The Cassandra Sanction Read Online Free PDF Page B

nightmare begins.
    Within hours, the Marrakech Brigade Touristique and detectives from the regular Morocco police will be scouring the streets, searching for the missing child. Soon afterwards, British embassy officials are joined by envoys from the Foreign Office as the abduction investigation widens.
    All for nothing. No trace of little Ruth will be found, either in the city or the surrounding area. Ben’s mother Kathleen will be treated for the near-catatonic state of grief that will ultimately claim her life, while Ben’s father, Alistair Hope, desperately draws on every shred of official influence his position as a senior legal figure can lend him. But there is no power that can bring her back.
    She is gone.
    The worst is imagining what is happening to her at the hands of the men who took her. The young Ben will no longer be able to close his eyes without hearing her screams in the darkness. When things feel darker still, he will secretly wish her dead rather than enduring tortures he cannot imagine. Just as part of him is now dead inside.
    That day is the day that will change everything for him. The day that will light the fuse that will destroy his family and set him on a path that dictates the rest of his life. A life he could not have envisaged before now, but is all that remains for him. He will never be weak. He will never turn his back again. He will learn to become stronger than strong, and to devote himself utterly to finding people who are lost. The people who need him. The people you don’t turn your back on.
    Whatever it takes. Bring it on.
    Even if it means losing himself in the process. He doesn’t care any more.

Chapter Five
    While he was still a young man, Ben had been schooled in the importance of secrecy. Combat-hardened warriors with ferocious glares and strident voices had taught him how to keep his mouth shut even in the face of determined enemy interrogation; and as his instructors quickly discovered, his response to that training was off the charts. In a world of lies where even elected rulers,let alone top military brass, were often kept unaware of the real truth behind political machinations or cloak-and-dagger black ops, it nonetheless behoved a future Special Forces officer to guard such sensitive information as had been confided in him with extreme caution. Once entrusted with a secret, Trooper Hope would let you slice him to pieces before you could extract a single word.
    He’d excelled at it from the start, because he had a natural talent for silence. Observe, listen, learn, don’t say more than you have to . As a child his teachers had found him private and reserved to the point of obstinacy. Likewise, when the Bad Things had begun to happen in his life he’d seldom, if ever, spoken of them to anyone. It had been that way ever since. The story of what had happenedthat terrible day in Marrakech was a secret he’d confided to only a bare handful of people over the years. It went against his inclinations to talk about it, but he felt he owed it to Raul Fuentes.
    Raul listened quietly, staring intently and absorbing every word. Finally he asked, ‘Your parents, where are they now?’
    ‘Both dead. They didn’t last long after what happened.’
    Raul’s expressionsaddened, thinking of his own family. ‘And you? What did you do?’
    ‘I went a little nuts,’ Ben said. ‘Drank too much, wanted to blow up the world, joined the army, put everything I had into it. For a while, anyway.’
    Funny how you could crush thirteen years’ service and a thousand exploits into so few words.
    ‘Then I left and put what I had into trying to help people who were lost, likeRuth. People who’d been taken. To find them, bring them back.’ Ben talked a little about some of what he’d done in those years, what he’d seen, what he’d learned.
    Raul was listening and watching him with such intensity in his eyes that he was almost trembling. ‘But your sister, you never found her?’
    The question