Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  Beside the desk stood a purpose-built console, which housed a computer terminal with direct access to the CIA’s extensive databases, to the Internet, and to a host of other data sources including all the major news feeds.

  He had arranged five of the photographs in a curving horizontal line across his desk, and in chronological order. The sixth picture he had placed off to one side. That one had been taken on the transit by the KH-12 bird three days earlier, and just showed an open boat, but no sign of an occupant.

  It was that picture that had originally both alerted and alarmed the Director, particularly when he had checked the precise geographical location specified by the satellite, and printed at the head of each photograph. The next few passes had revealed nothing in that area, and he had for a brief period hoped and almost believed that the first picture had been an isolated occurrence of no long-term significance.

  Then another pass had generated the remaining five pictures, taken at thirty-second intervals as the Keyhole satellite had over-flown the target area. These were superficially very similar. Close to the centre of each frame was the unmistakable shape of the same open boat – N-PIC had measured its length at just over eighteen feet – with a small wheelhouse at its stern.

  The CIA officer wasn’t Photographic Interpretation trained, so each picture had been annotated by the N-PIC analysts at his request. Most of the labels were self-evident – wheelhouse, ropes, cleats, radar reflector, tyres acting as fenders, and so on – but he was going to have to accept their word that the vague oblong shapes visible along both sides of the boat towards the stern were aqualung racks, one with a set still in place.

  In the first two pictures, the single occupant of the boat was leaning over the side, reaching down for something, or hauling something in. Until he’d studied the third picture, the CIA officer had wondered briefly if perhaps this was all a false alarm, and that what he was looking at was nothing more than a fisherman hauling up a lobster pot. Then he’d checked a Mediterranean chart and realized that the water there was far too deep for any lobster fisherman to foolishly try to catch anything.

  And, anyway, in the third photograph the shape of an aqualung tank was clearly visible beside the man in the boat, even without the N-PIC label, so the analysts had been right about the type of boat, although they hadn’t been able to identify it by a name or a number.

  The fourth picture showed three aqualung tanks resting beside the anonymous figure in the diving boat, but it was one N-PIC label in the fifth and final photograph that had caused the CIA officer most concern.

  The major difference between this picture and the preceding four was that the figure was no longer bending over the side of the boat. Instead, the KH-12 camera had caught him just entering – or perhaps standing beside – the wheelhouse. For at least the sixth time, the CIA officer leaned forward over the last photograph and stared intently at one tiny section of it through his desk magnifying glass.

  Clearly visible on the side of the boat, where the man had been bending over earlier, was a very slight protuberance. Next to that was an inked line joining it to the N-PIC label, that simply stated ‘ROPE IN WATER AND CLEATED TO GUNWALE’.

  And that meant, or it could mean, that there was something at the submerged end of the rope.

  Aeroporto di Brindisi, Papola-Casale, Puglia, Italy

  ‘Where did you spot him?’ Richter asked. It was late evening and he and Simpson were sitting in a military briefing-room at the Brindisi-Casale air base. Brindisi is a small airport, just outside the town of that name, handling a couple of dozen civilian flights a day to and from Rome, Milan and Venice. It is home to 9 Brigata Aerea of 15 Stormo, which flies Sikorsky HH-3F Search and Rescue helicopters, and also to the United Nations Logistic Base, which supports humanitarian aid and peacekeeping operations.

  Rather than go to Rome or to any other location where the Italian Secret Service maintained a presence, they had decided it was both safer and easier to brief Richter within the confines of the airfield. He was, after all, the only member of any Western Intelligence service who could positively identify Lomas/Lomosolov. Even Simpson had wanted reassurance on that point.

  ‘You can do it, Richter?’ he had asked.

  Richter thought back to that hotel in West London, and to the image of Lomas’s smiling face staring at him from the doorway of the room. It was an image that he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, would be with him for the rest of his days, no matter what happened now in Italy.

  ‘No problem,’ he had confirmed. ‘I’ll know him.’

  ‘Lomas – or the man we believe is Lomas – was spotted eight days ago by a covert operative, one of our watchers, at Rome’s Fiumicino airport,’ explained Giancarlo Perini, a senior operational agent of the SISDE who had flown into Brindisi-Casale an hour earlier by helicopter, specifically to brief Richter.

