examination.’
Hardin started working on the liver next, using his scalpel to separate it from its various blood vessels, and placed it in a steel dish. ‘More smells,’ he said, as he turned to the membranes supporting the stomach and large bowel. He removed the stomach first, then cut through the rest of the membrane supporting the large bowel, severing the end of the rectum as close as possible to the anus, and also cut away the urethra and bladder. All these pelvic organs Hardin removed together, then used his scalpel to separate them. The bladder and urethra he placed in one steel bowl, and the large bowel into another one.
‘I won’t bother about the testicles,’ Hardin said. ‘I still don’t know what killed him, but I’m quite certain it wasn’t some form of venereal disease.’
The final organs left in the abdomen were the kidneys, and Hardin swiftly removed them. ‘Right,’ he said to the tape recorder. ‘The abdomen is empty apart from the residual blood, with all organs removed. External examination suggests that the lungs, and possibly the liver and kidneys, contain fluid of some sort, probably blood, which again is consistent with death caused by some form of viral haemorrhagic fever. OK, Mark, just the brain to remove and then we can start looking at the organs themselves.’
In a mortuary suite, the head of a cadaver is placed on an H-shaped head block made of hard rubber which facilitates the opening of the cranium using a Stryker saw. Hardin had neither a head block nor a power saw, so he had to improvise.
He arranged three small sandbags – sand was plentiful enough around Kandira – in a U-shaped pattern to support Aristides’s head, then picked up a fresh scalpel to be sure of a sharp blade. He pushed the tip of the scalpel into the fairly thin skin above the right ear and kept on thrusting it in until it made contact with the bone of the skull. Then, pressing hard, Hardin ran the blade over the top of Aristides’s head until he reached the top of his left ear, so separating the scalp into two sections. He seized the front half of the scalp and pulled it forward over the dead Greek’s face, then pulled the rear half backwards, thus exposing the top of the skull.
A Stryker is a power saw fitted with a small and very sharp reciprocating blade. It screams when in use and fills the air with an unpleasant odour: an amalgam of burnt bone and blood. The mortuary attendant whose job it is to open the cranium will begin and end the cut at the forehead, often leaving a small notch to allow the calvarium or cranial cap to be accurately replaced after the autopsy has been completed. Hardin wasn’t even slightly bothered about whether or not the calvarium could be refitted neatly: all he was interested in doing was getting into the skull and removing the brain.
In the absence of a Stryker saw, Hardin had selected the next best thing – a short-bladed bone saw. He had to be careful using it, because all he wanted to achieve was to cut through the bone of the skull itself. He didn’t, if he could possibly avoid it, want to cut into the dura mater, the tough membrane that lies directly below the bone and encases the brain. With Evans holding the sides of the skull firmly, Hardin started at the forehead, cutting with swift, sure strokes once the blade had started to bite. Then he and Evans changed positions, Evans wielding the saw on the left-hand side of the skull while Hardin held it firmly. It took over twenty minutes to complete all the cuts necessary.
Normally the calvarium is freed from the skull by inserting a bone chisel into the incision made by the saw and twisting it, repeating the process all the way round the skull until the cap loosens and can be lifted off. Hardin preferred to use a broad-bladed screwdriver with a T-shaped handle, and had the calvarium freed in a couple of minutes.
He and Evans carefully examined the grey dura mater, and Hardin pressed it experimentally a few times, testing for any excessive pressure in the skull that might be caused by leaking blood vessels. Hardin had heard of autopsies on Ebola victims where so much blood had leaked into the brain that the dura mater had bulged outwards as the calvarium had been removed and in one case, possibly apocryphal, the pressure had allegedly been sufficient to rupture the dura itself, sending a lethal stream of Ebola-rich blood spraying across the floor of the pathology suite.
‘It looks and feels normal to me,’ Hardin finally announced, reaching for a pair of blunt-ended scissors to cut away the dura mater. He first used a pair of forceps to pinch a small section of the dura, then cut into it with the scissors. A few drops of blood leaked out, but that was all. Hardin nodded in satisfaction and cut away the rest of the dura mater, revealing the surface of the brain, the cerebral cortex.
