James Barrington - Pandemic

Rawlins raised his eyebrows. ‘Who were the victims?’

‘Charles Hawkins, James Richards and Henry Butcher.’

Rawlins shook his head. ‘I don’t think I ever ran into any of them.’

‘You probably wouldn’t have, Henry: they were well before your time. In fact, all three of them retired over ten years ago.’

‘But if they’re long retired, why the hell did somebody need to kill them?’

‘That,’ Westwood said, ‘is what I’d like to know. But whoever the killer is, he’s absolutely ruthless. He not only killed Hawkins, but he took out his wife as well, and Henry Butcher was already in a deep coma in a hospital when he was murdered. What’s worrying me is that the killer probably still works right here in this building. And that’s why I’ve been running about trying to find someone who fits the very basic profile I’ve so far been able to put together.’

‘Which is?’ Rawlins asked.

‘He had to have been employed by the Company at least as early as nineteen sixty-nine or seventy, probably in Operations or Intelligence, and he’s likely to be still working here now in some senior position.’

‘And that’s it?’ Rawlins asked, incredulous.

‘That’s it,’ Westwood confirmed, ‘and that’s why I’ve been tying up your staff, Henry. I have to say I didn’t expect a personal visit over it,’ Westwood added with a smile.

Henry Rawlins smiled back. ‘Normally I wouldn’t bother, but this morning we received a high-priority signal request from CIA London, and my staff considered it important enough to call me in. The British Secret Intelligence Service has been inquiring about a bunch of people they believe were CIA officers in the early seventies.’

‘Really?’

‘And guess what,’ Rawlins added, ‘some of the names they’ve got are the same as those you’ve just mentioned.’

Western Crete

Richter drove Murphy’s rented Peugeot up to Tavronítis and then turned right towards Chaniá and Réthymno, putting some distance between himself and the two corpses he’d left behind. He stopped in Máleme, dumped the Peugeot there and reclaimed his own Renault hire car. He then drove out of the town towards Chaniá. On reaching Plataniás, he pulled off the road and reached into his jacket pocket.

For obvious reasons, he had switched off both the mobile phones he was carrying when he’d donned the old man’s hat and coat. Now he switched them both on again and, selecting the mobile that Ross had given him, fished out the notebook in which the dead man had written the contact number for SIS Crete. He dialled this and asked for Fitzpatrick. Thirty seconds later the SIS man was on the line.

‘I’ve taken care of that matter we discussed,’ Richter said.

‘That’s “taken care of” as in what, exactly?’

‘You could describe it as a terminal solution. The man who encountered Charles Ross is no longer with us, and nor is the cleaner somebody sent out to take care of him.’

‘Cleaner?’ Fitzpatrick asked. ‘What cleaner? It’s the first I’ve heard of that.’

‘Me too,’ Richter replied. ‘I talked to Watson – real name Richard Stein – before he got ventilated—’

‘Your doing?’

‘Oddly enough, no,’ Richter said. ‘I had every intention of eliminating him, but somebody else did the job before I got the chance. From what Stein told me, my guess is that this whole operation was a double-blind set in motion by Stein’s CIA briefing officer in the States. He sent three agents out here to Crete to totally destroy the wreck of the Learjet and recover all the evidence, and then sent out a cleaner – he was called Murphy – to kill them and take away the evidence. And then, probably, he’d already got somebody else organized in the States to kill the killer.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Fitzpatrick said. ‘This guy is prepared to kill three or four CIA agents just to eliminate all traces of some thirty-year-old Company operation? Why? What the hell is he trying to protect?’

‘I wish I knew. Anyway, I need to explain what happened, so you’ll need to take notes. Ready?’

‘Ready.’

Richter described the location between Zounáki and Nterés where the abandoned Seat and the bodies could be found. ‘Somebody may well have stumbled across them by now,’ Richter said, ‘in which case the Cretan police will already be involved. I tried to set the scene so that it would look like both men died after a shoot-out, with no third-party involvement. I don’t know how good forensic science is here on Crete, so I can’t predict how the police will interpret the scene, but there are a few things you should know before you talk to them.

‘First, the Cordoba has four bullet holes in it: one through the boot lid, one in the driver’s door, another in the passenger door, and one that destroyed the right front wheel. In fact, the hole in the passenger side door is an exit hole, so there were only three hits on the car. All those shots came from a Dragunov sniper rifle that I found around three hundred metres from where the vehicle was stopped.’

‘A Dragunov? I’ve not seen one of those for a while,’ Fitzpatrick commented.

‘Nor me.’

‘What did you do with it – the Dragunov, I mean?’

‘I left it where it was. Unless the Cretan police realize the shots that hit the car came from a rifle, not a pistol, they’ll have no reason to go looking for another weapon. Obviously, if they find it, the “gunfight at the OK Corral” scenario goes straight out of the window.

‘I searched the scene and I couldn’t find any of the Dragunov’s bullets, or even any fragments. But if the police decide to analyse the traces of copper on the bullet holes in the Seat and compare that with the copper jackets of the nine-millimetre slugs in the Daewoo and SIG pistols, they’ll probably find a difference in the composition. That would be a bad idea, so perhaps you can talk them out of conducting too deep an investigation.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Fitzpatrick confirmed. ‘Anything else?’

‘Only to request a light touch in checking the rest of the crime scene. I was responsible for the elimination of Murphy – he’s the one you’ll find holding the Daewoo – and I’ve no doubt I may have left some traces at the scene. I was wearing gloves, but there’ll be hairs, clothing fibres, all that kind of thing.

‘The ideal conclusion for the Cretan police to draw would be that Stein killed their officer in Kandíra, and also the diver whose body we recovered from the sea near Gávdos. There’s a police officer called Inspector Lavat who’s up to speed on those two killings, so I suggest you bring him into the loop.

‘In Chaniá, you could argue that Stein killed his colleague, real name Roger Krywald, though he was near death in the hospital, to avoid any possibility of him talking. In fact, according to Stein, Krywald was killed by Murphy.

‘Then, back in Réthymno, Stein discovered Charles Ross in his hotel room and killed him. Perhaps you could suggest that Six received a tip-off about this renegade American agent. After that Stein, with four killings already under his belt, tried to escape from Crete – perhaps heading for a boat or helicopter, which he’d arranged to pick him up somewhere on the west coast.

‘He’d got himself as far as Máleme when he was intercepted by Murphy – I don’t know if that’s his real name or an alias, but he’s got to be carrying some kind of ID. They drove off the main road and up into the hills, got involved in a confrontation and shot each other to death. End of story, but perhaps you could dress up Murphy’s role so that he becomes a US undercover police officer, hot on Stein’s trail.’