Pandemic (51 page)

He had to decide what to do now. Krywald was dying, might already be dead, and there was no way Stein was going to go back to the hospital to check on him. He also was going to have to be
careful about leaving his hotel. McCready would almost certainly have sent a cleaner, perhaps even a team of them, to Crete, so it was possible that one was already sitting on the opposite side of
the street watching the hotel entrance through the telescopic sight of a silenced sniper rifle.

Stein was going to have to use the rear entrance, maybe even wait until after dark before he could leave safely. The only other possibility was to exit in the middle of a large party of
tourists, but the hotel currently didn’t seem to have enough guests to make that a viable option.

Even when he got out, he wasn’t sure where he could go: he couldn’t return home without undergoing extensive facial surgery. But, no matter. Stein had always liked Europe, and he had
funds salted away in various banks around the world so, while he wasn’t exactly a rich man, he could certainly live fairly comfortably on his assets. And, if things got tight, he could always
try peddling his knowledge of the inner workings of the CIA to some of the more anti-American European intelligence services – like the French, for example.

Chaniá, Crete

‘They’re based in a hotel in Réthymno,’ Ross explained as soon as Richter answered his mobile. ‘I’m still in Irakleío, but
I’m leaving in five minutes. I suggest we meet there in the town. Where are you now?’

‘Right, I’m in Chaniá at the moment,’ Richter replied, ‘but I’ve got a room booked in Réthymno. How about we meet at my hotel?’

‘Fine,’ Ross said, ‘give me the address.’ Richter’s hire car, he belatedly remembered, was still over at Kandíra, so he hailed a taxi. After a short argument
over the fare – the driver hadn’t liked the idea of charging it on the meter, but Richter could be very persuasive when he wanted – he was en route to Réthymno along the
main north-coast road.

Friday
Chaniá, Crete

Mike Murphy actually passed Richter’s taxi on its way east towards Réthymno, as he himself approached the outskirts of Chaniá in his Peugeot. He had
decided to take care of Krywald first, just in case the American staged some kind of miraculous recovery from whatever bug had attacked him. What he couldn’t do was just wait around until
Krywald died: Nicholson had been emphatic that there were to be no loose ends when Murphy left the island.

He left his car in a public parking area outside the hospital, headed in through the double doors and across to the receptionist. After some slight language difficulties, he was given directions
to the ward where ‘Mr Curtis’ was confined.

But when he glanced in through the window while walking down the corridor under the suspicious gaze of the orderly standing outside, Murphy realized that his presence was probably both
superfluous and pointless. Superfluous, because Krywald was quite obviously, even to untrained eyes, on the point of death, and pointless because there was no easy way he could get anywhere near
the patient. At least, not from inside the building.

Ignoring the orderly, Murphy carried on along the corridor without breaking stride. A side-ward two doors down from Krywald’s was empty and, after a swift glance around to check that
nobody was watching, he pushed open the door and stepped inside. The room had a small bathroom attached, with just a toilet and a sink, and hanging from a rail was a light blue hand towel. Murphy
grabbed it, stepped back into the main room and walked across to the window. He pushed it open, dangled the towel partly outside, then pulled the window closed to hold the towel in place. Now he
had a useful marker.

For a few seconds Murphy peered out of the window, staring across the scrubby grass of the small and unused internal quadrangle towards the side of the building opposite, then he exited the
side-ward and retraced his steps to the front entrance.

Two minutes later, outside the hospital, he headed quickly over to where he had parked his car. He opened the boot, reached inside and pulled his overnight bag towards him. Quickly checking that
he was unobserved, he unzipped it and removed the Daewoo DP51, sliding it into the waistband of his trousers. He’d left the pistol in the boot just in case he’d had to pass through a
metal detector to get access to the hospital. He felt around again inside the bag until his fingers touched the smooth cylindrical shape of the silencer: that went into his inside jacket
pocket.

Murphy closed and locked the boot, turned back towards the hospital, but didn’t approach the main doors. Instead, he walked around to the other side of the building, striding confidently
as if he knew exactly where he was going, and made his way through a service entrance located over on the left-hand side of the hospital complex.

