Pandemic (7 page)

‘A woman?’ Simpson asked, recalling the motley collection of hairy-arsed men employed in the same role by MI5 and to a lesser extent by SIS.

Perini nodded. ‘We have always used women in preference to men. They tend to be more observant, and they can get into most places a lot easier, and with far fewer questions asked, than any
man. They are also rarely perceived as a threat. Anyway, our operative sat and sipped her drink and waited. About fifteen minutes later a man entered the restaurant and walked straight over to the
bar. He greeted the consular official like an old friend, then they had a drink together and a light lunch.’

‘But it wasn’t Lomas,’ Richter said.

Perini looked surprised. ‘You’re quite right. It wasn’t Lomas. How did you know?’

‘I didn’t,’ Richter said, ‘but from what we know of the man, he always tries to use cut-outs. My guess is that the man the official was meeting was just a go-between sent
by Lomas to receive a verbal briefing, or whatever, on his behalf.’

The Italian nodded again. ‘We don’t know what information was exchanged but, when the two men parted, our operative decided to follow the unknown male. It was a good decision –
he climbed into a car and drove off, heading east. All the motorcycles our people use are fitted with long-range tanks, which is just as well because he kept on going for over two hundred
kilometres. He finally led her to an isolated villa just outside a town called Matera. That’s on the main road between Taranto and Salerno, and about one hundred and twenty kilometres –
around seventy-five miles – west of Brindisi. As the man went inside, she stationed herself in a position from which she could cover the front of the villa. She stayed there, tucked behind
some bushes on the hillside, for the rest of the day.

‘She had called in a progress report as soon as she reached the restaurant, and another when she got to the villa, but neither her description of the man she’d followed nor the
address of the villa meant anything to us, so we did nothing from this end. All our watchers use the latest surveillance equipment, including binoculars fitted with integrated digital cameras.
Because she was using one of these devices, as dusk fell she was able to take two photographs through an uncurtained window of the villa.’

Perini opened a manila envelope and slid a number of large black-and-white photographs onto the table in front of him. He separated them into piles, then passed two pictures each to Richter and
Simpson.

‘These are enlarged copies of the two photographs she was able to get.’

Richter looked down at them and saw, for the first time, a picture of the face that still haunted his dreams.

Monday
Kandíra, south-west Crete

Brilliant white stars studded the sky over Crete, but Spiros Aristides saw none of them as he trudged from his simple home down the narrow unlit streets towards the centre
of the village. He was both preoccupied and irritated, and badly needed a drink – or, better, several drinks.

He had hoped – in fact, he’d felt certain – that the steel case contained valuables, but unless something remarkable popped out when he finally opened those flasks, as far as
he could see he’d just been wasting his time. He would have done better to have just left that damned case where he’d found it.

The murmur of conversation stopped briefly as Aristides pushed open the pale green door of the
kafeníon
, the café-bar, and stepped inside. Kandíra was well off the
tourist track and had been spared the dubious ‘improvements’ visited on most coastal towns in the Mediterranean. There were no illuminated signs above the door or flickering in the
small and dirty windows, no signs of any sort, in fact, to announce that the place was a bar. No juke-box, no gaming machines, no bar meals or shaded terrace where a passing tourist could pass a
pleasant half-hour sipping red wine and writing postcards.

It was just a small, scruffy room with half a dozen tables and twenty or so assorted chairs, most in need of some repair. Down one side ran a battered oak bar behind which Jakob – that
wasn’t his real name, but the previous incumbent had been called Jakob and old habits died hard in Crete – stood wearing a once-white apron and dispensing drinks with the kind of ill
grace that frequently made his clientele wonder why he hadn’t opted for a different profession, like tax collector or maybe New York yellow cab driver.

As far as Aristides could tell, the bar hadn’t changed in any significant way since he had first arrived in Kandíra a little over eight years earlier, and nor had its occupants.
Every evening the old men of the village trickled in, in their ones and twos, took their usual seats at the discoloured tables and, without a word being exchanged, were served their usual tipples
by Jakob. Then they talked or just sat in silence. Sometimes a pack of cards would be produced and the usual bar noises would be punctuated by the slap of pasteboard on a table and the cries of
exultation or recrimination as some game progressed.

