pocket.
Murphy closed and locked the boot, turned back towards the hospital, but didn’t approach the main doors. Instead, he walked around to the other side of the building, striding confidently as if he knew exactly where he was going, and made his way through a service entrance located over on the left-hand side of the hospital complex.
He possessed a good sense of direction and, once inside, followed a passageway leading to his right. It was lined on both sides with doors marked with signs in Greek, and more or less paralleled the corridor he’d followed in the main building. He had to push open half a dozen doors before he found what he wanted. The seventh door along stood slightly ajar and inside he glimpsed piles of dirty laundry: sheets, towels, gowns and other garments heaped everywhere.
He’d encountered nobody in the passageway, so it was the work of just a few moments to step inside, grab a slightly discoloured white surgical coat and slip it on over his jacket. There was no name tag, no convenient stethoscope to dangle around his neck, but Murphy wasn’t concerned. All he wanted was something that made him look more as if he officially belonged, and in a hospital nothing works better than a doctor’s white coat.
Another few metres along, the corridor ended in a T-junction. There, on his right, was what he’d been hoping to find: an unlocked door giving access to the small quadrangle that lay between the ward block and the utility wing.
On the other side of the patchy grass Murphy spotted the light blue towel moving slightly in a gentle breeze, then counted the windows positioned to the right of it, working out which one belonged to the room in which Krywald was being treated. He pulled the Daewoo pistol out of his waistband, checked that the magazine was fully loaded, then slammed it back in place. He screwed the silencer firmly onto the barrel, racked the slide back to chamber a round, set the safety catch, and replaced the pistol out of sight.
Only then did he step out and begin moving confidently along the perimeter of the quadrangle.
‘Understand we’ve got a bit of house-breaking to attend to?’ Ross asked.
‘It’s a hotel rather than a house, but otherwise yes,’ Richter replied. ‘I hope you’re good at picking locks,’ he added, ‘because I’m not.’
‘All part of the basic training,’ Ross nodded. ‘It’s part of the kit they give you when you join: exploding briefcase, Walther PPK, bullet-proof Aston Martin, that kind of thing.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not really,’ Ross replied, ‘but I have done the course, so unless this hotel is a lot more secure than most you find on Crete, it should be easy enough to get into their rooms.’
The two men had arrived at Richter’s hotel almost simultaneously, going through the same recognition procedure in the street outside it as they’d followed during their previous telephone conversation. Ross was tall and slim with dark hair greying at the temples, and with a square, somewhat aggressive-looking moustache. He’d been here on Crete for two years, and now that his Greek had become pretty fluent he was confidently expecting a posting notice from SIS almost immediately, which would send him off to some other country where the locals spoke any language but Greek.
‘The Royal Navy’s much the same,’ Richter confided, as they took chairs at a table outside a street cafe. ‘The moment you’re competent and comfortable in any job, they immediately post you somewhere else. So how did you locate the Americans’ hotel?’ he asked.
‘It wasn’t that difficult,’ Ross replied. ‘Some of the biggest and most expensive hotels employ their own computerized booking systems, while the really small ones don’t bother with anything except telephone or fax reservations. So if they’d been staying in a hotel at either end of the spectrum it might have been awkward, but we guessed they’d probably go for a middle-priced place. The majority of the hotels on the island use the same central reservations system, and we’ve needed to hack our way into that several times before. It’s not difficult, because the information contained isn’t particularly sensitive or confidential.’
Ross switched to Greek to order two coffees from the waiter who had appeared beside their table, then continued in English. ‘We searched for the names you gave me and came up with nothing, but in the circumstances that wasn’t entirely surprising. Then we searched for any two American men who were not part of a large group travelling together, but were staying in the same hotel. That generated fewer matches than you might expect; only about a dozen, probably because it’s low season here now. Finally we narrowed it down to just seven names.
‘We then sent men out to check with the hotels those seven men were registered at. Four were in Irakleio itself, so it didn’t take long to get the results. The first two men were a pair of elderly widowers doing Europe, and the other two were very obviously gay lovers. So unless the CIA has started recruiting poofs to do its dirty work, the two men you’re looking for have got to be among the last three we identified – Roger Clyde, David Elias and Richard Wilkins. All three are staying right here in Rethymno. I know you’re only looking for two men,’ Ross added, ‘but these three are apparently travelling together. Is it likely there might be a third man involved?’
‘That,’ Richter brooded, ‘could well make sense. When we located the wreck, the chopper picked up a body from the water. He’d been shot in the head and my guess is that he was a specialist diver who’d been recruited just to plant the explosives. Once he’d done his stuff, the others just blew his brains out.’
The waiter returned with their coffee and Richter paid the bill. ‘And the hotel they’re using?’ he asked.
‘It’s just up the road,’ Ross replied. ‘We can go as soon as you’re ready.’
Tyler Hardin took a final look at the motionless figure, with wires and cables connecting him to a bank of monitoring equipment, then shrugged his shoulders and stepped over to the door of the side-ward. As he’d explained to Richter in the helicopter from Kandira, there was no known treatment for the virus that was attacking the patient called Curtis. The American’s pulse was markedly weaker than when Hardin had last checked it only a few minutes earlier and his blood pressure was now so low it was frankly miraculous that he was still alive. What blood remained in his veins and arteries was gradually seeping out of his ears, eyes, nose and mouth and, even though Hardin could neither see nor measure it, also into his abdominal cavity and internal organs. The man was dying in front of his eyes and Hardin was powerless to do anything to stop it.
He stepped out into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind him. Gravas and the orderly were waiting outside, and kept well away from Hardin’s space-suited figure. Both were wearing surgical gowns, rubber boots, masks, gloves and protective goggles.
‘Is he dead yet?’ Gravas asked, his voice slightly muffled.
‘No,’ Hardin replied, ‘but it won’t be long now.’ He turned back towards the side-ward and suddenly caught a glimpse of movement outside the external window beyond, which faced onto the grassy quadrangle. He fell silent and stared for a moment, then turned back to Gravas. Perhaps it had just been a bird flying past.
The instant the figure in the bulky orange suit had turned towards him, Murphy had ducked down below the level of the window sill. He didn’t think he’d been spotted, and all he had to do now was finish the job.
He edged carefully upright against the concealing wall, then peered briefly through the adjacent window. The orange-clad figure was still out in the corridor, talking to two others wearing green surgical scrubs, but the ward itself was empty apart from the motionless figure of Roger Krywald.
For a moment, Murphy peered down at the bed inside, wondering if the man was already dead, if he was endangering himself for no purpose. But then he noticed Krywald’s left hand twitch, and realized he had no option. He leaned back again, pulled out the Daewoo pistol and slipped off the safety catch, concealing the weapon behind his body and pointing it at the ground.
When he checked the ward again, the three figures out in the corridor had now moved away slightly, so Murphy knew that this was about the best chance he was likely to get. The window in front of him was armoured glass, designed to prevent any violent patient from jumping through it. Murphy knew he wouldn’t be able to knock a hole in it easily, even with a rock, but it would offer almost no resistance to a 9mm Parabellum bullet.
Stepping slightly away from the wall, he aimed his pistol through the window at Krywald’s still form. When he squeezed the trigger, the pistol coughed once, and a neat hole appeared in the window, surrounded by concentric rings of shattered glass. A brass cartridge case span through the air, as the second round was chambered by the recoil action, and Murphy watched Krywald’s body shudder with the impact.