He possessed a good sense of direction and, once inside, followed a passageway leading to his right. It was lined on both sides with doors marked with signs in Greek, and more or less paralleled
the corridor he’d followed in the main building. He had to push open half a dozen doors before he found what he wanted. The seventh door along stood slightly ajar and inside he glimpsed piles
of dirty laundry: sheets, towels, gowns and other garments heaped everywhere.

He’d encountered nobody in the passageway, so it was the work of just a few moments to step inside, grab a slightly discoloured white surgical coat and slip it on over his jacket. There
was no name tag, no convenient stethoscope to dangle around his neck, but Murphy wasn’t concerned. All he wanted was something that made him look more as if he officially belonged, and in a
hospital nothing works better than a doctor’s white coat.

Another few metres along, the corridor ended in a T-junction. There, on his right, was what he’d been hoping to find: an unlocked door giving access to the small quadrangle that lay
between the ward block and the utility wing.

On the other side of the patchy grass Murphy spotted the light blue towel moving slightly in a gentle breeze, then counted the windows positioned to the right of it, working out which one
belonged to the room in which Krywald was being treated. He pulled the Daewoo pistol out of his waistband, checked that the magazine was fully loaded, then slammed it back in place. He screwed the
silencer firmly onto the barrel, racked the slide back to chamber a round, set the safety catch, and replaced the pistol out of sight.

Only then did he step out and begin moving confidently along the perimeter of the quadrangle.

Réthymno, Crete

‘Understand we’ve got a bit of house-breaking to attend to?’ Ross asked.

‘It’s a hotel rather than a house, but otherwise yes,’ Richter replied. ‘I hope you’re good at picking locks,’ he added, ‘because I’m
not.’

‘All part of the basic training,’ Ross nodded. ‘It’s part of the kit they give you when you join: exploding briefcase, Walther PPK, bullet-proof Aston Martin, that kind
of thing.’

‘Really?’

‘No, not really,’ Ross replied, ‘but I have done the course, so unless this hotel is a lot more secure than most you find on Crete, it should be easy enough to get into their
rooms.’

The two men had arrived at Richter’s hotel almost simultaneously, going through the same recognition procedure in the street outside it as they’d followed during their previous
telephone conversation. Ross was tall and slim with dark hair greying at the temples, and with a square, somewhat aggressive-looking moustache. He’d been here on Crete for two years, and now
that his Greek had become pretty fluent he was confidently expecting a posting notice from SIS almost immediately, which would send him off to some other country where the locals spoke any language
but Greek.

‘The Royal Navy’s much the same,’ Richter confided, as they took chairs at a table outside a street café. ‘The moment you’re competent and comfortable in any
job, they immediately post you somewhere else. So how did you locate the Americans’ hotel?’ he asked.

‘It wasn’t that difficult,’ Ross replied. ‘Some of the biggest and most expensive hotels employ their own computerized booking systems, while the really small ones
don’t bother with anything except telephone or fax reservations. So if they’d been staying in a hotel at either end of the spectrum it might have been awkward, but we guessed
they’d probably go for a middle-priced place. The majority of the hotels on the island use the same central reservations system, and we’ve needed to hack our way into that several times
before. It’s not difficult, because the information contained isn’t particularly sensitive or confidential.’

Ross switched to Greek to order two coffees from the waiter who had appeared beside their table, then continued in English. ‘We searched for the names you gave me and came up with nothing,
but in the circumstances that wasn’t entirely surprising. Then we searched for any two American men who were not part of a large group travelling together, but were staying in the same hotel.
That generated fewer matches than you might expect; only about a dozen, probably because it’s low season here now. Finally we narrowed it down to just seven names.

