had been the Seat turning off the road at Tavronitis, and Murphy had had to close the gap between the two vehicles quickly so as not to lose sight of his quarry.
He’d been a quarter of a mile behind the Seat as it left the village of Zounaki. The moment he’d seen the other car pull off the road, Murphy had turned his own vehicle around, driven a short distance back and parked out of sight. He’d opened the boot, grabbed the Dragunov and run to the top of the gentle hill in search of what he’d hoped was a good vantage point.
He’d just settled down to watch the Seat when the driver’s door opened and a man climbed out, glanced around him, then opened the right-hand rear passenger door and leaned inside. A few seconds later he’d closed the door and climbed back into the driver’s seat. Murphy had braced himself, wondering if he was going to drive away, which would mean a hard run down the hill back to his Peugeot, but there was no sign yet of the Seat’s engine starting.
Murphy hadn’t even got a decent look at the man – he’d still been focusing his binoculars when the stranger had climbed out of the car – but he was certain he’d never seen him before. What he’d registered was a fair- haired male, and that was about all. Having had some previous experience of John Nicholson’s operating methods, for a brief while Murphy wondered if he’d been set up, whether Nicholson had sent somebody else to help Stein get off the island, but a few moments’ thought told him this idea was a non-starter. So that really left only one possibility: some other intelligence organization had somehow got involved, and they had got to Stein before Murphy could complete his contract.
So what should he do about this newcomer? Eliminating an American agent was bad enough: killing an agent of a foreign intelligence service could prove disastrous, especially when he had no idea which one of them was involved. The last thing Murphy wanted was to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for an assassin sent after him by the SVR or Mossad.
Ideally, Murphy needed to email Nicholson to advise him of the changed situation and to request advice, but there was absolutely no way that he was going to have the luxury of doing that. Sooner or later, either Stein would emerge from the stationary car or it would drive away and Murphy would follow it again, until Stein did get out. Whatever scenario, Murphy had no option but to kill Stein and eventually probably the stranger as well.
Then another thought struck him. Killing Stein was his remaining priority-two task. His highest priority was recovering the case and the file. He’d been assuming all along that Stein would have both items with him, but what if the stranger had kidnapped Stein and the case and file might be stuck in a hotel safe or even locked up inside another car? Maybe the killing of Stein would just have to wait a while.
‘So where’s the case?’ Richter demanded.
‘It’s in the trunk of this car,’ Stein replied. ‘Krywald opened it and he got infected, so I’ve wrapped it in a couple of garbage bags. I swear there’s nothing you can say or do that will make me open it up for you. You want it, you take it. You open it up, and in twelve hours you’ll be dead.’
‘I don’t want to open it,’ Richter said, ‘just make sure it’s really there. I’ll free your arms, and then we’ll go and check it together.’ He opened the door and slid out. Moving round the car, he opened the rear passenger door and reached in with a knife to slice through the cable tie securing Stein’s bound wrists to the grab handle. Then he seized the American agent and pulled him out of the back seat. They stepped around to the Seat’s rear and Richter popped open the boot.
‘That’s it,’ Stein nodded towards a bulky oblong object wrapped in heavy-duty black plastic. ‘I suggest you leave it right where it is.’
Richter nodded, but nevertheless reached into the boot and grabbed the black plastic object, lifting it a few inches. Stein stepped back immediately, panic written all over his face.
‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘I believe you.’
Murphy stared through his binoculars, watching the two men intently. Then he grunted in satisfaction, opened up the cardboard box beside him and hauled out the Dragunov. He spread the bipod legs, inserted the magazine, switched on the laser sight, and in one fluid movement hauled the rifle into his shoulder and chambered a round. He looked through the Bushnell scope towards the Seat Cordoba and the two men standing beside it.
The black-wrapped object sitting in the trunk had to be the case, just because of the way Stein and the stranger were reacting to it, and if the case was in the trunk, then for sure the file must be there too or somewhere else in the car. That meant Murphy could complete his remaining priority-two task, killing Richard Stein, and get rid of the other man at the same time.
Murphy picked his target, the Bushnell variable-power telescopic sight seeming to pull the two men towards him. He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, and then gently squeezed the trigger.
Chapter 24
Saturday
For a few seconds Richter just stared at the innocent-looking black plastic bag in the open boot of the Seat Cordoba. It could have contained almost anything – a week’s worth of garbage, a collection of old clothes, even a dismembered corpse – but everything that he could imagine, even a corpse, would have been better than the invisible and utterly deadly pathogen that he knew was inside it.
Something had been nagging away at Richter’s subconscious, since he’d started talking to the US agent. It was something Stein had said, or had maybe not said, and it had eluded him until this precise moment.
‘You said that Krywald was as good as dead,’ Richter said, ‘but in fact he died yesterday, in the hospital at Chania.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Stein replied. ‘He was pretty far gone when I took him to the emergency room, but there was no way I was going to go back to check on him.’
Richter was watching Stein closely and, as far as he could tell, the man was telling the truth. This confirmed a nagging suspicion he’d entertained ever since Hardin explained how Roger Krywald had died.
‘The virus didn’t kill him,’ Richter continued. ‘Somebody punched a couple of nine-millimetre slugs through his chest, and I had that down to you.’
Stein turned pale, and shook his head decisively. ‘It wasn’t me. Look, if I’d wanted to take him out I could have shot him by the side of the road somewhere. But I didn’t go back to the hospital just to kill him.’
‘So who did then?’ Richter wondered.
‘I don’t know,’ Stein said, ‘but my guess is that McCready has sent a cleaner here to Crete. He’ll have orders to take out all of us, recover the case and get it back to the States.’ Even as he said the words, Stein glanced around nervously, conscious how the two of them were standing exposed on open ground. ‘We should get the hell away from here. We’re like two ducks in a shooting gallery.’
Richter glanced round quickly, then back towards Stein and suddenly saw a tiny red mark appear in the middle of the American agent’s chest. It signified a laser sight, almost certainly attached to the barrel of a sniper rifle.
He reacted immediately. The sniper was going to save him a job. He took one step back towards the car, then shoved Stein sideways and ran off towards the driver’s side of the Seat.
At precisely the moment Mike Murphy squeezed the trigger, Stein stumbled, lost both his footing and his balance, his arms still lashed together in front of him, and fell sprawling to the ground. The bullet that Murphy had aimed missed him completely, but drilled a neat hole through the right-hand side of the Cordoba’s boot lid then smashed into a rock some twenty yards beyond, ricocheting off it and into the distance.
As he leapt into the driver’s seat, Richter glanced in the interior mirror. He spotted the bullet hole in the boot lid and he’d already seen the spray of debris from the rock as the 7.62mm bullet had struck it. He didn’t need any particular expertise in trigonometry to estimate the position of the gunman: the sniper was located behind him and on higher ground.
Richter was armed. He had the 9mm Browning drawn from HMS
