Solo - Jack Higgins [34]
But where to start, that was the problem? He was sitting in the living-room of the Gresham Place flat just after four, working his way through several different newspapers with accounts of the shooting, when the doorbell rang. When he opened it, Harry Baker was standing there, holding a leather briefcase.
He walked straight in. 'Bit rough on young Stewart, weren't you? I mean, the lad's got to learn.'
Morgan followed him into the living-room and stood waiting, hands in pockets. 'All right, Harry, what do you want?'
'Ferguson phoned me. Said you'd been on his back again.'
'Did he also tell you he'd warned me off?'
'Yes.'
'So?'
Baker took out his pipe and started to fill it. 'You saved my life in Nicosia, Asa. If it hadn't been for you, I'd have taken a bullet in the head from that EOKA gunman. You shoved me down and took it in the back instead.'
'We all make mistakes.'
'If Ferguson finds out about this I'm finished, but to hell with it.' Baker opened the briefcase, produced a Manila folder and tossed it on the table. 'There you are, Asa. Everything there is to know, and that isn't a great deal, on the man who shot Maxwell Cohen and killed Megan. The man we call the Cretan Lover.'
5
Baker stood in front of the fire, warming himself as Morgan started to work his way through the file.
'As you can see, the first time he appeared on the scene was in nineteen sixty-nine. The Vassilikos killing. That's when the newspapers first referred to him as the Cretan.'
'Because the chauffeur was so sure he'd spoken with a Cretan accent?'
'Which according to the file, was confirmed by the maid at the Hilton in West Berlin a month later when he got General Stephanakis.'
Morgan read on. 'This business with the girl in the wardrobe while they were waiting for Stephanakis to appear. It's genuine?'
'Oh, yes.'
'Which explains the Cretan Lover tag?'
'That and a similar case you'll find mentioned in there. And that Boudakis girl - it wasn't rape. A psychiatrist had a session with her. His impression was that she'd fallen for the man.'
'From the details listed in here, I'd say a great many Greeks might be cheering for him,' Morgan said. 'Both Vassilikos and General Stephanakis seem to have been a couple of butchers.'
'All right,' Baker said. 'So our friend is just a simple Cretan peasant, a hero of the Resistance who doesn't like the present regime in Greece, a regime he sees as fascist. He decides to do something about it. Fine - except for one rather important point. Since then, he's been responsible for one assassination after another the world over. Oh, the credit's usually been claimed by some appropriate terrorist group, but we know, as do most of the world's leading intelligence organizations, when the Cretan has been responsible. His touch is distinctive and unmistakable. Read on. You'll see what I mean.'
He sat by the fire and relit his pipe and Morgan started to work his way through the file.
In June 1970, he had killed, in his hotel room, Colonel Rafael Gallegos, Chief of Police for the Basque country which straddles the Pyrenees between Spain and France. The killing was a carbon copy of the murder of General Stephanakis in West Berlin. Responsibility had been claimed by the Basque Nationalist movement, the ETA, which had been fighting for years for separation from Spain.
In September of the same year, General Severo Falcao, head of the Brazilian secret police, had been assassinated in Rio de Janeiro by a traffic policeman who had stopped his car on a quiet country road leading out of the city to the General's home. As in the Vasslikos killing, only the General and his bodyguards died. The chauffeur had been allowed to go.
In November 1970, he had murdered George Henry Daly, an insurance executive in Boston. What the newspapers had not been told was that Daly was actually Major Sergei Kulakov, who had defected to the Americans five years before from the Red Army's Berlin Intelligence station. The CIA had squeezed him dry and then provided him with what they had fondly imagined