Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  Westwood had read through the first three operation files on screen, but then decided to get the original paper files out of storage, because he suspected that the electronic versions were somewhat abbreviated, and besides some of the scanned documents were actually quite difficult to read. Also, he was still concerned about leaving an electronic trail of opened files running visibly through the CIA database. Hauling the originals up from the archives might therefore be a whole lot better for his long-term health prospects.

  It would have been worth it, he thought, if after all this work he’d actually found something, but the search had turned up nothing. He’d just in fact finished reading the last case file of all, had filled a couple of dozen pages with hand-written notes, but the eventual result was a neat round zero. Nothing found in any of the files linking these two men could, by any stretch of the imagination, have led to their deaths. There had to be something else – something he was missing.

  Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

  Richter and Crane stood shoulder to shoulder next to the open starboard-side door of the ASW helicopter and checked each other’s equipment. Below the hovering Merlin, the surface of the Mediterranean was churned into spray by the down-wash from the massive rotor blades, so the buoy, attached to a lead sinker by a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot rope that they’d dropped five minutes earlier, was being blown all over the place.

  They were going deep, and so would need something on the surface as support. Richter nodded to O’Reilly, then he and David Crane stepped back out of the way as the Senior Observer and the aircrewman manhandled a bulky fabric-covered bundle over to the door. O’Reilly seized a lanyard on the side of the bundle and, as the aircrewman pushed, he tugged it.

  The bundle dropped straight down and, with a loud hissing sound audible even over the beat of the rotors and the roar of the jet engines, it burst open, as bright orange air cells filled rapidly with compressed air from the bottle secured on the life raft.

  The raft floated briefly upright on the sea below the helicopter, but almost immediately the rotor downwash began blowing it aside. Crane moved forward and stepped out of the doorway, keeping his legs straight as he plummeted into the Mediterranean. He submerged, then reappeared, swam a few strokes, grabbed the safety line attached to the life raft and began towing it towards the buoy.

  The pilot moved the Merlin about fifty yards away to make it easier for Crane to tow the raft. Once it was secured, the helicopter moved directly over the raft again while O’Reilly and the aircrewman began lowering the rope to which Crane and Richter had secured the aqualung sets. Below them, still buffeted by the downwash, Crane struggled to heave them into the raft. Once the last set was on board the fragile craft, the helicopter again moved a few yards away.

  As soon as the Merlin was clear of the raft, Richter stepped out and dropped into the sea. Entering the water was a mild but very pleasant shock. It had already been hot inside the Merlin, and both he and Crane had got a lot warmer very quickly once they’d pulled on their wetsuits. The water was cooler than the air, and Richter immediately felt more comfortable as he surfaced and looked round for Crane. Above him, the helicopter peeled away to his left. There was nothing else the aircraft could do, so O’Reilly had decided earlier to land it on Gavdopoúla and wait there, rotors running, until the two men resurfaced after their dive.

  Richter reached the life raft just as Crane had finished securing the end of the aqualung rope to it. Together the two men lowered the weighted end of the coil down into the sea beneath them, their extra sets of breathing apparatus vanishing into the depths, to hang suspended beneath the raft.

  ‘You ready?’ he asked, and Crane nodded. ‘Keep your eyes on me, please,’ Richter added. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve done any diving, so if I start doing something stupid, just stop me.’

  ‘You bet.’ Inserting their mouthpieces, both men ducked beneath the surface, lifted up their legs and began their descent. Richter led the way, mainly so Crane could keep watch on him, following the path of the anchor rope attached to the buoy.

  As they descended deeper, the light gradually faded, the azure of the surface water giving way slowly to darker shades of blue and finally almost to grey as they reached eighty feet down. When the seabed loomed up quite suddenly, Richter halted his descent by abruptly grabbing the buoy rope. As Crane drifted down beside him, the two men gazed around them.

  The dunking sonar had already provided an extremely accurate position for the wreckage, so the buoy had been dropped as close to it as possible. Nevertheless, Crane, like Elias before him, had come well prepared. As Richter waited, Crane reached into the pouch attached to his weight belt and withdrew a roll of thin but very strong nylon cord. He expertly tied one end of it to the buoy rope about ten feet off the bottom then, after making sure Richter was still beside him, began to pay out the cord as the two men swam westwards.

  Just over a minute later they halted again on spotting the ghostly shape of the Learjet wing, one end driven deep into the seabed, looming in front of them. The Merlin crew had dropped them virtually on top of the wreckage they were seeking.

  Richter turned to Crane and gave the ‘OK’ sign. The two men then moved on, beyond the wing, searching for what was left of the aircraft’s fuselage. Crane held a rough plan drawn on a waterproof board, showing the relationship between the sonar returns detected earlier on the seabed. He checked his compass again, tapped Richter’s right arm and led the way across the murky grey sea floor. Less than two minutes later Crane spotted the lifting bag that Spiros Aristides had attached to the major section of the Learjet’s fuselage.

  Meanwhile, inside the wreckage and tucked well under the seats where Elias had tossed them, the chemicals inside four pencil detonators were slowly eating their way through the membranes that protected the water-activated switch and the battery. When Crane spotted the lifting bag, the detonators had already been live for a little over two hours and twenty-five minutes.

