Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  ‘Not that I’m aware of, Richter,’ Simpson replied. ‘We have a little business to take care of here in Italy. I suppose it is faintly possible that the Mafia might be a beneficiary, but our real client is the SISDE – the Italian Secret Service.’

  ‘And what exactly does the Servizio per le Informazione e la Sicurezza Democratica want with us?’ Richter asked, in perfect Italian construction yet badly mangling the pronunciation. Simpson even looked impressed. ‘I do know my business, Simpson,’ Richter added.

  ‘I’ve no doubt you do. We – or to be more accurate you – have been sort of lent to them for a while.’

  ‘There’s a quid pro quo lurking here somewhere, I presume?’

  ‘You presume correctly, but it’s none of your business. You just do your bit and then you can fly your pretty little grey fighter back to the ship, and finish off your pleasure cruise in the Med.’

  ‘And my “bit” is what, exactly?’

  Simpson looked at him steadily for a few moments before he replied. ‘We think Andrew Lomas has resurfaced, and we need you to finger him for us,’ he said.

  Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

  In a sudden flurry of bubbles and foam, Spiros Aristides’s head broke the slightly choppy surface of the Mediterranean less than a metre from the stern of the Nicos. Immediately the Greek stretched out his hand and grabbed the diving ladder. He reached down, pulled off his fins and tossed them on board, and followed them with his mask. Then he climbed up the ladder and into the boat, shrugged off his scuba set and placed it carefully in a rack on the starboard side. The racks were covered with a tarpaulin whenever the boat was in harbour, but at sea Aristides didn’t bother.

  There was a practised haste in his movements. Decompression stops had kept him below the surface for the better part of fifty minutes, and Aristides was eager to get himself and his prize back to his house in Kandíra as soon as possible.

  He pulled off the neoprene hood and unzipped and removed his wetsuit jacket – it was cold at the depths he had dived to, but very warm now he was back at the surface – and next his gloves, then rummaged in a locker until he found another pair of gloves of an entirely different type. These were tough workman’s gloves made of stiff canvas, and with leather strengthening patches sewn onto the palms.

  Pulling on the gloves, Aristides stepped over to the port side of the Nicos and reached down. Securely attached to two cleats was a one-centimetre-diameter orange nylon rope, which descended vertically into the azure waters of the Mediterranean. Taking a firm grip, Aristides began hauling the rope inboard, hand over hand. The first scuba set appeared in seconds, and he paused only to detach it and place it carefully beside him before continuing to pull on the rope.

  Within five minutes, Aristides had three scuba sets sitting on the bottom of the boat – he’d used them all during his decompression stops on the way up to the surface – and some eighty metres of orange rope coiled about him. But still he hauled on the rope. Finally he saw a glint of something metallic in the water below him, and pulled more gently, stopping when the object hung suspended just below the surface of the sea, and he then expertly secured the rope around the cleats. He walked back to the wheelhouse where he had an unobstructed view, and surveyed the sea around him carefully, in a complete circle, before walking back to resume hauling on the rope after he felt quite certain nobody could observe him.

  Twenty seconds later, Aristides was crouching in the bottom of the Nicos to untie the rope from around the metal briefcase he’d pulled from the wrecked aircraft.

  Five minutes after that, all the scuba sets were secured in their racks under the concealing tarpaulin, the orange rope was coiled and stowed in a seaman-like fashion, the lead weight he’d used to anchor the rope was back in its locker, and the briefcase was hidden below a set of foul-weather gear on the floor of the wheelhouse. The Nicos was under way, making directly for Kandíra at about two knots faster than her usual cruising speed. Spiros Aristides was a methodical man, but today he was a methodical man in a hurry.

  A little under three hours later, he unlatched the door of his small white-washed house, opened it and walked through the tiny hall into the main room. Light from the afternoon sun streamed through the closed slatted-wood shutters, creating Morse-code patterns across the rough tiled floor, as dust-motes danced in the air. Aristides switched on the overhead light and lowered his large canvas sack to the floor.

