‘It’s no good,’ Westwood said, tossing down the red Ultra-Secret classified file and looking across his study at the couch where Richter lay sprawled, half-asleep.
‘No?’ Richter sat up, yawning, but looking interested. Tired but interested.
‘I was going to use this,’ Westwood tapped his finger on the file in front of him, ‘to cross-reference the names of any agents who fitted the rough profile I prepared. I’d already checked out the senior agents listed on the inside front cover. That got me nowhere, because they’re all dead.
‘In fact,’ he added, ‘it was the killing of the two retired Company agents that sparked our interest in what was going on in the first place. The problem is that all the junior agents are referred to in the file either by their initials, sometimes only by single initials, or by their Christian names. Sometimes they used two or three initials at the start of a memo and then only used single letters after that. It’s real confusing now, but probably made good sense at the time, when everybody knew exactly who “B” and “R” and “John” and “Mike” were.’
‘How many different sets of initials are we looking at?’
Westwood glanced down at the paper on which he’d been making notes. ‘I’ve got eleven sets of three initials, six sets of two letters, and fifteen single initials, and there’s really no way I can make any sense of them. I mean, right here in this tasking sheet I’ve got “CRP”, “P”, “CP” and “RCP”. That could be one person if the “RCP” is a misprint for “CRP”, or two, or three, or even four different people, and I can’t see any way of finding out which at this stage.’
‘And the Christian names?’
‘Half a dozen different ones,’ Westwood said, again reading from his list. ‘I’ve got Dave, George, John, Mike, Oliver and Steve. And unless I’ve missed something, these guys are never referred to by their initials, because none of them match. There’s no “J” or “D”, for example. And I’ve checked the initials and the names with the agents that I’m guessing might have been involved way back, but none of them match, apart from “John”, three times, but that’s not real surprising.’
‘Can we look at it from the other side?’ Richter interposed. ‘Is there anything in the memos to show what CAIP was supposed to achieve?’
‘No. Apart from the medical stuff, they’re all just routine: requests for motor transport, inquiries about aircraft availability, booking briefing-rooms, that kind of thing. Nothing with any details. I think you’re right. Almost everything in this file deals with the very specific medical aspects of CAIP. The other files, the ones that as far as I know were destroyed back in nineteen seventy-two, probably dealt with the overall picture. Unless we can identify Mr X and persuade him to tell us what the aim of the operation was, I think the only way we’re going to find out is if the Company vets some of our senior medical specialists and gives them clearance to analyse this file. Maybe they could translate this stuff into something mere mortals could understand.’
‘So what now?’
‘I don’t know,’ Westwood said, ‘but I guess the first step is to take all this stuff’ – he gestured towards the red file and Stein’s briefcase – ‘and show it to my boss, Walter Hicks. But the problem is we’ve still only got a bunch of initials and six Christian names. We can’t start accusing anyone only with that, and particularly not any of the senior guys now at Langley.’
‘I can see that,’ Richter said. ‘Accusing somebody who out-ranks you of being a multiple murderer is not the way to make friends and influence people, unless, of course, you can prove it, and you certainly can’t do that with what we’ve found so far. If you’re wrong, you’d spend a very long time working very hard trying to make people forget. It’s your call, John, but my advice would be don’t involve Walter Hicks until you’ve got more than some initials to go on. I think the best option would be a bit of finesse here.’
‘Meaning what, exactly?’
Richter got off the couch and moved across to sit opposite Westwood at the desk. He rubbed his tired eyes then leaned forward. ‘Let’s sketch out a scenario. According to Stein, the man we’re looking for has been calling himself McCready. I know that’s almost certainly an alias, but let’s use it for the moment as a convenient name for our bad guy.’ Westwood nodded. ‘Now, he’s sent three agents to Crete to recover this file and the steel case with the flasks inside it, and also to blow up the Learjet. He’s probably been keeping in regular contact with them by email or mobile phone or maybe both.
‘They’ll have been keeping him informed, so he’ll know that they successfully destroyed the jet and found the case and all the bits. He’ll probably have been told that the diver had been eliminated, and that Krywald was terminally sick in Chania hospital, and he’d certainly arranged a pick-up for Stein from the west end of Crete. I know that because Stein told me so, and the
‘I’m guessing that McCready also briefed Murphy to eliminate Krywald, find and kill Stein and recover the steel case. I assume both Stein and Murphy had been briefed about the pick-up by helicopter, and this McCready didn’t much care which of them made it, as long as one of them did. If Stein got there before Murphy found him, fine: McCready could take care of him in the States. If he was already dead, Murphy would have recovered the steel case and he’d be the man the chopper collected. Probably Murphy would walk into a bullet or a subway train or something else fast-moving and lethal once he’d handed over the case to our mystery man.’
‘I can’t argue with any of that,’ Westwood said.
‘OK, then look at what’s happened since. The chopper left the rendezvous empty-handed, with Stein and Murphy being no-shows because both of them were already dead. The frigate no doubt signalled Langley through some covert route informing McCready that nobody had appeared. Once he heard that news, I presume he started trying to reach Stein or Murphy by email or mobile phone, but for obvious reasons he’s not going to get a response from either. So for the first time since this operation started, he’s completely in the dark. He’s got no idea what’s happened to either Stein or Murphy, or who’s currently got possession of the steel case.
‘He’ll probably guess that the Cretan police have got involved – maybe they just got lucky and arrested Stein, or picked up Murphy or something like that – so he thinks that the police have his case. Now if I was McCready, I’d want some sort of information, and I’d want it fast. I’d task any asset I had located anywhere near Crete to get on to the island and investigate. Then I’d be thinking about sending a new team over there to pick up the pieces the first team dropped.’
‘So?’ Westwood asked.
‘So how about we bring Mike Murphy back from the dead? We email this McCready character, tell him Murphy had to run for his life after he’d killed Stein, didn’t make the rendezvous with the chopper, so had to fly back to the States commercial. That would explain why he hasn’t replied to any emails McCready might have sent, and why his phone’s been switched off all this time. We tell him Murphy’s here in America, complete with the file, steel case and its contents, and ask where he wants to fix the handover.’
‘That,’ Westwood said after a few moments, ‘might just be the best idea you’ve ever had.’
‘Obviously you don’t know me as well as you think, John. Back in the UK I’m known as a fund of wonderful ideas. Just ask anyone who knows me.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Westwood smiled briefly. ‘What about the practicalities? Do you happen to know what email addresses McCready and Murphy were using?’
‘No, but it doesn’t matter. I had to borrow Murphy’s car after the shooting stopped, then I decided to liberate his laptop and his mobile, on the grounds that he wasn’t going to be needing them any more. I’ve also got Richard Stein’s laptop and mobile, and an unfired SIG P226 automatic with a couple of spare magazines I found in Stein’s luggage. The SIG hasn’t got a serial number, which makes it a potentially very useful bit of kit. In fact,’ Richter added, ‘I’ve now got two laptop computers, four mobile phones, and a Browning Hi-Power pistol as well as the SIG, and not one of them belongs to me.
‘Murphy’s laptop will have copies of all the emails he’s received and probably those he’s sent as well, and he’ll have been using his mobile phone to dial whatever ISP McCready has been using. All we have to do is hitch the phone to the laptop, switch on and hope for the best.’
‘Why “hope for the best”?’
‘Because Murphy probably has some kind of password protection built in to his machine. If it’s a Windows password it’s not a problem – a mentally retarded gibbon could work its way round one of those – but if it’s a BIOS password or something more sophisticated it could be a lot more difficult.’
