“And by return post we got an enormous article, ready to print,” Chris told me. “The Times was investigating thalidomide”—a drug prescribed for morning sickness, later linked to horrific birth defects—“but the manufacturers had slapped Evans with another injunction. He had this massive article he couldn’t publish in the Times, so he just gave it to our little university paper.” It was a brilliant coup, and Chris’s golden ticket; that article guaranteed he’d be appointed the Palatinate’s next editor and likely find a juicy journalism job right after graduation. Naturally, for Chris that meant it was time to quit. He couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his life behind a typewriter; he’d always seen himself on the move, bopping about as some kind of roving mental-health healer. So he turned his back on writing and got his master’s in psychology instead. When he was close to his Ph.D., he jumped ship again: this time, his dissertation research had taken him to Miami Beach, where he found such a bizarre buffet of mental disorders on the streets that he decided to stop studying and start helping.
For the rest of Chris’s life, that was his pattern: if the easy road led toward a desk, Chris backed up and found another one. He liked being in the field, traveling from home to home each day to work with elderly and not-quite-stable outpatients. On vacation, he’d take his then girlfriend to a beach resort but persuade her to forget the sea and head inland with him, turning it into a weeklong ramble. Boating buddies could count on Chris whenever a last-minute mate was needed for anywhere, even a freezing sail to Scandinavia. When I first went to meet him in Oxford, I got off the train expecting lunch first, maps second, beers last; instead I found myself trotting behind him on a spontaneous, double-time, four-hour walking tour that included bell towers, underground pubs, and a muddy stretch of his neighbor’s backyard. That’s what happens if you tell him it’s your first time in town.
Chris’s natural inclination to move, all the time and for any reason, has made him something of a natural-movement savant. You’ll never catch him working out (Repetitions? Routine? Forget it), yet he’s never not working out. His ever-bubbling brain won’t let him sit, so Chris just flows along behind it; his distractions lead the way, and his body figures out how to keep up. Like Paddy, Chris’s intelligence and curiosity have made motion his natural state, his way to both push hard and rest easy. When he finally came inside as a manager, the promotion came with unexpected and not always welcome changes.
Luckily, Crete was waiting.
When Chris’s friend called with the update that George was still alive, Chris’s thinking abruptly changed. Until that moment he’d been dealing with history; now, suddenly, it was a story, alive and ongoing. How many other survivors were back in those hills? What did they know that Paddy never revealed?
Because when it came to the kidnap scheme, Paddy remained strangely quiet. He’d come close to perfectly executing one of the most daring heists of the war, but even when it was safe to talk, the show-off who could tell stories all night was reluctant to share this one. Maybe it was because of the man he killed. Maybe it was because of the other he couldn’t save. Something was silencing him; even after others told their version, Paddy went to the grave with his.
But as long as Crete was alive with eyewitnesses and evidence, Chris could do more than just try to get inside Paddy’s head: he could get inside his boots. By tracking Paddy’s movements, he might still have a chance to track down people who’d seen everything. First he got in touch with Tim Todd, a former Oxford police detective who’d become the Mycroft Holmes of amateur Cretan espionage enthusiasts. Like Sherlock’s smarter, less mobile brother, Tim’s brain reached further than his legs; he knew elderly escaped POWs in New Zealand and dead soldiers’ daughters in Australia. He got copies of military documents as soon as they were declassified and photos of others that weren’t supposed to leave the archives. He became friendly with Stelios Jackson, the Greek book hound who can find anything in or out of print, and the husband-and-wife historians Artemis Cooper and Antony Beevor, who between them know more than anyone alive about the Cretan Resistance. Tim Todd is a hearty and resourceful investigator, but unfortunately his health isn’t great. He can’t really get out there in the field.
Chris can. He turned his backyard cabin into a command room, and it was there—amid the black-and-white photos, stacks of World War II memoirs, and blown-up copies of Wehrmacht maps—that we met in the winter of 2011. There is no official history of exactly what the British agents got up to on Crete, but there is Chris White. Chris had turned himself into a formidable amateur detective, and to solve the lingering mysteries of Paddy’s plot, he knew exactly what we had to do next:
Go to the scene of the crime.
A few months later, Chris and his brother, Pete, were waiting for me on a notch of pebbly beach on Crete’s southern coast.
“Welcome to bandit country,” Chris said, as I shucked my sweat-soaked backpack and looked back at the snarl of hills I’d just hiked over. Chris and Pete had arrived a week earlier because, frankly, they weren’t sure they could trust me. They hated the idea of accidentally turning the Resistance’s secret hideouts into tourist attractions, so until they sized me up they’d be cautious about what they’d share. They wanted to search for some sites in private, so I gave them a week’s head-start before I flew to Crete and set off to catch up.
From Heraklion I rattled over the mountains by bus to the end of the line and got a room for the night above a village taverna. At daybreak I set off on foot, the sun on my back as I headed due west along the coastline. A shepherds’ trail climbed the cliffs high above the shore, occasionally wandering into stone gullies before veering again toward the water. By late afternoon, I was dead-legged and wondering if I’d find my way out before dark when I suddenly found myself a step away from empty air: far below at the bottom of a long drop was a small cove, invisible until I was right overhead. A jagged switchback led down to a solitary guest house, where Chris and Pete were bunking after hiking in the night before.
“You’re seeing something Paddy never did,” Chris greeted me after I’d scrambled on down. “He could only come here by dark, guided by shepherds.” It was a good place for British subs to surface without being spotted, and for British agents to disappear once they made it to shore.
Outlaws and rebels have been hiding in these parts as long as there’s been anyone to hide from, bursting from the trees in hit-and-run rebellions against centuries of seagoing bullies who tried to make the Sliver their own. Thorny tangles and abrupt cliffs make pockets of the southern coast labyrinthine enough to stash a Minotaur, especially when the usual blanket of sea mist creeps in. Even George got himself into trouble around here in a fast-rolling fog, thinking he was walking down a familiar hill before discovering he was a few feet from disaster. “I wore myself out all night trying to get away from that accursed precipice,” George would grumble.
Chris never got a chance to meet George; shortly before Chris’ first trip to the island, the Cretan runner had died in 2006 at age eighty-five. But Chris and Pete had paid their respects by visiting George’s lifelong home, the tiny and notoriously defiant village a few miles north of us called Asi Gonia. The name means “unconquerable” in Arabic and was bestowed by the Turks as an honor of sorts, during their two-century occupation of Crete. The only natural way into Asi Gonia is through a narrow gorge, and George’s forefathers defended it so stubbornly that the great Ottoman Empire decided the little hornet’s nest wasn’t worth the trouble and mostly just left the Asi Gonians be.