Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  This realization had come late to Murphy, though his assessment of what had happened was remarkably accurate. Unfortunately for him, it was too late for him to do anything about it.

  He whirled round, suddenly conscious that he might have unwittingly made the transition from predator to prey. He swung the Daewoo up to face the threat that he was suddenly sure he was now facing, but he was too late. A lifetime too late.

  The bullet from the SIG took Murphy in the right shoulder, spinning him round as the Daewoo clattered to the ground. As he fell back with a shout of pain, stumbling into the rear of the Seat, Murphy looked up at the figure standing ten feet in front of him, and met Richter’s ice-blue gaze.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Richter asked, his voice quiet and controlled.

  ‘Murphy. Mike Murphy.’ The response came through clenched teeth as the wounded man clutched at his shattered shoulder.

  ‘Well, Mike, here’s the bad news. Some of us in British Intelligence,’ Richter said, echoing Murphy’s remarks, ‘don’t have scruples and don’t give a flying fuck for anybody’s rules. But what I don’t do is tell lies, so you’re getting the same two you doled out to Stein there.’

  Richter altered his aim slightly and shot Murphy in the stomach. The assassin howled with pain and doubled up, falling to the ground. Richter stepped closer and ten seconds later Murphy fell silent permanently as Richter’s last bullet blew off the top of his head.

  Chapter 25

  Saturday

  South of Zounáki, western Crete

  The Seat was useless to Richter. The car had three bullet holes in it – one through the boot lid, the others in the driver and passenger doors – and Murphy’s shot had not only punctured the right front tyre but also buckled the wheel rim and smashed the brake disc. It was now going to have to be hauled away behind a recovery truck.

  But, Richter reasoned, Murphy hadn’t just been waiting around there on the road out of Zounáki on the mere off-chance that Stein would turn up there. Obviously he’d been following the Seat, which meant that there was another vehicle parked somewhere in the vicinity. He could hopefully use that to get back to Máleme.

  But Richter needed to do a bit of a clean-up first, because he wanted to leave a satisfactorily tidy solution for the Cretan police to find. He first checked Stein’s body and found, as he had expected, that the bullet from the sniper rifle had gone straight through the American agent’s left thigh – Richter could clearly see the entry and exit points in the fabric of the trousers – and vanished into the scrubland beyond.

  The other injuries had all been caused by Murphy’s Daewoo pistol, and all the wounds on Murphy’s own corpse by the SIG that Stein had originally been carrying. The bullet holes in the Seat were simply that, and they would reveal little information about the weapon that had fired the bullets themselves. Richter’s rudimentary knowledge of ballistics reassured him that a round fired from a high-velocity rifle at long range would leave a hole similar to that from a larger but slower bullet shot at close range from a pistol.

  Richter eyed critically the two bodies now lying beside the Seat. He then dragged Stein a little further back, and turned him round so that his feet were pointing towards his dead assassin. That looked better. With a little imagination it was easy to construe this scene as some kind of gunfight between the two men that had ended with both of their deaths.

  It would take a lot more imagination to credit that both had managed to shoot each other in the stomach before simultaneously shooting each other in the head, but Richter believed that Fitzpatrick could probably use his influence to make sure it became the accepted account. That way, the open files on the killings of a policeman and two villagers in Kandíra, of the diver near the island of Gávdos, and a man calling himself Curtis in the hospital in Chaniá, could all be closed.

  Richter was still wearing the thin rubber gloves he’d donned before approaching Stein in the car park at Máleme, so was reasonably certain that he’d left few traces in the Seat. He placed the Daewoo by Murphy’s side, then stepped across to the other corpse. He wrapped Stein’s right hand around the butt of the SIG, pointed the pistol into the sky and pulled the trigger. The weapon coughed and recoiled. A paraffin test, if anybody bothered to carry one out, would now show that both men had fired weapons shortly before they died.

  He checked Murphy’s pockets, found a set of car keys as expected, and the magazine from the Dragunov, which he hadn’t anticipated. Richter put both of these in his jacket pocket, lifted the briefcase from the passenger seat and the black-wrapped steel case out of the boot of the Seat, and set off down the hill.

  A few minutes later he locked both items safely in the boot of the Peugeot he’d found parked a quarter of a mile away, and began climbing up the hill to the north of the parked vehicle, looking for a sniper rifle. When he discovered it, Richter whistled softly. It was a long time since he’d seen that particular model. For a few moments he wondered what to do with it, then shrugged, tossed the magazine down beside it and headed back down the hill. He’d let some Cretan local find it and add it to his private armoury.

