Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  He’d meanwhile done what he could to monitor the kind of activity that an investigation was bound to generate, although there was already almost nothing that anybody could find. The hard-copy files had been removed from the Registry and shredded; he’d done that himself over thirty years ago, as a junior agent acting on the specific instructions and with the written authorization – which had later been destroyed as well – of Henry Butcher, who had been the ranking agent responsible for CAIP. The electronic records in the Walnut database had been purged as far as possible and the file entries – the only data that couldn’t be removed – had been sealed under the signature of an authority that would be absolutely impossible to breach.

  Nicholson was therefore satisfied that the only information anyone would now be able to find would be the name of the operation, the names of the senior agents responsible for it, and the registration number of a crashed Learjet. Even Sherlock Holmes himself would have had a job deducing much from such paucity of data.

  But still he’d set some tripwires, the first of them now nearly thirty years old – automatic triggers that would be pulled by anybody accessing particular electronic files, or inputting specific keywords into Walnut’s search facility, or even requesting certain hard-copy files from the Registry. Each tripwire would tell him the date, time, nature of the request or search string and, most importantly, the name of the originating agent for each occurrence, and all such information was recorded in a log file to which only he had access.

  Ever since the Learjet had been found, Nicholson had been checking the log file on a daily basis, and wasn’t unduly surprised when one name kept on appearing, since logic suggested that a single agent would be instructed to look into the implications of the deaths. Therefore he’d been able to pinpoint the date on which the internal investigation had started, and to a large extent been able to follow the subsequent thought processes of the investigating officer.

  He checked his office computer that afternoon and scanned the log file again. Westwood’s last request, for nearly sixty personnel files, showed that, far from the guy’s investigation dying a death due to lack of data, as Nicholson had hoped, it seemed to be hotting up.

  He knew John Westwood by sight, but that was all, their respective divisions being sufficiently diverse to ensure that their professional paths hadn’t crossed. He knew little about the man, but if he continued probing, it was possible John Westwood might have to meet with an accident, and soon.

  HMS Invincible, Sea of Crete

  A little under two hours after Richter’s call to Simpson, the ship’s propeller revolutions increased slightly and the carrier began a slow transit towards the west, in company with its Royal Fleet Auxiliary supply ships and two escorting frigates. In the Air Operations Department, Ops 3 began calculating an outline flying programme for the following day. The new orders from the Invincible’s operating authority specified a high level of surface, sub-surface and air surveillance of the Mediterranean to the west of the island of Crete, paying specific attention to any surface or airborne contacts that might make landfall on the island.

  This was the kind of activity that the ship had frequently carried out during exercises, but had only rarely employed in a real world environment. Ops 3 had already decided that the Sea Harriers could help out as well, running CAP to supplement the coverage of the ship’s own radars and those of the escorting frigates and the ASaC Sea Kings and ASW Merlins.

  The supplementary orders were unusual too: any possible landfall location was to be advised immediately to a secure mobile telephone, which only a handful of people knew was in Paul Richter’s possession.

  Máleme, Crete

  Once he’d lost sight of Stein’s car, Mike Murphy had spent several increasingly anxious hours trying to find it again.

  On the assumption that Stein intended to spend the night in Máleme, he guessed the American would choose one of the anonymous town-centre hotels and more easily lose himself in the crowds, but despite checking every single hotel car park, and all on-street parking areas, he saw no sign of a blue Seat Cordoba.

  So he widened his search area to include the outskirts, but it was almost ten that night before he finally struck lucky. He heaved a sigh of relief when he eventually spotted the Seat at the rear of a hotel, in a car park that served two neighbouring hotels also.

  His immediate problem was deciding which establishment Stein had checked in to, and at that time of night there seemed no easy way to do it. Unless Stein was propping up the bar in one of them, which seemed foolhardy and extremely unlikely, Murphy reckoned he was going to have to wait until the morning.

  But he decided to take a look anyway. All three hotel bars were open, doing a modest trade, but nobody who looked even slightly like Richard Stein was in any of them. Ten minutes later, Murphy walked out of the third one he had investigated and went back to his car. There wasn’t much more he could do that night. Stein would certainly have used a false name, so even if he could devise some way of getting a look at all three hotel registers there was no way he could confirm whether or not Stein was a resident.

  Murphy was pragmatic by nature. With no obvious way of finding his target that night, he hauled his overnight bag out of the back of the Peugeot and checked himself in to the middle hotel of the three establishments. Ensuring that the room he’d been given overlooked the rear car park, he went down to the bar and ordered a beer and a bar snack in lieu of the dinner he’d been forced to miss that evening.

  Just an hour after locating the Seat, Murphy climbed into his hotel bed, his travelling alarm clock set for six-thirty in the morning. He intended to be up and dressed long before Stein appeared in the car park below to reclaim his vehicle.

  Chapter 23

  Saturday

  Máleme, Crete

  George Pallios had been a police officer on Crete for almost his entire adult life. He’d been born in Chaniá, shared a small apartment in the town with his wife of six years and their two children and, when he thought about it at all, he guessed he would eventually die there. Always having wanted to become a police officer, from the day he first donned the uniform he had done his best to live up to the standards he knew were expected of him.

