an expensive private jet? There simply had to be something significant inside them.
For the third time, he picked one up and shook it, close to his ear, but could still detect no sound of anything moving inside. Perhaps, he surmised, they might contain small amounts of some very pure drug: heroin or maybe cocaine. The only way to find out was to open one.
Aristides studied the top of one flask. He couldn’t see the stopper at all, because the whole top end of the container was covered in a thick red covering of some sort, as if the mouth had been dipped into a bowl of molten wax to seal it. Confining the wax was a wire net, whose thin strands cut deep into the surface and were twisted together round the neck of the flask to secure it. Whoever had sealed these flasks had definitely not intended that one might come open by accident. Aristides nodded to himself. Perhaps it
In his toolbox Aristides had a pair of sharp wire-cutters, and it was the work of only a few seconds to snip off the twisted knots of wire at the neck of the flask. Pulling the wire strands out of the wax took longer, but after ten minutes he had removed them all, and was examining the unconfined wax itself.
The simplest way to get the stuff off, Aristides thought, was to melt it again, so he walked through to his kitchen and reached down beside the cooker to turn on the gas supply from the large blue cylinder attached to it. Then he rotated the discoloured knob on the front of the cooker and struck a match to light the gas. He’d actually walked back to his dining table and picked up the sealed vacuum flask before his natural caution reasserted itself.
Suppose the heat from the gas destroyed the contents before the wax melted? Or, worse, what if he was wrong about what it contained – maybe an explosive, not drugs – and the flask blew up in his hands?
No, the safest option was his knife. Aristides went back and switched off the gas cylinder, then returned to the table. He opened his old clasp knife again and eased its point gently into the red wax covering the neck of the container, then rotated the flask in his left hand while the right held the blade of the knife firmly, at an angle, against the flask itself. The knife was sharp and cut easily through the wax, the blade spiralling closer and closer to the top of the flask as he turned it. Then he stopped, put down the knife and seized the loose end of the wax, pulling it off like the skin of a peeled apple. The wax covering the actual mouth of the flask was much thicker than that on its sides, so he had to insert the point of the knife blade under it to lever it off.
Aristides looked carefully at the stopper – now revealed – and raised his eyebrows. It had been locked in place, with a small keyhole right in its centre, and the Greek could tell immediately that this was intended for some kind of security key. His trick with a screwdriver wouldn’t work again.
He sat thoughtfully at the rough oak table, hefting the small steel flask in his hand, considering his options. The precautions that had been taken with these containers were like nothing he had ever seen before, and in his long career as a diver he’d been involved in the recovery and opening of numerous safes and strongboxes found on wrecked ships. Some had been little more than padlocked containers, yielding to a simple wrench from a pry- bar or a blow from a hammer, while others had required oxy-acetylene cutters or even a thermic lance to cut around the lock or slice an access hole in the back or side of a safe. But none that he could recall had ever involved such serious multi-layered protection for such a small object.
Aristides could think of only two possible reasons why such elaborate precautions had been taken: the contents had to be either extremely valuable or very dangerous. The question was, which?
The top-floor office was spacious, light and airy, and had a clear and unobstructed view of the Virginia woodlands surrounding the Headquarters complex, but the big man wearing the charcoal-grey suit and sitting in a leather swivel chair had no eyes for the natural beauty of the locality. His attention was fixed on six eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs spread out on the desk in front of him.
The desk itself was big and impressive, an oak-framed antique with a walnut veneer. It was his personal property, having been in his family for at least eighty years. Apart from the photographs and three steel-mesh document trays, the only other objects on the desk were two telephones and a solid silver writing set. A tidy and organized desk, he had always believed, denoted a tidy and organized mind.
Beside the desk stood a purpose-built console, which housed a computer terminal with direct access to the CIA’s extensive databases, to the Internet, and to a host of other data sources including all the major news feeds.
He had arranged five of the photographs in a curving horizontal line across his desk, and in chronological order. The sixth picture he had placed off to one side. That one had been taken on the transit by the KH-12 bird three days earlier, and just showed an open boat, but no sign of an occupant.
It was that picture that had originally both alerted and alarmed the Director, particularly when he had checked the precise geographical location specified by the satellite, and printed at the head of each photograph. The next few passes had revealed nothing in that area, and he had for a brief period hoped and almost believed that the first picture had been an isolated occurrence of no long-term significance.
Then another pass had generated the remaining five pictures, taken at thirty-second intervals as the Keyhole satellite had over-flown the target area. These were superficially very similar. Close to the centre of each frame was the unmistakable shape of the same open boat – N-PIC had measured its length at just over eighteen feet – with a small wheelhouse at its stern.
The CIA officer wasn’t Photographic Interpretation trained, so each picture had been annotated by the N-PIC analysts at his request. Most of the labels were self-evident – wheelhouse, ropes, cleats, radar reflector, tyres acting as fenders, and so on – but he was going to have to accept their word that the vague oblong shapes visible along both sides of the boat towards the stern were aqualung racks, one with a set still in place.
In the first two pictures, the single occupant of the boat was leaning over the side, reaching down for something, or hauling something in. Until he’d studied the third picture, the CIA officer had wondered briefly if perhaps this was all a false alarm, and that what he was looking at was nothing more than a fisherman hauling up a lobster pot. Then he’d checked a Mediterranean chart and realized that the water there was far too deep for any lobster fisherman to foolishly try to catch anything.
And, anyway, in the third photograph the shape of an aqualung tank was clearly visible beside the man in the boat, even without the N-PIC label, so the analysts had been right about the type of boat, although they hadn’t been able to identify it by a name or a number.
The fourth picture showed three aqualung tanks resting beside the anonymous figure in the diving boat, but it was one N-PIC label in the fifth and final photograph that had caused the CIA officer most concern.
The major difference between this picture and the preceding four was that the figure was no longer bending over the side of the boat. Instead, the KH-12 camera had caught him just entering – or perhaps standing beside – the wheelhouse. For at least the sixth time, the CIA officer leaned forward over the last photograph and stared intently at one tiny section of it through his desk magnifying glass.
Clearly visible on the side of the boat, where the man had been bending over earlier, was a very slight protuberance. Next to that was an inked line joining it to the N-PIC label, that simply stated ‘ROPE IN WATER AND CLEATED TO GUNWALE’.
And that meant, or it could mean, that there was something at the submerged end of the rope.
‘Where did you spot him?’ Richter asked. It was late evening and he and Simpson were sitting in a military briefing-room at the Brindisi-Casale air base. Brindisi is a small airport, just outside the town of that name, handling a couple of dozen civilian flights a day to and from Rome, Milan and Venice. It is home to 9 Brigata Aerea of 15 Stormo, which flies Sikorsky HH-3F Search and Rescue helicopters, and also to the United Nations Logistic Base, which supports humanitarian aid and peacekeeping operations.
Rather than go to Rome or to any other location where the Italian Secret Service maintained a presence, they had decided it was both safer and easier to brief Richter within the confines of the airfield. He was, after all, the only member of any Western Intelligence service who could positively identify Lomas/Lomosolov. Even Simpson had wanted reassurance on that point.
‘You can do it, Richter?’ he had asked.
Richter thought back to that hotel in West London, and to the image of Lomas’s smiling face staring at him
