Pandemic (33 page)

‘You have a booking for us, I hope, in the name of Wilson? A boat and some diving equipment?’

Monedes stared at him as though through a haze. ‘A booking?’ he echoed as he leaned against the shop doorway while fumbling with a large bunch of keys.

‘Wilson. The name is Wilson,’ Stein repeated with as much patience as he could muster. ‘The booking was made by phone from America.’

Monedes’s face cleared somewhat, but it was only because he had finally found the right key. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said cheerfully, turning the key in the lock and pushing
open the door. The Cypriot staggered over to the counter and lurched behind it. ‘What can I get you?’ he asked as he reached down and pulled up a glass bottle half-f of a clear
liquid with a very faint bluish tinge. The label identified it as ‘Raki’, an alternative name for
tsikoudia
– though not related to the Turkish intoxicant of the same
name.

Stein waved the bottle away and repeated his question, but Monedes appeared totally engrossed in removing the top.

‘We need a boat and some aqualungs,’ Stein said.

‘I have aqualungs,’ Monedes giggled. ‘Lots of aqualungs. You’ve come to the right place.’ He finally unscrewed the bottle cap, smiled at the two men, put the neck
of it to his lips and took a gulp. Then he slammed the bottle back on the counter, gazed unsteadily at Stein for about a minute, pointed towards the open door with his left hand and slowly toppled
sideways.

‘Shit,’ Krywald growled as the Greek hit the floor. ‘That’s all we needed right now.’

Stein stepped forward to check that Monedes was still breathing, then rolled the unconscious man onto his side into the recovery position. ‘He’ll have the mother of all hangovers
when he finally wakes up.’

‘Yeah, well that’s
his
problem.
Our
problem is that we still need to acquire a boat and some scuba equipment for Elias.’

‘That’s not really a problem. We can pick it up in the morning,’ Stein said. ‘Look, it’s too late for him to do any diving today anyway. We can go find a hotel, get
back here first thing in the morning and we’ll still have the job done by lunchtime. That means we can be out of here tomorrow afternoon and on our way back to the States tomorrow
night.’

Krywald considered this for a moment. ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ he nodded. ‘Go fetch Elias and the car, and we’ll see what we can find here.’

Thursday
Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

‘Hullo, John,’ Jayne Taylor murmured, as Westwood pushed open the outer door to the office of the Director of Operations (Clandestine Services) and walked in.
‘Good morning, Jayne. You’re looking good.’ As she invariably did, in fact, Westwood thought, and wondered again at the rumours that periodically surfaced about the precise nature
of the relationship between Walter Hicks and his personal assistant. Jayne Taylor’s coal-black hair and huge brown eyes had inspired more than one fantasy even in Westwood, who had a wife he
adored and two children he doted on, though this mental image crumbled almost immediately he included the lumbering figure of Walter Hicks.

‘Thank you, kind sir.’ Jayne Taylor smiled back at him. ‘You can go right in – he’s expecting you.’

Westwood headed across to the inner office door, knocked and entered.

‘Hi, John. Take a seat and grab a coffee.’ Hicks gestured towards the conference table where another man was already sitting. He was wearing a ‘Visitor’ tag so Westwood
knew immediately that he wasn’t Company personnel.

‘Frank, this is John Westwood. He’s the head of the Foreign Intelligence Staff here at Langley, and he’ll act as your CIA liaison officer for the duration of this
investigation.’

‘What investigation?’ Westwood asked.

‘All in good time, John,’ Hicks said. ‘Right, this is Detective Delaney of the Washington DC Police Department, who’s actually heading up this case.’

Delaney was slightly overweight, had lost most of his hair and was perspiring gently even in the air-conditioned cool of the office. ‘The name’s Frank, Mr Westwood,’ he said,
clambering to his feet and extending his hand.

‘And I’m John,’ Westwood replied, before sitting down opposite him.

‘OK,’ Hicks said. ‘John knows nothing about this yet, so perhaps you could fill him in on why you’re here, Frank.’

‘Sure.’ Delaney placed his arms squarely on the table in front of him. ‘Yesterday two former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency died in mysterious circumstances. One
was certainly murdered and the other died as a result of a drug overdose, but we’re reasonably sure it wasn’t either an accident or suicide.’