  Chapter 18

  Friday

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  ‘Mr Westwood?’ The gruff voice on the telephone was unmistakable.

  ‘Good morning, Frank,’ Westwood replied. ‘You have some news for me, I hope?’

  Detective Delaney’s chuckle echoed over the telephone line. ‘More like no news, I guess. We’ve done the usual house-to-house in Crystal Springs, where James Richards lived, and we’ve also pretty much taken his property to pieces.

  ‘Basically, nobody saw anything unusual, nobody heard anything. Three neighbours – smartasses after the event – claim to have seen a suspicious-looking character lurking near Richards’s house early that evening. The composite description gives us a black Caucasian male between five seven and six two in height, weighing between one-twenty and one-ninety pounds, cleanshaven with a full beard, wearing a black or tan or blue overcoat. It’s just possible there’s a description of this unsub in there somewhere, but I wouldn’t count on it.

  ‘Our forensic guys managed to lift just over four hundred full and partial prints, mainly latents but a few visuals too, from the lounge and hall of Richards’s home. Three hundred and eighty-five of these were left by Richards himself, and all but four of the rest were deposited by his neighbours. The four remaining were glove prints, not fingerprints. Fine quality leather, the techs tell me.

  ‘We found faint traces of mud on the lounge carpet, but it could have come from pretty much anywhere in that area, maybe even from Richards’s own garden. We also picked up seven head hairs that didn’t come from Richards or any of the neighbours we’ve interviewed. All the lab can say so far is that they came from a Caucasian, probably male, dark hair turning grey. So until we find ourselves a suspect, they’re as much use as tits on a boar-hog.’

  ‘And Hawkins?’

  ‘Pretty much the same scenario,’ Frank Delaney continued. ‘At his house, two partial glove prints – the same fine quality leather – and s
everal indistinct glove marks on Mary Hawkins’s throat and arms. Three hairs from the same source as those picked up in Crystal Springs, so at least we now know that the killings are related. Traces of mud on the carpet, but that definitely came from the street right outside Hawkins’s house. There was no other physical evidence inside the property that couldn’t be accounted for.

  ‘The third crime scene was Hawkins’s car. We found glove marks on the passenger-side door handle, one gloved hand-print on the dashboard and the same on the outside of the passenger door window. We also found a single hair on the headlining on the passenger side, just above the door – from the same source as the others. But nothing else. The one deduction we could make from finding that hair, apart from proving that the same unsub committed all three murders, is that he’s probably fairly tall, which supports the Popes Creek neighbour’s description of an unknown male seen entering the Hawkins’s residence. But, basically, we got zip. Whoever this guy is, he’s a pro.’

  As Delaney had been speaking, Westwood had jotted down a few notes, and once the detective finished he scanned over them. ‘That’s not a lot to go on, Frank,’ he said finally.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Delaney muttered. ‘You got anything from your end? Any idea about motive?’

  ‘Nothing yet,’ Westwood replied. ‘Nothing about this business makes a hell of a lot of sense right now. I’m checking through all the files but I can’t think of any reason why somebody would need to go around killing retired CIA officers.’

  ‘Beats the shit out of me, too,’ Delaney growled. ‘If our boys come up with anything else, you’ll be the first to know. And you find out anything, you tell me – otherwise, don’t call me, and I won’t call you.’

  ‘Got it,’ Westwood replied, and put down the phone.

  Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

  They swam slowly with easy, energy-conserving strokes towards the hollow shell of the Learjet’s fuselage. Richter stopped at the rear end, beside what had once been the tail-plane and engine nacelle, and looked closely at what was still visible of the registration number. Someone – presumably Spiros Aristides – had cleaned off some of the marine growth, so the letter ‘N’ could clearly be seen.

  Richter gestured to Crane for the waterproof board and pencil, and he passed them over. Richter pointed at the letter ‘N’ and wrote down ‘USA’. Then he cleaned more growth off the fuselage, looked again at the registration number and copied it onto the board below the word he’d just written. With this, he could initiate a check through the Federal Aviation Administration database and then positively identify the aircraft. That was probably the single most important piece of information he was likely to collect from the wreckage.

  The forward end of the fuselage was a mess. The entire cockpit had been torn away, either on impact with the surface of the Mediterranean or during the aircraft’s subsequent plunge to the bottom of the sea, so the front of the passenger cabin gaped wide open.

  Due to the depth of water, there hadn’t been the huge amount of colonization in and around the wreckage that would have occurred if the plane had crashed at a shallower level, but there was still enough marine growth to soften the edges of the torn metal and obscure the shape of whatever objects remained inside the cabin.

  The two men switched on their torches before peering cautiously inside. It was pretty much as Spiros Aristides had explained it to Nico in the village bar. The dancing torch beams illuminated five aircraft seats, the sixth having apparently been ripped away from the floor, probably on impact with the water.