After Aristides pushed the door closed behind him, the murmur of conversation began again. Two or three of the customers smiled or lifted a hand to acknowledge the Greek, gestures to which
Aristides responded with a nod, but most of the old men ignored him. He was, after all, a relative newcomer who wasn’t even Cretan, and he was still considered by many of them to be a
suspicious foreigner.

Aristides walked across to the bar and looked at Jakob, who looked straight back at him. The Greek had been drinking in the bar three or four nights every week for the past eight years, but
Jakob still pointedly regarded him as a stranger.

‘Whisky,’ Aristides snapped. Greek he might be, but he didn’t have a Greek’s palate for retsina or ouzo.

Jakob slapped a small glass on the bar and poured a measure of golden liquid into it from a bottle labelled ‘Glenfiddich’, but which Aristides was quite certain the man kept topped
up with the cheapest whisky he could find on his weekly trips to the supermarkets in Chaniá. He had never, since he first walked into this bar, seen the bottle anything other than half-full,
and he had never seen Jakob open a new bottle of Scotch of any brand. There were two other permanently half-full bottles of whisky on the shelves behind the bar, one of them labelled ‘Johnnie
Walker’ and the other ‘Famous Grouse’, and the contents of all three tasted absolutely identical. Only their prices were different.

Aristides drained the Scotch in two gulps, gestured for Jakob to refill his glass, then dropped some coins on the bar, picked up his drink, walked across the room and sat down at an unoccupied
table in the corner.

He’d been sitting there for something over half an hour and three Scotches, when the bar’s door opened yet again. Like everyone else, Aristides looked up at the new arrival and, for
the first time since he’d walked in, he smiled. The man at the door smiled back and walked over to join him at the corner table.

‘I tried your house, but it was in darkness, so I guessed you’d be here.’

‘Sit down, Nico, sit down. A beer? Something stronger?’

Nico Aristides, one of Spiros’s numerous extended family, pulled up a chair and sat down. He gestured to Jakob, and the swarthy unsmiling Cretan plopped a beer bottle and a chipped and
dirty glass down on the table in front of him. Nico took one look at the glass and decided to drink straight from the bottle.

‘You were out again today?’ Nico said, more of a statement than a question. ‘Anything?’

Nico had never enjoyed diving but he had numerous clients on Crete, and scattered around the Eastern Mediterranean, who were always keen to purchase any interesting objects that his uncle
recovered from the bottom of the sea. And, whenever possible, Spiros obliged, hauling up ancient artefacts that the archaeologists, given the choice, would far rather were left in situ. Nico, in
effect, acted as his uncle’s fence.

Spiros shook his head, deciding in that instant to say nothing, yet, about the flasks in the steel case.

‘Nothing, really. A wrecked plane, but nothing of value inside.’

‘A plane?’ Nico’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He was used to his uncle finding amphorae, statuary, pots and occasionally ancient jewellery, but he’d never expected him to
find a recent wreck, far less so an aircraft. ‘Where?’

Aristides gestured vaguely to the south, but didn’t specify a location.

‘What sort of aircraft? Fighter? Bomber? From the war?’

Spiros grinned at him, revealing a selection of yellowish teeth amid an almost equal number of gaps, then shook his head.

‘No, a modern one. Some kind of a small jet – a private jet, that kind of thing. But it had certainly been in the wars,’ he added enigmatically.

Nico looked at him, then glanced around the tiny bar. Almost every seat was now occupied, and as he looked at the table a couple of feet to his left, he met the level stares of two Cretans who
had obviously overheard Spiros’s last remark. Under Nico’s gaze, the two men looked away and seemed to resume their conversation.

‘I don’t follow,’ Nico said, leaning closer, and gesturing to Aristides to do the same. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ Aristides rasped in his gravelly voice, ‘that there were three bodies inside it, and another one lying on the bottom, all of them still strapped in their
seats.’ Nico’s eyes widened and he shivered involuntarily. ‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ Aristides added, more loudly now, settling down to tell his story and
oblivious of the interest still being shown by the occupants of the adjacent table. ‘That plane didn’t crash. Somebody shot it down.’

