‘I won’t bother about the testicles,’ Hardin said. ‘I still don’t know what killed him, but I’m quite certain it wasn’t some form of venereal disease.’
The final organs left in the abdomen were the kidneys, and Hardin swiftly removed them. ‘Right,’ he said to the tape recorder. ‘The abdomen is empty apart from the residual blood, with all organs removed. External examination suggests that the lungs, and possibly the liver and kidneys, contain fluid of some sort, probably blood, which again is consistent with death caused by some form of viral haemorrhagic fever. OK, Mark, just the brain to remove and then we can start looking at the organs themselves.’
In a mortuary suite, the head of a cadaver is placed on an H-shaped head block made of hard rubber which facilitates the opening of the cranium using a Stryker saw. Hardin had neither a head block nor a power saw, so he had to improvise.
He arranged three small sandbags – sand was plentiful enough around Kandíra – in a U-shaped pattern to support Aristides’s head, then picked up a fresh scalpel to be sure of a sharp blade. He pushed the tip of the scalpel into the fairly thin skin above the right ear and kept on thrusting it in until it made contact with the bone of the skull. Then, pressing hard, Hardin ran the blade over the top of Aristides’s head until he reached the top of his left ear, so separating the scalp into two sections. He seized the front half of the scalp and pulled it forward over the dead Greek’s face, then pulled the rear half backwards, thus exposing the top of the skull.
A Stryker is a power saw fitted with a small and very sharp reciprocating blade. It screams when in use and fills the air with an unpleasant odour: an amalgam of burnt bone and blood. The mortuary attendant whose job it is to open the cranium will begin and end the cut at the forehead, often leaving a small notch to allow the calvarium or cranial cap to be accurately replaced after the autopsy has been completed. Hardin wasn’t even slightly bothered about whether or not the calvarium could be refitted neatly: all he was interested in doing was getting into the skull and removing the brain.
In the absence of a Stryker saw, Hardin had selected the next best thing – a short-bladed bone saw. He had to be careful using it, because all he wanted to achieve was to cut through the bone of the skull itself. He didn’t, if he could possibly avoid it, want to cut into the dura mater, the tough membrane that lies directly below the bone and encases the brain. With Evans holding the sides of the skull firmly, Hardin started at the forehead, cutting with swift, sure strokes once the blade had started to bite. Then he and Evans changed positions, Evans wielding the saw on the left-hand side of the skull while Hardin held it firmly. It took over twenty minutes to complete all the cuts necessary.
Normally the calvarium is freed from the skull by inserting a bone chisel into the incision made by the saw and twisting it, repeating the process all the way round the skull until the cap loosens and can be lifted off. Hardin preferred to use a broad-bladed screwdriver with a T-shaped handle, and had the calvarium freed in a couple of minutes.
He and Evans carefully examined the grey dura mater, and Hardin pressed it experimentally a few times, testing for any excessive pressure in the skull that might be caused by leaking blood vessels. Hardin had heard of autopsies on Ebola victims where so much blood had leaked into the brain that the dura mater had bulged outwards as the calvarium had been removed and in one case, possibly apocryphal, the pressure had allegedly been sufficient to rupture the dura itself, sending a lethal stream of Ebola-rich blood spraying across the floor of the pathology suite.
‘It looks and feels normal to me,’ Hardin finally announced, reaching for a pair of blunt-ended scissors to cut away the dura mater. He first used a pair of forceps to pinch a small section of the dura, then cut into it with the scissors. A few drops of blood leaked out, but that was all. Hardin nodded in satisfaction and cut away the rest of the dura mater, revealing the surface of the brain, the cerebral cortex.
‘The brain appears normal on first examination,’ Hardin said, again speaking to the tape recorder. ‘OK, Mark, this is a bit fiddly, and you’ll need to help me. Can you just lift the frontal poles for me so that I can cut through the olfactory nerves? Good: that’s it.’ Hardin eased his scalpel down the anterior of the brain. ‘Right, now I’ll sever the optic nerves and we’ll take a look at the pituitary stalk.
