The last thing he heard before the soundproof door slammed shut was Nicholson’s despairing wail as the viral spores began to fill his lungs.
Chapter 29
Monday
John Westwood seemed almost in a state of shock as he drove the Chrysler away from the safe house. He’d said nothing since Richter had ushered him out of the place and slammed the door shut behind them.
Richter had left a note for the caretaker, warning him not to go into the briefing-room but to wait for a decontamination team to arrive. He would have to consult Tyler Hardin again, so that the expert could advise what procedures were needed before the room could be safely opened. But all that could wait for a day, at least.
‘It’s not my call, John,’ Richter commented eventually. ‘Ultimately, this is your mess and you’re the ones who are going to have to clean it up. But I do feel very strongly that you can’t just bury it. Going public wouldn’t achieve anything except to pillory the CIA and America itself, and you can certainly do without that. My advice is that you take the remaining flasks back to Langley to brief Walter Hicks and suggest that they’re handed over to the boffins at Fort Detrick. They just might help in the search for an eventual cure.’
‘What are you yourself going to do?’ Westwood spoke for the first time. ‘Will you tell Simpson?’
Richter nodded. ‘Yes. I don’t really see I’ve got much option. If the circumstances were reversed, you’d do the same.’
‘I guess so,’ Westwood murmured, then straightened slightly in his seat, as if he’d come to a sudden decision. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the next few days are going to be mayhem over here. I’m going to be spending all my time at Langley explaining what the hell happened back at the safe house – that’s the easy bit really – and trying to find an answer to the harder question: why a bunch of rabid neo-Nazi lunatics in the CIA decided thirty years ago that killing off half of the population of Africa seemed like a good idea.
‘You probably want to get back home anyway, so why don’t we just pick up your stuff at my house and then I’ll run you out to Baltimore International?’
Richter replaced the Clancy novel in the bookcase – he’d seen the film, knew exactly where the ‘Red October’ had finished up. He took another look around John Westwood’s guest bedroom to ensure he’d left nothing behind that he didn’t intend leaving, picked up his overnight bag and Stein’s briefcase, and pulled the door closed behind him.
‘John,’ he explained, as he walked into the kitchen where Westwood was sitting at the breakfast bar, a blank expression on his face, ‘I can’t take the pistols with me so I’m going to have to leave them here. You can keep the SIG – call it a gift from the late Richard Stein – but if you could get the Browning Hi-Power sent over to the US Embassy in London in the diplomatic bag so I can pick it up, that would be a great help. You have no idea how many forms I’ll have to fill in if I don’t hand the fucking thing back. I’ve left both pistols upstairs in the guest room, unloaded and with the magazines out, on the top shelf of the built-in wardrobe. Your kids won’t be able to reach them up there.
‘You can have this, too,’ he said, putting a bulky heavy-duty carrier bag on the kitchen table. ‘It’s got Murphy’s mobile phone and laptop in it, just in case you need to show Hicks the sequence of emails you exchanged with Nicholson. There might also be some other information there that could help you.
‘I’m taking Stein’s briefcase back with me. I’ll get our guys to see if there’s anything useful on his laptop, and then I’m going to keep it; it’s time I had a computer of my own. And he had a better mobile phone than the one I use back in the UK. Let’s call it the spoils of war.’
The in-flight movie was crap, Richter knew, because he’d already seen it in the Wardroom of the
That hadn’t worked either, and after fidgeting around for thirty minutes trying to get comfortable – a nearly impossible task in the plane’s economy section – he’d given up trying and hauled Stein’s briefcase down from the overhead locker and opened it up. He’d been vaguely planning to have a fiddle with the dead man’s laptop – Richter wasn’t quite as computer illiterate as he usually made out – but when he lifted the lid of the briefcase something else caught his attention.
Sticking out of one of the narrow document pockets was a piece of paper. Richter pulled it out, unfolded it and found it was actually six sheets of thin paper stapled together. At the top of the first sheet was the unmistakable dark blue CIA seal, the bald eagle surmounting the white shield with the sixteen-pointed red compass, and the classification – Ultra Secret – stamped in red at the top and bottom of every page, supplemented by a caveat: ‘CAIP EYES ONLY’.
He knew immediately, even before reading to the bottom of the first page, exactly what this document was, and where it had come from. It was the executive summary of the aims, conduct and procedures of Operation CAIP. Krywald or Stein had obviously removed it from the file, and Richter could guess why.
It was dynamite, with enough explosive force to blow the Central Intelligence Agency into oblivion, and the only living soul who now knew it existed was Paul Richter.
Wednesday
Richard Simpson turned the pages slowly, rereading the document for the third time. Then he dropped it onto his desk and stared across at Richter.
‘Where did you get it?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t get it from anywhere, really,’ Richter said. ‘I liberated a briefcase from this CIA agent named Richard Stein, because it contained his laptop computer and it was convenient for carrying it. I wasn’t watching the bloody awful movie on the long-haul back from Baltimore, so I decided to have a play with the laptop instead. When I opened up the briefcase, I saw this bit of paper sticking out of a document pouch. That’s it really.’
Simpson looked down and prodded the sheaf of pages a couple of times in an experimental manner. ‘So what do you expect me to do with it?’ he demanded.
‘What worries me,’ Richter said, ‘and has done since the moment Nicholson finally told us what CAIP was all about, was what the CIA will do with the evidence. Even John Westwood looked totally stunned at the implications, and I would be prepared to lay money there’ll be a powerful faction within the Company that will just want this buried.’
‘They could be right,’ Simpson said. ‘Having something like this made public would do immeasurable damage to the American Government, and I don’t really see what good it would do to anybody now. AIDS is with us and that’s a fact. Whether or not somebody created it, or if it just crawled out of the African rain forest somewhere, seems to me to have become largely irrelevant.’
‘But that’s not the point,’ Richter’s voice rose. ‘If the CIA was behind this, then the Company should accept some kind of responsibility. I’m not talking about a public blood-letting – I agree that wouldn’t help anyone – but some kind of financial reparation wouldn’t go amiss. Maybe they could subsidize the cost of the AIDS drugs being used these days. A lot of victims of the disease can’t receive treatment simply because they can’t afford to pay for it.’
‘You seem to know a lot about the subject,’ Simpson commented.
‘I’ve done some research since I got back.’
‘OK, but you still haven’t answered my question. What do you want