Aeroporto di Brindisi, Papola-Casale, Puglia, Italy

‘Is
that
Lomas?’ Perini asked.

Richter took his time, studying both photographs with exaggerated care. They weren’t bad either, bearing in mind the circumstances in which they had been taken. Each showed two men
standing inside a house, illuminated by the light of a small chandelier and framed by a tall window, apparently talking to each other. Because the pictures had been shot from a distance, and
through the window glass, the images naturally weren’t as clear as if taken in the open air.

In both of them, the man on the right-hand side was in profile. In the first shot, the other man was also in profile, but in the second photograph he appeared full-face, apparently staring
straight into the lens of the camera. Richter had no doubt, absolutely no doubt at all, that this was Lomas, but he shook his head.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s very like him, but I really need to see him in the flesh. Photographs can be deceiving.’

Perini looked disappointed. ‘We had hoped you could provide us with a positive identification just from these pictures,’ he said.

Richter shook his head again. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t be completely certain. It could be Lomas, but to be absolutely sure I’ll have to see him face-to-face.’

Simpson eyed Richter with deep suspicion. ‘Remember what I said, Richter,’ he snapped, ‘not sliced or diced.’ Richter put down the photographs and looked back at him
without expression.

‘I’m sorry?’ Perini said, with a puzzled frown, as he looked from one man to the other.

‘Nothing,’ Simpson replied, still staring at his subordinate. ‘Can you arrange for Richter to see this man?’

Perini was silent for a few moments, then replied slowly. ‘We were going to arrest him tomorrow afternoon,’ he said, some doubt in his voice. ‘I suppose Mr Richter could
accompany our team, purely as an observer, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Richter echoed. ‘But what are you going to arrest him for?’

Perini smiled slightly. ‘We hadn’t decided,’ he said. ‘If you had positively identified him, it would have been for murder, acting on behalf of the British Government. As
you haven’t, we’ll probably start with charging him for using a false passport or maybe illegal entry into Italy, and see what happens after that.’

Kandíra, south-west Crete

Spiros Aristides staggered slightly as he walked through the bar doorway and out into the cool of the night. It was nearly midnight, and he knew he’d drunk far more
of the cheap Scotch than he should have. He would no doubt suffer for it tomorrow, but tonight he would certainly sleep soundly.

Nico put a steadying hand out to the older man, but Spiros shrugged it off. Side by side they each retraced their separate steps back from the bar through the narrow streets until they reached
the Greek’s tiny house, where Spiros fumbled for a moment with the door handle.

‘You’ll take a last glass with me?’ he inquired. Nico nodded and followed him inside.

‘That was all I found,’ Spiros gestured towards the still-open steel case lying on the dusty floor. Nico walked across and picked it up. He opened and closed it several times, and
looked closely at the shaped and padded recesses designed to hold the flasks.

‘This is a very expensive item,’ he murmured. ‘This case was custom-made for some very special purpose, I think.’

‘Can you sell it?’ Spiros demanded somewhat hoarsely as he walked into the kitchen, returning with an open bottle of beer. He put the beer down on the table, sank into a chair and
filled a glass with Scotch.

‘No,’ Nico replied firmly, sitting down and picking up the beer, ‘or not easily, anyway. It’s too specialized in purpose, and in any case it’s been in the water for
too long.’

He studied the objects on the table with interest, picked up first the red-covered file, flicked through it, then put it down. Unlike his uncle, Nico spoke a little English – it was always
useful in dealing with the annual influx of tourists – but he’d never learned to read more than a few words of the language.

‘Those were in the case as well,’ Spiros said, nodding at the objects on the table.

‘Twelve of them?’ Nico asked, pointing at the case.

‘No,’ Spiros said, ‘just the four. All the other spaces were empty. And look at this,’ he added, picking up the flask from which he’d stripped the wax and passing
it to Nico.

His nephew hefted the flask in one hand, exclaimed at how light it was, and peered closely at the lock securing the top.