‘We then sent men out to check with the hotels those seven men were registered at. Four were in Irakleío itself, so it didn’t take long to get the results. The first two men
were a pair of elderly widowers doing Europe, and the other two were very obviously gay lovers. So unless the CIA has started recruiting poofs to do its dirty work, the two men you’re looking
for have got to be among the last three we identified – Roger Clyde, David Elias and Richard Wilkins. All three are staying right here in Réthymno. I know you’re only looking for
two men,’ Ross added, ‘but these three are apparently travelling together. Is it likely there might be a third man involved?’

‘That,’ Richter brooded, ‘could well make sense. When we located the wreck, the chopper picked up a body from the water. He’d been shot in the head and my guess is that
he was a specialist diver who’d been recruited just to plant the explosives. Once he’d done his stuff, the others just blew his brains out.’

The waiter returned with their coffee and Richter paid the bill. ‘And the hotel they’re using?’ he asked.

‘It’s just up the road,’ Ross replied. ‘We can go as soon as you’re ready.’

Chaniá, Crete

Tyler Hardin took a final look at the motionless figure, with wires and cables connecting him to a bank of monitoring equipment, then shrugged his shoulders and stepped
over to the door of the side-ward. As he’d explained to Richter in the helicopter from Kandíra, there was no known treatment for the virus that was attacking the patient called Curtis.
The American’s pulse was markedly weaker than when Hardin had last checked it only a few minutes earlier and his blood pressure was now so low it was frankly miraculous that he was still
alive. What blood remained in his veins and arteries was gradually seeping out of his ears, eyes, nose and mouth and, even though Hardin could neither see nor measure it, also into his abdominal
cavity and internal organs. The man was dying in front of his eyes and Hardin was powerless to do anything to stop it.

He stepped out into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind him. Gravas and the orderly were waiting outside, and kept well away from Hardin’s space-suited figure. Both were wearing
surgical gowns, rubber boots, masks, gloves and protective goggles.

‘Is he dead yet?’ Gravas asked, his voice slightly muffled.

‘No,’ Hardin replied, ‘but it won’t be long now.’ He turned back towards the side-ward and suddenly caught a glimpse of movement outside the external window beyond,
which faced onto the grassy quadrangle. He fell silent and stared for a moment, then turned back to Gravas. Perhaps it had just been a bird flying past.

The instant the figure in the bulky orange suit had turned towards him, Murphy had ducked down below the level of the window sill. He didn’t think he’d been spotted, and all he had
to do now was finish the job.

He edged carefully upright against the concealing wall, then peered briefly through the adjacent window. The orange-clad figure was still out in the corridor, talking to two others wearing green
surgical scrubs, but the ward itself was empty apart from the motionless figure of Roger Krywald.

For a moment, Murphy peered down at the bed inside, wondering if the man was already dead, if he was endangering himself for no purpose. But then he noticed Krywald’s left hand twitch, and
realized he had no option. He leaned back again, pulled out the Daewoo pistol and slipped off the safety catch, concealing the weapon behind his body and pointing it at the ground.

When he checked the ward again, the three figures out in the corridor had now moved away slightly, so Murphy knew that this was about the best chance he was likely to get. The window in front of
him was armoured glass, designed to prevent any violent patient from jumping through it. Murphy knew he wouldn’t be able to knock a hole in it easily, even with a rock, but it would offer
almost no resistance to a 9mm Parabellum bullet.

Stepping slightly away from the wall, he aimed his pistol through the window at Krywald’s still form. When he squeezed the trigger, the pistol coughed once, and a neat hole appeared in the
window, surrounded by concentric rings of shattered glass. A brass cartridge case span through the air, as the second round was chambered by the recoil action, and Murphy watched Krywald’s
body shudder with the impact.

He sighted and fired again, this bullet striking Krywald’s chest within two inches of the first wound, then ducked down below the level of the window, his eyes scanning the ground. Murphy
picked up one cartridge case, then found the second, and put them carefully into his jacket pocket. He slid the pistol back into the rear waistband of his trousers, under his jacket, crouched low
until well clear of the side-ward windows, then he stood upright and headed calmly back the way he had come.

He’d been out there in the grassy quadrangle for less than ninety seconds, and the first of his Priority Two tasks was successfully completed.