Westwood pulled a cup and saucer towards him and reached out for the coffee pot. ‘Who were these two men?’ he asked.

‘The man who was clearly murdered was James Richards. He was a widower who lived alone in a small community called Crystal Springs – that’s just south of the old Route 66,
about twelve, fifteen miles west of DC. He had a small house in a quiet area and none of his neighbours seemed to know him well. Certainly none of them knew he was ex-CIA: they all seemed to think
he’d been involved in some kind of communications business.’

Westwood poured his coffee and took a sip.

‘Richards was found this morning by a neighbour who had noticed that his front door was slightly ajar. She knocked, but got no reply and went inside. She found Richards lying beside the
fireplace in his lounge, his head stove in and blood everywhere. She screamed and ran out to dial nine one one.’ Delaney was warming to his theme. ‘Now obviously Richards was murdered
– that’s not in dispute – and he died yesterday evening. The initial medical report suggests around ten to ten-thirty local time – not earlier than nine and not later than
midnight. What bothers us were some anomalies at the crime scene.’

Delaney held up a slightly podgy hand and began ticking off points on his fingers in turn. ‘First, he had a non-fatal bullet wound inflicted by a small-calibre weapon on his left upper
arm, but none of his neighbours heard anything resembling a gunshot yesterday evening, though all of them we’ve interviewed were at home when Richards must have died. That means whoever
pulled the trigger was using a silencer, which is not a common accessory for any burglar to carry. If they carry any firearm at all, it’s usually a snub-nosed revolver or a small automatic
– the extra length of a silencer just makes a pistol more cumbersome and a lot more difficult to conceal.

‘Second, as far as we’ve been able to check, nothing was taken. Richards had a few nice pieces of hi-fi and video equipment and couple of expensive cameras plus around a thousand
bucks in cash right there in his living room, and the perp just left them and walked away.

‘Third, we found no evidence of a break-in. As far as we can tell, the perp came right through the front door, which means Richards let him into the house himself. So pretty obviously he
knew his attacker.’

‘So maybe a falling-out between friends?’ Westwood hazarded.

‘Possible, but we think that’s unlikely,’ Delaney said. ‘People don’t usually go calling on their buddies carrying silenced pistols unless they’ve got a real
serious attitude problem.’

‘The weapon didn’t belong to Richards?’ Hicks asked.

‘No, sir,’ Delaney replied. ‘Richards had a couple of pistols in the house, with permits, naturally. Neither of them had been fired for some time, and neither had a silencer
fitted. That’s another anomaly – the pistols were found in a drawer in the desk in his lounge, but as far as we can see Richards didn’t go anywhere near the desk. If the killer
had been a burglar or someone else he didn’t know and trust, we would expect him to try to pick up one of those weapons just as a precaution.

‘No,’ Delaney said firmly, ‘what we’re looking at here is a murder committed by someone Richards knew well and trusted enough to let into his home late in the evening. It
looks like the perp pulled the gun on him and he fought back – that’s how he picked up the wound in his arm. Then the killer finished him off with the fireside poker.’

‘Why use the poker?’ Westwood asked.

‘Probably didn’t want to risk a second shot. Even a silenced weapon makes some noise, but nobody would hear him crushing Richards’s skull with a poker unless they were right
there in the room with him.’

‘What about the bullet that wounded Richards?’

Delaney shook his head. ‘The perp took it with him. It went right through the victim’s arm, but missed the bone. We found a hole in some wooden panelling where we guess the guy who
pulled the trigger dug it out and took it away. Our best guess is it was probably either a twenty-two or a point-two-five-calibre weapon, certainly no larger than a thirty-two, but that’s
about it.’

As Delaney fell silent, Walter Hicks leaned forward, looking at Westwood. ‘Right, John, I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering why the murder of a former CIA employee
would bring the Washington DC police to the Company, right?’

Westwood nodded. Hicks was sharp, and that had been almost exactly what Westwood had been thinking as Delaney completed his account of the crime.

‘If it was just the murder of James Richards, we wouldn’t get involved at all. Granted, there are some peculiarities about the murder itself, but in the normal course of events
there’s no way we would become involved in what seems purely a police matter. What has brought us together here is the second death on the same day. Right, Frank, it’s your ball –
you run with it.’

