‘What the fuck do you mean what do I want? What do you think I want? I want to talk about that fiasco in Italy.’
‘Well, there’s a surprise.’
‘Don’t get clever with me, Richter. You tried to kill a helpless and unarmed man who had his hands tied behind his back while he was being held by two other men. To make things worse, you did it in front of witnesses. Then you beat up a police officer, stole a car and a helicopter, and finally you shot your way off the airfield at Brindisi, writing off one of their military trucks on the way. The Italians, in case you hadn’t noticed, are supposed to be our fucking allies.’
‘I was in a hurry,’ Richter said. ‘I’m sorry about the cop, but I didn’t have time to stand around and argue with him. I could have killed him instead of just giving him a headache. And I didn’t steal either the car or the helicopter: I just borrowed them for a while.’
‘Don’t quibble. Fortunately for you, the policeman will recover. The car and the chopper are incidental, the truck too, but what you did to Lomas isn’t. I’ve been fending off some heavyweight diplomatic pressure to have you arrested the moment your ship reaches port, and then extradited to Italy to face charges. The Italians are extremely annoyed about this, Richter, and so am I.’
‘Get used to it, Simpson. What’s done is done, and if I was in the same position tomorrow I’d do exactly the same again. Lomas was an animal, a vicious, rabid beast and I think of myself as the pest-control man. He deserved to die.’
‘Wrong tense, Richter,’ Simpson said, ‘and watch your tongue. I’ve stopped their extradition attempts so far, but I can always change my mind.’
‘What do you mean, “wrong tense”?’
‘Just what I said. Your little attempt to bisect Lomas didn’t succeed. A doctor turned up a few minutes after you’d headed for the hills and he managed to stop most of the bleeding. The air ambulance arrived straight afterwards, so Lomas made it to the hospital at Bari, went into surgery immediately and was still alive this morning. It’s going to be a long time before he’s walking around again, but it looks like he’ll pull through.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Richter said.
‘That, in fact,’ Simpson added, ‘is probably why the Italians haven’t been trying as hard as they might to get hold of you. They’ll have plenty of time to debrief Lomas once he’s out of danger, and he’ll be in no fit state to resist. What they probably won’t do, though, is share the take with us, which has certainly pissed me off and is hardly going to make you flavour of the month with Vauxhall Cross and Five when they find out about it.
‘It’s also worth your while remembering that Lomas has shown himself to be extremely vindictive. If he does recover from what you did to him, he’s going to want blood in return. You’ll need to watch your back.’
‘I’ve got used to that ever since I started working for you,’ Richter said. ‘I hope Lomas does come after me – I’d like to finish the job. So what’s next?’
‘In view of the hostile vibes you’re likely to receive if you come back to London right now, you might just as well stay on that ship for at least another week. Let things cool down a bit.’
‘Fine with me. I can’t fly back from Athens for the next few days, because we’re standing off Crete.’
‘Why?’
‘Some kind of medical emergency. The ship’s been positioned here to ferry goods and bodies around the place.’
‘OK, stay on board for the next seven days. If their operation runs on for more than a week, get yourself ashore and buy a ticket home from Crete. Economy class, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘Oh, and Richter.’
‘Yes?’
‘I wouldn’t take a holiday in Rimini for a few years if I were you.’
Chapter 10
Wednesday
Sometimes it’s not the direction of travel, or even the duration of the journey, that causes the greatest discomfort and jet-lag. Sometimes it’s just the circumstances, nothing more.
When he had driven his Lincoln to Langley the previous morning, all David Elias had been expecting was another routine day of analysing raw intelligence data from the Pacific Rim area and writing reports and summaries based upon that intelligence.
What had actually happened was that he had been summoned to his first-ever operational briefing, where he had been given what were clearly highly edited instructions about his intended role, and received background information that frankly made little sense. Then he’d been appointed the third member of a covert team comprising two men he’d never met before, and who clearly weren’t particularly enamoured with the idea of a mere analyst hitching a ride with them, and finally hustled into a car and rushed to Baltimore to catch a Jumbo to London Heathrow.
There had been a twenty-minute delay in landing the 747 and, despite their best efforts to get to the departure gate in time, they’d missed their connection to Crete. Nearly three hours later, most of it spent sitting around in startlingly uncomfortable seats in the departure lounge, they’d boarded the next available flight to Irakleio. The taxi ride to Rethymno had seemed interminable and, when they finally arrived, the hotel was hardly five star.
So it was, perhaps, not altogether surprising that Elias simply walked into his room, dropped his bag on the floor, took off his jacket, tie and shoes, and then crashed out on the bed. Within three minutes he was sound asleep.
Krywald and Stein were made of sterner stuff, or perhaps they were just more used to such things. They had been booked into adjoining rooms – Elias was occupying a single down the corridor – and as soon as they’d stowed their gear and cleaned up, Krywald switched on his laptop computer, plugged in the connecting lead to his mobile phone, and dialled an unlisted service provider in the United States.
There were three email messages waiting, all signed McCready but which had actually been sent by Nicholson. All three messages were scrambled using the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption program, but it took Krywald only minutes to decrypt them. The first simply confirmed the details of the overt support Nicholson had arranged – where they should go to collect the hire car, the boat and Elias’s diving equipment, and so on – while the second message provided similar information for obtaining the covert support, like the explosives, detonators and personal weapons. The third email was perhaps the most interesting – or rather the most alarming.
Nicholson had sent it soon after he had read the translated newspaper report on the CIA database of the apparent filovirus death at Kandira. The message was brief and to the point: Krywald and his team were to amend their pre-briefed roles. They were to pose now as either American journalists or CDC personnel investigating the medical emergency on Crete. They were to enter Kandira as soon as possible, gain access to Spiros Aristides’s house and search it thoroughly. Nicholson had a plan for them that, Krywald thought to himself as he scanned the email for the third time, might even work.
The case containing the flasks, Nicholson suggested, was probably still in the dead man’s home, overlooked or ignored by the local police. Destruction of the wrecked aircraft was now to become the secondary priority.
‘Just as well,’ Stein remarked, somewhat sourly, ‘as our highly trained diver is sound asleep down the hall and in no fit state to get into a bathtub without help, never mind dive to the bottom of the ocean.’
‘Right,’ Krywald agreed. ‘OK, let’s do things in order. You go collect the car. I’ll pick up some maps of this goddamned island, then we’ll grab a drink and work out how the hell we’re going to get inside this Kandira place.’
Charles Jerome ‘CJ’ Hawkins had retired from the Central Intelligence Agency over twelve years earlier, but unlike most of his contemporaries – who had moved their entire families south to Florida, ‘God’s waiting room’, as