  Two of these seats were unoccupied, but all the others held disintegrating human skeletons, strapped in. Richter was no anatomist, but from the size of their skulls he guessed that all three victims were male. On the cabin floor, between the two rows of seats, he spotted a bulky black object, and a pile of what looked like tools and instruments beside it. Richter swam cautiously over and examined it more closely. The black object seemed to be an empty doctor’s bag and, on prodding the pile beside it, Richter was able to identify an array of forceps, tweezers and scalpels.

  It wasn’t therefore a great leap of reasoning to deduce that at least one of the corpses nearby had been a doctor, but that didn’t help Richter work out why the aircraft had been shot down in the first place. And he was quite certain that it had been blown out of the sky: the traces of the missile that had virtually torn the port engine from its mounting were unmistakable to his trained eyes.

  He moved slowly and carefully through the cabin, ensuring he didn’t snag his aqualung hoses on anything sharp. Apart from the doctor’s bag, whatever clues there were to the identity of the three corpses had probably long since vanished, so Richter realized that he was almost certainly wasting his time. The bodies were now little more than skeletons, and while a forensic pathologist might identify their sex and age from their bones, and even come up with their names if their dental records were on file, there was virtually nothing he could do down here in the dark at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

  The cabin floor was covered in debris and marine growth, so even slight movements by either diver caused eddies of sediment to rise in clouds from the floor, reducing visibility. But Richter persevered in searching anyway, and found exactly nothing until he got right to the back of the cabin. There was a scattering of debris against the rear bulkhead and, prodding at it more in hope than expectation, he was rewarded by a tiny silvery gleam. He stretched out his gloved hand to grab at it. It was bigger than he had expected, heavier too, and of a vaguely familiar shape.

  Gripping the object firmly in his left hand, Richter reached down to his right calf and pulled his diving knife from its rubber sheath. When he hit his discovery smartly with the back of the blade a chunk of marine encrustation fell off, and he knew immediately what it was. He put it carefully into the mesh bag attached to his weight belt and was again prodding the pile of debris when Crane tapped him urgently on the arm, gesturing towards the front of the cabin.

  Richter looked at him, and Crane waved again towards the rent in the fuselage. He took off and swam swiftly in that direction with Richter following. The diving officer swung round in a tight circle, grabbing hold of the edge of one of the seats and pointed under it. Richter stopped beside him and looked down.

  During his first few months of employment with the Foreign Operations Executive, Richter had spent a considerable amount of time attending various training courses that enabled him to recognize and handle proficiently most types of modern handguns, submachine-guns and assault rifles, and so on. At the same time he’d also been taught to identify a wide variety of explosive devices, both improvised and manufactured, while receiving a basic instruction in fuses and detonators. So he had no difficulty at all in recognizing the two M118 Composition Block Demolition Charges lying side by side under the seat, despite their unusually bulky appearance. Only the pencil detonators sticking out of them were new to him.

  St Spiridon Forensic Laboratory, Irakleío, Crete

  The samples flown from Kandíra to Irakleío by Merlin were of two very different types. The majority were specimens of tissue gathered during the autopsy on Spiros Aristides, which had been whisked straight into the medical section of the laboratory for histological and toxicological analysis. The rest were a motley collection of dust, fluff and soil samples gathered from inside the dead man’s house or from the ground immediately outside it, plus swabs and scrapings from the walls, doors and furniture of his living room and bedroom – even the whisky bottle and glass that he had presumably drunk from before lying down on his bed. The medical samples were immediately subjected to a battery of well-established tests, while the glass and bottle were dusted for fingerprints and the sediment in them analysed, but about all the laboratory could do with the dust and other bits was to scan them through the microscope.

  So that’s exactly what they did. Starting with the scrapings from the walls and doors and most of the furniture, they found nothing. The f
luff revealed nothing either, and nor did the soil samples, at least when scrutinized through a conventional light microscope. But when the laboratory technician used a scanning electron microscope to examine the scrapings collected from the old oak table in Aristides’s living room, she noticed something she’d never seen before.

  Before calling her supervisor over, she tried a technique she’d employed previously with some success on similar samples, and prepared another specimen for examination in the SEM. When she looked carefully at this second image, she was frankly astonished.

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Pacing up and down in front of his desk, Westwood looked for inspiration. The logic of the situation seemed undeniable, and he was now feeling in agreement with Walter Hicks. Two men had been killed on the same day in the same area, and there seemed to be only three linking factors. First, eyewitness and forensic evidence strongly suggested that both victims had known their murderer. Second, it seemed probable that the same perpetrator had carried out both crimes, as subsequently confirmed by Delaney’s forensic evidence. Third, the only thing that seemed to connect the two victims was their years of service in the Operations Directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  But Westwood had found nothing at all in the case files that he had studied so diligently to provide any kind of a motive for these murders, especially so long after both men had retired from the Company. But the fact that the killings had happened meant there had to be a motive, so Westwood had presumably just missed it.

  Was there, he wondered, any other way to look at the evidence – some piece of lateral thinking that would enable him to consider the data he had extracted from a different perspective? And time was now getting short. Walter Hicks hadn’t been riding Westwood so far, but he would certainly be expecting some results fairly soon.