the electron microscope, but what it seems to resemble more than anything is Bovine Leukaemia Virus.’
There was a brief silence as the CDC personnel absorbed this information.
‘That,’ Jerry Fisher said slowly, ‘makes no sense whatsoever. BLV only attacks cattle, and it’s really slow- acting. As far as I know there’s never been a case of the virus having any effect whatsoever on a human being, and even if it did, it would probably cause a cancer gestating over a period of years. What it definitely couldn’t do is kill two healthy men within twelve hours.’
‘They didn’t say that it
John Westwood hadn’t found anything yet, but what he had
His search through the Company vacation and sabbatical requests for 1971 and 1972 hadn’t helped, simply because neither Hawkins nor Richards had, according to the records, either submitted a request for a sabbatical or taken one. That directly contradicted what their personnel records had stated, and suggested to Westwood that he was on the right track.
Both men, it now seemed clear, had been involved in some kind of covert operation starting in mid 1971. An operation so covert that all details of it had been expunged from their personnel files and the bland ‘sabbatical’ reference substituted in its place.
Westwood picked up the telephone, intending to contact the Registry Archive to request copies of all operation files active between July 1971 and July 1972, but then he hesitated and replaced the receiver.
He’d wanted to avoid using the CIA computer system where possible, but this time he couldn’t see any other way to get the information he needed. He turned now to his computer keyboard and initiated a search of Walnut specifying the same parameters he’d intended to request from the Archive. There were, viewing the search results, hundreds of entries, far more than he could possibly search through if he wanted to get any other work done. There was an obvious way to reduce the total to a manageable number, so he specified a search within the results he’d generated, and added the names ‘Hawkins’ and ‘Richards’ to its parameters.
That search produced only two results: both men had been assigned to operations in mid July 1972, immediately after they’d returned from their supposed ‘sabbaticals’. Westwood swiftly checked the details of each operation, but neither was highly classified nor in any way contentious, and he was more sure than ever that it was during late 1971 and early 1972 that he should be looking.
And then Westwood realized what he was overlooking, and what he was doing wrong. The CIA computer database is a secure source of information, and data entered into it has to conform to certain basic rules. One of these is that even if a file is sealed, the file date, file name and the names of the responsible CIA officers are hard-coded into the database, and cannot be deleted – a basic security measure – even if everything else has been sanitized. Westwood had so far been looking for active operations, and hence active files. With a sense of growing excitement, he entered the names ‘Hawkins’ and ‘Richards’ again, but this time specified sealed and inactive files only.
Then he sat back and watched as the computer monitor displayed a single file name, with a date in July 1971, and the names of six senior CIA agents. Two of those names were Charles Hawkins and James Richards.
The aircrewman expertly spun O’Reilly round, grabbed the back of his harness and pulled him into the rear compartment, paying out cable from the winch as he did so. As soon as O’Reilly’s feet touched the floor he clipped his safety harness to a nearby strap, then stepped out of his loop harness and bent over the black-clad body lying face-down in the helicopter’s rear compartment.
Together, O’Reilly and the aircrewman turned the body over. For a second the pair just stared down at the bloody and unrecognizable mess that had once been a human face, then O’Reilly seized the top of the diver’s wetsuit hood and pulled it off. His probing fingers felt for a pulse in the neck but found nothing.
The aircrewman was saying something, but O’Reilly couldn’t hear him over the noise of the rotors and engines. He pulled on a headset, and immediately the din dropped to a more bearable level. ‘What?’ he said.
‘Who is it?’ the aircrewman asked him again, and O’Reilly gazed down at the still figure lying on the floor.
‘I don’t know,’ and O’Reilly realized that he really didn’t. It wasn’t Crane – the ship’s own diving officer was markedly taller than this man – and Richter’s hair was very fair. The body in front of him was average height and had light brown hair. And as O’Reilly looked more carefully he realized something else. This man had been shot, shot in the head. ‘I don’t know,’ O’Reilly repeated, ‘but I’m sure it isn’t either Crane or Richter. So who the hell is it? And where the hell are
As he spoke these words, the pilot’s voice echoed in his headset. ‘I can see two others in the water, left eight o’clock at fifty yards.’ O’Reilly immediately felt the Merlin lift and turn to port and moments later the helicopter was again in a hover and he found himself looking straight down at Richter and Crane in the sea below him. Four minutes later, the two men were also standing drying off in the rear compartment of the helicopter, looking at the body of the unidentified diver sprawled on the floor.
John Westwood stared at his computer screen with a certain amount of satisfaction, not to say deja vu. It was all, he realized, slowly coming together. The amount of stuff his search had extracted from the database was very limited, but at last he had something he could show to Walter Hicks.
On the screen in front of him was revealed a very brief entry. The filename was ‘CAIP’, which he immediately recognized from his earlier, unofficial searches for details of the Learjet crash. The file’s initiation date was 3 July 1971, and the names of the six senior Company agents responsible for conducting this operation were Henry Butcher, George Cassells, Charles Hawkins, William Penn, James Richards and Roger Stanford. No details of the operation itself were listed, or even the geographical area in which it had been conducted, although Westwood could take an intelligent guess at that, because of the one other piece of information provided by the system. As soon as Westwood had seen the filename he had predicted what the final part of this entry would be. The last line on the screen displayed the note: ‘Cross-reference: N17677. Access prohibited. File sealed July 02, 1972’, and the security classification ‘Ultra’.
It was clear to him that in mid 1971 the CIA had become involved in some kind of highly covert operation, probably in the eastern Mediterranean. Whether this operation had succeeded or failed Westwood had no idea, but what he did know was intriguing enough. Almost exactly one year to the day after CAIP had been initiated, and one month after the State Department-owned Learjet registration N17677 had plunged to the bottom of the Mediterranean, well away from the area that was subsequently searched for the wreckage, the operation file had been sealed and all possible details expunged from the database.
For a few minutes Westwood just stared at the data in front of him. He knew that a sealed file could always be unsealed – it was not an irreversible process. All that was required was the agreement and approval of the officer who had sealed it, or that of a higher-ranking officer in the same department or one of the Company’s senior officers – a supergrade – to over-ride the sealing order. Granted, that could take some time to achieve, especially with an old or large and complex file that might have to be read first by a number of senior officers to determine its suitability for unsealing, but it was certainly possible.
Westwood didn’t know the exact procedure he would have to follow to get this file opened, but it wouldn’t take him long to find out. There were a couple of things he could do before he went that route, however, and he could initiate them immediately.
First, he called up the sealing instruction and checked the authorization. Inevitably this would consist of a
