Authors: James Barrington
‘Beats the shit out of me, too,’ Delaney growled. ‘If our boys come up with anything else, you’ll be the first to know. And you find out anything, you tell me –
otherwise, don’t call me, and I won’t call you.’
‘Got it,’ Westwood replied, and put down the phone.
Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean
They swam slowly with easy, energy-conserving strokes towards the hollow shell of the Learjet’s fuselage. Richter stopped at the rear end, beside what had once been
the tail-plane and engine nacelle, and looked closely at what was still visible of the registration number. Someone – presumably Spiros Aristides – had cleaned off some of the marine
growth, so the letter ‘N’ could clearly be seen.
Richter gestured to Crane for the waterproof board and pencil, and he passed them over. Richter pointed at the letter ‘N’ and wrote down ‘USA’. Then he cleaned more
growth off the fuselage, looked again at the registration number and copied it onto the board below the word he’d just written. With this, he could initiate a check through the Federal
Aviation Administration database and then positively identify the aircraft. That was probably the single most important piece of information he was likely to collect from the wreckage.
The forward end of the fuselage was a mess. The entire cockpit had been torn away, either on impact with the surface of the Mediterranean or during the aircraft’s subsequent plunge to the
bottom of the sea, so the front of the passenger cabin gaped wide open.
Due to the depth of water, there hadn’t been the huge amount of colonization in and around the wreckage that would have occurred if the plane had crashed at a shallower level, but there
was still enough marine growth to soften the edges of the torn metal and obscure the shape of whatever objects remained inside the cabin.
The two men switched on their torches before peering cautiously inside. It was pretty much as Spiros Aristides had explained it to Nico in the village bar. The dancing torch beams illuminated
five aircraft seats, the sixth having apparently been ripped away from the floor, probably on impact with the water.
Two of these seats were unoccupied, but all the others held disintegrating human skeletons, strapped in. Richter was no anatomist, but from the size of their skulls he guessed that all three
victims were male. On the cabin floor, between the two rows of seats, he spotted a bulky black object, and a pile of what looked like tools and instruments beside it. Richter swam cautiously over
and examined it more closely. The black object seemed to be an empty doctor’s bag and, on prodding the pile beside it, Richter was able to identify an array of forceps, tweezers and
scalpels.
It wasn’t therefore a great leap of reasoning to deduce that at least one of the corpses nearby had been a doctor, but that didn’t help Richter work out why the aircraft had been
shot down in the first place. And he was quite certain that it had been blown out of the sky: the traces of the missile that had virtually torn the port engine from its mounting were unmistakable
to his trained eyes.
He moved slowly and carefully through the cabin, ensuring he didn’t snag his aqualung hoses on anything sharp. Apart from the doctor’s bag, whatever clues there were to the identity
of the three corpses had probably long since vanished, so Richter realized that he was almost certainly wasting his time. The bodies were now little more than skeletons, and while a forensic
pathologist might identify their sex and age from their bones, and even come up with their names if their dental records were on file, there was virtually nothing he could do down here in the dark
at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
The cabin floor was covered in debris and marine growth, so even slight movements by either diver caused eddies of sediment to rise in clouds from the floor, reducing visibility. But Richter
persevered in searching anyway, and found exactly nothing until he got right to the back of the cabin. There was a scattering of debris against the rear bulkhead and, prodding at it more in hope
than expectation, he was rewarded by a tiny silvery gleam. He stretched out his gloved hand to grab at it. It was bigger than he had expected, heavier too, and of a vaguely familiar shape.
Gripping the object firmly in his left hand, Richter reached down to his right calf and pulled his diving knife from its rubber sheath. When he hit his discovery smartly with the back of the
blade a chunk of marine encrustation fell off, and he knew immediately what it was. He put it carefully into the mesh bag attached to his weight belt and was again prodding the pile of debris when
Crane tapped him urgently on the arm, gesturing towards the front of the cabin.