  ‘He arrived at the international terminal, Terminal Three. Because he was spotted before he reached passport control, the immigration people were able to record his details. He was travelling on a German passport, in the name of Günther, and had just arrived on a flight from Geneva. The purpose of his visit, he claimed, was tourism. We checked with Swiss – the airline he was flying with – and learned he has a return ticket to Geneva, due to fly out of Rome in three days. That was when we contacted your Secret Intelligence Service, Mr Simpson.’

  Richter glanced over at Simpson and did some swift mental calculations. The timing for this was almost exactly right. As soon as Simpson had been informed by SIS about the possible sighting of Andrew Lomas – who was on the alert list of every Western Intelligence service – he had suddenly, miraculously, changed his mind about Richter’s long-standing request for two weeks’ continuation training on board the Invincible.

  ‘So where is he now?’ Richter asked, putting the thoughts from his mind.

  ‘Not too far from here,’ Perini replied, ‘and he’s led us on quite a dance so far. He took a taxi from Fiumicino to the Stazioni Termini – Rome’s main railway station – and there bought a ticket to Naples. One of our men got close enough to him to hear him speaking to the ticket clerk.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just fly direct to Naples, then?’ Simpson asked.

  ‘He couldn’t,’ Perini replied. ‘There are no direct flights from Geneva to Naples. They all route through an airport in some other country first, usually Paris or Munich, and our guess is that Lomas didn’t want to risk being spotted either in France or in Germany.’

  ‘So he’s now in Naples?’

  ‘No. Let me explain,’ Perini shook his head, looking slightly embarrassed. ‘We got one of our men on to the train that Lomas caught, and briefed watchers to wait for him at Naples. That train makes three stops before it gets there: Latina, Formia and Aversa. Lomas got off at Aversa – the station serving Caserta, a few miles north of Naples. Our man followed him out, and then used his mobile phone to let us know what had happened, but we had nobody waiting at Aversa and the station’s at least a half-hour drive from Naples. That was our mistake.

  ‘Lomas got into a taxi and our man followed in another, but it was late afternoon and the traffic was very heavy. When he got boxed in, the taxi carrying Lomas slipped away.’

  ‘We tend to use motorcycles,’ Simpson remarked shortly.

  ‘So do we,’ Perini replied with a frown, ‘and we had two waiting at the station in Naples, but unfortunately nothing at Aversa. There had been no indication that Lomas realized he was being followed, and we assumed incorrectly that he would proceed to Naples. It was just an unfortunate oversight.’

  ‘He probably didn’t know he was being followed,’ Richter said sympathetically, ‘but for men like Lomas taking precautions becomes a way of life. He’d probably never buy a ticket to any railway station he was actually intending to use – always for somewhere further down the line, and then get off earlier. So how did you find him again?’ Perini stared at him. ‘You obviously did find him,’ Richter went on, ‘otherwise I wouldn’t
be sitting here trying to develop a taste for pasta al forno and with a Sea Harrier parked outside that the Royal Navy would quite like to get back safely.’

  Perini nodded. ‘Yes, we did find him again. Our man had the registration number of the taxi Lomas hired, and we interviewed its driver. He took his fare to one of the smaller hotels in the centre of Caserta, but when we checked with the hotel reception, nobody resembling Lomas was registered there.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Simpson snorted. ‘As Richter’s already said, Lomas is an accomplished professional. He was a deep-cover illegal in Britain for years, and for at least the last ten of them he was running the head of the Secret Intelligence Service as a source for the SVR. We had no inkling this man even existed until we got to interrogate Malcolm Holbeche. What he certainly isn’t going to do is take a taxi to any hotel that he’s actually staying at. So where did you pick him up?’

  ‘We had a bit of luck then,’ Perini admitted. ‘We circulated all the hotels in Caserta, searching for a guest who looked like Lomas or who was using the name Günther. As we had expected, that produced no results, and neither did canvassing taxi drivers and car-hire firms. But, like you, we have watch teams permanently in place around all the foreign embassy buildings in Italy, and three days ago—’

  ‘Don’t tell me Lomas actually went to an East European Embassy?’ Simpson interrupted.

