Pandemic (60 page)

‘He’d got himself as far as Máleme when he was intercepted by Murphy – I don’t know if that’s his real name or an alias, but he’s got to be carrying
some kind of ID. They drove off the main road and up into the hills, got involved in a confrontation and shot each other to death. End of story, but perhaps you could dress up Murphy’s role
so that he becomes a US undercover police officer, hot on Stein’s trail.’

‘OK, that should work,’ Fitzpatrick said after a moment. ‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I don’t really know. I’ve collected what evidence there is to be found, and all the opposition players have been eliminated as far as I know, so I suppose I’ll just head
back to London and let my section or Six sort it all out.’

‘Good luck. Right, I’ll get over to Zounáki and fix things out there. Maybe I’ll see you again some time.’

‘You never know.’ Richter disconnected.

HMS
Invincible
, Sea of Crete

The young communications rating was concerned. The procedures were quite specific, but as far as he could see there was no way he could follow them. So he called the Chief
over and explained his problem.

‘Leave it to me,’ the CPO said, and walked across to the Communications Officer.

‘Yes, Chief?’

‘Slight problem, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a Flash signal classified Secret for Lieutenant Commander Richter, but as far as I know he’s ashore somewhere so we
can’t deliver it within the specified time.’

‘Sounds like it’s Commander Richter’s problem rather than ours, Chief. Give it to me and I’ll see if the Ops Department has any kind of contact with him.’

As he left the Communications Centre the officer reflected that he’d never known a junior officer – and in his book a lieutenant commander
was
still a junior officer –
to receive so many personal classified signals or, frankly, cause so much trouble to other departments on board any ship. He wished the bloody man would get off the
Invincible
and bugger off
back to London or wherever he’d come from.

‘Richter?’ he said without preamble as he stepped into the Ops Office and saw Ops Three sitting at his desk working out the following day’s flying programme. ‘Have you
got a contact number for him?’

‘I have,’ Ops Three replied, ‘but he’s either had his mobile switched off for the last few hours or he’s been out of a cell. Why?’

‘I’ve got a signal for him,’ the Communications Officer said, thrusting a clipboard at him. ‘It’s Secret and Flash, and I reckon you’ve got a much better
chance of contacting him about it than I have, so you may as well take it. Sign here.’

‘Thanks a bunch,’ Ops Three muttered under his breath.

Western Crete

Richter had ended his call to Fitzpatrick only four minutes earlier, and had just started the engine of the Renault and slipped it into first gear when his other mobile
phone – the Enigma issued on the
Invincible
– started to ring.

‘Commander Richter? It’s Ops Three, sir, on Mother. We’ve been trying to reach you for some time.’

‘Sorry, the phone’s been switched off. What did you want?’

‘I was instructed to pass some landfall information on to you, sir. An American frigate approached Crete from the west and launched a chopper this afternoon at just after three local time.
It flew to somewhere near Plátanos where we think it landed. It got airborne again a few minutes later and flew back to the frigate. Then the frigate itself left the area, and we presume
that the helicopter picked someone up.’

Richter smiled slightly before he replied. ‘I don’t think the man they were expecting actually turned up, because I met him first. Is that it, then?’

‘No, sir. I’ve just been handed a Secret signal for you, precedence Flash. It’s in a sealed envelope so that’s all I can tell you about it. What do you want me to do with
it?’

Richter thought for a moment before replying. ‘Open it, please,’ he said, ‘on my authority.’

‘I won’t be able to read it to you, sir,’ Ops Three said. ‘Not even over a secure telephone.’

‘I know,’ Richter said, ‘but you will be able to tell me if I need to get back to the ship in a hurry or do something else.’

‘Right, sir.’ Richter heard a faint tearing sound and then silence for a few moments as Ops Three scanned the signal.

‘Yes?’ Richter said encouragingly.

‘I don’t understand the third sentence here, sir, but the first two are quite clear. You’re to report by the fastest possible means to the American naval air station at
Soúda Bay.’

That wasn’t at all what Richter had been expecting. Having just killed in cold blood someone who was almost certainly a CIA agent or asset, he had rather hoped to be keeping his distance
from America and the Americans for some time.

