‘But no aircraft?’ Richter pressed.
‘No,’ Crane reached for his towel. ‘No aircraft.’
‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘let’s try contestant number four.’
‘Right,’ O’Reilly agreed. ‘Pilot, Sobs. Jump one nine five, range three thousand five hundred metres.’
Tyler Hardin was peering around the bedroom of Nico Aristides’s rented apartment. His team had carried out a thorough search of the place and had found exactly what he had anticipated – only the kind of things one would expect to find in a property inhabited by a young single man.
They’d opened the wardrobes and cupboards and stared at clothes and shoes. In the living room they’d found an expensive sound system and dozens of CDs, a television set, a DVD player with a collection of disks, some pornographic. In the kitchen it soon became clear that Nico was no cook: the fridge contained only beer, and there was nothing in the cupboards apart from biscuits and various tinned and packet meals. What they hadn’t found was anything that looked like the bottle or flask Hardin had deduced from the scanty evidence found.
Nico’s body still lay in the bedroom. Hardin had initially considered performing a second autopsy, but the external condition of the young man’s corpse was so similar to his uncle’s that he decided it was pointless, because they were unlikely to glean any additional information. Instead, he’d given orders that both bodies should be collected as soon as possible for transferral to the mortuary in Irakleio. He had also instructed that the corpses be held in the mortuary indefinitely in case further tests were required.
If there were any clues at all to the identity of the agent that had slaughtered the two Greeks, they were most likely to be found in the swabs and samples collected from Spiros’s house or in the tissue specimens removed from his body. All Hardin could do now was wait for the laboratory staff in Irakleio to complete their analyses.
In the meantime, with no indication whatsoever of any further cases of ‘Galloping Lassa’, there seemed no good reason for keeping Kandira sealed off. Hardin shook his head in frustration and headed down the outside staircase to tell Lavat that his men could start taking down their barricades.
‘You didn’t tell me that fucking aircraft was full of fucking bodies,’ Elias almost screamed.
‘Bodies?’ Krywald asked weakly. He was still suffering, though his stomach had settled somewhat once the boat had come to anchor. ‘What bodies?’
‘There are three dead bodies inside that fucking aircraft,’ Elias shouted. ‘It was a hell of a shock. You should have warned me.’
‘We didn’t know,’ Stein said firmly. ‘McCready didn’t tell us anything more about the aircraft than where to find it and what to do with it. I suppose we should have guessed there could be human remains inside.’
Elias angrily undid the buckles securing his aqualung and lowered it onto the wooden seat in front of him.
‘OK,’ Stein demanded. ‘You planted the demolition charges?’
Elias nodded. ‘Yes, no problem there. I did just as you said, and now all four are inside the fuselage.’ He didn’t add that he’d just tossed them inside instead of placing them carefully at intervals, as instructed.
Stein glanced over at Krywald, and received an almost imperceptible nod.
‘That’s very good, David,’ Stein said, ‘we couldn’t have managed this without you.’ He waited until Elias had turned away to begin unbuckling his weight belt, before he pulled out his SIG P226, racked back the slide to chamber a round, and in one fluid motion raised it to the back of Elias’s head and pulled the trigger. The silencer muffled the sound of the shot to a dull cough, but the American’s head almost exploded with the impact from a 9mm Parabellum round at such short range. His body slumped, lifeless, over the gunwale, half in and half out of the boat.
‘Thanks again,’ Stein muttered, pressing down on the de-cocking lever on the left side of the SIG’s butt to drop the hammer into the safety notch. Then he replaced the pistol in the waistband of his trousers, stepped forwards, lifted Elias’s legs into the air and watched as the body tumbled into the water and floated gently away from the boat. Elias’s weight belt was still half secured around his waist, and Stein watched as his body began to sink slowly. Quickly he tossed the spare aqualungs and all the other impedimenta that the diver had used over the side, then hauled up the anchor, moved back to the stern and started the engine.
‘I sure hope you know your way back,’ Krywald muttered sourly, ‘because I’m no sailor.’ He briefly glanced over to where Elias’s body had disappeared from view, a spreading cloud of blood already attracting fish.
‘Neither am I,’ Stein replied, ‘but it shouldn’t be difficult. Hell, we can almost see Chora Sfakia from here. All I have to do is point the boat in that direction and stop when we get to the other end. Christ, if a guy got lost here he could just hang around and follow the ferry back to Crete. Even you could manage that.’
Lieutenant Commander Mike O’Reilly leaned back from the display in front of him and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think that’s it either. These shapes are too regular and too similar in size. I think this is dumped cargo, or maybe pig-iron ballast, something like that.’
Richter had been leaning against one of the equipment racks to look over the Senior Observer’s shoulder. He stood up as O’Reilly glanced at him and nodded agreement.
‘You’re the expert,’ Richter said. ‘If you say it’s pig-iron, I’ll believe you. To be honest, I think the most likely site for our wreck is somewhere to the south of Crete – Andikithira’s a bit of a long flog for a man in an open boat starting out from Kandira. Anyway, that’s the last likely contact around here – let’s go and take a look at the Gavdos area.’
O’Reilly pulled a navigation chart from a cubbyhole and studied it for a few moments, measuring the angles and directions by eye. ‘Pilot, Sobs,’ he next instructed on the intercom, ‘climb out of the hover and steer track one eight five, height two thousand feet.’
‘How far is it?’ Richter asked.
‘By the shortest route it’s about seventy nautical miles,’ O’Reilly explained, ‘but that means climbing way up over the mountains, talking to Souda Bay and all the rest. So I’m taking us the pretty route instead. We’ll head south, clip the western end of Crete and then transit directly to Gavdopoula. It’s the longer way round by about twenty miles, but in this baby that’s less than ten minutes extra.’
Richter nodded and sat on a pull-down seat on the starboard side of the cabin. He looked at his watch and began figuring times and distances. It was almost midday, which meant they’d already spent nearly one and a half hours in their search with absolutely nothing to show for it. He just hoped that this next site would prove rather more interesting.
As the Merlin transitioned from the hover to begin its flight south towards Gavdopoula, the chemical reactions within the pencil detonators on the four demolition charges scattered randomly through the cabin of the wrecked Learjet had already been running for a little over forty-three minutes.
John Westwood leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms up above his head. He seemed to have been in this building for hours, yet to have achieved remarkably little.
The theory Walter Hicks had floated at the meeting in his office the previous day had then seemed to contain obvious merit – someone might well want to take revenge if he had suffered because of some operation those two Company men had been involved in – but the more Westwood examined the records, the less likely this scenario appeared. The obvious objection was the timing. Both Richards and Hawkins had left the CIA over ten years earlier – Hawkins had been retired for nearly thirteen years – and it seemed inconceivable to Westwood that anyone bent on revenge would wait around for over a decade and then kill two men
There was one possible explanation that he was still tossing around in his mind. The reason for the killer’s delay might simply be because he had been locked up all that time in a prison somewhere. But even that theory