‘The pituitary reveals no apparent abnormalities,’ Hardin announced, a minute or two later. ‘Now I’ll detach the tentorium cerebelli and then we can remove the roof of the cerebellum. OK, that’s fine.’ Working more quickly now, as the daylight outside began to fade, Hardin cut the remaining nine pairs of cranial nerves, and waited while Evans collected a sample of cerebrospinal fluid in a pipette. Then Hardin cut through the lower medulla oblongata and the vertebral arteries, and gestured to Evans. Evans wrapped both hands around the brain and moved it gently from side to side. That freed it enough to allow him to ease it backwards out of the skull, exposing the spinal cord, which Hardin severed to free the brain completely. Evans removed it from the skull and placed it carefully in the last steel dish on the sideboard.
‘OK,’ Hardin said. ‘I think the answer lies in the blood and in the lungs. Let’s see what we can find here.’
Chóra Sfakia, Crete
It was still low season for tourism in Crete, which meant the first couple of hotels Krywald stopped the car outside were firmly closed. The next one he found was open, but full, but one around the corner, on the northern outskirts of the town, still had four rooms free. As Stein booked three of them, Krywald parked the car on the street outside, the hotel having no private car park. Then the three men carried their few bags inside and took the lift up to the second floor.
Stein and Krywald took for themselves the two rooms closest to the lift and staircase, though on opposite sides of the corridor, while Elias’s lay four doors further down the passage. Once they’d dumped their luggage, Krywald – still carrying the case containing the steel briefcase – summoned them to the nearly empty bar next to the reception desk to discuss their plan for the next day.
‘As long as that drunken bum Monedes is even halfway sober by then we should be OK,’ Krywald said. ‘All he has to do is give us the scuba gear, tell us where the boat is kept and give us the keys to get it started. After that he can drink himself to death for all I care.’
Stein nodded agreement, then turned to Elias. ‘You’re familiar with boats, I guess?’
‘If you’re a diver, it pretty much goes without saying,’ Elias confirmed. ‘You spend a lot of time sitting around in them.’
‘I appreciate that, but can you navigate and so on?’
Elias shook his head. ‘I don’t have any formal qualifications, no,’ he said, ‘but I reckon I can handle the sort of boat provided tomorrow without any problems. But I figured that one of you two would be qualified.’
Krywald gave a short laugh. ‘Nope,’ he said, ‘our talents lie in different directions. But all we have to do is get the boat out of the harbour and find our way out to the spot where this Greek diver found his wrecked aircraft. McCready supplied us with the exact co-ordinates, and we’ve got two GPS units right here. There we drop anchor, you get suited up and go over the side. You do your stuff on the bottom and we’re out of here.’
Elias put down his coffee cup and looked at Krywald inquiringly. ‘McCready was a bit evasive about that. When you say “do my stuff”, what exactly do you mean?’
Krywald glanced briefly at Stein before replying. ‘Apart from the contents of the steel case I’ve got right here, that wrecked aircraft is the last possible link to a covert Company operation run in the 1970s. You don’t need to know what it involved – in fact, I don’t know all the details myself – but if any information about it came to light today it would reflect badly, very badly, all round. McCready’s orders are most specific. The case goes back to Langley for disposal, and all traces of the aircraft must be obliterated. I’ll deal with the case: the aircraft is your job.’
For
a long moment Elias just stared at him. ‘You mean I’ve got to blow it up?’ he finally demanded.
‘The boy’s quick,’ Krywald commented drily. ‘Spot on, Mr Elias. You just drop yourself down to the bottom of the sea, plant some plastic on board the wreck, light the blue touchpaper and get the hell out of there.’
‘But I don’t know anything about explosives,’ Elias’s voice rose.
‘You don’t need to.’ Krywald glanced round the bar to make sure nobody could overhear them. ‘When he went out earlier this morning Stein collected enough plastic explosive to sink half of Crete. All you have to do is put some charges in the wreck, snap the end off each of the pencil detonators and then get yourself back up to the boat. The fuses are pre-set for three hours so as to give us plenty of time to get clear. We could well be on our way back to Réthymno before the big bang occurs.’