Richter looked at him, and Crane waved again towards the rent in the fuselage. He took off and swam swiftly in that direction with Richter following. The diving officer swung round in a tight
circle, grabbing hold of the edge of one of the seats and pointed under it. Richter stopped beside him and looked down.
During his first few months of employment with the Foreign Operations Executive, Richter had spent a considerable amount of time attending various training courses that enabled him to recognize
and handle proficiently most types of modern handguns, submachine-guns and assault rifles, and so on. At the same time he’d also been taught to identify a wide variety of explosive devices,
both improvised and manufactured, while receiving a basic instruction in fuses and detonators. So he had no difficulty at all in recognizing the two M118 Composition Block Demolition Charges lying
side by side under the seat, despite their unusually bulky appearance. Only the pencil detonators sticking out of them were new to him.
St Spiridon Forensic Laboratory, Irakleío, Crete
The samples flown from Kandíra to Irakleío by Merlin were of two very different types. The majority were specimens of tissue gathered during the autopsy on
Spiros Aristides, which had been whisked straight into the medical section of the laboratory for histological and toxicological analysis. The rest were a motley collection of dust, fluff and soil
samples gathered from inside the dead man’s house or from the ground immediately outside it, plus swabs and scrapings from the walls, doors and furniture of his living room and bedroom
– even the whisky bottle and glass that he had presumably drunk from before lying down on his bed. The medical samples were immediately subjected to a battery of well-established tests, while
the glass and bottle were dusted for fingerprints and the sediment in them analysed, but about all the laboratory could do with the dust and other bits was to scan them through the microscope.
So that’s exactly what they did. Starting with the scrapings from the walls and doors and most of the furniture, they found nothing. The fluff revealed nothing either, and nor did the soil
samples, at least when scrutinized through a conventional light microscope. But when the laboratory technician used a scanning electron microscope to examine the scrapings collected from the old
oak table in Aristides’s living room, she noticed something she’d never seen before.
Before calling her supervisor over, she tried a technique she’d employed previously with some success on similar samples, and prepared another specimen for examination in the SEM. When she
looked carefully at this second image, she was frankly astonished.
Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Pacing up and down in front of his desk, Westwood looked for inspiration. The logic of the situation seemed undeniable, and he was now feeling in agreement with Walter
Hicks. Two men had been killed on the same day in the same area, and there seemed to be only three linking factors. First, eyewitness and forensic evidence strongly suggested that both victims had
known their murderer. Second, it seemed probable that the same perpetrator had carried out both crimes, as subsequently confirmed by Delaney’s forensic evidence. Third, the only thing that
seemed to connect the two victims was their years of service in the Operations Directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency.
But Westwood had found nothing at all in the case files that he had studied so diligently to provide any kind of a motive for these murders, especially so long after both men had retired from
the Company. But the fact that the killings had happened meant there had to be a motive, so Westwood had presumably just missed it.
Was there, he wondered, any other way to look at the evidence – some piece of lateral thinking that would enable him to consider the data he had extracted from a different perspective? And
time was now getting short. Walter Hicks hadn’t been riding Westwood so far, but he would certainly be expecting some results fairly soon.
‘Time,’ Westwood muttered to himself, pacing the carpet while wondering whether another shot of caffeine would help pummel his brain into action.
Time
.
Suddenly he stopped short. Time? That
would
be another way of looking at the data. A timeline of both men’s careers side by side. Westwood forgot all about getting himself another
cup of coffee and returned to his desk.
He took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote ‘RICHARDS’ and ‘HAWKINS’ in capital letters at the top of it. Then he checked the two deceased agents’ personnel files and
on the left-hand side of the page below the name he wrote the month and year that James Richards had joined the CIA – August 1958.
