Chapter 22
Friday
Richter heard what he thought was a cough in his earpiece and ignored it, but then the crash as Ross’s body hit the floor told him that something had gone badly wrong. He said nothing and listened acutely, but the sounds he now heard made no immediate sense – a rustling noise, a door opening, a couple of footsteps. Next heavy breathing and then Ross’s phone was abruptly switched off, which told him pretty much all he needed to know. Obviously contestant number three had returned to his room. The more he re-ran the sequence of sounds in his mind, the more that cough had sounded like the report of a silenced pistol.
Richter started to move: out of the coffee shop and across the lobby to the main stairs and lifts. Not running, because that could attract unwanted attention, but moving quickly and smoothly. He ignored the lifts – they would just be too slow – and took the stairs. As he reached the first floor, he stopped dead.
Apart from two tiny chambermaids, arms full of linen, he had seen nobody else using either the stairs or the lifts since his colleague had ascended to the third floor. That meant there had to be a back staircase, something neither he nor Ross had investigated earlier. Hindsight was always a wonderful comfort.
On the first-floor landing, Richter looked in both directions. About ten feet away, he spotted a notice in red lettering screwed to the wall, and ran over to study it. It was an emergency evacuation plan, in four languages, complete with a diagram of the hotel’s entire floor layout. A fire escape and rear staircase were indicated at the end of the right-hand corridor.
Richter turned and ran, crashed through the fire doors at the far end and began scrambling as quickly as he could down the stairs. As he reached the bottom and pushed open the outside door, he was just in time to see a light blue Seat saloon – maybe a Cordoba or a Toledo – swing left out of the opposite side of the car park and accelerate hard along the adjoining street and out of sight.
Richter pulled a small notebook and ballpoint pen out of his pocket and made a brief note, then headed back inside the hotel and climbed the stairs to the third floor. The door to room 306 was closed and had automatically locked. Unlike Charles Ross, Richter had no lock-picking skills, but he was in no mood to wait around for somebody with a pass-key. He stepped back from the door and kicked it hard, with the flat of his foot, right above the lock. The door creaked but held firm.
The third time his foot hit it, the door crashed open and Richter stepped inside, his Browning 9mm pistol cocked and safety catch off, held out in front of him in the classic two-handed combat grip. He saw Ross lying motionless on the floor at the foot of the bed and stepped across to him. One glance at the surprisingly small dark red stain in the centre of his chest told the whole tale, but Richter checked for a pulse anyway. Two minutes later he left the room, went down the stairs and out through the lobby.
He crossed the street to a cafe, sat down at a table and ordered a coffee from the waiter. He then pulled out his mobile phone and notebook, checked the emergency contact number Ross had given him earlier for the duty SIS officer and dialled. A voice answered on the second ring.
‘This is Summer Lightning,’ Richter said. ‘I need a clean-up team at the hotel in Rethymno. Mickey Mouse didn’t make it.’
John Westwood was pleased at the speed with which the Personnel Department managed to generate the information he wanted, but unpleasantly surprised by the number of names on the list. Over two and a half thousand people fitted his initial criteria, and he knew he’d have to whittle that number down considerably before he could start any kind of a detailed investigation.
He picked up the internal phone and dialled Personnel. ‘Thanks for the listing,’ he said, ‘but I need to apply some filters to reduce it to a manageable size. Using the information you’ve supplied as a base, eliminate all agents known to be currently on vacation outside the continental United States, also those who are hospitalized, and any known to be incapacitated. By that I mean people recovering at home from a broken leg or in long-term care, that kind of thing. Some guy who rang in last Tuesday claiming he had a migraine doesn’t count.’
Thirty minutes later a new print-out lay on his desk, but there were still just over eighteen hundred names left, far too many to make a search feasible.
Westwood pondered for some time before he applied the next obvious filter, simply because he wasn’t sure he was wise to do so. He had no idea exactly where the killer was based, but wherever it was it had to be within fairly easy reach of the state of Virginia. Instinctively, Westwood thought Mr X was probably sitting in an office in the same building at Langley as himself right then, but that was an assumption he certainly couldn’t rely on.
So he made his decision and called Personnel again. ‘Now eliminate all those based outside Washington, DC, Maryland and Virginia,’ he ordered.
After four hours of successive filters, he had whittled the listing down to fifty-seven people, and couldn’t think of anything else to reduce the number any further. So now it was just down to footwork, checking the personnel file of each agent in turn.
Three minutes after he’d terminated his call to the duty SIS officer, Richter’s mobile rang.
‘This is Tyler Hardin, Mr Richter, and I’ve got some news for you.’
‘Let me guess,’ Richter said. ‘The man calling himself Curtis is dead?’
‘Correct, but that isn’t the news I think you’ll want to hear. Curtis was going to die anyway: maybe this afternoon, maybe tonight, but he certainly wouldn’t have seen tomorrow. No, the news is that somebody wasn’t prepared to wait for this pathogen to take its course. The virus didn’t kill Curtis – someone with a pistol did that.’
Richter wasn’t often lost for words, but that stumped him for a moment. ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘Curtis was unconscious, even comatose, and due to die within a few hours, no matter what, and somebody still felt they had to eliminate him? That makes no sense.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Hardin replied, ‘but there’s no doubt about what happened. I’ve just pulled two nine- millimetre slugs out of the victim’s chest, and the local police have taken them away for testing. I’ll let you know what they come back with, if anything.’
‘Thanks, Tyler. I wish I could say I knew what the hell is going on here.’
Hardin laughed briefly. ‘Join the club.’
Stein knew he was running for his life. He was still uncertain exactly how he stood with McCready, but he guessed that he was now a disposable asset and that McCready would have him killed as soon as he’d handed over the crucial file and the flasks. That was one problem.
Another problem was the dead man he’d left behind him in the hotel at Rethymno. He had no idea who he was, but the label inside his jacket had been sewn there by a tailor in London’s Jermyn Street and, although far from conclusive, it did at least suggest that the man was a Brit.
Whoever he was, Stein guessed that by now the Cretan police would have been called in and furnished with a description of Stein himself, and maybe even a photofit, by the hotel desk clerk. So he was going to have to rigorously avoid making eye contact with the local cops until he could get off this island.
The mystery dead man also meant that he dare not risk trying to catch a passenger ferry or regular airline flight out of Crete, because the police would be watching out for him at all the ports and airports. It was looking more and more likely, therefore, that he was going to have to accept McCready’s highly suspect offer of a helicopter flight to the US Navy frigate. That didn’t please Stein at all.
In fact, about the only good news in his life right then was that at least he still felt fine, so he presumed that his rudimentary precautions earlier had prevented the lethal virus from infecting him. In the circumstances that