‘I don’t like the sound of it,’ Elias said. ‘Suppose something goes wrong. What if the fuses are faulty and the explosive goes off while I’m still in the water?’
‘Roger told you our talents lie in different directions,’ Stein replied. ‘I’m an explosives expert, so I know detonators and I know plastic. I’ve already checked the stuff we’ve been given and it’s good. The fuses are the latest models – pencil fuses safe down to five hundred feet – and I guarantee this plastic won’t blow for three hours.’
Elias nodded, looking far from convinced. He stood up. ‘Look, I’m going to take a walk. After being stuck in that damn car all day, I need to clear my head. We’re going to eat somewhere here?’
Krywald glanced across the road, where three restaurants were clearly preparing to open. ‘One of those places should be OK, so get back here by eight. We don’t want to eat late, and if you’re diving tomorrow you should get a good sleep tonight.’
Elias nodded agreement and walked out of the bar.
‘You have any problems at Soúda Bay?’ Krywald asked, as he and Stein stepped into the lift.
Stein shook his head. ‘No. The plastic’s OK and they really are three-hour detonators.’
‘Bit of a surprise, that,’ Krywald murmured. ‘I wouldn’t have put it past McCready to have doctored them to take out the three of us while we’re bobbing around in the goddamn ocean. You get the weapons as well?’
‘Sure did. Three SIG P226s with silencers and two extra magazines each.’
‘Nice,’ Krywald said.
Inside his room, Stein handed one of the weapons over. Krywald worked the action a couple of times then slammed a fully loaded magazine into the butt. ‘No serial number,’ he observed.
‘No. They’ve been sanitized. I don’t know how he did it,’ Stein said, ‘but our Captain Levy told me that a trace on these weapons will lead straight to the Fibbies.’
‘No kidding? That’ll really piss off the Bureau if they ever find out.’
Stein loaded a second pistol and tucked it into the rear waistband of his trousers. ‘You want me to give the other one to Elias?’ he asked.
‘Are you out of your fucking mind? He’s just an analyst. If he wasn’t a qualified diver he’d still be pushing paper round his desk at Langley. The last thing we do is give him a gun to play with. Christ knows what he’d do with it.’
Kandíra, south-west Crete
‘Mr Hardin?’ Inspector Lavat called up the stairs.
‘I’m here,’ Hardin replied, from above.
‘I’ve got the floodlights you asked for. Do you want them now?’
‘Yes, please, Inspector. It’s starting to get a bit dark.’
Outside, the sun was sinking towards the western horizon and although it was still demonstrably daylight, the shadows were lengthening as evening approached.
Lavat climbed up the stairs with a mains-powered portable floodlight in each hand. He stopped on the landing, outside the door of the spare bedroom, put the lights down on the floor and squinted into the room. The first thing he saw was the eviscerated corpse of Spiros Aristides, chest cavity gaping open and the top of the skull grotesquely absent.
Like most other policemen, Inspector Lavat had been required to attend occasional autopsies in the course of his duties, but he had never been able to view a dead body with anything like the clinical detachment exhibited by doctors and pathologists. And the sight of the mutilated corpse in the incongruous surroundings of a spare bedroom in a Cretan village house was doubly disturbing. The two figures crowded into the small room behind the corpse didn’t help either, the orange Tyvek suits and Racal helmets reminding Lavat uncomfortably of aliens from a low-budget science-fiction film.
Hardin looked up at him as Evans stepped out onto the landing and picked up the floodlights. He positioned them in opposite corners of the bedroom, pointing the bulbs upwards to give reflected rather than direct light.
Hardin followed Lavat’s gaze to Aristides’s body. ‘We’ll be tidying the cadaver up later, once we’ve finished the organ examination.’ He then noticed that Lavat looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Are you feeling all right, Inspector?’ he asked.
Lavat nodded, though feeling the bile rise, his face noticeably paler beneath the suntan. ‘It’s just the—’ He got no further, but turned away and headed swiftly down the stairs and out of the small house.