‘Who’s it from?’ Richter asked.

‘The originator is listed as “FOE” – that’s Foxtrot Oscar Echo,’ Ops Three reported, ‘and the signal is signed “Simpson”.’

‘Is there anything else you can tell me without compromising the text?’

‘Really there’s only one thing, sir. It’s the proper name “Westwood”. Does that help?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Richter replied, wondering what the hell John Westwood’s name was doing in a signal sent to him from Richard Simpson. At least he could trust Westwood,
counted him as a friend. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll get myself to Soúda Bay. Can you get that signal to Soúda Bay Ops or wherever by helicopter so I can pick it
up?’

‘Yes, sir. That shouldn’t be a problem. We’ve got a Merlin leaving the ship in fifteen minutes to join the ASW screen. I’ll re-task it on telebrief to call at
Soúda Bay first.’

‘Thanks.’ A thought suddenly struck Richter. ‘Are you still running surveillance out to the west of Crete?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir. How did you know about that?’

‘Actually, I requested it. You might need a higher authority to confirm it, but there’s now no reason for it to continue. I suggest you check with Wings and tell him what I’ve
just said.’

‘Right, sir.’ Ops Three’s voice sounded uncertain. The instructions for the surveillance operation had come straight from Flag Officer Third Flotilla,
Invincible
’s
operating authority. How the hell could a request from a lieutenant commander in the Royal Naval Reserve turn into an order from an Admiral?

‘Thanks, Ops Three,’ Richter said. ‘My guess is I won’t get back on board this deployment, but maybe I’ll get the chance to fly with the squadron again some other
time.’

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Like Henry Rawlins, Nicholson wasn’t normally to be found at Langley over the weekend, but he’d been expecting a signal from the US Navy frigate that had been
tasked with collecting Richard Stein or, more likely, Mike Murphy, from the western end of Crete.

Conscious of the time difference between the Mediterranean area and the American eastern seaboard, he’d appeared in his office early, but it wasn’t until after ten local time that
the signal finally arrived, having been routed through various satellites, the frigate’s operating authority and Langley’s own communications section. And when he read it, Nicholson
knew that his problems were far from over. The signal, shorn of its routing indicators and other dross, was for Nicholson a two-word nightmare. It said simply: ‘NO SHOW’.

For two or three minutes he just stared at the words, wondering what the hell could have gone wrong. He knew Krywald and Stein had recovered the case and file because he’d received
Krywald’s email confirmation of that. He knew Elias was dead because Stein had told him, and he knew Krywald had been eliminated because Murphy had confirmed his death. The only thing Murphy
had needed to do after that was locate and eliminate Stein himself, recover the two items, and climb onto a chopper for the ten-minute flight to the waiting frigate.

That wasn’t rocket science, for Christ’s sake, and it was the kind of thing Murphy did all the time. For a few moments Nicholson wondered if the timescale had been just too tight,
but he’d discussed it all with Murphy before he’d even left for the airport, and his operative had seemed quite satisfied with the proposal. Something, Nicholson knew, must have gone
tits up.

His priority obviously was to find out what had happened. Nicholson was methodical, so first he checked his secure email inbox, hoping for a message from Murphy, but found nothing there. Then he
took a risk: he used his office telephone to call Murphy’s mobile, but just heard a recorded message stating that the phone was switched off. Without much hope, he then tried Stein’s
mobile, but got the same response – or rather lack of it.

The only option was to email Murphy and find out what had happened. It took Nicholson less than three minutes to compose and send a message to the classified server. He marked it High Priority
and incorporated a request for a read receipt: that way he’d know when the email got displayed on Murphy’s laptop.

After a moment’s thought, he sent an almost identical message to Richard Stein. Then all he could do was sit back and wait.

South of Zounáki, western Crete

Inspector Lavat stood by the boot of the blue Seat Cordoba and stared at the two bodies lying on the ground. Then he examined the bullet holes in the metal of the Seat,
shook his head and glanced towards the higher ground lying to the north of the crime scene. To Lavat, the damage to the car looked as if it had been caused by a rifle, not a pistol – a rifle
that he was certain had been fired from somewhere in those hillocks some three or four hundred yards away. But that, he had already decided, was not going to be the official version.

