The Merlin had meanwhile landed on a stretch of flat ground at the south-east end of the island of Gavdopoula, scattering a dozen goats in its descent, and Mike O’Reilly had since been watching the life raft carefully through binoculars. As soon as he saw the divers surface, he turned and instructed the pilot to take-off. Seconds later the helicopter lifted into the air and made straight for their position.
The Merlin had covered most of the distance towards the two men when the sea around them erupted and boiled.
Westwood closed Hawkins’s file and picked up the paper on which he’d noted down the briefest possible summaries of the lives of the two dead former CIA agents. In fact, he’d had to use three sheets of paper to get all the dates down, because of the long careers both men had enjoyed with the Company. He leaned back in his chair and began comparing the two records, year by year.
Strangely enough, although both men had worked in the Operations Directorate, their paths didn’t seem to have crossed all that often. They’d attended two courses together, fairly early in their careers, but as far as Westwood could see they had never worked together on a single operation of any sort. But if Hicks’s theory was correct, the record had to be wrong, or at least incomplete, so Westwood studied the dates again.
Then he noticed something he hadn’t expected. In mid 1971 both men had taken sabbaticals, each being away from the Agency for just under twelve months. The dates of their absences were not an exact match, but both started and ended within a week of each other. Westwood had been looking for operations, not vacations – and it was only when he compared the timelines side by side that he saw the coincidence. Only perhaps it wasn’t just a coincidence.
He drummed his fingers on the desk impatiently. This wasn’t what he had been hoping to find, but it was something. Maybe they’d gone off on vacation together, hunting or the like, and something had happened during that period, something that had, over thirty years later, sent a man after them with a gun. God, that was thin, but it was the only patch of ground Westwood had so far uncovered, so he had no option but to start digging.
He picked up the internal telephone, dialled down to the Registry Archives and asked them to send up all the leave and sabbatical request records for the calendar years 1971 and 1972.
The pilot of the Merlin instinctively hauled back on the collective and the control column, pulling the helicopter up into the air and away from the huge plume of spray and water rising from the sea in front of him.
‘What the hell was that?’ O’Reilly demanded as the aircraft lurched violently.
‘An underwater explosion. It looked to me like a depth charge going off, just like in those old Second World War films.’
‘Fuck,’ O’Reilly muttered. ‘Can you see our two divers?’
‘Not yet,’ the pilot replied. ‘The water’s disturbed as hell. The life raft’s been holed on one side, and I can’t see anybody near it.’
The pilot tilted the nose of the Merlin downwards again and accelerated towards the partially submerged orange raft. He was still about fifty yards away when O’Reilly spotted a shape in the water directly below them.
‘Back up,’ he ordered. ‘Body in the water – there’s someone down there. Aircrewman, ready with the winch.’
The pilot immediately swung the helicopter into a tight left-hand turn, scanning the surface below as the Merlin turned away from the focal patch of disturbed water and the swamped life raft. ‘Got it,’ he said, dropping the aircraft closer to the sea. ‘Right two o’clock at thirty yards.’
The side door of the helicopter had been left open throughout the flight, there being no other way of keeping the rear compartment at a reasonable temperature. O’Reilly was now hanging out of it, looking down, and as the pilot’s position report echoed in his ears, he spotted the figure again. A black-clad body, no aqualung, no weight belt, floating limply and face down on the surface of the sea.
O’Reilly didn’t hesitate. He took off his headset, unclipped his safety harness, then removed his boots and flying overalls. He put his safety harness on again, then pulled the loop attached to the end of the winch cable over his shoulders and secured it under his armpits. ‘Lower me,’ he shouted to the aircrewman, then stepped out of the Merlin’s door to dangle at the end of the cable.
The pilot didn’t even bother engaging the flight computer. He just drove the helicopter down towards the surface, coming to a hover about fifteen feet above the waves as O’Reilly began to drop downwards, the winch cable paying out above his head. The Senior Observer entered the water about six feet away from the floating body, and with two swift strokes he was beside it. The harness had two loops, one for the aircrewman himself, and a second for the person to be rescued. O’Reilly grabbed one arm of the body, swiftly looped the harness over its head and under the other arm, then gave an urgent gesture to be raised.
Almost immediately, he felt the cable tighten as the winch took the strain. With a jerk he was lifted clear of the water, the body rising with him. But O’Reilly guessed they were wasting their time. He had felt a total lack of movement in the body as he’d positioned the harness around it, so he was virtually certain that the man was dead.
The only thing he didn’t know for sure was whether he had his arms round David Crane or Paul Richter.
Stein wasn’t making too bad a job of nosing the boat into the harbour, though he didn’t have anything like the same level of skill as Elias. Krywald had almost recovered from his nausea by the time they entered the harbour, though he still looked unwell as he stood in the bow, mooring rope in hand. Suddenly they heard a dull rumble somewhere out to sea behind them.
Stein said nothing, concentrating on giving the boat just the right amount of reverse thrust to stop its forward motion. He switched off the engine as soon as Krywald had stepped safely onto the jetty and looped the mooring rope over a bollard, then took up the stern mooring rope to finish securing the boat. Only then did Stein check his watch. ‘Two hours fifty-five minutes, as near as makes no difference,’ he murmured. ‘I told you those were good detonators.’
‘Yup.’ Krywald stepped back into the boat and picked up the black case containing the steel one they’d retrieved what seemed like weeks ago from Nico Aristides’s apartment in Kandira. ‘OK, that’s pretty much the end of it as far as we’re concerned. Let’s find the car and then get the hell off this island.’
Tyler Hardin had attached a note with Inspector Lavat’s mobile phone number to the samples he had sent to the Irakleio forensic laboratory so that he could be contacted as soon as any results were obtained. He was in conference with his team in one of the tents when Lavat entered, telephone in his hand. ‘For you, Mr Hardin,’ the inspector announced.
The American took the phone and pressed it to his ear. ‘Hardin,’ he said shortly, and then he just listened for three minutes. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and added, ‘I’d like that in writing, please. Thank you again.’
Snapping the telephone closed he handed it back to Inspector Lavat. ‘Well, this case gets stranger by the minute. That was Irakleio. They’re still analysing the specimens but they seem to have found something in the samples taken from Spiros Aristides’s house.’
‘A filovirus?’ Susan Kane inquired.
Hardin shook his head firmly. ‘Definitely not,’ he said. ‘They found what looked like spores of a completely unknown type, which is interesting enough, but when they added some moisture to the sample, the spores burst open and released virus particles. Lots and lots of virus particles.’
‘Could they identify it?’ Kane asked.
‘That’s the interesting bit,’ Hardin said. ‘It appears to be of an unknown type, at least on examination using