‘OK,’ Delaney said. ‘The second death could possibly have been suicide, but we don’t think so. The victim’s name was Charles Hawkins. He retired from the Agency a
couple of years before Richards and lived with his wife – her name’s Mary – in Popes Creek on the edge of the Potomac, a few miles south of DC. It’s the same house he owned
when he was an Agency employee. They had three children, now all grown up and living away from here. That’s the background.

‘Late last night a guy out walking his dog at Lower Cedar Point – that’s just south of the Nice Memorial Bridge on the Maryland side of the river – noticed a car parked
near the water, and figured that the man sitting behind the wheel was just sleeping. He came back with his dog a half-hour or so later and the car was still there, with the driver slouched in
exactly the same position. The dog-walker peered in and couldn’t see any signs of life, so he knocked on the window and then tried the door when he got no response. The door wasn’t
locked.

‘Having had some training as a paramedic, this guy felt for a pulse but couldn’t find one. He closed the car door, walked to the nearest phone and dialled for an ambulance. When the
meat wagon arrived the paramedics tried for a pulse as well. After confirming that the driver was dead, they checked his identity. They found his driver’s licence, noted his home address and
requested a black-and-white to go tell his wife the good news.

‘And that’s when we got involved, because when the squad car arrived at Popes Creek, they found that Mrs Mary Hawkins was also deceased. She’d died of a drug overdose, same as
her husband, but in her case it certainly hadn’t been self-induced. There were bruises all over her where somebody had knocked her about, then forced a pill down her throat.’

‘Could have been a domestic?’ Westwood interjected. ‘Maybe Hawkins killed his wife then killed himself in a fit of remorse. It’s been known to happen.’

Delaney nodded. ‘Certainly has. However, when one of the neighbours saw Charles Hawkins driving away from his home at around seven-thirty that evening, Mary Hawkins was waving him goodbye
from the front door. Hawkins never returned home, but around ten minutes after he’d left, another neighbour spotted an unknown male arrive at the Hawkins residence. Mrs Hawkins let him
inside, so presumably she knew him. Nobody, as far as we know, saw this unsub – the unknown subject – leave.’

‘Anybody get a description of this guy?’ Westwood asked.

Delaney nodded. ‘Yes, but it’s not going to help a lot. White male, six feet tall, dark coat.’

‘That’s it?’ Westwood asked, incredulous.

‘That’s it,’ Delaney echoed. ‘It’s a quiet, good-quality area. People don’t scrutinize what their neighbours are doing, or what their visitors look like.
We’re lucky we’ve got somebody who saw the unsub at all, otherwise we’d be looking at a murder–suicide scenario pretty much like the one you sketched out.’

‘Right,’ Walter Hicks said, ‘you see the pattern. With Richards it’s been by deduction, but in the case of Mrs Hawkins by direct observation. The killer – my
money’s on a single perpetrator – was known to two of his victims, and by implication was also known to Charles Hawkins. There were no marks of violence on Hawkins’s body, so we
presume that the only way he was persuaded to swallow the tablet that killed him was by the perp holding a gun to his head.’

‘What was in the tablet? Were Hawkins and his wife killed with the same substance?’

Delaney shuffled through the papers in front of him on the conference table and pulled out a single slightly crumpled sheet.

‘OK, we’re still waiting for some final tests to be completed, but the initial results suggest that both the Hawkinses swallowed the same poison. The last time I talked to the
toxicologist he was waiting for the X-ray crystallography results, but in his opinion it was a vegetable alkaloid. He thinks it was probably a highly concentrated form of coniine.’

‘Never heard of it,’ Westwood said.

‘It’s the active principle in hemlock,’ Delaney said. ‘You know, what the ancient Greeks used when they wanted to take the night train.’

Westwood looked puzzled for a second or two, then nodded. ‘You mean, commit suicide?’

‘Yup,’ Delaney replied.

Westwood glanced up at Hicks, who’d just lit a cigar. He was trying to cut down, as he told anyone who asked him, but as far as Westwood could see he was smoking fewer, but much larger,
cigars than before, which probably meant his nicotine intake was pretty much the same as it had always been.

‘OK, Walter,’ Westwood said. ‘I see that there’s a pattern, and it’s probably more than a coincidence that two ex-CIA employees have been killed on the same day,
but what exactly is my role in all this?’