  It therefore had genuinely been something of a shock to realize that these standards included a certain amount of blind-eye activity in return for envelopes containing notes of fairly high denominations, but it hadn’t taken him too long to get comfortable with the idea. After all, most of his fellow officers seemed happy to do exactly the same thing.

  He’d also got used to not having to buy meals or drinks whenever he was in uniform. Most bar and restaurant owners were only too pleased to receive occasional visits from a local police officer – as a useful reminder to their clientele to behave – so they were more than happy to offer a beer or a glass of raki in exchange. Any proprietors whose hospitality was less forthcoming tended to find that their calls for assistance were answered tardily, or not at all.

  Life, in short, was pretty good most of the time. The worst part of his job, Pallios decided, was the night-shift. The streets were more or less deserted and almost everywhere was closed while the island slept. With no bars open where he could enjoy a glass or two, nothing much to look at in the towns apart from parked cars and closed doors, and an occasional sleepwalking goat on the country roads, Pallios sat behind the wheel of his patrol car and cruised slowly around, fingers tapping out tunes from one of the local radio stations.

  Where he drove was up to him, so long as he covered a specified minimum mileage. Tonight he’d started just after midnight in Chaniá and decided to spend some time cruising the tangle of roads linking Chaniá, Soúda and the Akrotíri peninsula. That yielded nothing of interest, and by three-thirty Pallios was driving out of Chaniá again and heading west.

  He drove slowly through the towns he came to, alert for any sign of trouble because, despite his relaxed and accommodating attitude, Pallios was, at heart, a lawman and he took his jo
b seriously. Galatás, Plataniás and Geráni: all were quiet. He skirted the edge of Máleme and drove on out to Kolymvári, arriving there a little after five. He debated then about following the main road to its natural end at Kastélli, but decided not to. He’d check Kolymvári and Máleme, then head back to Chaniá and call it a night.

  He reached Máleme at six and began a slow sweep through the town, passing the hotel where Stein had left his hire car at six-twenty. If he’d been much earlier, he probably wouldn’t have spotted the blue Seat Cordoba or at least realized it was blue because it would have been too dark to see the colour.

  In the early-morning light Pallios instantly noticed the vehicle as his eyes swept the car park of a small hotel on the outskirts, but he didn’t immediately react in any way. He drove on past the hotel without changing speed and continued around the next right-hand corner. There he stopped the car and switched off the engine. On a clipboard secured to the dashboard were several sheets of paper comprising current watch notices, warnings and other instructions. Pallios was certain one of them had mentioned a blue Seat.

  He flicked through the pages and then stopped at the one he sought. He memorized the registration number, but also noted the instruction – underlined and in bold type – not to approach the car or its driver. Pallios took a small pair of binoculars out of the glove box, climbed out of his patrol car, locked the door, checked that his pistol was loaded and the holster flap unclipped, and moved slowly back down the silent street towards the three adjoining hotels.

  Reaching the corner, he paused and visually checked up and down the street before continuing. He stopped again about seventy metres short of the car-park entrance, staying on the opposite side of the street and well out of sight of the hotel windows. There he raised the binoculars to his eyes and looked carefully at the front of the Seat Cordoba. Then he nodded in satisfaction, turned and retraced his steps.

  Three minutes later Pallios was a little over half a mile away, microphone in hand and describing the exact location of the parked car to his control room.

  Réthymno, Crete

  At six fifty the SIS mobile phone beside Richter’s bed began playing the theme tune from the television series Morse. Not for the first time he wished he could remember to change the tune to something – anything – else.

  ‘We’ve found the Seat,’ Fitzpatrick informed him. ‘It was spotted by a police officer in Máleme about half an hour ago in a hotel car park.’

  ‘Nobody was in it, I presume?’ Richter asked, waking up fast.

  ‘No. Following his orders, he didn’t approach it to feel the bonnet or anything to see if it had been there all night, but he confirmed the registration number. It’s definitely the car that this Watson or Jones character hired in Réthymno yesterday.’

  ‘What else has been done so far?’

  ‘Nothing at all. The orders were most specific: no approach to either the car or the driver. Once he was satisfied it was the right car, the cop just climbed back into his patrol car to radio in his report and drove away.’

  ‘Right,’ Richter reached for a notepad, ‘give me the details.’

  Máleme, Crete

  Murphy had settled his hotel bill in advance, explaining that he would have to leave very early in the morning. By six fifty-five he was sitting in the Peugeot, his bags stowed in the boot. The night before he’d positioned the car with an unobstructed view of the rear of the three hotels. That way, he would be able to spot Stein the moment he left his hotel to enter the car park.

  He couldn’t see the Seat itself, which was out of sight behind a Renault Espace and a Volkswagen Transporter, but he reckoned that was less important than covering the hotel exits: he wanted to be able to start his car and get mobile the moment Stein appeared. He planned to follow him as he drove away, then take him down somewhere quiet, recover the case and the file, and then get the hell off the island.

