Pandemic (42 page)

‘That looks to me like an ASW bird,’ he murmured, peering southwards through a small pair of folding binoculars, ‘but I can’t identify it for sure. It could be a Sea King
or one of the new Merlins.’

‘Who uses them primarily?’ Krywald asked. With every mile they’d covered in their approach to Crete, he had been feeling a little better, considerably cheered by the prospect
of stepping onto dry land.

‘If it’s a Sea King, almost anyone,’ Stein replied, still studying the helicopter. ‘It’s a very good aircraft and a hell of a lot of nations operate them –
Germany, Canada, Spain and Egypt for starters – and any of those could have warships in this area. If it’s a Merlin, Britain and Italy are the most likely.’

‘What’s it doing?’

‘From here I can’t be certain, but it looks as if it’s transitioned into a hover, so it’s probably using its dunking sonar.’

‘You think they’re looking for the Learjet?’

‘I doubt it. It’s probably just doing regular anti-submarine exercises. And even if it is looking for the wreck, those charges are going to blow real soon now.’

ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

Just over thirty minutes after the Merlin had begun its dunking sonar search, O’Reilly suddenly leaned forward, staring intently at the display in front of him.

He then glanced up at Richter who was trying to peer over his shoulder. ‘This looks more like it,’ O’Reilly said. ‘A cylindrical object about thirty feet long which could
well be part of an aircraft fuselage – it’s big enough for that – plus two flat plates, one right next to the cylinder and the other a short distance away and standing vertically
upright.’

‘Wings?’ Richter queried.

‘That’s my guess,’ O’Reilly said. ‘One still attached to the wreckage, the other torn off by the impact with the sea. I’ve also got two very strong returns
from fairly small objects, which I assume are the engines. This is the best candidate we’ve located so far,’ he added, ‘but it’s deep, around one hundred feet.’

Richter looked at him. ‘OK, Mike, on a scale of one to ten, where do you reckon this contact scores?’

O’Reilly thought for a moment. ‘At least a seven,’ he said, ‘maybe eight.’

‘That’s good enough for me.’ Richter turned towards the rear of the helicopter. ‘David, get suited up.’ Turning back to the Senior Observer, he added, ‘Mike,
we’ll have to use the life raft, and we’ll need a buoy to mark the precise spot. Can you position the aircraft as near as you can to what you think is the fuselage?’

‘No problem.’ O’Reilly did some swift calculations. ‘Pilot, jump one three five, seven hundred yards.’

As the helicopter climbed away from the hover, Richter joined Crane at the rear of the cabin and began pulling on a wetsuit.

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

John Westwood snapped the file closed. He got up from his chair, stretching his arms and rubbing his eyes, then paced the office carpet for a few moments. He had come in
fairly early that morning, and ever since then he seemed to have done nothing but either stare at text on the computer screen or plough through dusty operation files.

Hicks had been adamant there were answers to be found somewhere within the vast CIA database of information, and equally firm that he expected Westwood to find them, although not at the expense
of his normal work. But ‘cracking the Walnut’, as Hicks had somewhat dismissively termed this operation, had not proved as easy as at first supposed.

Westwood had initially searched the database to identify those cases and operations in which either Charles Hawkins or James Richards had participated. That had eventually produced a list he had
output to his laser printer, but that, of course, was just the start. Once he’d identified the operations in which the men were involved, he was obliged to read through all the case files as
well, and that was where his problems really started, just because of the sheer volume of data he was trying to analyse.

James Richards and Charles Hawkins had both worked in the Operations Directorate for almost their entire professional careers, a total in Richards’s case of over thirty years. Hawkins had
transferred to Administration for the last five years of his time at the Agency, but that still left twenty-eight years’ worth – over one hundred and twenty operations involving one man
or the other – to be scanned and assessed.

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.

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 several 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.’