Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  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?’

  ‘Just what I said at the start of the meeting, John. Liaison. Frank will be handling the strictly criminal aspects of this investigation. What I want you to do is dig back through the old files here at Langley. Identify all the cases that Hawkins and Richards worked on together, just in case what we’re looking at here is some kind of revenge killing spree – a guy assassinating Company agents who were involved in some operation that went wrong, or even went right.’

  ‘Not quite so many of those, Walter,’ Westwood said with a smile.

  Hicks just looked at him. ‘Smart answer,’ he muttered. ‘And, while you’re doing that, identify everybody else who was involved with these two guys, just in case we can stop any other retired employees getting themselves knocked off.’

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  Tyler Hardin heard the throb of the Merlin’s rotors as it swept over Kandíra on its way back to the Invincible. It had, he assumed, just brought the Operations Officer who would liaise with the ship to provide flights as and when required. What he did know for certain was that the man who’d called himself Richter was now on board the helicopter and returning to the Invincible.

  The Brit was a puzzle. Hardin knew very little about the British Medical Research Council, but what he did know didn’t fit at all with what Richter had been saying. The MRC was certainly involved in research – that was, after all, what the letter ‘R’ stood for – but not at all the kind of research that Richter had referred to. Hardin had never heard of the MRC sending out field investigators to the site of a medical emergency and, if they had done, he was certain that they would be qualified doctors. Sending a lay person to investigate a complex medical crisis would be completely pointless.

  No, he was quite satisfied that Richter was nothing whatever to do with the MRC, but was obviously some kind of investigator of considerable importance, otherwise they would not be ferrying him about the Mediterranean on board a British warship. No doubt, Hardin mused, he would find out the truth eventually.

  Mark Evans stood on the opposite side of their makeshift mortuary table. The two men, wearing Tyvek biological space suits and Racal hoods for safety, had set up a trestle table in the smaller, spare bedroom of Aristides’s house, simply because Hardin didn’t yet want to risk moving the corpse out of the building. Downstairs, Fisher and Kane were beginning an exhaustive search of the property, looking for any remaining trace of the infective agent.

  Once Hardin’s instrument boxes had been brought upstairs, they’d picked up Aristides’s body and carried it carefully from the room in which he had died, laid it flat on its back, and prepared to go to work.

  In broad terms, a hot autopsy – meaning the dissection of a potentially biohazardous corpse – is performed in very similar fashion to a normal post-mortem, but a range of additional precautions are put in place to protect the personnel involved. In a hospital or morgue, the body is placed on a specially designed mortuary trolley called a pan, incorporating a trough underneath to catch any fluid or other debris that might drop from the corpse and contaminate the floor. Additionally, the body is encased in at least two biohazard bags, both of which remain completely sealed until the autopsy itself is about to commence.

  The procedure will be carried out on a stainless-steel autopsy table, its upper surface made of either mesh or perforated steel. Above the table, below banks of high-wattage fluorescent lights, several microphones will be suspended to enable the pathologist to provide a running commentary.

  Unless the body is considered to be dangerously contaminated, full biohazard suits will not usually be worn. Although they provide the ultimate protection, they are cumbersome and uncomfortable, making it difficult to carry out the delicate procedures required. The tendency of the face masks to mist up doesn’t help either.

  Instead it is usual for the mortuary staff to wear three layers of lighter protection: over the normal scrub suits worn in operating theatres they wear surgical gowns, and over the gowns plastic waterproof aprons. Their hair is then covered with surgical caps, and their theatre shoes have plastic or paper covers fitted.

  The delicate areas most vulnerable to infection are the eyes, nose and mouth, so plastic safety goggles will be worn, and a surgeon’s mask made of biofilter material designed to trap biological particles. The hands are arguably the most likely parts of the body to become infected, due to the sharp instruments used, so at least one and usually two pairs of surgical gloves will be worn, with an additional pair of heavier rubber kitchen gloves over them.

  The prosector or pathologist who physically performs the post-mortem examination also wears a stainless-steel chain-mail glove over his non-dominant hand. This is essential, because most accidental injuries are to the hand that isn’t holding the surgical saw or scalpel. Over this, a rubber kitchen glove will be worn to provide a better grip.

  Tyler Hardin looked around the spare bedroom and shrugged. The contrast between the gleaming and totally equipped mortuary suites in the States where he normally conducted his autopsies and this small and scruffy bedroom could hardly have been greater.

  Réthymno, Crete

  Mike Murphy opened his eyes to look at the travelling alarm clock sitting on the small bedside table. For a few moments he had absolutely no idea where he was. Then recollection and awareness returned. It was late afternoon, the room was bright with the sun slanting through the windows, and he found he’d slept for well over twelve hours.

  For a few minutes he just lay there, listening to the noises of the hotel and the sound of the traffic on the road outside, then he swung his legs off the bed, walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. While he waited for the water temperature to rise to a level he considered acceptable, he opened his small case and pulled out his washing kit, then stripped off, tested the temperature and stepped into the cubicle.

  Once he’d dressed, he unconsciously mirrored the actions Roger Krywald had taken late the previous evening, switching on his laptop computer and using his mobile phone to log on to a classified and unlisted service provider in America to check for any messages from Nicholson.

  There was only one: a confirmation that phase one of the operation had been completed, and that the other group – named the First Team by Nicholson – had already located and recovered the case. Murphy had no idea what was in the case, and he had no interest in finding out. His orders had been extraordinarily simple: he was to retrieve the case from the First Team, and then eliminate all members of that team.

/>   Nicholson had included two other pieces of information. The first was a note of the real names, aliases and descriptions of the three members of the First Team, and details of the hotel they had been booked into. The second was a reminder to Murphy to expect a delivery at his own hotel imminently.

  Fifteen minutes later Murphy descended the stairs to the lobby and crossed to the desk clerk. ‘My name’s White,’ he said, producing a genuine American passport bearing that name, but which had never been anywhere near the US State Department. ‘I’m expecting a couple of packages to be delivered here. Some camera equipment, a tripod and so on.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the clerk replied, in heavily accented English. ‘They arrived earlier this afternoon.’ He reached down behind the desk and lifted up two heavy boxes. ‘Here you are.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Murphy said. ‘Do I need to sign for them?’ The clerk shook his head. ‘No, sir, they were delivered personally by your friend.’

  Murphy had no idea who his ‘friend’ might be, nor again had the slightest interest in finding out. He remained one of the least curious people one could ever encounter, concerned only with the essentials necessary to get a job done. He nodded his thanks, picked up the two packages and returned to his room.

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  ‘How many autopsies have you performed since med school, Mark?’ Hardin asked.

  Evans lifted his eyes from Aristides’s corpse and met Hardin’s questioning gaze.

  ‘Exactly or approximately?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘None at all,’ Evans said, and Hardin could see a smile forming on the younger man’s face.

  ‘OK,’ Hardin reached out to switch on the portable tape recorder. ‘I’m the prosector here and you’re my assistant, so if there’s anything you don’t understand I’ll talk you through it. Now, normally a body would arrive at the dissection table on a gurney and contained inside a couple of biohazard bags. After weighing the cadaver we’d unzip those, lift the body onto the table and have the bags themselves destroyed. We’ll consider that stage to have already been reached – so, what’s next?’