The Lucifer Network (35 page)

‘There's no point,' she commented. ‘He's in the hospital.'

‘What?'

‘Last night. An ambulance came.'

Sam gaped. He had visions of another murder.
Hoffmann's
neck with a strap round it this time.

‘Heart attack,' the crone went on, gleeful at the drama that had come into her tedious life. ‘That's what they said. Like his wife.
Unheimlich,
nicht?
'

Uncanny indeed. Sam asked when it had happened and she told him it was around midnight. Which would have been shortly after the man had got home.

‘He didn't seem too bad,' the woman concluded. ‘He could still talk. Told me not to worry.'

Sam asked which hospital he'd been taken to but she didn't know.

He thanked her and made his way downstairs again, making a mental note to try to trace the clinic later and check on his condition.

One thing was clear. If the old spy had been hospitalised last night, he could hardly have been connected with the death of Vladimir Kovalenko.

Brussels

On the tenth floor of the University Clinic of St Luc, two of the four twenty-five-bed units had been turned into isolation wards. In the past twelve hours the Brussels police had traced and brought to the hospital every person known to have been in contact with Anders Klason since his arrival in the Belgian capital the previous day. Thirty of those who were now sitting on beds or standing around chatting had been involved in the conference where Klason had collapsed. Sitting alone at the far end of the second unit was a scared, uncomprehending Turkish taxi driver, the man who'd brought the Swede from the airport to the city centre.

In a room on her own lay a terrified Commissioner Blanche Duvalier. When she'd heard about Klason's incident with the broken glass at the Austrian lakeside, she'd told Dr Gouari about her own confrontation with a sharp object outside the Commission building three days earlier. Within minutes she'd been isolated. Since then she'd been questioned thoroughly by the police and subjected to hourly blood tests administered by a masked nurse with coldly observant eyes. Klason, she'd learned, was still alive but little more than a vegetable. She knew too that her description of the woman she'd collided with bore similarities to the one provided by Nina Klason. Something evil was under way in Europe and the two
of them were its first victims. She'd sent word to Paris where her daughter worked for UNESCO. Annette was on her way. She'd been praying to God that she would arrive in time.

In the last hour she'd begun to feel confused, as if parts of her memory were being unplugged and then reconnected. She remembered Anders Klason disintegrating before her eyes in the Salle Bertrand. Remembered his fear. She was experiencing panic interspersed by patches of incomprehensible calm. One such more restful moment was engulfing her now. Her lips widened in a smile at the irony of it all. All along she'd been hoping for a closer relationship with the tall blond Swede, but not in separate beds.

The door to her small room opened. She didn't recognise the three who came in because their faces were masked. They were carrying equipment which they began to set up. A roll of transparent plastic. Stainless steel frames. Drips, tubes. To her it looked like the paraphernalia of death.

One of the masked faces came closer. A black face that she was quite certain she had never seen before. And it spoke.

‘Je suis desolé, madame.'

Nina Klason was also occupying a single room. No masks for the medical staff here though, because her blood tests had shown none of the viral antibodies now surging through the veins of the Commissioner for Racial Equality. The African doctor's initial assessment was proving the most likely one. That the virus was like rabies and needed broken skin to enter the body and attack the brain.

A small table had been brought to her room for the plain-suited, Neanderthal-faced Belgian police officer to
set up his laptop. He liaised with Interpol, he'd said, and had been showing her disks full of photographs. Men mostly, hard faces with shaven heads. A few sour women too. A cast of hundreds from a half-dozen nations, all with a record for racially motivated crime.

Nina Klason shook her head for the hundredth time. None of the faces was familiar. None matched the couple who'd crouched next to Anders's beach towel less than a week ago. By now she was numb with exhaustion. No sleep last night and a day of talking today.

