‘Nothing,’ Simpson replied, still staring at his subordinate. ‘Can you arrange for Richter to see this man?’
Perini was silent for a few moments, then replied slowly. ‘We were going to arrest him tomorrow afternoon,’ he said, some doubt in his voice. ‘I suppose Mr Richter could accompany our team, purely as an observer, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Richter echoed. ‘But what are you going to arrest him for?’
Perini smiled slightly. ‘We hadn’t decided,’ he said. ‘If you had positively identified him, it would have been for murder, acting on behalf of the British Government. As you haven’t, we’ll probably start with charging him for using a false passport or maybe illegal entry into Italy, and see what happens after that.’
Spiros Aristides staggered slightly as he walked through the bar doorway and out into the cool of the night. It was nearly midnight, and he knew he’d drunk far more of the cheap Scotch than he should have. He would no doubt suffer for it tomorrow, but tonight he would certainly sleep soundly.
Nico put a steadying hand out to the older man, but Spiros shrugged it off. Side by side they each retraced their separate steps back from the bar through the narrow streets until they reached the Greek’s tiny house, where Spiros fumbled for a moment with the door handle.
‘You’ll take a last glass with me?’ he inquired. Nico nodded and followed him inside.
‘That was all I found,’ Spiros gestured towards the still-open steel case lying on the dusty floor. Nico walked across and picked it up. He opened and closed it several times, and looked closely at the shaped and padded recesses designed to hold the flasks.
‘This is a very expensive item,’ he murmured. ‘This case was custom-made for some very special purpose, I think.’
‘Can you sell it?’ Spiros demanded somewhat hoarsely as he walked into the kitchen, returning with an open bottle of beer. He put the beer down on the table, sank into a chair and filled a glass with Scotch.
‘No,’ Nico replied firmly, sitting down and picking up the beer, ‘or not easily, anyway. It’s too specialized in purpose, and in any case it’s been in the water for too long.’
He studied the objects on the table with interest, picked up first the red-covered file, flicked through it, then put it down. Unlike his uncle, Nico spoke a little English – it was always useful in dealing with the annual influx of tourists – but he’d never learned to read more than a few words of the language.
‘Those were in the case as well,’ Spiros said, nodding at the objects on the table.
‘Twelve of them?’ Nico asked, pointing at the case.
‘No,’ Spiros said, ‘just the four. All the other spaces were empty. And look at this,’ he added, picking up the flask from which he’d stripped the wax and passing it to Nico.
His nephew hefted the flask in one hand, exclaimed at how light it was, and peered closely at the lock securing the top.
Spiros looked at him appraisingly. ‘Something valuable inside, maybe?’
‘Maybe, maybe,’ Nico replied. ‘This was sealed just like the others?’
‘Yes. I cut the wire away and stripped off the wax.’
‘It’s very light, but there must be
‘Elias? It’s the Director. I need to pick your brains for a minute. You’ve done plenty of recreational diving, right? Why would a diver attach aqualungs to a rope dropped underneath a boat?’ On the top floor at Langley, the CIA officer leaned back in his chair and gazed out of the window as he waited for David Elias, a junior officer in his own section, to reply.
‘That’s easy, Director. If you dive using compressed air cylinders – what you would normally call an aqualung – below a particular depth for longer than a certain time, you have to decompress yourself before you surface, otherwise you could suffer from the bends.’
‘That’s a bit vague. “Particular depth” and “certain time”? What depth, and what time?’
Three floors below, David Elias unconsciously mimicked his superior officer, leaning back in his seat and staring out of the window. ‘I can’t tell you precisely, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s variable, depending on a lot of different factors. Should I come up? I can explain it better in person.’
‘Yes, do that.’
Elias entered four minutes later, holding a dark blue book in his hand. John Nicholson waved him to a chair and watched as his subordinate opened the book.
‘I’ve some idea about the bends, but what’s the actuality of them?’
‘It’s all to do with pressure, sir. The deeper you dive, the greater the pressure on the human body from the water surrounding you. The pressure increases by about one atmosphere for every thirty feet of depth. When there’s significant pressure, say when you dive below about sixty feet, the nitrogen in the compressed air mixture you’re breathing isn’t expelled completely from your lungs, but starts going into solution in your bloodstream.’
‘Is that dangerous?’
‘Not as long as your body is under pressure, no. The problem comes when you re-surface. If you come up too fast without decompressing, the nitrogen comes out of solution as bubbles in the blood, usually at your joints. That will cause excruciating pain and often forces the sufferer into physical contortions, hence the name. To prevent that, a diver must pause at certain depths on the way back up to the surface and wait for the nitrogen to emerge from the bloodstream gradually.
‘The simplest way to cope is to lower a line with a heavy weight on the end from the diving tender, and attach separate sets of aqualungs to the line at the correct decompression depths. Then all the diver has to do is ascend until he reaches the lowest set, wait there for the appropriate time, then ascend to the next one. You have to use these additional compressed air cylinders,’ he accurately anticipated his superior’s next question, ‘because after a very long or deep dive the diver would use up all the remaining air in his aqualung long before he could safely surface.’
Elias gestured to the book he’d opened on the desk in front of him.
‘These tables show the recommended decompression depths and times for particular diving depths and durations, sir. Unfortunately, as I said on the phone, the equations are highly variable, and to complicate things there are a whole bunch of different tables to consider. The US Navy’s tables, as a matter of interest, acquired themselves some notoriety for getting divers out of the water quickest but also into the decompression chamber fastest.’
Nicholson looked at him blankly, and Elias explained.
‘It’s a kind of joke, sir. If a diver surfaces too quickly, which anybody using the US Navy tables would almost certainly do, getting them straight into a decompression chamber is the only way to stop them suffering from the bends. The chamber is basically a pressurized cylinder carried on the deck of the bigger diving tenders, which allows divers to get re-pressurized in controlled conditions. No aqualungs involved, so no hanging around twenty feet below the surface for half an hour.
‘To give you an example, sir, the US Navy tables list a total decompression time of only twenty-one minutes for a dive of half an hour down to a depth of one hundred and thirty feet. The Buhlmann tables give twenty-eight minutes as a minimum, and the DECOM tables, which are derived from the Buhlmann figures, recommend thirty- eight minutes, which is nearly twice as long as the US Navy suggest. Me, I’d go for the DECOM figures every time.’
‘So,’ the Director asked, ‘taking a hypothetical case, what would be your best guess at a dive depth that required three aqualung cylinders for the decompression pauses?’
‘It’s impossible to be sure,’ Elias replied, ‘but if I had to guess I’d say you were looking at either a very deep dive – down to maybe one hundred and fifty feet – or an unusually long dive at some intermediate depth.’
When the door had closed behind Elias, Nicholson opened the wide central drawer in his desk, pulled out the photographs and spread them out in front of him again. He was once more examining the fifth picture through his