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Just after nine, Henry Rawlins knocked on the door of John Westwood’s office and slumped down, uninvited, in a leather chair in front of his desk.

  Westwood watched him quizzically. The CIA Director of Personnel was a most infrequent visitor to his domain: in fact, as far as Westwood could recall, Rawlins had never before even been in his office. When they met at all, it was usually at high-level meetings and conferences elsewhere, or over meals in the super-grades’ dining room at Langley.

  ‘Good morning, Henry,’ Westwood said. ‘Unusual to find you defending democracy on a weekend.’

  Rawlins smiled thinly. ‘I’m not absolutely sure that’s what the CIA is doing, and I personally don’t get involved if I can avoid it. I generally leave that to you full-time warriors.’

  ‘So what’s special about this Saturday, Henry?’

  Rawlins smiled again, but didn’t answer the question. ‘I hear you’ve been running checks on some pretty senior guys, John,’ he said, and Westwood nodded. ‘What’s it all about?’

  ‘Right now, Henry,’ Westwood replied, ‘I’m not really sure. What I do know is that the Company was involved in some kind of deep black operation back in the seventies, somewhere in the Mediterranean region. A short time ago a Greek diver found a crashed Learjet near the coast of Crete. What research I’ve been able to do has demonstrated a definite link between that same deep black op and the crashed jet. The moment the news of the Lear’s discovery hit the press, somebody here in America began eliminating every CIA agent who’d originally been involved in that operation. He killed three former agents, all long retired.’

  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.’

  ‘OK, that should work,’ Fitzpatrick said after a moment. ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I don’t really know. I’ve collected what evidence there is to be found, and all the opposition players have been eliminated as far as I know, so I suppose I’ll just head back to London and let my section or Six sort it all out.’

  ‘Good luck. Right, I’ll get over to Zounáki and fix things out there. Maybe I’ll see you again some time.’

  ‘You never know.’ Richter disconnected.

  HMS Invincible, Sea of Crete

  The young communications rating was concerned. The procedures were quite specific, but as far as he could see there was no way he could follow them. So he called the Chief over and explained his problem.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ the CPO said, and walked across to the Communications Officer.

  ‘Yes, Chief?’

  ‘Slight problem, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a Flash signal classified Secret for Lieutenant Commander Richter, but as far as I know he’s ashore somewhere so we can’t deliver it within the specified time.’

  ‘Sounds like it’s Commander Richter’s problem rather than ours, Chief. Give it to me and I’ll see if the Ops Department has any kind of contact with him.’

  As he left the Communications Centre the officer reflected that he’d never known a junior officer – and in his book a lieutenant commander was still a junior officer – to receive so many personal classified signals or, frankly, cause so much trouble to other departments on board any ship. He wished the bloody man would get off the Invincible and bugger off back to London or wherever he’d come from.

  ‘Richter?’ he
said without preamble as he stepped into the Ops Office and saw Ops Three sitting at his desk working out the following day’s flying programme. ‘Have you got a contact number for him?’

  ‘I have,’ Ops Three replied, ‘but he’s either had his mobile switched off for the last few hours or he’s been out of a cell. Why?’

  ‘I’ve got a signal for him,’ the Communications Officer said, thrusting a clipboard at him. ‘It’s Secret and Flash, and I reckon you’ve got a much better chance of contacting him about it than I have, so you may as well take it. Sign here.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch,’ Ops Three muttered under his breath.

  Western Crete

  Richter had ended his call to Fitzpatrick only four minutes earlier, and had just started the engine of the Renault and slipped it into first gear when his other mobile phone – the Enigma issued on the Invincible – started to ring.

  ‘Commander Richter? It’s Ops Three, sir, on Mother. We’ve been trying to reach you for some time.’

  ‘Sorry, the phone’s been switched off. What did you want?’

  ‘I was instructed to pass some landfall information on to you, sir. An American frigate approached Crete from the west and launched a chopper this afternoon at just after three local time. It flew to somewhere near Plátanos where we think it landed. It got airborne again a few minutes later and flew back to the frigate. Then the frigate itself left the area, and we presume that the helicopter picked someone up.’

  Richter smiled slightly before he replied. ‘I don’t think the man they were expecting actually turned up, because I met him first. Is that it, then?’

  ‘No, sir. I’ve just been handed a Secret signal for you, precedence Flash. It’s in a sealed envelope so that’s all I can tell you about it. What do you want me to do with it?’