She'd spoken on the phone to her mother in Vienna, who was at the end of her tether coping with the Klason's two attention-seeking children. The woman had agreed to hold the fort for one more day on the understanding that Nina made alternative arrangements after that. Nina was torn about what to do. The Congolese doctor had told her that if her blood tests were still negative the next morning, she would be free to go home. The children needed her, but so did Anders. The doctors had warned her he could die, and deep down she'd already accepted it. She wanted to be there when it happened, whether or not he was aware of her presence. But someone had to look after the children. She'd tried three of her Viennese neighbours. All had expressed concern that whatever infection Anders had been hit by, the Klason infants might be carrying it.

‘Es tut mir leid,' she whispered, apologising to the policeman for not recognising the last of the faces presented to her. The Flemish officer had been conversing with her in German.

‘Thank you for trying, Frau Klason,' he replied, powering down the computer and shutting the lid. ‘I didn't expect anything, to be honest with you. Most of these are football hooligans. The people who attacked your husband are in another league.' He stood up and
shook her hand. ‘I hope the doctors can do something for him.'

Only if they can work miracles here, thought Nina Klason. Only if they can work miracles.

HMS
Truculent

Arthur Harris was lunching in the senior rates' mess. In the corner of the small, beige-panelled space a couple of chiefs were looking through a box of video cassettes, trying to decide which films would bear watching for the umpteenth time this patrol.

Harris had resigned himself to the idea of playing no further part in the ‘Russians on the Rocks' mystery, as the affair was being referred to on board. The boat had been due to take in a broadcast at six that morning. He'd slept through until nine, but if there'd been a follow-up he was sure he would have heard about it.

There was a different atmosphere on board today. An end of term feel, yet one the men were reluctant to grasp. The operational phase was over, but it would be three weeks before they saw the lights of Plymouth again. Meanwhile the weekend lay ahead. Many of those with partners coming out to Crete were suffering from nerves. Sitting beside Harris was one of the ‘back aft' chiefs, a nuclear reactor technician.

‘It's like starting again every time I get back with the wife,' he complained.

‘I know what you mean,' Harris affirmed, living his small private lie.

‘They say being married's like riding a bike. You don't
forget how to do it. But each time you get back on top you ask yourself if anything's changed. Any bits broken or worn out. Anybody been oiling it while you've been away . . .' The chief picked up his empty plate. ‘Shouldn't have fucking said that,' he muttered, returning it to the serving hatch. ‘Got meself all worried now.'

Harris drank down the remains of his coffee and stared absently into the corner. He would miss this companionship when he got back to Cheltenham. The only regular company he had at home was his mother, whom he'd moved down from the north after his father died.

The sonar chief Brian Smedley dropped into the chair opposite with a plate of spaghetti, which he began to devour.

‘You stopping in Crete before heading home?' Smedley asked, tomato sauce sticking to his lips.

‘No. Got a flight booked for Saturday night. The CTs' job is over.' No need for the GCHQ team to stay on board for the long underwater transit to the UK. ‘Looking forward to Souda?'

‘Not much, to be frank,' Smedley confided. ‘Have to behave meself now there's a spy on board.'

‘How d'you mean?'

‘That pretty-boy lad with the panda eyes.'

‘I'm not with you. You mean Griffiths?'

‘Yes. Bloody Griffiths. It were
my
daughter he got pregnant, the dirty little rascal. I'm gonna be his bloody father-in-law in a few months' time. Can't have him reporting back to the wife.'

‘I had no idea,' Harris breathed, trying not to smile. ‘Cramping your style a bit then.'

‘Just this once, yes. Won't happen again. The coxswain's getting him transferred to another boat.' Smedley stuffed his face with another forkful. ‘Mind you, we mightn't even get to Crete, the way things are going.'

‘How d'you mean?' Harris's hopes soared suddenly. Perhaps they were going Russian-hunting again after all.

‘We detected a bloody submarine this morning. Went into the ultra-quiet state. Didn't you hear the pipe?'

‘Must've slept through it,' he mumbled disconsolately.

‘Just before six, when we were going to PD for the broadcast. Had to go deep again. We thought it was one of the Yugoslav boats at first. Turned out to be an Italian way out of his box.'

