wanted.
All that showed clearly how the CIA was not averse to developing and utilizing lethal substances. So maybe the coniine used here had come from a secret chemical weapon stockpile somewhere within the Company itself. If so, Westwood’s earlier deduction about the possible source of the killer was probably justified.
What he wasn’t sure about was where to go from there. If the killer was indeed a Company employee, he would certainly have covered his traces well. Even with his high-level security clearance, Westwood knew that there were areas on the CIA database that he himself was unable to access, and anyway he had no idea at all where to start looking for the source of the poison. He even toyed with the idea of just entering ‘coniine’ in the database search field to see what the system generated, then quickly decided not to. If the unknown assassin was still an active CIA agent, he could have left tripwires within the system to alert him if anybody started digging too close to him.
Reluctantly, Westwood turned his attention back to the personnel records, searching for some link between James Richards and Charles Hawkins that made any kind of sense in the context of their deaths.
Stein and Krywald were only about four miles off Chora Sfakia when they spotted the helicopter approaching from the west. At first it was just a curiosity to them, nothing more, but when it descended into the hover over the area of sea lying between Gavdopoula and Gavdos, Stein began to worry.
‘That looks to me like an ASW bird,’ he murmured, peering southwards through a small pair of folding binoculars, ‘but I can’t identify it for sure. It could be a Sea King or one of the new Merlins.’
‘Who uses them primarily?’ Krywald asked. With every mile they’d covered in their approach to Crete, he had been feeling a little better, considerably cheered by the prospect of stepping onto dry land.
‘If it’s a Sea King, almost anyone,’ Stein replied, still studying the helicopter. ‘It’s a very good aircraft and a hell of a lot of nations operate them – Germany, Canada, Spain and Egypt for starters – and any of those could have warships in this area. If it’s a Merlin, Britain and Italy are the most likely.’
‘What’s it doing?’
‘From here I can’t be certain, but it looks as if it’s transitioned into a hover, so it’s probably using its dunking sonar.’
‘You think they’re looking for the Learjet?’
‘I doubt it. It’s probably just doing regular anti-submarine exercises. And even if it is looking for the wreck, those charges are going to blow real soon now.’
Just over thirty minutes after the Merlin had begun its dunking sonar search, O’Reilly suddenly leaned forward, staring intently at the display in front of him.
He then glanced up at Richter who was trying to peer over his shoulder. ‘This looks more like it,’ O’Reilly said. ‘A cylindrical object about thirty feet long which could well be part of an aircraft fuselage – it’s big enough for that – plus two flat plates, one right next to the cylinder and the other a short distance away and standing vertically upright.’
‘Wings?’ Richter queried.
‘That’s my guess,’ O’Reilly said. ‘One still attached to the wreckage, the other torn off by the impact with the sea. I’ve also got two very strong returns from fairly small objects, which I assume are the engines. This is the best candidate we’ve located so far,’ he added, ‘but it’s deep, around one hundred feet.’
Richter looked at him. ‘OK, Mike, on a scale of one to ten, where do you reckon this contact scores?’
O’Reilly thought for a moment. ‘At least a seven,’ he said, ‘maybe eight.’
‘That’s good enough for me.’ Richter turned towards the rear of the helicopter. ‘David, get suited up.’ Turning back to the Senior Observer, he added, ‘Mike, we’ll have to use the life raft, and we’ll need a buoy to mark the precise spot. Can you position the aircraft as near as you can to what you think is the fuselage?’
‘No problem.’ O’Reilly did some swift calculations. ‘Pilot, jump one three five, seven hundred yards.’
As the helicopter climbed away from the hover, Richter joined Crane at the rear of the cabin and began pulling on a wetsuit.
John Westwood snapped the file closed. He got up from his chair, stretching his arms and rubbing his eyes, then paced the office carpet for a few moments. He had come in fairly early that morning, and ever since then he seemed to have done nothing but either stare at text on the computer screen or plough through dusty operation files.
Hicks had been adamant there were answers to be found somewhere within the vast CIA database of information, and equally firm that he expected Westwood to find them, although not at the expense of his normal work. But ‘cracking the Walnut’, as Hicks had somewhat dismissively termed this operation, had not proved as easy as at first supposed.
Westwood had initially searched the database to identify those cases and operations in which either Charles Hawkins or James Richards had participated. That had eventually produced a list he had output to his laser printer, but that, of course, was just the start. Once he’d identified the operations in which the men were involved, he was obliged to read through all the case files as well, and that was where his problems really started, just because of the sheer volume of data he was trying to analyse.
James Richards and Charles Hawkins had both worked in the Operations Directorate for almost their entire professional careers, a total in Richards’s case of over thirty years. Hawkins had transferred to Administration for the last five years of his time at the Agency, but that still left twenty-eight years’ worth – over one hundred and twenty operations involving one man or the other – to be scanned and assessed.
Westwood had read through the first three operation files on screen, but then decided to get the original paper files out of storage, because he suspected that the electronic versions were somewhat abbreviated, and besides some of the scanned documents were actually quite difficult to read. Also, he was still concerned about leaving an electronic trail of opened files running visibly through the CIA database. Hauling the originals up from the archives might therefore be a whole lot better for his long-term health prospects.
It would have been worth it, he thought, if after all this work he’d actually found something, but the search had turned up nothing. He’d just in fact finished reading the last case file of all, had filled a couple of dozen pages with hand-written notes, but the eventual result was a neat round zero. Nothing found in any of the files linking these two men could, by any stretch of the imagination, have led to their deaths. There had to be something else – something he was missing.
Richter and Crane stood shoulder to shoulder next to the open starboard-side door of the ASW helicopter and checked each other’s equipment. Below the hovering Merlin, the surface of the Mediterranean was churned into spray by the down-wash from the massive rotor blades, so the buoy, attached to a lead sinker by a one- hundred-and-fifty-foot rope that they’d dropped five minutes earlier, was being blown all over the place.
They were going deep, and so would need something on the surface as support. Richter nodded to O’Reilly, then he and David Crane stepped back out of the way as the Senior Observer and the aircrewman manhandled a bulky fabric-covered bundle over to the door. O’Reilly seized a lanyard on the side of the bundle and, as the aircrewman pushed, he tugged it.
The bundle dropped straight down and, with a loud hissing sound audible even over the beat of the rotors and the roar of the jet engines, it burst open, as bright orange air cells filled rapidly with compressed air from the bottle secured on the life raft.
The raft floated briefly upright on the sea below the helicopter, but almost immediately the rotor downwash began blowing it aside. Crane moved forward and stepped out of the doorway, keeping his legs straight as he plummeted into the Mediterranean. He submerged, then reappeared, swam a few strokes, grabbed the safety line attached to the life raft and began towing it towards the buoy.