He’d been telephoned an hour earlier by a man he’d never heard of, called Fitzpatrick, and given brief details of the incident occurring near Zounáki. The moment Fitzpatrick
mentioned Richter’s name, Lavat had been sure that there would be more to these killings than met the eye. And, after a brief initial inspection, he knew that he was right.

The police in Máleme had received an almost hysterical phone call from a female British tourist who had stumbled on the grisly scene whilst out walking, and they had reacted immediately.
Half a dozen police officers had been dispatched to the location, and now stood around, making sure that the small but growing crowd of eager sightseers all kept their distance and didn’t
contaminate the crime scene. They were waiting for their forensic people to arrive, and Lavat knew that then his real work would begin.

No experienced forensic scientist could accept the scenario that Fitzpatrick had suggested to Lavat. The chances of two people inflicting virtually identical bullet wounds on each other, and
then simultaneously shooting each other in the head, were less than zero. Lavat realized that and so too would the men in white suits when they finally arrived.

But Lavat also knew that that scenario made perfect sense from the point of view of convenience and even justice. Fitzpatrick had informed him exactly who the two dead men were, and Lavat knew
that one of them – the one clutching a SIG P226 automatic pistol – was almost certainly the man who had killed his police officer in Kandíra. Fitzpatrick was a little more vague
about the identity of the second corpse, but Lavat didn’t feel inclined to probe too deeply.

He shook his head again, wondering how best to approach the problem. Perhaps conjuring up an anonymous eyewitness might be the best option: somebody who had actually observed the two men
shooting at each other. That might be the best way of persuading a suspicious forensic scientist to doubt the evidence of his own eyes.

Failing that, he guessed he would just have to accept whatever the forensic team decreed, but ignore the conflicting evidence when he came to write the report. After all, the one thing certain
was that there would be no court case: this double shooting was a dead end, and was also going to close four open files.

On balance, he was glad Richter had been around, and he was certain he could detect the hand of the Englishman in many of the events following the death of Spiros Aristides. But he was also
pleased that Richter was leaving Crete: life there had been both quieter and simpler before he arrived.

NAS Soúda Bay, Akrotíri, Crete

The armed sentry posted at the counter-weighted barrier guarding the main entrance to the Soúda Bay base took one look at Richter’s Royal Navy identity card
and raised the barrier.

‘You’re expected, sir,’ he said. ‘They’re warming up one of the RC-135s for you. Do you know where the flight line is?’

‘No,’ Richter said, ‘I’ve never been here before.’

The sentry handed him a printed map annotated with directions and supplemented it with a string of verbal instructions. Richter drove on into the base, trying to shift a feeling of unreality
engendered by the sentry’s casual phrase: ‘They’re warming up one of the RC-135s for you.’

The RC-135 is a highly specialized and very expensive electronic surveillance aircraft based on the ubiquitous and reliable Boeing 707 platform. It was an RC-135 on a regular patrol out of the
States that stood off the Kamchatka Peninsula in 1983 and recorded all the transmissions from Soviet ground stations and fighter aircraft, as Korean Airlines flight KAL007 flew increasingly further
off-course into Soviet territory and was finally shot down by a Russian Flagon interceptor. That incident resulted in the loss of two hundred and sixty-nine lives but produced for the West arguably
the greatest intelligence coup of the decade, comprising Russian radar signatures, radio frequencies, intercept procedures and all the rest. Appallingly, many Western intelligence analysts
considered the sacrifice of so many lives to be entirely justified.

The RC-135 is not only an extremely complex and expensive aircraft, but is also highly classified. The Americans are very reluctant to let anyone anywhere near one unless they have a
demonstrable and essential need to know what goes on inside the fuselage. So why, suddenly, was Richter being allowed aboard one as a passenger? And as a passenger to where, exactly?

As he hauled the Renault round a corner and headed towards the complex of hangars, he suddenly noticed the unmistakable shape of a Royal Navy ASW Merlin standing over to his right. He checked
the mirrors, braked the car to a halt, then reversed back until he could turn onto the dispersal where the helicopter was parked.