‘So what happened to the broadcast?' Harris asked, his hopes rising again.

‘Lost it. Had to stay deep. Next access time is about now.'

They both glanced at the depth repeater on the mess bulkhead.

‘Thirty metres,' Smedley nodded. ‘We're on the way up again.'

Commander Anthony Talbot nodded with satisfaction as the sound room reported no new sonar contacts.

Earlier, when the first trace of that other submarine had been picked up, the control room had gone electric. He'd marched into the sound room to listen to the rustling noises that Chief Smedley assured him was the water flow round a submerged hull. With no NATO boats scheduled in the area, he'd had to assume it was a potential enemy which they needed to identify. They'd diverted from their course south to track it. From his own point of view he'd have been delighted to have missed the run ashore in Souda Bay if it meant a bit of action. For the most part, this mission had been tediously routine and it was his last patrol before a staff job ashore. But when the ‘enemy' boat's signature was identified as an Italian Sauro class submarine, the relief on the faces of the crew told
him that if he'd cancelled the weekend's leave he might have had a mutiny on his hands.

‘Twenty metres.' The planesman had shouted the depth every ten metres as they came slowly up.

‘Keep eighteen metres,' Talbot ordered. He got to his feet, standing behind the ship control panel. ‘Revolutions for three knots.'

As the submarine's fin grazed the surface of the sea the boat began to wallow, the planesman pushing forward to decrease the ascent angle, then pulling back sharply to stabilise the response. Riding the bubble, they called it.

A red figure 18 appeared on the digital depth gauge and stayed there.

‘Depth steady at eighteen metres, sir.'

‘Thank you, ship control. Raise the search periscope.'

Watch officer Lieutenant Harvey Styles grabbed the handles as the shiny tube slid upwards. When it locked in place he walked the sight all the way round.

‘Nothing visual, sir.'

‘Raise the WT mast,' Talbot ordered. Two minutes to go to the broadcast.

The periscope video camera showed a grey morning up above, with large waves splashing foam over the optics. The boat rolled uncomfortably. Submariners' stomachs weren't used to surface motion. They'd want to go deep again the moment the broadcast was in.

Talbot noticed Arthur Harris hovering by the chart table, waiting to know if there was a reaction to the recording they'd transmitted twelve hours earlier. A man obsessed by a voice.

In the W/T room LED displays flickered as bursts of data were sucked in from the satellite 24,000 miles above them.

‘Broadcast reception successful, sir,' the operator announced a few seconds later.

The signals officer broke off a strip of punched tape containing the day's code and fed it into the reader. A few seconds later the dot-matrix printers perched on top of the equipment racks purred into life. The officer fingered the leading edge of the paper to read the heading.

Arthur Harris stood by the chart table staring down the passageway leading aft. The W/T office was off it. He noted the rating emerge with his clipboard and followed him with his eyes as he approached the captain. Talbot took the sheets of signals. He read the heading, then ordered Styles to take the boat to thirty metres again. Frowning, he walked towards his cabin.

Once inside with the curtain drawn across the doorway, Talbot sat at his tiny desk and began to read. As he did so, his heart sank. Then almost simultaneously he experienced a surge of excitement.

The shore leave at Souda Bay had been cancelled. They were to return to the waters near the island of Lastovo and prepare for a special forces mission. There'd be action after all.

He sat quietly for a moment, thinking. Selling the idea to the crew would have to be done with care and compassion. Expressions of regret over the loss of leave, rather than being too gung-ho about their new task.

After a couple of minutes he stood up and returned to the control room, pausing by the navigation table. He looked at the chart, measuring their distance from Lastovo with a pair of dividers.

Lieutenant Harvey Styles came and stood beside him.

‘We're going back,' Talbot told him. ‘On full power.'

Styles pursed his lips but didn't say anything. In a few
moments the captain would need to make a pipe, a task he didn't envy him.