  Then he walked back into the hall, opened the door and looked up and down the dusty street. Nobody in sight, and nothing moving apart from an elderly marmalade cat cleaning itself in the shade of the fig tree on the other side of the narrow lane. No sound but the ever-present cicadas zithering their drowsy salute to the late-afternoon sun, that was now shading into evening. It was a good time to return home for a man who didn’t particularly want to meet any of his neighbours. Aristides nodded his satisfaction, pulled the door closed, locked it and walked back to where he’d placed the sack.

  To one side of the room was a small sturdy oak table and two upright chairs, the table still bearing the remains of Aristides’s simple breakfast – a bowl containing a few black olives, a small piece of feta cheese on a plate, and a cup half-full of the thick black coffee he favoured. He flapped his hand ineffectively at the flies crawling sluggishly over the remnants, then removed the debris to the kitchen. After that he gave the top of the table a cursory wipe with a damp cloth. Before doing anything else, Aristides walked across the room and seized the standard lamp that stood next to one of the easy chairs positioned either side of the small fireplace. He dragged it across to the table, stretching it to the very end of its lead and switched it on.

  Bending down, he loosened the draw-string closing the neck of the sack, then carried his prize to the table and put it down carefully. He’d scraped off most of the marine growth before he’d started the Gardner diesel of the Nicos and hauled up the anchor. His neighbours were quite used to the smell of decaying seaweed emanating from his property, but he would still rather avoid them asking awkward questions.

  The case was bulky, in size about mid-way between a briefcase and a small suitcase. It was made of metal – steel or perhaps aluminium – and had originally been covered with leather or plastic since in places there were still small patches of coarse, dark material adhering to it. Aristides pulled a clasp knife from his pocket and snapped it open, then ran the point of it lightly along the side of the case for a couple of centimetres. The knifepoint barely scratched the metal, so he knew it was steel.

  When he’d hauled it out of the sea and into the Nicos, Aristides had been surprised at how light in weight his discovery seemed. He’d realized, because of the way he’d found it floating, that it was airtight, but he had still been hoping for something of substance inside it.

  He sat down at the oak table and studied the outside of the case for a few moments. There were no distinctive markings of any sort that he could see, not even a manufacturer’s name or number. The case had one large central catch and a lock on either side of it, both quite simple affairs and each with an over-centre latch holding the lid closed. Aristides guessed that the primary security of the case and its contents had been the man carrying it, whose wrist had originally been secured to the handcuff still dangling from a steel chain welded to the case – a man whose bones now lay lost and unremembered ninety feet below the surface of the Mediterranean.

  Underneath the old stone sink in his kitchen, Aristides kept a metal toolbox containing an assortment of screwdrivers, pliers, files and a hammer, useful items for tackling the odd household problem. He got up to collect the toolbox and placed it beside the mysterious case on the table. He selected a small screwdriver and measured the size of its point against the keyhole in one of the locks. A little too small. He picked one slightly larger, stuck the point into the keyhole and gave the handle a sharp rap with the hammer. The point drove about half a centimetre into the lock. Aristides seized the handle firmly and twist
ed the screwdriver – gently at first, then with increasing force. With a snap, the lock gave, the screwdriver turned, and Aristides freed the latch.

  He pulled the tool out of the ruined lock and repeated the treatment on the second one. The catch, between them, had no lock, so he simply unclipped it and eased the lid open slightly. There was a sudden hiss of escaping air. Aristides leaned back, then opened the lid all the way and peered cautiously inside.

  Aeroporto di Brindisi, Papola-Casale, Puglia, Italy

  Richter just stared at Simpson, ice-blue eyes unblinking as his mind span back through the years to the last, in fact the only, time he’d seen Andrew Lomas. And whenever he thought of Lomas, Richter remembered Raya Kosov.