  It was cool so early in the morning, and Murphy ran the engine for a few minutes to get the heater working. Then he switched it off and settled down for what could be a very long wait.

  HMS Invincible, Sea of Crete

  It was quite amazing just how many surface contacts there were around the western rim of Crete, even that early in the morning. Most of them, as the Surface Picture Compiler knew, were fishing boats, ferries, yachts, power boats, ski boats and a host of other types of pleasure craft that were heading out into the mirrored blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean to take advantage of yet another beautiful day.

  The orders the SPC had been given were quite specific: he was to track and report any surface contacts that appeared to be heading for a landfall anywhere on the western coast. Theoretically, that meant he could disregard all those contacts heading away from the island, but the problem, as he’d realized almost immediately, was that the vast majority of those contacts were at some point going to turn round and head back the way they’d come, for lunch, a refuel, change of passengers, an overnight stop or whatever, so actually he was having to track almost everything that moved.

  Since coming on watch he’d been keeping a personal written tote, listing the track number he’d allocated to each contact through the computer system, the location where the radar had first detected it, usually within a few hundred metres of leaving whatever port it had departed from, and its approximate heading. That way, he hoped, he could effectively eliminate all those surface contacts that simply sailed from some Cretan harbour, headed out into the Mediterranean, and then turned round and came back again.

  But what he was really looking for were the unknown contacts, those vessels appearing on his radar screen from far out to the west, and especially the bigger ones that might carry a helicopter. Just after seven that morning, he spotted another one. This contact wasn’t yet being detected by the ship’s radar, but had been fed into the system by secure data-link from one of the two ASaC Sea Kings established in holding patterns some fifty miles to the west of the Invincible. It was heading almost due east, on a track that, if unchanged, would take it to a point just to the south of Crete. And it was big – much bigger than most of the stuff buzzing about the waters near the Invincible. As he’d done dozens of times already, he allocated a track number to the new contact and reported it to the Principal Warfare Officer at his console in the centre of the Operations Room.

  ‘PWO, SPC. New track number two three one, bearing two six two range one hundred and twenty miles, heading zero nine five. Source is ASaC data-link.’

  ‘SPC, PWO, roger. Maintain tracking. Report any changes of heading and when the contact reaches range fifty.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  The SPC bent over his display again, checking that every contact on his screen was wearing a computer-generated label of some sort, but the main focus of his attention was on the new track. Every sweep of the timebase around the radar screen showed it very slightly closer, and it was, the SPC thought, almost exactly what he’d been told to watch out for.

  And he was quite correct.

  Máleme, Crete

  Richard Stein woke up at seven-thirty, climbed out of bed and walked straight across to the window overlooking the car park at the rear. He pulled back the curtain a fraction and looked out carefully at the cars, at the adjacent streets and the adjoining properties, and saw absolutely nothing that seemed out of place. He shrugged, checked that the chair still jammed the room door, headed into the bathroom and took a shower.

  Just after eight he sat down to a light breakfast in the hotel’s small dining room, then went back up to his room and again viewed the car park. People were now moving about the streets, and two couples that he recognized from breakfast were loading suitcases into the boots of their cars – a white Opel and a light grey Fiat – but nobody else was visible anywhere near the building.

  Stein switched on the laptop and the mobile phone and logged on to the server back in the States. There were no further messages for him or Krywald, so he shut both down and packed them away into his b
riefcase. The pick-up McCready had arranged was for fifteen twenty that afternoon, which meant he had about six hours to kill before the rendezvous, and Stein had no intention of going outside until he had to. He had no desire to spend the day cooped up in this hotel, but he realized his chances of being recognized would be far greater out in the open.

  He took a paperback novel from his overnight bag and lay down on the bed to try to read it, but his mind kept wandering and he found himself re-reading the same page over and over again. Every few minutes he got up to open the door to his room and check up and down the corridor, and inspected the car park below his hotel room window. The only disturbance was the chambermaid who came in to tidy his bed and clean mid-morning. Stein never let her out of his sight the whole time she was in the room, the SIG – minus its silencer – grasped loosely in his hand underneath the novel.

  At twelve fifteen he again checked both the car park and the corridor, then headed down to the dining room, bought himself a buffet lunch and was back up in his room just before one.

  By one twenty he had packed his few belongings into his overnight bag and put it on the bed beside the crucial briefcase. He glanced at his watch, mentally calculating times and distances, and took a last look round the room and in the bathroom to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. Before he left the hotel room, he again spent some time peering out of the window from behind the curtain, checking that nothing seemed out of place. Stein then picked up his bags, moved quietly along the corridor to the rear of the hotel, opened the emergency exit door and climbed down the metal fire escape to the car park. At ground level, he again checked all round him, then crossed the street and strode off down the road towards the car park where he’d left his Seat.

  He was about twenty yards from the Cordoba when he noticed that an old Cretan, wearing a filthy hat and ragged coat, was working his way through the car park, checking the garbage bins. Bent and bowed with age, he was moving slowly as if in pain, a plastic bag clutched in his right hand. Stein registered him briefly, and then ignored him. That was a mistake.