probably the single most important piece of information he was likely to collect from the wreckage.
The forward end of the fuselage was a mess. The entire cockpit had been torn away, either on impact with the surface of the Mediterranean or during the aircraft’s subsequent plunge to the bottom of the sea, so the front of the passenger cabin gaped wide open.
Due to the depth of water, there hadn’t been the huge amount of colonization in and around the wreckage that would have occurred if the plane had crashed at a shallower level, but there was still enough marine growth to soften the edges of the torn metal and obscure the shape of whatever objects remained inside the cabin.
The two men switched on their torches before peering cautiously inside. It was pretty much as Spiros Aristides had explained it to Nico in the village bar. The dancing torch beams illuminated five aircraft seats, the sixth having apparently been ripped away from the floor, probably on impact with the water.
Two of these seats were unoccupied, but all the others held disintegrating human skeletons, strapped in. Richter was no anatomist, but from the size of their skulls he guessed that all three victims were male. On the cabin floor, between the two rows of seats, he spotted a bulky black object, and a pile of what looked like tools and instruments beside it. Richter swam cautiously over and examined it more closely. The black object seemed to be an empty doctor’s bag and, on prodding the pile beside it, Richter was able to identify an array of forceps, tweezers and scalpels.
It wasn’t therefore a great leap of reasoning to deduce that at least one of the corpses nearby had been a doctor, but that didn’t help Richter work out why the aircraft had been shot down in the first place. And he was quite certain that it had been blown out of the sky: the traces of the missile that had virtually torn the port engine from its mounting were unmistakable to his trained eyes.
He moved slowly and carefully through the cabin, ensuring he didn’t snag his aqualung hoses on anything sharp. Apart from the doctor’s bag, whatever clues there were to the identity of the three corpses had probably long since vanished, so Richter realized that he was almost certainly wasting his time. The bodies were now little more than skeletons, and while a forensic pathologist might identify their sex and age from their bones, and even come up with their names if their dental records were on file, there was virtually nothing he could do down here in the dark at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
The cabin floor was covered in debris and marine growth, so even slight movements by either diver caused eddies of sediment to rise in clouds from the floor, reducing visibility. But Richter persevered in searching anyway, and found exactly nothing until he got right to the back of the cabin. There was a scattering of debris against the rear bulkhead and, prodding at it more in hope than expectation, he was rewarded by a tiny silvery gleam. He stretched out his gloved hand to grab at it. It was bigger than he had expected, heavier too, and of a vaguely familiar shape.
Gripping the object firmly in his left hand, Richter reached down to his right calf and pulled his diving knife from its rubber sheath. When he hit his discovery smartly with the back of the blade a chunk of marine encrustation fell off, and he knew immediately what it was. He put it carefully into the mesh bag attached to his weight belt and was again prodding the pile of debris when Crane tapped him urgently on the arm, gesturing towards the front of the cabin.
Richter looked at him, and Crane waved again towards the rent in the fuselage. He took off and swam swiftly in that direction with Richter following. The diving officer swung round in a tight circle, grabbing hold of the edge of one of the seats and pointed under it. Richter stopped beside him and looked down.
During his first few months of employment with the Foreign Operations Executive, Richter had spent a considerable amount of time attending various training courses that enabled him to recognize and handle proficiently most types of modern handguns, submachine-guns and assault rifles, and so on. At the same time he’d also been taught to identify a wide variety of explosive devices, both improvised and manufactured, while receiving a basic instruction in fuses and detonators. So he had no difficulty at all in recognizing the two M118 Composition Block Demolition Charges lying side by side under the seat, despite their unusually bulky appearance. Only the pencil detonators sticking out of them were new to him.
The samples flown from Kandira to Irakleio by Merlin were of two very different types. The majority were specimens of tissue gathered during the autopsy on Spiros Aristides, which had been whisked straight into the medical section of the laboratory for histological and toxicological analysis. The rest were a motley collection of dust, fluff and soil samples gathered from inside the dead man’s house or from the ground immediately outside it, plus swabs and scrapings from the walls, doors and furniture of his living room and bedroom – even the whisky bottle and glass that he had presumably drunk from before lying down on his bed. The medical samples were immediately subjected to a battery of well-established tests, while the glass and bottle were dusted for fingerprints and the sediment in them analysed, but about all the laboratory could do with the dust and other bits was to scan them through the microscope.
So that’s exactly what they did. Starting with the scrapings from the walls and doors and most of the furniture, they found nothing. The fluff revealed nothing either, and nor did the soil samples, at least when scrutinized through a conventional light microscope. But when the laboratory technician used a scanning electron microscope to examine the scrapings collected from the old oak table in Aristides’s living room, she noticed something she’d never seen before.
Before calling her supervisor over, she tried a technique she’d employed previously with some success on similar samples, and prepared another specimen for examination in the SEM. When she looked carefully at this second image, she was frankly astonished.
Pacing up and down in front of his desk, Westwood looked for inspiration. The logic of the situation seemed undeniable, and he was now feeling in agreement with Walter Hicks. Two men had been killed on the same day in the same area, and there seemed to be only three linking factors. First, eyewitness and forensic evidence strongly suggested that both victims had known their murderer. Second, it seemed probable that the same perpetrator had carried out both crimes, as subsequently confirmed by Delaney’s forensic evidence. Third, the only thing that seemed to connect the two victims was their years of service in the Operations Directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency.
But Westwood had found nothing at all in the case files that he had studied so diligently to provide any kind of a motive for these murders, especially so long after both men had retired from the Company. But the fact that the killings had happened meant there had to be a motive, so Westwood had presumably just missed it.
Was there, he wondered, any other way to look at the evidence – some piece of lateral thinking that would enable him to consider the data he had extracted from a different perspective? And time was now getting short. Walter Hicks hadn’t been riding Westwood so far, but he would certainly be expecting some results fairly soon.
‘Time,’ Westwood muttered to himself, pacing the carpet while wondering whether another shot of caffeine would help pummel his brain into action.
Suddenly he stopped short. Time? That
He took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote ‘RICHARDS’ and ‘HAWKINS’ in capital letters at the top of it. Then he checked the two deceased agents’ personnel files and on the left-hand side of the page below the name he wrote the month and year that James Richards had joined the CIA – August 1958.
For a few moments Westwood just sat and stared at the date: nearly half a century ago. What possible relevance could there be in such ancient history? He shook his head, picked up James Richards’s personnel file and began scanning through it, recording the start and finish dates of every course, every posting and every operation that the man had been involved in. When he’d finished, he did exactly the same for agent Charles Hawkins.
‘What is it?’ the supervisor asked, peering over the technician’s shoulder at the image on the screen. You don’t