  Richter had been the totally expendable bait in a complex trap laid by Richard Simpson to ensnare a high-level traitor somewhere within British Intelligence. Sent to Austria on what purported to be a courier assignment, Richter had unwittingly been set up as the tethered goat to attract the tiger. Not knowing where the traitor was employed, Simpson had disseminated his story throughout all arms of the intelligence community. He had portrayed Richter as a disaffected Russian cipher clerk, a renegade from the SVR, a man running from his former masters and carrying documentary evidence that would expose the traitor. His confrontation with Gerald Stanway, the treacherous SIS officer, had nearly cost Richter his life, but when the shooting stopped it had been Stanway who lay dead.

  Then, in a bizarre example of reality imitating art, a genuine cipher clerk – in fact the deputy manager of the SVR computer network – had run from Russia to seek sanctuary in the West. Raya Kosov had had her own agenda and her own reasons for running, and she had applied her own conditions. One of these was that she would not meet with any serving or even retired member of British Intelligence. Richter was not only on the spot, he was the only man Simpson could find who met all the criteria that Raya had specified, and Simpson was desperate to access the information she possessed before the CIA, or even worse the SVR, found her.

  It was only after Richter had met Raya, and the two were making their way through France to Britain, that he had learnt the reason for her refusal to be handled by a ‘proper’ intelligence officer. She knew the identity of a traitor so highly placed in the British Secret Intelligence Service that she wasn’t prepared to trust anybody in that organization or in any of the other arms of the intelligence community. And the man she could identify wasn’t Gerald Stanway.

  With both SVR hit-squads and SIS assassination teams looking for them, Richter and Raya had literally run for their lives and, perhaps inevitably, had become ‘involved’ with each other. Finally they had made it to London, where an analysis of the data Raya had obtained pointed at one man – Sir Malcolm Holbeche, the head of the SIS – and Richter and Simpson had confronted him together.

  And then, as the operation wound down, Holbeche’s own Russian case officer, Alexei Lomosolov – a deep-cover illegal using the cover name Andrew Lomas – had counter-attacked. With Holbeche dead, and the operation over as far as Richter was concerned, he had let his guard slip and had been followed back to the hotel where he had hidden Raya.

  Ten minutes after he got in, there had been a knock at the door. Without thinking, Richter had opened it and looked straight into Andrew Lomas’s dark, almost black, eyes for less than a second before the taser dart had stabbed into his stomach. When he had come round, he found himself lying on the bed – and Raya’s horribly mutilated body was lying beside him. The only good news was that Simpson had already taken custody of the disks and data that Raya had smuggled out of Moscow.

  ‘Where is he?’ Richter growled, finally.

  ‘Here in Italy – somewhere near Taranto, to be exact,’ Simpson replied. ‘At least, that’s what the Italians think. They’ve got a couple of photographs of somebody who matches Lomas’s description, and also a copy of the photofit you did back in London. But you need to confirm his identification, because you’re the only person in the service who’s known to have met him in the flesh, so to speak. And Richter,’ Simpson warned, ‘we – that’s myself as well as the Italians – want Lomas in one piece, not diced, sliced or blown away.’

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  Spiros Aristides slumped back in his chair, disappointment evident in every line of his face. He didn’t know exactly what he’d been expecting, but what he’d actually found definitely wasn’t it. The case was lying on the floor, where he’d tossed it in irritation, and its contents were now spread across the table in front of him. The biggest and heaviest item was a thick file enclosed in a bright red cover. Aristides had opened it and looked at some of the papers it contained, but they’d been meaningless to him. He’d simply recognized that the writing was in English, a language he didn’t speak, though he could read the odd word.

  The only other things in the case were four small heavily sealed steel vacuum flasks, each bearing a white label with the legend ‘CAIP’ on it, and below that a number. Their tops were held in place with red wax and wire, and the flasks had been fitted snugly into shaped and padded recesses inside the case. There were also spaces for a further eight flasks of the same size, but none of these had been occupied.

