blood all over his face. He could hardly stand, so his friend had to almost carry him in here. We put him on a trolley and took him straight into one of the examination rooms – down the corridor there.’
Richter glanced in the direction she was pointing. ‘This friend of his,’ he asked, ‘did he give you his name?’
The receptionist flicked back through a loose-leaf binder and ran a well-manicured finger down the handwritten entries. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Here we are. He gave us Mr Curtis’s details, and the address of the hotel they’re staying at here in Chania. His name was Watson – Richard Watson.’ She wrote both the names and the address of the hotel on a slip of paper and passed it over the desk.
‘Can you remember what this Mr Watson looked like?’
The receptionist thought for a few seconds, then shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We were all so concerned about Mr Curtis that I don’t think any of us paid too much attention to the other man.’
‘That was easy, Mr Richter,’ Gravas said as he turned away towards the corridor where Hardin was waiting.
‘Far too easy,’ Richter grunted. ‘I’ll bet this Watson character just gave her the name of a hotel he drove past on his way to the hospital, and Curtis and Watson are certainly going to be aliases. Wherever these two jokers have been staying I’m reasonably certain it isn’t Chania. But at least it gives me somewhere to start.’
The new car, which Stein had hired by using some of his own documents rather than those issued by the CIA, was a light blue Seat Cordoba. He’d wanted a saloon car – he’d actually asked for a ‘sedan’, which had just confused the booking clerk – because he had no intention of sharing the new vehicle with the steel case containing the flasks and their lethal contents. Though it might not make any practical difference, he wanted that case securely locked in the trunk, not sitting right behind him in the luggage compartment of a hatchback.
Stein drove the Seat into the half-empty car park at the back of his hotel and slotted it conveniently into the space next to the Ford Focus. He first glanced round the car park to ensure that he wasn’t being observed, then pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and swiftly opened the boots of both vehicles.
Unfortunately, Stein hadn’t looked around thoroughly enough. Mike Murphy wasn’t actually in the car park itself, but was sitting in his own hire car about eighty metres up the street. He’d been waiting there for over an hour, using a set of compact but powerful binoculars to watch the Ford that Nicholson said had been originally hired by Krywald and Stein. He hadn’t expected Stein to turn up in another vehicle, and Murphy wasn’t quite sure now which car the American would be using, so he carefully noted the number and colour of the Seat as he continued observing Stein’s activities.
His problem was that he was facing the fronts of the two cars. He could see that Stein had opened the boots of both vehicles, and was moving between the two, presumably transferring something from one to the other. But from his vantage point he couldn’t identify what the American was shifting.
The black case was right where Krywald had left it earlier. Stein gingerly stretched out an arm to seize the handle, then lifted the case and placed it carefully inside a black rubbish bag, which he quickly sealed. Then he took another bag and repeated the procedure. With the outer one secured as well as he could make it, he carried it over to the blue Seat, dropped it into the boot and slammed the lid shut. He next pulled Krywald’s briefcase and his own overnight bag out of the boot of the Ford, leaving his blood-stained jacket inside it, then secured the boot lid and finally pulled off and discarded his gloves. He wasn’t intending to touch the case again, or even open the boot of the Seat, until he was ready to climb into whatever aircraft McCready would arrange to fly him off Crete.
In his hotel room, Stein put Krywald’s briefcase on the desk and opened it. Then he stopped dead and backed away. The CAIP file that Krywald had been so insistent Stein should read was sitting right on top of the laptop computer. Obviously after he’d removed it from the steel case, he’d decided to keep it readily available so he could refer to it again. And sitting beside the laptop was a small stainless-steel flask, heavily sealed and with a faded label on its side.
For perhaps half a minute Stein just stared at the briefcase, remembering what Krywald had said earlier. There had been some sort of dust or dirt on the file cover, which his partner had brushed away with his hand, and that was why he was now lying in intensive care in the hospital at Chania, and there might still be some of the stuff lurking on or in the file, or elsewhere inside the briefcase. But Stein had to get the file out of there in order to make use of the laptop – because that was the only way he could contact McCready in the States.
He backed away further and sat down on the bed, his eyes still fixed on the open briefcase. Then he realized something that he had forgotten. When he and Krywald had entered those two houses in Kandira, at least the first one of them had to have been full of virus particles, yet neither he nor Krywald had suffered any ill effects at that stage. And, Stein rationalized – unwittingly reaching almost the same conclusion as Tyler Hardin – the reason that they were not infected was that they had been wearing gloves and masks. Obviously the contaminants, whatever the hell they were, couldn’t pass through the fabric or rubber.
Actually, Stein wasn’t correct in the full detail of his deduction, because when active the virus particles could easily penetrate the comparatively coarse fabric of a mask, but that didn’t matter now. The fact was that wearing a mask and gloves prevented any of the virus spores from coming into contact with the mucous membranes of the nose or mouth. The only risk was therefore to the eyes.
Stein got up off the bed and rummaged round in his case, finally pulling out a mask and surgical gloves, which he swiftly put on. Still cautious, he closed the lid of the briefcase slowly and carefully, so as not to disturb anything, and carried it through into Krywald’s adjoining room. There, he placed it on the bed and opened it to face away from him. He then reached over the lid and used both hands to carefully remove the file and place it beside the briefcase. He did the same for the laptop and its power adaptor, the cable to connect it to the mobile phone, the phone itself, and finally the flask. Then he closed the briefcase and put it on top of the free-standing wardrobe in one corner of the room. He wouldn’t touch it again and, as far as Stein was concerned, if some Cretan chambermaid spotted it and took it home with her, that was her lookout. He had his own almost identical case in the room next door, and everything could now go in that.
His most pressing need was for the laptop. Stein crossed into the en-suite bathroom and picked up a couple of small towels, then returned to the bed. He thoroughly wiped the external surfaces of the computer, always moving the towel away from him, then opened up the laptop and did the same to its screen and keyboard. He put the machine to one side, and in turn cleaned the power adaptor, all the leads and cables, the mobile phone, and the steel flask, just as carefully.
The file proved more difficult, but Stein did what he could, wiping the cover carefully before he opened it. Inside he could see no sign of anything that looked even slightly like the dust Krywald had described. Finally he picked up all the items and returned to his own room. He put everything down carefully on the desk, then closed and locked the connecting door: he wouldn’t be entering that room again.
Stein plugged in the laptop computer and switched it on. He attached the mobile phone via the data cable and waited while the operating system loaded, then opened up Outlook Express and dialled the unlisted service provider they were using back in the States.
There were no emails waiting for Krywald, so Stein closed the connection and began composing his own message. It wasn’t a long email. He briefly advised McCready that the Learjet had been destroyed and that David Elias’s body had been consigned to the deep. He assumed that Krywald had already told McCready that they’d retrieved the steel case from Kandira, but he confirmed this information anyway. Then he explained how Krywald had opened the case, despite most explicit operational instructions, and was now lying in a critical condition in the Chania hospital.
When he’d finished he used the PGP encryption program to scramble the text, re-dialled the server and sent off the message. And all he could do then was wait for McCready to respond.
John Westwood spent some time jotting down notes on a piece of paper, trying to work out the criteria that had to apply to Mr X, which wasn’t easy because he still didn’t have a hell of a lot to go on.
What he knew for sure was that the unknown killer had to have been working for the Agency by 1971, and probably for at least a couple of years before that to have acquired sufficient experience to become involved in
