better part of an hour. Richter had tied his wrists together using plastic cable ties, then secured them to the grab handle above the right-hand passenger door. Stein’s arms were pulled uncomfortably upwards as his torso slumped forwards, but Richter wasn’t bothered about his comfort. As far as he was concerned Stein was already dead: it was just a matter of when he’d actually stop breathing. But he had wanted to ensure that the American agent was completely immobilized.
Stein lifted his head, his eyes blinking slowly as he looked around him. The first thing he saw was Richter staring back at him, and the second thing he noticed was the muzzle of a 9mm Browning Hi-Power pointing at his head.
‘Try to move,’ Richter growled, ‘and you’ll never move again.’
‘Oh, shit.’ Stein’s voice was low and racked with pain. ‘You were that goddamn old man I saw working the street.’
Within ten minutes of the call from Fitzpatrick, Richter had been sitting in his Renault Clio hire car holding eighty miles an hour, en route from Rethymno to Maleme. As he’d reached the outskirts of the town he’d seen an old man shuffling along in the gutter and hauled the car to a stop. Using a selection of hand gestures and the handful of Greek words that he’d picked up since he’d arrived on Crete, he’d managed to do a convenient deal. The old man’s hat and coat in exchange for enough money for him to have an overcoat custom-made for him in London, unlikely though that possibility might be.
Having no idea when his target would leave the hotel, Richter had spent hours wandering about in the vicinity of the car park where he had seen the blue Seat. He had been seriously wondering if the American calling himself Watson or Jones was going to stay in his hotel all day, when he had at last spotted the man himself approaching the vehicle.
‘Did McCready send you?’ Stein suddenly asked from the back seat.
‘Who’s McCready?’
Stein leaned back in the seat, easing the pressure on his aching arms. For a moment he said nothing.
‘I just asked you a question,’ Richter said. ‘Who’s McCready?’
Instead of answering, Stein studied him curiously. ‘You’re a Brit,’ he decided.
‘Full marks for deduction,’ Richter said, ‘but you still haven’t answered me and I’m not a patient man. Tell me, who’s McCready?’
Stein shook his head. ‘McCready doesn’t matter,’ he muttered. ‘He was just our briefing officer back home, and I was kinda expecting him to have sent a welcoming committee here, after all the fuck-ups.’
‘Fuck-ups like killing the unarmed man in Rethymno? That kind of thing?’
‘Listen,’ Stein said, ‘I’m real sorry about that. He looked to me like he was going for a weapon.’ Richter just stared at him, saying nothing. ‘I’m sorry,’ Stein repeated. ‘I thought he was carrying. And who are you, anyway? Who are you working for?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
But Stein shook his head. ‘It might be,’ he said. ‘Are you a cop, or what?’ Still Richter didn’t reply. ‘OK, then I’ve got nothing to tell you,’ Stein added, finality in his voice.
What the hell? Richter thought. Whether or not this American knew who employed him probably didn’t matter.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘I work for British Intelligence. I presume you’re with the Company?’
Stein nodded, an expression of relief on his face. ‘OK, then, great. We’re on the same side.’
‘No fucking way,’ Richter snapped. ‘Any “special relationship” ended the moment you fired your pistol in Rethymno. Your itchy trigger finger killed a senior British SIS officer.’
‘I told you, that was an accident.’ Stein’s face grew pale as the implications of his action dawned on him. ‘I didn’t know who he was, I swear.’
‘You might be telling the truth,’ Richter said, ‘but I don’t see it that way, and neither will SIS.’
‘What are you going to do with me?’
Richter paused for a few moments before replying. ‘I haven’t decided yet. A lot depends on what you’re prepared to tell me. What was your function in this operation?’
‘I was only the linguist,’ Stein said, deciding to dumb down his role. ‘I speak fluent Greek, which was needed to get the job done. Look, I’ve about had it with this op. My partner’s as good as dead and I’m hauling around a file I don’t understand and a bug that’ll kill you in under a day. You work for an allied intelligence service, so if you want that fucking case and the file, you take ’em. Just let me get the hell out of here.’
‘It’s not that easy,’ Richter said, ‘and I’ve still got some questions. Who else was in the team?’
For a moment Stein didn’t reply, apparently considering his options.
Richter leaned slightly closer to him, and his voice, when he spoke, was frigid with menace. ‘Let me explain things. You have exactly two options. You talk to me, answer my questions, and there’s just a chance you can walk away from this. Clam up on me, and you’re just so much dead weight. I’ll haul you out of the car right now and put a bullet in your head. Is that clear enough?’
Stein looked at the Englishman, and didn’t for one second doubt that he meant exactly what he’d said. He gave a brief shrug. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘the diver was a guy named David Elias. He was an analyst, not from Operations, and he was only along because we needed somebody who could dive deep enough to place the charges.’
‘And once he’d done that he became expendable, right?’ Richter demanded.
‘McCready’s orders.’ Stein paused. ‘We didn’t like it at all, but—’
‘But you killed him anyway? Just like that police officer in Kandira? And the two old villagers?’
Stein nodded reluctantly. ‘Krywald killed the cop,’ he said, ‘not me.’
‘Who else was involved? And what’s your real name?’
‘It’s Richard Stein. There were just the three of us. The guy in charge was Roger Krywald.’
‘And the briefing?’ Richter pressed.
‘Just the bare minimum to get the job done,’ Stein muttered.
‘What exactly did the briefing officer tell you?’
‘We had to fly to Crete, locate some guy called Aristides, recover the case from him and destroy the wrecked aircraft.’
‘Did he explain why?’
‘No, he didn’t. You know about CIA covert ops, don’t you? He just told us it was classified Cosmic Top Secret and real urgent – Priority One. Recovery of the case and its contents was paramount; all other considerations were secondary.’
‘How were you supposed to be getting off the island?’ Richter changed tack.
‘McCready arranged a helicopter pick-up for me this afternoon out to the west of Platanos.’
‘And the big question,’ Richter said, ‘is what’s in those flasks?’
‘I didn’t look inside the case,’ Stein explained, ‘but Krywald mentioned there were only four of them although the case has spaces for twelve. He said one of them had been opened. I can’t tell you what’s in them because I don’t know, but it’s something fucking dangerous.’ Stein decided in that instant to say nothing about the file summary he’d found. ‘Krywald looked through the file, and so did I, but it didn’t mean a hell of a lot to us. Just a bunch of letters and memos and real long words. We worked out it involved some kind of operation in Africa, but that was about all. Krywald reckoned that the stiffs in the aircraft were a bunch of scientists who’d pulled some kind of lethal bug out of the rain forest, to develop it as a biological weapon.’ That made sense to Richter. It was an open secret that despite America’s official stance on biological and chemical warfare, to develop antidotes requires possession of the biological agents themselves. Of necessity, therefore, America has always possessed a huge variety of bioweapons, so extracting a new virus out of the rain forest so as to develop an antidote for it was indeed a likely scenario.
At that very moment Mike Murphy was little over two hundred yards away from the blue Seat, his Peugeot hire car tucked off the road and well out of sight. He was lying prone on the dusty ground, peering through a pair of compact binoculars up the hill towards the Cordoba from the shelter of a stunted bush. Beside him was the long cardboard box containing the Dragunov SVD sniper rifle, and as soon as he’d worked out what the hell was happening up there, he was planning on using it.
He’d picked up the Seat within a couple of minutes of the vehicle leaving the hotel car park in Maleme and he’d followed it easily enough as the driver picked up the main road and headed west. What he hadn’t anticipated
