Sitting on the steps of a white-washed cottage they found an elderly Cretan man, wrinkled and burnt umber by the sun, smoking a foul-smelling cigarette, obviously hand-rolled. Stein stopped to explain that he and Krywald were part of the American specialist team, then asked directions to Aristides’s house.
The old man wrinkled his eyes against the glare of the sun, and looked up at the two Americans. He took his time removing the cigarette from his mouth, then replied briefly in his native language.
‘What did he say?’ Krywald demanded.
‘He asked “Which one?”’ Stein replied.
‘What the hell does that mean? The one that’s dead, of course.’
Stein switched back to Greek and addressed the old man again. ‘We’re looking for the house belonging to the Aristides who died because of this illness we’re investigating.’
The old Cretan grinned up at him and took another drag on his cigarette. ‘Which one?’ he asked again.
‘Either this guy’s an idiot or Spiros isn’t the only dead Aristides in this village,’ Stein muttered to Krywald, then turned back to the Cretan. ‘Do you mean there’s more than one man here dead with this disease?’ he asked.
The old man nodded. ‘Spiros Aristides and Nico Aristides – and both of them are dead.’
‘OK,’ Stein took a small notebook from his pocket. ‘Can you tell me where they lived?’
Chapter 11
Wednesday
His check of the FAA Registry hadn’t helped Westwood much, or even at all, so he turned his attention to the CIA’s own database, known to Agency insiders as ‘Walnut’, which had been the source of his interest in the first place. Walnut is actually several databases, some containing purely unclassified background information, being data in the public domain, and others allotted varying security classifications, some with heavily restricted access.
Using the custom-designed search engine, which accepted almost every kind of permutation within its parameters including Boolean logic, he keyed in a simple enough search – ‘Mediterranean+aircraft+crash’ – specified the entire database rather than just a particular section of it, sat back and waited.
A little over three seconds later the first page of results appeared on the screen in front of him. There had been a surprising number of aircraft crashes in the Mediterranean, it seemed. Maybe this indicated that there was a ‘Maltese Triangle’, Westwood thought with a wry smile, mirroring the so-called Bermuda Triangle on the other side of the world, about which so much complete and unsubstantiated rubbish has been written over the years. Or maybe it was just that the airspace over the Mediterranean is particularly busy, and has been ever since man first took to the air.
Westwood realized he was going to have to tighten his search if he didn’t want to spend all day reading through aircraft crash reports that were of no interest to him. He read through the Greek newspaper article again and then entered a new search command, looking within the results the system had already generated, and specifying only aircraft that had crashed since 1960.
That still threw up a couple of dozen reports, so he refined the search again, using the registration letters reported for the crashed aircraft: ‘N’, ‘1’, ‘7’ and ‘6’. The screen cleared and he was now looking at three reports only, all classified ‘Restricted’ – the lowest possible rating above ‘Unclassified’ – and all referring to the same incident: a Learjet that vanished somewhere over the Eastern Mediterranean in 1972. The first file was the reported loss, the second a compilation detailing the various stages of the surface search that had been mounted, and the third noted when the search had been abandoned without result. Westwood printed them all as hard copy and began to read through them.
It wasn’t a great leap of logic to connect this report with the wreckage of the aircraft that the Greek diver had reportedly found at the bottom of the Mediterranean, particularly as the registration number of the missing aircraft was N17677, but as he studied the printed pages in front of him Westwood realized that something didn’t gel.
The location of the missing Learjet was necessarily imprecise, as the aircraft had been outside radar cover when it went down, and the search teams had simply extrapolated the aircraft’s predicted route from its filed flight plan, and then concentrated on the area the aircraft should have reached when the en route controlling authority lost radio contact with it. But the location where the Greek diver had apparently found the wreckage was nowhere near either this predicted course or the original search area. It was a long way to the north, which suggested that the pilot of the Learjet had for some reason waited until his aircraft was outside radar cover, then turned north towards Crete, and that didn’t make any sense unless the aircraft was lost – which was most unlikely – or on some kind of covert mission.
Westwood turned back to his computer terminal and on a hunch typed in a new search solely for ‘N17677’.
The result surprised him. Realistically, he had been expecting to see only the same three reports that the system had already generated, but the more specific search had now added a fourth file. Its title was ‘N17677’.
That didn’t make sense. The search parameters he had entered previously – the partial registration number ‘N176’ – should also have located this file. Westwood bent over the keyboard again and entered ‘N*7677’, then pressed the ‘Enter’ key. The ‘*’ symbol is a wildcard that can mean any letter, number or symbol, so that search string should bring up the ‘N17677’ file reference – but it didn’t. Once again, Westwood was gazing at only the original three references.
He tried again, this time inputting ‘Learjet N17677’, but with the same result: only the same three Restricted reports about the missing aircraft. That had to mean that the ‘N17677’ file was protected. It could only be located by typing in the exact filename – a primitive, but actually quite effective, means of ensuring that the file could only be accessed by somebody who already knew about it.
Again, Westwood typed in ‘N17677’ and glanced at the screen. Next to the filename was its classification, ‘Ultra’ – one of the highest classification levels above ‘Top Secret’ – and the cryptic note ‘Cross-reference: CAIP’. Beside this was a warning: ‘Access prohibited. File sealed July 02, 1972’.
‘What the hell is CAIP?’ Westwood muttered to himself. He tapped the letters into the search field and pressed ‘Go’. Almost as he had expected, the result was virtually a mirror image of what he had already seen – ‘Cross-reference: N17677. Access prohibited. File sealed July 02, 1972’ – and again the security classification ‘Ultra’. The only additional information provided were the names of the six senior CIA officers who had been responsible for CAIP, whatever it was, but Westwood had never heard of any of them.
For a couple of minutes he sat silently, staring at his computer monitor. Then he opened Internet Explorer, moved the cursor into the ‘address’ field, and typed in ‘www2.faa.gov’, the address of the Federal Aviation Administration’s website. He selected ‘Information’ and ‘Pilots and Aircraft Owners’, then ‘Services’ and ‘Query the Aircraft database’. He clicked the link at the bottom of the ‘Aircraft Inquiry Site’ page, waited while the ‘FAA Registry Aircraft Registration Inquiry page’ loaded and chose ‘N-Number’. In the query field he typed ‘17677’ and pressed ‘Go’.
Then he leaned back from the screen and shook his head. In front of him were details of the aircraft bearing the North American registration N17677. It was a Learjet 23, exactly the same type of aircraft as the one that had been lost in the Mediterranean in 1972, but according to the FAA database, it hadn’t crashed or gone missing – it had been retired from service in 1979.
But an aircraft’s registration number, just like that for a car, is issued only once, so either the FAA had made a mistake and the details Westwood was looking at on the screen were incorrect, which seemed extremely unlikely, or the registration of the aircraft referred to in the CIA database was wrong.
Or, Westwood suddenly thought, maybe not. There was a possible way in which they could both be right.
