had been caught, imprisoned, tortured and disposed of before they could blow the whistle to the world media.
    The Chinese authorities were also highly accommodating when it came to their total non-investigation of the sharp increase in disease rates and birth defects affectingwide areas around the dumping zones. Reports of two-headed babies being born in Tibetan villages, you could generally ignore in the safe knowledge that nobody knew, nobody cared and nothing would ever come of it.
    Anyway – as Grant had been known to joke in private to his colleagues – two heads are better than one.
    Grant peeled back the sleeve of the Zegna and looked at his Breguet Classique.The watch had cost almost as much as the suit. He nodded to himself. The last of the drums would soon be in the ground and the giant hole filled up with a thousand tons of earth and stone. He was getting cold and bored out here, and decided he didn’t need to hang around any longer.
    But he’d be back, soon enough. There was always another cargo to deliver, another operation to oversee. Anothergigantic pile of money to make.
    Free enterprise. Where would we be without it?
    He started walking back towards the helicopter.

Chapter Seven
    Raul Fuentes emptied a third sachet of sugar into the paper cup of coffee, stirred it in with the little plastic stick, took a sip and screwed up his face, muttering, ‘ Sabe a mierda .’ He turned to Ben. ‘How can you drink it?’
    Ben shrugged and went on gazing out of the plane window. If the flight was taking the most direct route, then by his reckoning they were somewhereover Bordeaux. Their destination was Hamburg, Germany’s most northerly airport and the nearest to Rügen Island. Before heading all the way south to Munich, Ben first wanted to pay a visit to the cliffs where Catalina Fuentes was said to have killed herself.
    Raul poured in a fourth sugar, sipped again and pulled another pained expression.
    ‘Give it to me,’ Ben said, grabbed the cup fromhis hand and swallowed it down in four gulps. It was bad, but once you had tasted army coffee you could drink pretty much anything. As far as Ben was concerned, adaptability was a virtue. Besides, he was tired and needed the caffeine. His night on Raul’s couch had been a sleepless one, his mind too full of thoughts and refusing to switch off. If Raul would only shut up a while, he might get some restbefore they touched down at Hamburg. But Raul had barely stopped talking since they’d left his Volkswagen in the long-stay parking and hit the departure lounge at the Aeropuerto de Málaga. Ben knew the guy was nervous and upset, and didn’t have the heart to tell him to put a sock in it. He turned away from the window and closed his eyes, hoping maybe that would give the Spaniard a hint.
    ‘Yoursister,’ Raul said. ‘Ruth, is that her name?’
    Ben opened his eyes. ‘What about her?’
    ‘Where is she now?’
    Ben looked at him. ‘Now?’
    ‘What happened to her? Where does she live? Do you see her? Are you close?’ It seemed as if Raul had been plucking up the courage to ask for so long that his questions had all come tumbling out at once. Ben could sense he really needed to know the answers.If one lost sister could be recovered, then maybe so could another. That was the only thought that could offer Raul any solace at this moment.
    Except that Ruth Hope hadn’t driven her car off a sheer drop into the sea and given every indication of having taken her own life.
    ‘Ruth lives in Switzerland now,’ Ben said. ‘She has a business there. I haven’t seen her in a while, but we speakon the phone.’ Ben didn’t mention that his sister was no longer talking to him.
    ‘You never told me how you found her.’
    ‘Her kidnappers were Arab white slavers,’ Ben said. ‘Middlemen. Once they had her, they transported her into the