‘But I don’t know anything about explosives,’ Elias’s voice rose.

‘You don’t need to.’ Krywald glanced round the bar to make sure nobody could overhear them. ‘When he went out earlier this morning Stein collected enough plastic explosive to sink half of Crete. All you have to do is put some charges in the wreck, snap the end off each of the pencil detonators and then get yourself back up to the boat. The fuses are pre-set for three hours so as to give us plenty of time to get clear. We could well be on our way back to Rethymno before the big bang occurs.’

‘I don’t like the sound of it,’ Elias said. ‘Suppose something goes wrong. What if the fuses are faulty and the explosive goes off while I’m still in the water?’

‘Roger told you our talents lie in different directions,’ Stein replied. ‘I’m an explosives expert, so I know detonators and I know plastic. I’ve already checked the stuff we’ve been given and it’s good. The fuses are the latest models – pencil fuses safe down to five hundred feet – and I guarantee this plastic won’t blow for three hours.’

Elias nodded, looking far from convinced. He stood up. ‘Look, I’m going to take a walk. After being stuck in that damn car all day, I need to clear my head. We’re going to eat somewhere here?’

Krywald glanced across the road, where three restaurants were clearly preparing to open. ‘One of those places should be OK, so get back here by eight. We don’t want to eat late, and if you’re diving tomorrow you should get a good sleep tonight.’

Elias nodded agreement and walked out of the bar.

‘You have any problems at Souda Bay?’ Krywald asked, as he and Stein stepped into the lift.

Stein shook his head. ‘No. The plastic’s OK and they really are three-hour detonators.’

‘Bit of a surprise, that,’ Krywald murmured. ‘I wouldn’t have put it past McCready to have doctored them to take out the three of us while we’re bobbing around in the goddamn ocean. You get the weapons as well?’

‘Sure did. Three SIG P226s with silencers and two extra magazines each.’

‘Nice,’ Krywald said.

Inside his room, Stein handed one of the weapons over. Krywald worked the action a couple of times then slammed a fully loaded magazine into the butt. ‘No serial number,’ he observed.

‘No. They’ve been sanitized. I don’t know how he did it,’ Stein said, ‘but our Captain Levy told me that a trace on these weapons will lead straight to the Fibbies.’

‘No kidding? That’ll really piss off the Bureau if they ever find out.’

Stein loaded a second pistol and tucked it into the rear waistband of his trousers. ‘You want me to give the other one to Elias?’ he asked.

‘Are you out of your fucking mind? He’s just an analyst. If he wasn’t a qualified diver he’d still be pushing paper round his desk at Langley. The last thing we do is give him a gun to play with. Christ knows what he’d do with it.’

Kandira, south-west Crete

‘Mr Hardin?’ Inspector Lavat called up the stairs.

‘I’m here,’ Hardin replied, from above.

‘I’ve got the floodlights you asked for. Do you want them now?’

‘Yes, please, Inspector. It’s starting to get a bit dark.’

Outside, the sun was sinking towards the western horizon and although it was still demonstrably daylight, the shadows were lengthening as evening approached.

Lavat climbed up the stairs with a mains-powered portable floodlight in each hand. He stopped on the landing, outside the door of the spare bedroom, put the lights down on the floor and squinted into the room. The first thing he saw was the eviscerated corpse of Spiros Aristides, chest cavity gaping open and the top of the skull grotesquely absent.

Like most other policemen, Inspector Lavat had been required to attend occasional autopsies in the course of his duties, but he had never been able to view a dead body with anything like the clinical detachment exhibited by doctors and pathologists. And the sight of the mutilated corpse in the incongruous surroundings of a spare bedroom in a Cretan village house was doubly disturbing. The two figures crowded into the small room behind the corpse didn’t help either, the orange Tyvek suits and Racal helmets reminding Lavat uncomfortably of aliens from a low-budget science-fiction film.

Hardin looked up at him as Evans stepped out onto the landing and picked up the floodlights. He positioned them in opposite corners of the bedroom, pointing the bulbs upwards to give reflected rather than direct light.

Hardin followed Lavat’s gaze to Aristides’s body. ‘We’ll be tidying the cadaver up later, once we’ve finished the organ examination.’ He then noticed that Lavat looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Are you feeling all right, Inspector?’ he asked.

Lavat nodded, though feeling the bile rise, his face noticeably paler beneath the suntan. ‘It’s just the—’ He got no further, but turned away and headed swiftly down the stairs and out of the small house.

‘Is he OK?’ Evans asked.

‘I think so,’ Hardin replied. ‘We get so used to this kind of thing’ – he gestured to the corpse – ‘that we tend to forget other people rarely get to see it.’

Evans nodded. ‘Right, what’s next?’

‘We’ll start with the heart, and we’ll do the lungs last,’ Hardin said. ‘I think they’re going to be the most interesting.’

Mark Evans had earlier moved the steel dishes containing Aristides’s organs over to one side of the room, and had placed a wooden board on the top of the chest of drawers, which they could use for the dissections. Wood is not the ideal surface for such an operation because it retains traces of whatever was placed on it previously, and obviously if the organs are potentially ‘hot’ the wood itself becomes a source of infection. But they hadn’t been able to find anything else more suitable, so both the board and the trestle table on which the Greek’s body lay would be burnt as soon as Hardin had completed his autopsy.

Evans weighed the steel bowl containing the heart on the portable scales he had fetched out of one of the CDC boxes. He then placed the heart itself in the centre of the wooden board, before weighing the bowl and subtracting that figure from the total to calculate the weight of the heart itself. Hardin studied the organ carefully for several minutes, prodding it around so that he could visually check its entire surface.

‘The heart appears externally normal, and the weight falls within the usual range,’ Hardin announced for the tape recorder. ‘I’ll now begin the dissection itself.’

Evans watched as Hardin took a fresh scalpel and expertly slit open the organ. He looked closely into each chamber of the heart, then turned his attention to the coronary arteries, cutting them open so that he could examine their inner surfaces.

‘The interior appears normal. There’s some furring of the coronary arteries, but on the whole the heart looks healthy, particularly for a man of this age. For each organ we’ll be carrying out histological and toxicological examinations, so I’ll take samples now.’ Hardin leant forward and cut four roughly one-inch squares from the heart muscle.

Evans passed over two stock jars – small specimen containers pre-filled with formalin, a clear liquid that’s a highly poisonous preservative – and dropped one segment into each. He labelled both with the name of the deceased, the date and the source of the tissue, then added a red stick-on note reading simply ‘HISTOLOGY’. These samples would be examined under a microscope to try to detect any changes to the individual cells that might have been caused by a fatal disease. Privately, Hardin thought histology would reveal nothing of significance, but it was normal procedure.

The other two segments he put into what are known as ‘tox jars’ – plastic containers that don’t contain any preservative because that would destroy any toxins present in the specimen. On each of these he affixed a label bearing the word ‘TOXICOLOGY’. He would repeat this entire process as each separate organ was dissected.

‘Right,’ Hardin said, ‘I don’t think there’s anything else we can learn from studying the heart, so we’ll move on to the liver.’

Evans removed the dissected heart from the wooden board and replaced it in its steel bowl. After they’d finished the autopsy, all the organs would be sealed into plastic bags and placed in one of the two chest freezers provided for them by the Cretan Ministry of Health. Final disposal would almost certainly be by burning, probably in a sealed incinerator at a local hospital.

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