  The flasks were light and, as far as Aristides could tell, empty, but that made no kind of sense. Why would anyone seal up empty flasks and lock them securely in a briefcase then chained to a courier and carried on board an expensive private jet? There simply had to be something significant inside them.

  For the third time, he picked one up and shook it, close to his ear, but could still detect no sound of anything moving inside. Perhaps, he surmised, they might contain small amounts of some very pure drug: heroin or maybe cocaine. The only way to find out was to open one.

  Aristides studied the top of one flask. He couldn’t see the stopper at all, because the whole top end of the container was covered in a thick red covering of some sort, as if the mouth had been dipped into a bowl of molten wax to seal it. Confining the wax was a wire net, whose thin strands cut deep into the surface and were twisted together round the neck of the flask to secure it. Whoever had sealed these flasks had definitely not intended that one might come open by accident. Aristides nodded to himself. Perhaps it was drugs. Perhaps he might be able to make a profit out of his efforts after all.

  In his toolbox Aristides had a pair of sharp wire-cutters, and it was the work of only a few seconds to snip off the twisted knots of wire at the neck of the flask. Pulling the wire strands out of the wax took longer, but after ten minutes he had removed them all, and was examining the unconfined wax itself.

  The simplest way to get the stuff off, Aristides thought, was to melt it again, so he walked through to his kitchen and reached down beside the cooker to turn on the gas supply from the large blue cylinder attached to it. Then he rotated the discoloured knob on the front of the cooker and struck a match to light the gas. He’d actually walked back to his dining table and picked up the sealed vacuum flask before his natural caution reasserted itself.

  Suppose the heat from the gas destroyed the contents before the wax melted? Or, worse, what if he was wrong about what it contained – maybe an explosive, not drugs – and the flask blew up in his hands?

  No, the safest option was his knife. Aristides went back and switched off the gas cylinder, then returned to the table. He opened his old clasp knife again and eased its point gently into the red wax covering the neck of the container, then rotated the flask in his left hand while the right held the blade of the knife firmly, at an angle, against the flask itself. The knife was sharp and cut easily through the wax, the blade spiralling closer and closer to the top of the flask as he turned it. Then he stopped, put down the knife and seized the loose end of the wax, pulling it off like the skin of a peeled apple. The wax covering the actual mouth of the flask was much thicker than that on its sides, so he had to insert the point of the knife blade under it to lever it off.

  Aristides looked carefully at the stopper – now revealed �
� and raised his eyebrows. It had been locked in place, with a small keyhole right in its centre, and the Greek could tell immediately that this was intended for some kind of security key. His trick with a screwdriver wouldn’t work again.

  He sat thoughtfully at the rough oak table, hefting the small steel flask in his hand, considering his options. The precautions that had been taken with these containers were like nothing he had ever seen before, and in his long career as a diver he’d been involved in the recovery and opening of numerous safes and strongboxes found on wrecked ships. Some had been little more than padlocked containers, yielding to a simple wrench from a pry-bar or a blow from a hammer, while others had required oxy-acetylene cutters or even a thermic lance to cut around the lock or slice an access hole in the back or side of a safe. But none that he could recall had ever involved such serious multi-layered protection for such a small object.

  Aristides could think of only two possible reasons why such elaborate precautions had been taken: the contents had to be either extremely valuable or very dangerous. The question was, which?

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  The top-floor office was spacious, light and airy, and had a clear and unobstructed view of the Virginia woodlands surrounding the Headquarters complex, but the big man wearing the charcoal-grey suit and sitting in a leather swivel chair had no eyes for the natural beauty of the locality. His attention was fixed on six eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs spread out on the desk in front of him.

  The desk itself was big and impressive, an oak-framed antique with a walnut veneer. It was his personal property, having been in his family for at least eighty years. Apart from the photographs and three steel-mesh document trays, the only other objects on the desk were two telephones and a solid silver writing set. A tidy and organized desk, he had always believed, denoted a tidy and organized mind.