soon as they’d completed their time with the Company – he had elected to remain in the area where he had lived and worked for so much of his life.
His home was an elegant four-bedroom property on the edge of the small town of Popes Creek, overlooking the Potomac a few miles south of Washington, DC. He and his wife Mary lived there quietly, their three children long grown up and with families of their own, two living in Idaho and one up in Michigan.
For most of his career with the Company, Hawkins had worked in the Operations Directorate, much of it in the Covert Action Staff, responsible for disinformation and propaganda. He had been involved in hundreds of operations during his employment, some successful, many not, but the only one that he ever thought about these days still gave him sleepless nights. Not because of the operation itself – Hawkins had believed totally at the time in what they were doing – but in the possible consequence for both the Central Intelligence Agency, and even America itself, if details of it ever leaked out.
And early this morning, that nightmare from the past had suddenly loomed in front of him. It began, innocuously enough, with a phone call. The voice at the other end was familiar, although it was five years since they had last spoken together.
‘We need to meet,’ the man said. ‘It’s been found.’
Hawkins was silent for a few moments, and when he spoke there was a slight tremor in his speech. ‘When?’
‘A few days ago.’
‘Have you told the others?’
‘I’ve told Richards. Butcher is in a coma in a hospital in Baltimore, and the prognosis isn’t good.’
‘The meeting – when and where?’ Hawkins asked.
‘Tonight. We have to move quickly. Take a drive out to Lower Cedar Point, just west of Morgantown. Arrive at eight fifteen and park close to the water. I’ll find you.’
John Westwood had been head of the Foreign Intelligence (Espionage) Staff for a little over three years, after a career spent entirely in the CIA’s Operations Directorate, most of it located outside the United States. He hadn’t been particularly impressed with the idea of driving a desk after so many years in the field, but he had recognized the inevitability of the promotion and, being head of department, he was still deeply involved in the conduct of operations abroad.
One of the things that he had always done, as a matter of routine ever since his appointment, was to scan the main database for all new entries given an importance classification of ‘3’ or higher, and especially those from geographical regions ‘D’, ‘E’ and ‘G’ – respectively the Confederation of Independent States, Eastern Europe and the Middle East – those being the areas in which most CIA espionage operations were kept running for most of the time. But he also scanned the other regions as well, and the ‘F2’ code with an attached headline ‘
The Athens newspaper had picked up the story from the first report filed by the journalist based on Crete, and comprehensive information on the incident was somewhat lacking. However, the two locals sitting in Jakob’s bar that night had overheard just enough of what Spiros had said to make the story compelling. And because what he said was so intriguing, they had remembered enough to re-tell it later to a newspaper reporter – suitably embellished, no doubt.
But, even without embellishment, there was actually quite a lot of hard data. The crashed aircraft was definitely small, there had been bodies inside, its registration began with the letter ‘N’ and contained at least three numbers, and it was lying on the seabed somewhere near Crete.
Westwood read through the report three times, and each reading persuaded him that this was something worth looking into, not least because the ‘N’ in the wrecked aircraft’s number meant that it had been originally registered in the States, and the fact that the diver had found bodies suggested that there might somewhere be a still-open file on that missing aircraft – a file that could now perhaps be closed.
The first thing, he decided, was to try to identify the aircraft, which shouldn’t be that difficult if the Greek diver had noted down the right letter and numbers and, perhaps more importantly, had remembered them correctly when he wrote them on the piece of paper he’d handed to his nephew. And, of course, if the reporter who had talked to the two Cretans had transcribed them correctly when he wrote the story. Westwood mentally corrected his ‘shouldn’t be that difficult’ assumption to a definite maybe.
But he tried it anyway. Westwood used his desktop PC to log on to the Federal Aviation Administration database through the Internet and input ‘N176’ in the search field. That turned up a light aircraft, certainly not an executive jet, and it was still flying around – at least as far as the FAA knew.
Within three minutes Westwood knew he was wasting his time. The initial letter confirmed the aircraft’s country of registration, but the missing one or two digits – even assuming that the three the diver had reported were correct, and in the right order – expanded the number of possible aircraft to a huge extent, not least because one or both could be letters or numbers. He would have to try a different approach.
Stein was driving the rental car – a white four-door Ford Focus – that he had collected from the agency in Rethymno. Krywald was sitting beside him, studying a tourist map of the island. David Elias sat in the back seat, bleary-eyed and yawning, as the Ford bounced over the rough road – actually little more than a track through the olive groves – out of Sougia towards Kandira.
The car crested a slight rise and Kandira lay before them. Stein pulled the car off the road, and for a couple of minutes Krywald studied the scene before him through a small pair of binoculars. It looked much like any of the other small villages they’d already passed through on their seemingly interminable drive over the mountains from Maleme, where they’d left the main road. A cluster of white-painted houses perched almost at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. To one side a path snaked away towards the cliff itself, presumably leading down to a beach or a small harbour. On the slopes to the north of the village, their bases hidden by the stunted olive trees that covered the hillside, three circular white windmills sat, with their fabric-clad skeletal sails turning slowly in a gentle breeze.
‘OK,’ Krywald said, turning to Stein. ‘They’ve got a cordon in place around the village, but it’s real thin, just a local cop every fifty yards or so. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble getting in.’
Stein nodded and swivelled in his seat. ‘You ready, Elias?’
David Elias smothered another yawn and nodded.
‘Right,’ Krywald said, and gestured down the hill towards a point next to the cliffs and well away from the open space where three large tents had been erected within the cordon.
‘We’ll do it over there. There are two cops, one by the cliffs, the other about fifty yards inland. They can see each other, but I don’t think they can see any of the other guys forming the cordon, because there’s a stone outbuilding right next to them, blocking their view that way. Let’s get ready.’
Stein started the engine, turned the car around and drove it a short distance down the track away from Kandira. Once out of sight of the village, he stopped the vehicle and all three men climbed out.
Stein opened the boot and pulled out two pairs of white coveralls which he and Krywald pulled on over their other clothes. Each had the initials ‘CDC’ roughly stencilled on the left breast. There was one small case in the boot, black and square, the kind that might well be carried by a doctor or a forensic scientist. It was empty but big enough to accommodate the steel case whose dimensions had been supplied by McCready at their briefing in Virginia. Stein pulled out the case and handed it to Krywald.
‘You know what to do?’ he asked Elias.
Elias nodded. ‘I know what we discussed, but I’m not sure I can carry it off. I know just about enough Greek to order a cup of coffee.’
‘That’s exactly the point,’ Krywald said. ‘You’ll have to use a phrasebook and that’s going to spin everything out. That’ll give us time to get into the village. Look, David,’ he added, his tone friendly and persuasive, ‘I know you’re an analyst and this really isn’t your scene or anything that you’ve been trained for, but there’s just the three of us here, so you’re going to have to pull your weight.’