‘The brain appears normal on first examination,’ Hardin said, again speaking to the tape recorder. ‘OK, Mark, this is a bit fiddly, and you’ll need to help me. Can you just lift the frontal poles for me so that I can cut through the olfactory nerves? Good: that’s it.’ Hardin eased his scalpel down the anterior of the brain. ‘Right, now I’ll sever the optic nerves and we’ll take a look at the pituitary stalk.
‘The pituitary reveals no apparent abnormalities,’ Hardin announced, a minute or two later. ‘Now I’ll detach the tentorium cerebelli and then we can remove the roof of the cerebellum. OK, that’s fine.’ Working more quickly now, as the daylight outside began to fade, Hardin cut the remaining nine pairs of cranial nerves, and waited while Evans collected a sample of cerebrospinal fluid in a pipette. Then Hardin cut through the lower medulla oblongata and the vertebral arteries, and gestured to Evans. Evans wrapped both hands around the brain and moved it gently from side to side. That freed it enough to allow him to ease it backwards out of the skull, exposing the spinal cord, which Hardin severed to free the brain completely. Evans removed it from the skull and placed it carefully in the last steel dish on the sideboard.
‘OK,’ Hardin said. ‘I think the answer lies in the blood and in the lungs. Let’s see what we can find here.’
It was still low season for tourism in Crete, which meant the first couple of hotels Krywald stopped the car outside were firmly closed. The next one he found was open, but full, but one around the corner, on the northern outskirts of the town, still had four rooms free. As Stein booked three of them, Krywald parked the car on the street outside, the hotel having no private car park. Then the three men carried their few bags inside and took the lift up to the second floor.
Stein and Krywald took for themselves the two rooms closest to the lift and staircase, though on opposite sides of the corridor, while Elias’s lay four doors further down the passage. Once they’d dumped their luggage, Krywald – still carrying the case containing the steel briefcase – summoned them to the nearly empty bar next to the reception desk to discuss their plan for the next day.
‘As long as that drunken bum Monedes is even halfway sober by then we should be OK,’ Krywald said. ‘All he has to do is give us the scuba gear, tell us where the boat is kept and give us the keys to get it started. After that he can drink himself to death for all I care.’
Stein nodded agreement, then turned to Elias. ‘You’re familiar with boats, I guess?’
‘If you’re a diver, it pretty much goes without saying,’ Elias confirmed. ‘You spend a lot of time sitting around in them.’
‘I appreciate that, but can you navigate and so on?’
Elias shook his head. ‘I don’t have any formal qualifications, no,’ he said, ‘but I reckon I can handle the sort of boat provided tomorrow without any problems. But I figured that one of you two would be qualified.’
Krywald gave a short laugh. ‘Nope,’ he said, ‘our talents lie in different directions. But all we have to do is get the boat out of the harbour and find our way out to the spot where this Greek diver found his wrecked aircraft. McCready supplied us with the exact co-ordinates, and we’ve got two GPS units right here. There we drop anchor, you get suited up and go over the side. You do your stuff on the bottom and we’re out of here.’
Elias put down his coffee cup and looked at Krywald inquiringly. ‘McCready was a bit evasive about that. When you say “do my stuff”, what exactly do you mean?’
Krywald glanced briefly at Stein before replying. ‘Apart from the contents of the steel case I’ve got right here, that wrecked aircraft is the last possible link to a covert Company operation run in the 1970s. You don’t need to know what it involved – in fact, I don’t know all the details myself – but if any information about it came to light today it would reflect badly, very badly, all round. McCready’s orders are most specific. The case goes back to Langley for disposal, and all traces of the aircraft must be obliterated. I’ll deal with the case: the aircraft is your job.’
For a long moment Elias just stared at him. ‘You mean I’ve got to blow it up?’ he finally demanded.
‘The boy’s quick,’ Krywald commented drily. ‘Spot on, Mr Elias. You just drop yourself down to the bottom of the sea, plant some plastic on board the wreck, light the blue touchpaper and get the hell out of there.’
