T he Mayan conference was not due to start until 8.30 a.m., but O’Connor was in position by seven, choosing a nearby coffee shop from which he could observe the entrance to Aleta’s apartment in the Stephansdom Quarter.
Three-quarters of an hour later, Dr Weizman emerged from her apartment wearing a tailored black pants-suit and spike-heeled ankle boots. O’Connor followed at a discreet distance, watching her descend the path that led towards the Schwarzenplatz U-Bahn station. Satisfied, he retraced his steps. The entrance to her apartment block was in Sterngasse, not far from Shakespeare and Company, one of Vienna’s best-known British bookshops. The big double wooden doors that opened onto the lower courtyard were heavy, but for a man of O’Connor’s expertise, they were not an obstacle. He checked the narrow street, but there were only three pedestrians and they were all heading away from him. The cast-iron latch flipped back easily under his knife blade. Closing the door behind him, he found himself in a deserted stone courtyard with several entrances, all protected by steel security doors.
Apartment number four was listed under the intercom on the nearest entrance and identified by just the name ‘Weizman’. Like most security doors, O’Connor reflected, they provided more psychological peace of mind than actual protection, and he slipped a small tension wrench into the simple five-pin and tumbler barrel lock and applied pressure on the plug. Using a small diamond-shaped pick, he quickly raked the pins, before again working his way from the rear of the barrel to force up two that were not yet flush with the shear line.
The cam turned easily and O’Connor quietly swung the steel door open. Climbing to the second floor, he was again confronted with a pin-and-tumbler lock. At his first attempt, the lock didn’t open. O’Connor delved into his soft leather briefcase and selected a pick with a finer head. Top student of more than one of the CIA’s training courses, O’Connor fleetingly thought of the old master safecracker who’d been recruited from the dark side to teach CIA officers the art of break and enter. To the south-east of Richmond, Virginia, on Rochambeau Drive, was a place listed as the Camp Peary Naval Reservation. In fact, it was one of several top-secret CIA training bases where O’Connor had spent many hours honing the shadowy crafts of his profession. As he applied just enough pressure to hold the rear pins over the shear line, he carefully felt for the final pin and eased it up over the ledge he’d created with the torsion wrench.
O’Connor closed the solid cedar door quietly behind him. A short hallway led into the lounge room, which overlooked Sterngasse and Judengasse. To the left another corridor led past the spacious kitchen to the bedrooms and the bathroom at the far end. He looked around the lounge room. Soft white wool carpets and gold-and-black velvet drapes complemented the rococo Louis XV furniture. The walls were lined with mahogany bookcases, and O’Connor quickly ran his eye over the contents. Given Weizman’s background, it was not surprising to find whole shelves devoted to archaeology, and in particular to the Maya. There were works by the legendary Alfred Maudslay, who in the late nineteenth century opened up the ancient Mayan civilisation to more modern research; as well as publications by J E S Thompson on Maya Arithmetic and The Solar Year of the Mayas. Other shelves were devoted to works by Newton, Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger and Max Planck, the latter three inscribed by the famous authors to Professor Levi Weizman. O’Connor whistled softly as he recalled his earlier years at Trinity College in Dublin, where he’d wrestled with Schrodinger’s equations that described fiendishly difficult issues in quantum mechanics, like the movement of an electron around an atom. Levi Weizman had obviously rubbed shoulders with some of the finest scientists the world had seen.
The spacious apartment had three bedrooms, one of which was again lined from floor to ceiling with books. O’Connor tried the large wall safe, but it was locked. It would take time to crack it, so he left it for the moment and turned his attention to the main bedroom. He carefully went through it, but found nothing to explain Washington’s interest. He picked up a folder entitled Bad Arolsen Records from the bedside table and flicked through it. In 2006 the German government had finally agreed to release the Nazi records on seventeen million people who had been imprisoned, tortured or murdered at the hands of the Third Reich. Two books were also on the bedside table, The Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the ancient Quiche Maya, one of the most powerful Mayan tribes of the Guatemalan highlands, and The Hidden Maya Code by Monsignor Matthias Jennings. O’Connor surmised that Weizman might be attending Jennings’ lecture. He replaced the book exactly where he’d found it and headed for the bathroom.
O’Connor opened the bathroom cabinet. Amongst Aleta’s personal toiletries there was a single bottle of medication labelled ‘Sarafem’, half-full of purple-pink capsules. He examined the capsules and compared them to the wide range of pills in different colours, shapes and sizes in his briefcase. He wondered why Aleta might have been prescribed fluoxetine, otherwise known as Prozac, and then as Sarafem for women. Might Aleta be taking it for a severe form of premenstrual syndrome? Or could she be clinically depressed? The latter might be more likely, he thought, although with the administration at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue wanting her head on a plate, Weizman’s medical issues were perhaps the least of her problems.
O’Connor selected a sachet from his briefcase and chose an identical pill to those in Dr Weizman’s bottle, a pill the boys back in Science and Technology at Langley had dubbed ‘aspirin roulette’. The purple capsule contained a massive dose of morphine, equivalent to 200 milligrams of heroin, more than twice the dose required to kill even severe addicts with high resistance. The Polizei would find morphine in her bloodstream and the media would speculate, but with a lack of motive and the absence of any other poisoned pills in the bottle, the Polizei would suspect she was on drugs, the media would lose interest and the coroner would be forced to reach an open finding.
O’Connor paused as he recalled his conversation with Wiley back at Langley: ‘Find out everything there is to know about this Weizman bitch, and then silence her!’ Again the question demanded an answer… why? ‘You’re skating on fucking thin ice, O’Connor.’
For the first time in a long career, Curtis O’Connor disobeyed an order that had been put to him as a ‘clear and present danger’, an order that only the President could approve. O’Connor doubted the President had any idea of what the Vice President, Wiley or the hotheads in the Pentagon were up to. He put the aspirin roulette pill back into the sachet in his briefcase. The CIA was not the same agency he’d joined nearly twenty years before; and not until he worked out why Washington wanted this woman dead would he comply.