catcher?’
‘No.’ Richter ignored the jibe. ‘I want a series of orders sent to the
‘Why ask me? You can probably see the bloody ship from where you’re sitting now. Just use the phone or a radio or something.’
‘It would be better if these orders were official, from the Admiralty. I had a slight run-in with the Commander earlier, and I think I’d encounter fewer problems and more cooperation if the instructions came from above.’
Simpson’s chuckle echoed in the earpiece. ‘You seem to have a real knack for losing friends and failing to impress people, Richter. So, what do you want the ship to do for you?’
‘Just some basic surveillance. This last American agent’s running scared. His picture’s soon going to be plastered across the walls at all the ferry ports and airports, and every local cop will have a photograph in his pocket. The only way he’s going to get off Crete is if somebody organizes a pick-up from a US Navy vessel or even a submarine. My guess is that the rendezvous will be somewhere on the western end of the island. So I’d like the
‘Then what? You want it shot down or sunk as well?’
‘You’re joking, I presume. I just want it tracked, and as soon as the landfall location can be established, I want to know about it.’
‘Sounds a bit of a long shot to me, Richter. Even if the ship spots a chopper on radar, by the time they inform you and you find your car keys and drive to wherever it’s intending to land, the chances are it will already have picked up your man and headed back out to sea.’
‘It is a long shot, as you say, but right now it’s pretty much all I’ve got, unless the local plods can eyeball this comedian’s car pretty soon. If they can, that changes everything.’
‘OK, I’ll set the wheels in motion. And, Richter, try and keep the body count down from now on, will you? No doubt this American agent’s going to come to grief if you’ve got anything to do with it, but if you could leave at least some of the local population still standing when you’ve finished whatever the hell you’re doing I’m sure the Cretan tourist board would be grateful.’
‘Ever thought about a career on the stage, Simpson?’ Richter pressed the button to disconnect.
John Nicholson wasn’t exactly worried, but he was certainly concerned. He had realized that the killings of C. J. Hawkins and James Richards – he was hopeful that Henry Butcher’s death would be attributed to natural causes, and Mary Hawkins’s elimination was irrelevant as far as he was concerned – would result in a police investigation. He was also aware that it wouldn’t take the local police long to deduce that the same perpetrator had been responsible for all the deaths. Discovering that the only solid link between the elderly men was their previous employment in the Central Intelligence Agency would, he reckoned, take them longer, hopefully a lot longer, to establish. Nevertheless, sooner or later the police would make this connection and some kind of an internal inquiry would be certain to follow.
He’d meanwhile done what he could to monitor the kind of activity that an investigation was bound to generate, although there was already almost nothing that anybody could find. The hard-copy files had been removed from the Registry and shredded; he’d done that himself over thirty years ago, as a junior agent acting on the specific instructions and with the written authorization – which had later been destroyed as well – of Henry Butcher, who had been the ranking agent responsible for CAIP. The electronic records in the Walnut database had been purged as far as possible and the file entries – the only data that couldn’t be removed – had been sealed under the signature of an authority that would be absolutely impossible to breach.
Nicholson was therefore satisfied that the only information anyone would now be able to find would be the name of the operation, the names of the senior agents responsible for it, and the registration number of a crashed Learjet. Even Sherlock Holmes himself would have had a job deducing much from such paucity of data.
But still he’d set some tripwires, the first of them now nearly thirty years old – automatic triggers that would be pulled by anybody accessing particular electronic files, or inputting specific keywords into Walnut’s search facility, or even requesting certain hard-copy files from the Registry. Each tripwire would tell him the date, time, nature of the request or search string and, most importantly, the name of the originating agent for each occurrence, and all such information was recorded in a log file to which only he had access.
Ever since the Learjet had been found, Nicholson had been checking the log file on a daily basis, and wasn’t unduly surprised when one name kept on appearing, since logic suggested that a single agent would be instructed to look into the implications of the deaths. Therefore he’d been able to pinpoint the date on which the internal investigation had started, and to a large extent been able to follow the subsequent thought processes of the investigating officer.
He checked his office computer that afternoon and scanned the log file again. Westwood’s last request, for nearly sixty personnel files, showed that, far from the guy’s investigation dying a death due to lack of data, as Nicholson had hoped, it seemed to be hotting up.
He knew John Westwood by sight, but that was all, their respective divisions being sufficiently diverse to ensure that their professional paths hadn’t crossed. He knew little about the man, but if he continued probing, it was possible John Westwood might have to meet with an accident, and soon.
A little under two hours after Richter’s call to Simpson, the ship’s propeller revolutions increased slightly and the carrier began a slow transit towards the west, in company with its Royal Fleet Auxiliary supply ships and two escorting frigates. In the Air Operations Department, Ops 3 began calculating an outline flying programme for the following day. The new orders from the
This was the kind of activity that the ship had frequently carried out during exercises, but had only rarely employed in a real world environment. Ops 3 had already decided that the Sea Harriers could help out as well, running CAP to supplement the coverage of the ship’s own radars and those of the escorting frigates and the ASaC Sea Kings and ASW Merlins.
The supplementary orders were unusual too: any possible landfall location was to be advised immediately to a secure mobile telephone, which only a handful of people knew was in Paul Richter’s possession.
Once he’d lost sight of Stein’s car, Mike Murphy had spent several increasingly anxious hours trying to find it again.
On the assumption that Stein intended to spend the night in Maleme, he guessed the American would choose one of the anonymous town-centre hotels and more easily lose himself in the crowds, but despite checking every single hotel car park, and all on-street parking areas, he saw no sign of a blue Seat Cordoba.
So he widened his search area to include the outskirts, but it was almost ten that night before he finally struck lucky. He heaved a sigh of relief when he eventually spotted the Seat at the rear of a hotel, in a car park that served two neighbouring hotels also.
His immediate problem was deciding which establishment Stein had checked in to, and at that time of night there seemed no easy way to do it. Unless Stein was propping up the bar in one of them, which seemed foolhardy and extremely unlikely, Murphy reckoned he was going to have to wait until the morning.
But he decided to take a look anyway. All three hotel bars were open, doing a modest trade, but nobody who looked even slightly like Richard Stein was in any of them. Ten minutes later, Murphy walked out of the third one he had investigated and went back to his car. There wasn’t much more he could do that night. Stein would certainly have used a false name, so even if he could devise some way of getting a look at all three hotel registers there was no way he could confirm whether or not Stein was a resident.
Murphy was pragmatic by nature. With no obvious way of finding his target that night, he hauled his
