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.
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 happened that 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 expression saddened, 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, like Ruth. 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 hung in the air between them until Ben replied, ‘I found her.’
Raul stared at him even harder. ‘She was dead?’ Just a whisper, as if he dreaded the word and saying it too loudly could make it more of a dark reality.
‘She was alive,’ Ben said. ‘A lot of time had passed. She was grown up by then. It’s a long story, Raul. But the point is this. I’d stopped searching for Ruth many years before. I’d stopped believing, in my heart. Whatever faith I’d had that I might ever find her, alive or not, I’d lost it. And it wasn’t by design that I found her. It was just chance. One in a billion, just like it was one in a billion that she’d survived. But it happened. And that’s when I realised that I should never have lost faith. That was the most painful thing of all.’
Raul said nothing. He nodded slowly, processing what Ben was telling him.
‘That’s why I came back,’ Ben said. ‘Because I, of all people, should know better. And because you wouldn’t give up on your sister like I did. I admire you for that, Raul. Even if it turns out that you’re wrong. I just wanted to tell you that before I moved on.’
Raul closed his eyes for a moment. When he reopened them, he glanced at the crucifix on the wall. Then his gaze returned to Ben, looking at him with something like wonderment. ‘I think you must have been sent to me.’
‘I’m not an angel from heaven. I’m anything but.’
‘I didn’t pray for an angel. I prayed for someone who could help me find Catalina, like you found all those other people.’
‘It’s what I used to do,’ Ben said. ‘These days I’m just trying to find myself.’
‘But you know about these things.’ Raul bent forward in his seat with his hands clasped in his lap, his eyes large and liquid and full of pleading. ‘Look at me. I’m just an ordinary man. A schoolteacher. What have I ever done in my life?’ He pulled a face and glanced around him, as if he was disgusted with himself, his world, his whole existence. ‘You must, must help me. I’m completely certain that my sister didn’t do what everyone thinks. But I know she’s in terrible danger. I believe she was kidnapped.’
‘Your sister disappeared. That doesn’t mean she was kidnapped.’
Raul looked at him. ‘You don’t read the papers, do you? You don’t really know who she is.’
Ben shook his head, not understanding. Before he could reply, Raul stood up and went over to the bookcase. He lifted out a stack of magazines, came back and dumped them in Ben’s arms. Ben had no idea why, until he recognised the woman on the cover of the top magazine in the pile. It was one of those tabloid glossies that always filled the racks nearest the checkouts in stores and supermarkets, offering to spill the latest exclusive scoop or scabrous gossip about fifteen-minute celebrities Ben had never heard of and truly didn’t want to. This was the first time he’d ever recognised the face on the cover, as the perfect smile of Catalina Fuentes shone up at him from the glossy page. The tagline next to her picture said: IS THIS THE WORLD’S SEXIEST SCIENTIST?
He frowned up at Raul. ‘Your sister is this famous?’
‘Turn to page four,’ Raul said.
Ben flipped the magazine open to a double-page spread featuring more photos of her. The article began: ‘Who says you can’t have good looks and brains? Stunning Catalina Fuentes has them both by the bucket load.’
If Raul was surprised that Ben had never heard of his famous sister, he didn’t make a big deal of it. Even the biggest celebrity on the planet would have to be a stranger to someone. Or maybe something about Ben made it obvious that he didn’t exactly keep up with current trends.
Ben put the magazine aside and sifted through the rest of the pile. They were in date order, and the latest two had splashed all over their cover the shocking revelation of the suicide of one of the media’s best-loved personalities. HOW COULD SHE HAVE DONE IT? one proclaimed, almost indignant in tone. SECRET AGONY OF TRAGIC CATALINA, the other wailed, below an image of a wrecked Porsche Cayenne being winched from the sea at the foot of sheer white cliffs.
‘I had no idea,’ Ben said. He laid the magazines at his feet. ‘You told me she was a scientist.’
‘An astronomer,’ Raul said. ‘I also told you she was a little bit more than that. It was the television show that really started the whole celebrity thing. Until then, she was devoted to her work. She taught astrophysics and cosmology for a year in Madrid, then decided she wanted to broaden her horizons. She always had an incredible talent for languages, and could speak four of them fluently by the