hot agent: police work had no place in the purely medical and epidemiological investigation of the two deaths. Though he realized that the investigations were inextricably linked, he was far more concerned with the murder of his own officer, and he frankly wasn’t sure how best to identify the killers.
As a routine precaution, he had instituted a watch at all ferry ports and all three airports on the island, but the description his cordon police officer had provided was so vague as to be almost useless. The man was over at headquarters in Irakleio, trying to help build up a photofit picture of at least one of the two suspects, but Lavat wasn’t optimistic about the likely result of that.
The roadblocks were still in place, although village residents were now being allowed to move into and out of Kandira. All outsiders were still being refused entry. Lavat had just completed a tour of the perimeter of the village, checking that his officers were still manning the cordon and that they had an adequate supply of drinking water at their posts. Then, because it was, even by Cretan standards, a very hot day, he’d himself taken shelter from the sun in one of the tents erected near the main road entering the village.
He was sitting with his second glass of water when Theodore Gravas appeared at the entrance flap. Twenty minutes earlier they’d both stood at the barrier to watch as the light grey Merlin sent from the
‘Found anything yet?’ Lavat asked, as Gravas sat down on the other side of the table.
The doctor shook his head. ‘I’ve just been talking to Hardin. They’ve found nothing in Spiros’s house so far. They’ve taken swabs from the floors, doors, walls and so on, but the Americans seem to believe the causative agent either wasn’t there to be found or it’s been dissipated since and is now so scattered that they won’t be able to find it.’
‘So what’s their next move?’
‘Hardin’s people have just started on Nico’s apartment. Since that scene hasn’t had the same amount of traffic as Spiros’s house they may get lucky there. Otherwise, our best bet to find the agent is in the blood and tissues of its victims, so we’ll have to wait and see what Irakleio can uncover.’
The second location O’Reilly directed the pilot to lay almost directly north of Andikithira and around two miles off-shore. Here again, he lowered the sonar body into the water and began an active sweep of the seabed below them and further around the eastern and northern coasts of the small island.
Metallic objects, especially large metallic objects, are not uncommonly found on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. This area was a birthplace of civilization and was always the principal route for commerce between Europe and North Africa, besides being the location of several naval and air battles in the wars of the twentieth and previous centuries. And shallow waters – in oceanographic terms the Mediterranean is considered a shallow sea – are often the scene of the most violent storms, which have claimed numerous victims over the years.
While it wouldn’t be true to suggest that the seabed is littered with wrecks, there were certainly more than either Richter or O’Reilly had expected. Their first two sonar scans had between them located no fewer than forty-eight separate large metallic objects on the sea floor extending to the east and north of Andikithira, and when O’Reilly carried out his third scan, to the northwest of the island, he identified a further nineteen.
‘Jesus,’ Richter said, doing the arithmetic in his head, ‘that’s sixty-seven contacts in all. You said your speciality is finding needles in haystacks, Mike, but if we have to dive on all of these we’re going to be here for weeks.’
O’Reilly shook his head. ‘You won’t have to. We can carry out a lot of filtering first to discriminate between old shipwrecks and the remains of a fairly modern aircraft. Look, I may be teaching you to suck eggs, but ships are big and aircraft are comparatively small. So, the first thing is to eliminate all returns over a certain size, simply because unless you’re looking for a Jumbo Jet, the wreckage would be just too big.
‘Second, when a ship sinks it tends to stay all together in one piece, being a very heavy and robust piece of engineering, specially designed to spend its life on the water. Aircraft need to fly, obviously, so their construction is much lighter and hence weaker, and they tend to break up on impact with the water and get scattered over quite a wide area.
‘So what I’m looking for is not a single piece of wreckage, but a number of small pieces that are lying in more or less the same area. Now,’ O’Reilly gestured at the display in front of him, ‘applying those fairly simple parameters to these sixty-seven contacts, we can immediately eliminate fifty-two of them, which gets us down to fifteen altogether. Eight of these contacts are too deep for free diving, and three of them are less than half a mile out from the shore, so in fact we’re left with only four possibles to check out.’
David Elias descended slowly towards the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, his left hand lightly encircling the anchor rope as he followed it down, his right hand clutching one of the two torches he’d chosen at the dive shop. The second torch was safely in the string specimen bag attached to his weight belt, along with the coil of thin polypropylene cord, the four M118 demolition charges and half a dozen pencil detonators, more than he needed but just in case he dropped some.
The water around him grew increasingly cold and dark as he swam deeper, but visibility was still good enough for him not to need to use his torch. Elias had no idea how long it would take him to find the wreck, and he would certainly need one torch, possibly both, when he did, so he was conserving his resources.
The bottom appeared suddenly, looming under him, and Elias checked his depth gauge as he slowed to a stop just above the seabed. Eighty-three feet. Fairly deep, but not too deep. He pulled out the polypropylene cord, unravelled one end of it and secured it to the anchor rope just above its concrete weight. He needed to be able to find his way back easily to the rope, and then up through the water lying directly beneath the boat, because that was where his spare aqualungs were positioned, and if he couldn’t locate them he would either die or be crippled when he surfaced.
Holding the still coiled cord in his left hand, Elias peered around him. He had no idea in which direction the wreck might lie, because the co-ordinates McCready had supplied were obviously only those of the Greek diver’s boat up on the surface. The wreck itself had to be somewhere close by, but it could lie in any direction around him. He first checked his compass, then kicked off the seabed and began swimming with lazy, energy-conserving strokes to the north, paying out the cord as he moved away from the concrete anchor.
‘That’s certainly not it,’ O’Reilly muttered, as he studied the image of the second of four possible wrecks. ‘It’s far too small, so I think it’s probably some kind of metallic rubbish that’s been dumped from a passing ship. Maybe empty barrels or cylinders, or sections of pipe, something like that.’
Richter stared at the display immediately in front of O’Reilly, and then looked at the Senior Observer with an expression somewhat akin to amazement. ‘You can deduce all this from that garbage?’
O’Reilly turned his head slowly to face him. ‘I would hardly expect a mere stovie, especially a part-time stovie, to understand, Spook, but this garbage, as you call it, is the product of arguably the world’s most advanced acoustic signal processing equipment, and I, as a leading exponent of such technology, can certainly deduce that what I’m looking at here are cylindrical objects. Look,’ he pointed out an image on the screen, ‘you see that? Quite clearly a regularly shaped object, round in cross-section and about one and a half metres long.’
Richter looked carefully, and frankly saw nothing like that, but refrained from saying so. ‘It’s not an aircraft then?’ he said, feeling somewhat stupid.
‘Of course it’s not a bloody aircraft. OK, now we’ll try the third site.’ O’Reilly reeled in the dunking sonar body, then spoke into the intercom. ‘Pilot, aircraft captain. Jump two three zero, distance one thousand five hundred metres.’
Elias had found nothing by the time he reached the end of the one-hundred-metre length of the