For a few moments Westwood just sat and stared at the date: nearly half a century ago. What possible relevance could there be in such ancient history? He shook his head, picked up James
Richards’s personnel file and began scanning through it, recording the start and finish dates of every course, every posting and every operation that the man had been involved in. When
he’d finished, he did exactly the same for agent Charles Hawkins.
St Spiridon Forensic Laboratory, Irakleío, Crete
‘What is it?’ the supervisor asked, peering over the technician’s shoulder at the image on the screen. You don’t
look
through a scanning
electron microscope: the samples being examined are held in a vacuum chamber and the ‘viewing’ is carried out on a closed-circuit television screen positioned beside the apparatus
itself.
Typically, the SEM offers a range of magnifications from about fifteen up to around two hundred thousand, allowing progressively finer and finer details of the object to be observed. The sample
needs to be very carefully prepared to withstand the vacuum inside the chamber, and also has to be modified to conduct electricity because the sample is scanned with a stream of electrons, not
light waves. This process is usually done by coating it with a very thin layer of gold.
Once made ready, the specimen is placed carefully on a small tray attached to the inside of the door of the vacuum chamber, the door itself is then closed and sealed and the air pumped out. Once
a vacuum has been created, a gun at the top of the microscope fires a beam of electrons downwards through a series of magnetic lenses, which focus the beam on a very tiny area.
That spot of energy is then moved backwards and forwards across the surface of the sample by a series of coils: this is the ‘scanning’ part of the SEM. As the beam hits the specimen,
secondary electrons are dislodged from its surface. These are counted by a detector, which sends the information to an amplifier, and the final image that appears on the screen is created by
counting the electrons emitted by the sample.
‘I don’t know,’ the technician replied. ‘It looks like some kind of a spore, but not one I’ve ever seen before.’
‘Where did it originate?’
‘I found it in the scrapings from the dining table in the house belonging to this man Spiros Aristides – the index case.’
The black-and-white image of a handful of spherical objects appeared on the screen – because the SEM uses electrons the image will never appear in colour, although printed images often
have false colour added. The detail generated by the equipment was remarkable, but even with a magnification of one hundred and fifty thousand there was, frankly, little to see: just a collection
of tiny spore-like items.
‘Actually,’ the technician said, swiftly readying the electron microscope to receive the second specimen, ‘that wasn’t what I wanted you to see.’ As soon as the
vacuum had been dispelled she unlocked and pulled open the airtight door, then removed the first specimen and replaced it with the second one. ‘When I saw those things, I wondered if they
were lying dormant. So I added a small amount of water to a second sample, prepared that for the SEM and then examined it too. This,’ she finished, as the screen came to life, ‘is what
I wanted you to look at.’
The supervisor leaned closer, his mouth dropping open in astonishment. The microscopic spherical objects were still there, but all, without exception, had burst open and the sample was now a
mass of what looked like virus particles, but not, the supervisor noted immediately, with the characteristic thread-like shape of a filovirus.
‘Well, the good news is it’s definitely not Ebola or Marburg,’ he said. ‘The bad news is that I don’t know what it is. If I had to guess, I’d say it was some
kind of bovine virus. The only thing I’ve seen that looks anything like it is BLV – Bovine Lymphotrophic or Leukaemia Virus – but that makes no sense at all. That virus only
infects cattle and it’s very slow-acting: it attacks the lymph glands and can eventually cause cancer. There’s no way that it can kill a healthy human being in less than twenty-four
hours.’
Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean
For Richter, time seemed to have stopped. He hung motionless in the water, figuring the angles. He could see the two demolition charges under the seat in front of him and
he knew perfectly well that if either or both of them exploded the biggest remnant of his body anybody might subsequently find would be a tooth.
Naturally, that worried him. What also worried him was the fact that the charges he could see appeared to have been tossed into the cabin at random: for a proper demolition job they should have
been placed in strategic locations to ensure the total destruction of the aircraft. The casual manner in which they had been dumped suggested that possibly there were others scattered under the
seats, in the piles of debris, or even outside the fuselage.