He sighted and fired again, this bullet striking Krywald’s chest within two inches of the first wound, then ducked down below the level of the window, his eyes scanning the ground. Murphy picked up one cartridge case, then found the second, and put them carefully into his jacket pocket. He slid the pistol back into the rear waistband of his trousers, under his jacket, crouched low until well clear of the side-ward windows, then he stood upright and headed calmly back the way he had come.
He’d been out there in the grassy quadrangle for less than ninety seconds, and the first of his Priority Two tasks was successfully completed.
‘Are their rooms likely to be kept guarded?’ Ross asked. The two men had moved further down the street and were now standing about a hundred yards away from the hotel.
‘There’s no reason why they should be,’ Richter said. ‘My guess is that we found one of the three already shot by his companions after he’d completed the diving for them, and another is dying in the hospital in Chania. That just leaves contestant number three, the guy who gave his name as Richard Watson at the hospital, and who’s probably shitting himself in case he might be infected with the same bug that’s killing Curtis. So my guess is that guarding his room will be the last thing on his mind. He’ll be looking for a way off this island really fast, and it’s even possible that he may already have left.’
‘So you reckon we can just walk in?’
‘I hope so,’ Richter muttered.
‘OK. I’ll go up first and inspect the lock. Unless there’s a problem, I’ll open the door and check out the room. You’d better stay in the hotel lobby as a look-out.’
‘Fine with me,’ Richter said.
‘And we’re looking for what, exactly?’ Ross let the question hang in the air.
‘That,’ Richter confessed, ‘is the awkward bit. I really don’t know. And there may be nothing there to find anyway if our third man has already legged it. Whatever it is, it’s got to be reasonably small if it can be pulled out of a submerged plane wreck and carried to the surface by a solo diver. So it’s probably a small box or chest, and possibly they’ve already put it in a briefcase or suitcase, that kind of thing.’
‘OK,’ Ross said grimly, ‘let’s do it.’
Shrill alarms from the cardiac and EEG monitors echoed along the hospital corridor as Krywald’s heart stopped beating. Hardin span back towards the door of the ward and wrenched it open. He registered instantly the flat lines running across both ECG and EEG displays and knew immediately that the patient was dead. There was obviously no point in considering resuscitation, so Hardin walked across to the left of the bed and switched off the equipment. Instantly the alarms fell silent.
Though expecting it since he’d first stepped into the patient’s room, it was, like every other death he’d witnessed in his career, still something of a shock to him. He stepped closer to the bed and stared down at Curtis’s body. On looking more closely, he spotted the two open wounds in the left side of the patient’s chest. Bullet wounds were something he rarely saw, but Hardin had not the slightest trouble identifying them.
He swung round as quickly as the space suit would let him, searching for the assailant who he suspected, for an instant, might still be hidden somewhere in the ward with them. Then he saw the two rings of broken glass in the window with the bullet-holes in the centre of them, and realized that the killer had struck from outside.
He stepped across to the window and cautiously peered through it, but the grassy quadrangle was deserted. Whoever had killed the mysterious Curtis had already made good his escape.
‘Is that Mr Westwood?’
‘Yes, Dr Grant,’ Westwood recognized the voice immediately. ‘You’ve got the autopsy results already?’
‘No, no. The procedure won’t be completed for another half-hour or so, and then we’ll have to wait for the toxicology results. But I thought you’d be interested to know that you were right. Henry Butcher was murdered.’
Westwood’s reply didn’t sound even slightly surprised. ‘But how do you know that if the autopsy isn’t finished?’
‘Simple,’ Grant replied. ‘After we last talked, I made a point of examining Mr Butcher’s room and the equipment contained in it. As you probably noticed, he was receiving saline solution through an intravenous drip, and I noticed a tiny discolouration in the bottle. Saline solution is, of course, completely clear. So I checked the seal on the bottle and found a puncture, the kind that could be made by a hypodermic needle. I immediately had the contents analysed, and the lab found traces of a vegetable alkaloid.’ Grant paused, as if in triumph.
‘Thank you, Dr Grant,’ Westwood said. ‘I’d like to hear the final analysis result when you have it, but my guess is that you’ll find Butcher was killed by a dose of coniine. That seems to be our mystery man’s preferred modus operandi.’
Richard Stein had decided on two things. First, he wasn’t going to wait around any longer than necessary in the hotel at Rethymno, which meant he had to sneak out the back way, climb into his hire car and, as they say in the old westerns, get out of town. He was reasonably certain that neither McCready nor anybody else could have linked the Seat to him, because he’d paid for it using cash, and the credit card that the hire company had swiped as security had come from the private stash of documents that he always carried with him.
The second priority was to make a final check of any emails waiting for him on the server in America, just in case there was anything he could use. Just moments after he logged on, he sat reading an email from McCready with an escalating feeling of disbelief.
It didn’t exactly say
The trick, however, would be climbing into that helicopter without getting his brains blown out. Stein wasn’t stupid, so he realized immediately that McCready’s arrangement meant that the following afternoon his location would be both known and fixed, giving an ideal opportunity for a sniper to take him down. Clearly he would have to take extreme precautions in checking out the rendezvous well before the chopper arrived.
In the meantime, there was nothing to stop him getting out of this hotel and finding somewhere else to spend his last night on Crete.
Ross and Richter entered the hotel at more or less the same instant that Richard Stein shut down his laptop computer. Richter turned left and walked into the coffee shop where he found a vacant seat that offered a good view of the lobby, lifts and stairs. He watched as Ross strode across to the two adjacent elevators. As he waited for the lift to arrive, Ross dialled a number on his mobile phone and then slipped it into his jacket pocket.
Richter’s phone rang – a new unit supplied by Ross for the duration of this operation. He picked it up and answered it. ‘Richter.’
‘Ross. Loud and clear.’
His voice
Just then the lift arrived, and Ross stepped inside. Richter watched as the doors slid closed. ‘Going up,’ Ross
