didn’t make a lot of sense. The three killings were so markedly different in execution. One victim had been shot, then beaten to death with a poker, but the other two had been forced to swallow poison capsules.
Somebody coming to seek revenge would more likely want to be physical about it. They would want to make their victims suffer physically for whatever grievance had been done to them in the past. Forcing somebody to swallow a poison capsule that would produce unconsciousness in a matter of seconds didn’t really count as ‘suffering’ in Westwood’s book.
And besides, all the evidence suggested the killer was known to both his male victims and to Hawkins’s wife as well. If the perp – or the unsub, to use Detective Delaney’s phrase – was a man the CIA had sent to prison years ago, it seemed inconceivable that Richards would have opened the door to him. And why on earth would Mary Hawkins have let the man so readily into her house?
Quite possibly Charles Hawkins had met his killer by appointment, which implied that the two men knew each other quite well. If that was the case, it probably explained why the deaths had occurred in the sequence they did. With Hawkins lured out of his house the killer would have a window of opportunity to eliminate Mary Hawkins, while she would be there alone. Hawkins would be the next victim, already sitting alone in his car by the Potomac, waiting for his wife’s killer. Then Richards would follow. Maybe the unsub had originally intended to eliminate all his victims with poison capsules, but his plan had been thwarted when Richards fought back.
The only scenario to make any sense was that the killer was somebody known to all three victims – Richards, Hawkins and Hawkins’s wife – and that probably meant somebody who had once been, or perhaps even still was, an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.
As the Merlin rounded the south-western end of Crete and passed due south of Paliochora, Mike O’Reilly changed frequency on his UHF box and glanced over at Richter. ‘Let’s see if Ops Four is awake,’ he said, pressing the transmit button.
‘Fob Watch, this is Spook Two.’ There was absolutely no response. ‘He’s probably got his face full of sandwiches and coffee,’ O’Reilly muttered, and transmitted again. ‘Fob Watch, Fob Watch, this is Spook Two.’
There was a click, a short burst of static, and then a clearly puzzled voice responded. ‘This is Fob Watch. Say again your callsign.’
‘This is Spook Two. We’re an ASW Merlin from Mother in transit from the western edge of Crete to Gavdopoula, level at two thousand feet on the Regional Pressure Setting. We’re presently two miles south of Paliochora, heading one five zero and we’ll be holding at least two miles clear of the coast until we return to Mother. Have you any traffic for us?’
‘Negative, Spook Two, and good afternoon, sir.’ The Air Operations Chief Petty Officer – ‘Ops Four’ – had obviously recognized the 814 Squadron Senior Observer’s voice. ‘I have nothing known at this time. The next scheduled flight isn’t due here until around fifteen hundred this afternoon.’
‘Roger, Fob Watch. We’ll be carrying out anti-submarine exercises in the vicinity of Gavdopoula, and we’ll check in again when we climb out of the area.’
Forty minutes later the Merlin was sitting in the hover some two miles off the eastern coast of Gavdopoula, and the dunking sonar body was on its way down.
John Westwood was worried. Worried and puzzled. On his desk in front of him lay the analysis report of the poison used to kill Charles Hawkins and his wife. As Detective Delaney had said the day before, the lethal agent in question had been confirmed as coniine, a toxic vegetable alkaloid derived from the hemlock plant.
Westwood was puzzled because there were literally thousands of common poisons more readily available, and even the compiler of the analysis report had never previously encountered the use of coniine – at least, not since the days of Socrates, who himself had been executed using a preparation of hemlock.
Coniine, which is more accurately described by its chemical designation 2-propyl piperidine, is one of the simplest and most toxic of the vegetable alkaloids – with a fatal dose for human beings amounting to less than zero decimal two of a gram. In its pure form it’s a colourless and slightly oily liquid with an unpleasant smell and bitter taste. The source plant – hemlock – has a long history of medicinal use, having been employed by the Arabs as well as the Greeks as a sedative and painkiller, but always with the greatest care because of the very small difference between a therapeutic and a lethal dose.
The coniine that had killed Hawkins and his wife was highly concentrated. Taking hemlock first causes stimulation – it’s related to nicotine, another vegetable alkaloid, and has a similar initial effect – followed by depression of the nervous system, then loss of feeling in the limbs, drowsiness, paralysis and ultimately death after perhaps an hour – not unconsciousness in seconds. Whoever had chosen coniine had selected an unusual and rare poison, in sufficiently concentrated form to produce a dose that would be almost immediately fatal.
This was not easy to achieve, and suggested a fairly well-equipped laboratory staffed by experienced doctors and technicians. From his time in the Company, Westwood knew that private laboratories willing to turn out lethal poisons were somewhat thin on the ground, at least in America, so that possibly meant Fort Detrick was involved.
Fort Detrick is the current home of USAMRIID, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, located in the foothills of the Catoctin Mountains in western Maryland. Officially and actually, USAMRIID is part of the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command and is the principal research laboratory of the American Biological Defense Research Program. Fort Detrick contains one of the only two Biosafety Level 4 laboratories in America, intended to assist its personnel in the fight both against naturally occurring viruses or other pathogens, and in combating the biological weapons – bioweapons – manufactured by foreign regimes.
That’s the official story at least, but Fort Detrick has a secret and murkier past – and present. One of the conundrums of scientifically developing counter-measures to biological weapons is that you need to have a supply of the bioweapon you’re seeking defence against. So Fort Detrick holds – and has always held – stocks of a vast range of such agents including anthrax, botulinus toxin and so on. But developing antidotes or inoculations against them is only half the story.
Predicting how your enemy might modify anthrax, say, is something of a guessing game, and the only practical way to produce counter-measures to modified biological agents is to modify them yourself in order to develop more efficient strains, and then to develop effective antidotes. By default, therefore, Fort Detrick itself has to be constantly involved in the biological warfare business.
Although the CIA is officially forbidden to engage in assassinations, at numerous times in the past this rule has been relaxed sufficiently for attempts to be made to eliminate certain people whose intentions seemed diametrically opposed to those of the Agency. A classic example was Fidel Castro, who survived four CIA- sponsored attempts to assassinate him using poisons, supplied by the scientists at Fort Detrick, and at least the same number of attempts using alternative methods.
The first attempt employed regular poison pills, but the agent chosen to administer them couldn’t get anywhere near Castro. The second time they tried a scatter-gun approach, supplying a mixed bag of goodies, which included a poison pen, a cigar impregnated with botulinus toxin – one of the most lethal substances known to man and nowadays most notorious by being associated with ageing Hollywood stars trying to remove their wrinkles – and various substances containing biological agents. This attempt, delegated to a Cuban dissident living in Havana, also failed, of course.
The third time round, organized crime figures working under contract to the CIA identified a Cuban employed in a restaurant favoured by Castro, who was prepared, for a fee, to poison the Cuban leader’s food. Poison pills were duly supplied, but by the time the plan came together Castro had switched his affections to a different restaurant.
A year after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Company tried yet again, once more resorting to their contacts within organized crime and providing poison pills. This time the Cuban dissident agreeing to make the attempt wanted his payment in kind – demanding weapons and radio equipment instead of money. This was supplied to him by CIA front companies operating out of Florida before the assassination attempt was due to be made. Once again the attempt failed, and it’s possible that the Cuban never even tried to get near to Castro, once he’d received what he
