aircraft.
‘That’s all a bit circumstantial,’ Simpson said. ‘There could be other explanations.’
‘Like what?’ Richter demanded. ‘The corpses are real enough, and they certainly didn’t die from old age or heart attacks. Something got inside them that left them spewing blood like a lawn sprinkler. And there’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘Two men entered both properties in the village and almost certainly took away the container that held the virus, and they killed a policeman and two villagers to do it. They’re probably working for the people who created whatever was in that container, and came to Crete to retrieve their property. What worries me is what they’re going to do now they’ve got the stuff back.’
‘Did anybody get a description?’
‘Yes,’ Richter replied, ‘but it won’t help much. Caucasian, average height, average build. You won’t get much of a photofit from that.’
‘So what leads have you got?’
‘Right now,’ Richter said, ‘only one. Most of the water round here is too deep for free diving, which limits the number of places where the Greek could have discovered the aircraft. I’m plotting possible locations on a navigation chart and I’ve requested a Merlin to get airborne first thing tomorrow morning to try to locate the wreck using its dunking sonar. Once we’ve found it, I’m going down to take a look.’
Chapter 16
Friday
Monedes still wasn’t completely sober when Stein and Elias pushed open the door of his shop just after nine that morning, but at least he was upright. Stein guessed that the previous night he’d probably slept right where he’d fallen over, behind the counter. That was fortunate because it meant that he hadn’t locked the door and, according to a hand-written notice taped to the shop window, it wasn’t supposed to open until ten.
Monedes regarded the two men through red-rimmed and bleary eyes that held no sign of recognition whatsoever. Stein handled the negotiations with a certain inevitable feeling of deja vu.
‘You have a booking in the name of Wilson, for a day boat and some diving equipment? It was made from America this week?’
Monedes nodded and swallowed, his face grey, then reached under the counter. For a second Stein wondered if he was reaching for the bottle of
‘Wilson?’ he muttered, as he searched the pages. ‘Yes, here it is,’ he said at last. ‘A day boat, one aqualung set with four spare bottles. Plus a wetsuit, mask, fins, weight belt and everything else. The suit is for you yourself?’ he asked, looking at Stein.
‘No, for my friend.’ Stein gestured towards Elias.
Monedes looked Elias up and down. ‘No problem,’ he said, and led the way towards a door at the rear. The two Americans followed and found themselves entering a room lined with shelves groaning under the weight of various pieces of diving equipment.
Monedes said something to Stein, who turned to his colleague and pointed at the shelves. ‘He says you can help yourself,’ Stein explained, guessing that either bending down or reaching up might be beyond Monedes’s capabilities in his present fragile state.
Elias was in his element here. He selected a black neoprene two-piece wetsuit complete with hood, and added separate bootees and gloves. The aqualungs were stored in racks at the back of the room, and Elias checked the demand valves on three sets before he declared himself satisfied with one of them. He picked out four full compressed air cylinders as spares, weighing them by hand, then added demand valves, air hoses and mouthpieces to them. He chose a weight belt and a couple of dozen weights, a stainless-steel diving knife and calf sheath, a depth gauge, a compass, a one-hundred-metre coil of thin cord and another one-hundred-metre coil of orange polypropylene rope and a lead weight to anchor it. Then he selected fins, a mask, snorkel, a life-saving inflatable jacket, two powerful underwater torches, and a large string bag – as was used for collecting specimens – to complete the outfit.
Monedes watched Elias’s progress around the storeroom with a certain weary detachment. He turned to Stein as Elias added the last items to his growing pile. ‘Your friend knows what he’s doing, and he’s going deep, I think.’
Stein nodded without comment, then bent down to help Elias carry the equipment out to the car, parked right outside the door. While Elias was stowing the last item in the boot, Stein headed back into the shop. ‘The hire fee should already have been paid?’ he inquired.
Monedes nodded. ‘Yes, by American Express, but I will need your passport as security.’
Stein didn’t demur – he was carrying three completely genuine American passports in different names – and he immediately handed over the one bearing the name ‘Wilson’.
‘Can I see your diving permit?’ Monedes asked, as something of an afterthought.
Stein stared at him and shook his head. ‘What diving permit?’
‘You should have got a diving permit from the Department of Antiquities if your friend is going to dive here in Cretan waters. I am supposed to see it before I supply you with any equipment.’
Stein’s face cleared. ‘No, he’s not,’ he said, thinking on his feet. ‘We’re diving well away from Crete – that’s why we need the boat.’
Monedes still looked doubtful, so Stein passed over a handful of notes. ‘If anybody should ask you,’ he said, ‘perhaps you can confirm that you
Monedes looked at the notes in his hand and nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said, pushing them into his hip pocket, ‘perhaps I can.’
Stein grinned. ‘And the boat?’ he asked.
Three minutes later their car was pulling up alongside a nearby jetty. Twenty minutes after that Krywald and Stein were sitting side by side on a bench in a grubby but sea-worthy blue-painted open wooden boat about fifteen feet in length. They watched as Elias started the inboard diesel engine and slowly began to manoeuvre the craft through the harbour and out to the open sea.
The previous evening Richter had spent nearly two hours poring over a selection of navigation charts of the waters surrounding Crete. But he’d spent a few minutes preparing his criteria before even looking at them. He had decided to eliminate all areas within half a mile of the coast of Crete or any other inhabited islands, on the grounds that an aircraft wreck so close to the shore would have been discovered long before. He had also excluded all stretches of water greater than one hundred and fifty feet – fifty metres – in depth because of the difficulties of anyone diving that deep without specialized equipment.
What surprised him was how small – not large – an area that left to be searched. At his self-imposed half- mile cut-off point, there were virtually no locations around the Cretan coast where the water was less than one hundred metres deep. About the only possible areas on the coast itself were the two north-facing bays at the western end of the island – Kolpos Chanion and Kolpos Kissamou – but Richter was fairly certain Aristides hadn’t been diving in either of them.
Quite apart from anything else, both inlets contained popular holiday resorts, so anybody diving there would easily become the focus of numerous pairs of eyes and binoculars, not to mention cameras, and a man who earned his living by illegally recovering ancient artefacts from the seabed would hardly want such a large and attentive audience to witness his activities. No, on balance, Richter decided that Aristides would have been diving somewhere else.
But there were numerous small islands around Crete itself, most of them uninhabited because they were simply too small to be developed, so the shallower water close to their shores was a definite possibility. Richter