‘Is he OK?’ Evans asked.
‘I think so,’ Hardin replied. ‘We get so used to this kind of thing’ – he gestured to the corpse – ‘that we tend to forget other people rarely get to see it.’
Evans nodded. ‘Right, what’s next?’
‘We’ll start with the heart, and we’ll do the lungs last,’ Hardin said. ‘I think they’re going to be the most interesting.’
Mark Evans had earlier moved the steel dishes containing Aristides’s organs over to one side of the room, and had placed a wooden board on the top of the chest of drawers, which they could use for the dissections. Wood is not the ideal surface for such an operation because it retains traces of whatever was placed on it previously, and obviously if the organs are potentially ‘hot’ the wood itself becomes a source of infection. But they hadn’t been able to find anything else more suitable, so both the board and the trestle table on which the Greek’s body lay would be burnt as soon as Hardin had completed his autopsy.
Evans weighed the steel bowl containing the heart on the portable scales he had fetched out of one of the CDC boxes. He then placed the heart itself in the centre of the wooden board, before weighing the bowl and subtracting that figure from the total to calculate the weight of the heart itself. Hardin studied the organ carefully for several minutes, prodding it around so that he could visually check its entire surface.
‘The heart appears externally normal, and the weight falls within the usual range,’ Hardin announced for the tape recorder. ‘I’ll now begin the dissection itself.’
Evans watched as Hardin took a fresh scalpel and expertly slit open the organ. He looked closely into each chamber of the heart, then turned his attention to the coronary arteries, cutting them open so that he could examine their inner surfaces.
‘The interior appears normal. There’s some furring of the coronary arteries, but on the whole the heart looks healthy, particularly for a man of this age. For each organ we’ll be carrying out histological and toxicological examinations, so I’ll take samples now.’ Hardin leant forward and cut four roughly one-inch squares from the heart muscle.
Evans passed over two stock jars – small specimen containers pre-filled with formalin, a clear liquid that’s a highly poisonous preservative – and dropped one segment into each. He labelled both with the name of the deceased, the date and the source of the tissue, then added a red stick-on note reading simply ‘HISTOLOGY’. These samples would be examined under a microscope to try to detect any changes to the individual cells that might have been caused by a fatal disease. Privately, Hardin thought histology would reveal nothing of significance, but it was normal procedure.
The other two segments he put into what are known as ‘tox jars’ – pla
stic containers that don’t contain any preservative because that would destroy any toxins present in the specimen. On each of these he affixed a label bearing the word ‘TOXICOLOGY’. He would repeat this entire process as each separate organ was dissected.
‘Right,’ Hardin said, ‘I don’t think there’s anything else we can learn from studying the heart, so we’ll move on to the liver.’
Evans removed the dissected heart from the wooden board and replaced it in its steel bowl. After they’d finished the autopsy, all the organs would be sealed into plastic bags and placed in one of the two chest freezers provided for them by the Cretan Ministry of Health. Final disposal would almost certainly be by burning, probably in a sealed incinerator at a local hospital.
The two men had already established a working routine – first weigh; then external examination; dissection; internal examination; take samples for specialist histological and toxicological examination – followed by discussion, conclusion and verbal notes spoken into the tape recorder.
‘The liver shows some signs of cirrhosis, but at a comparatively early stage, and certainly not life-threatening,’ Hardin said as Evans removed the organ in question from the cutting board in front of him. ‘Probably cheap Cretan wine. Normally the liver appears bright and shiny, but in this case it’s dull and a fairly dark red. The organ contains rather more blood than would be normal, and there are some signs of blood weeping from the minor vessels of the liver, which is most unusual and could be indicative of haemorrhagic fever.’
The spleen is one of the likeliest places in the body to find the infectious particles characteristic of victims of this type of virus, so Hardin examined that organ with particular care, and again cut out several pieces for further examination. He checked the stomach, small intestine and large bowel, then took samples of both the contents and the structure of each section of the digestive tract. As Evans had spotted during the autopsy, the contents of each were noticeably darker than usual.
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