  Perini shook his head. ‘No, and we didn’t expect him to either. But we did wonder if he was in Italy to receive instructions, or perhaps to deliver a report, so we blanketed the whole area. We positioned pursuit crews – on motorcycles, Mr Simpson – outside all buildings known to be used by East European officials and businesses in the Caserta, Naples and Salerno areas. Each operative was briefed to follow any known or suspected intelligence officer, to stay out of sight, and to report any contact with anyone who looked anything like Lomas.

  ‘For the first few days we used up a lot of petrol and covered a lot of kilometres, and discovered absolutely nothing that we didn’t already know. And then, as I said, three days ago we got lucky. One of our watchers followed a mid-level consular official, believed to be an SVR agent, to a restaurant on the eastern outskirts of Salerno. He went inside and bought a drink at the bar, and appeared to be waiting for someone. Our operative followed him into the restaurant, bought herself a drink and—’

  ‘A woman?’ Simpson asked, recalling the motley collection of hairy-arsed men employed in the same role by MI5 and to a lesser extent by SIS.

  Perini nodded. ‘We have always used women in preference to men. They tend to be more observant, and they can get into most places a lot easier, and with far fewer questions asked, than any man. They are also rarely perceived as a threat. Anyway, our operative sat and sipped her drink and waited. About fifteen minutes later a man entered the restaurant and walked straight over to the bar. He greeted the consular official like an old friend, then they had a drink together and a light lunch.’

  ‘But it wasn’t Lomas,’ Richter said.

  Perini looked surprised. ‘You’re quite right. It wasn’t Lomas. How did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Richter said, ‘but from what we know of the man, he always tries to use cut-outs. My guess is that the man the official was meeting was just a go-between sent by Lomas to receive a verbal briefing, or whatever, on his behalf.’

  The Italian nodded again. ‘We don’t know what information was exchanged but, when the two men parted, our operative decided to follow the unknown male. It was a good decision – he climbed into a car and drove off, heading east. All the motorcycles our people use are fitted with long-range tanks, which is just as well because he kept on going for over two hundred kilometres. He finally led her to an isolated villa just outside a town called Matera. That’s on the main road between Taranto and Salerno, and about one hundred and twenty kilometres – around seventy-five miles – west of Brindisi. As the man went inside, she stationed herself in a position from which she could cover the front of the villa. She stayed there, tucked behind some bushes on the hillside, for the rest of the day.

  ‘She had called in a progress report as soon as she reached the restaurant, and another when she got to the villa, but neither her description of the man she’d followed nor the address of the villa meant anything to us, so we did nothing from this end. All our watchers use the latest surveillance equipment, including binoculars fitted with integrated digital cameras. Because she was using one of these devices, as dusk fell she was able to take two photographs through an uncurtained window of the villa.’

  Perini opened a manila envelope and slid a number of large black-and-white photographs onto the table in front of him. He separated them into piles, then passed two pictures each to Richter and Simpson.

  ‘These are enlarged copies of the two photographs she was able to get.’

  Richter looked down at them and saw, for the first time, a picture of the face that still haunted his dreams.

  Chapter 3

  Monday

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  Brilliant white stars studded the sky over Crete, but Spiros Aristides saw none of them as he trudged from his simple home down the narrow unlit streets towards the centre of the village. He was both preoccupied and irritated, and badly needed a drink – or, better, several drinks.

  He had hoped – in fact, he’d felt certain – that the steel case contained valuables, but unless something remarkable popped out when he finally opened those flasks, as far as he could see he’d just been wasting his time. He would have done better to have just left that damned case where he’d found it.

  The murmur of conversation stopped briefly as Aristides pushed open the pale green door of the kafeníon, the café-bar, and stepped inside. Kandíra was well off the tourist track and had been spared the dubious ‘improvements’ visited on most coastal towns in the Mediterranean. There were no illuminated signs above the door or flickering in the small and dirty windows, no signs of any sort, in fact, to announce that the place was a bar. No juke-box, no gaming machines, no bar meals or shaded terrace where a passing tourist could pass a pleasant half-hour sipping red wine and writing postcards.

  It was just a small, scruffy room with half a dozen tables and twenty or so assorted chairs, most in need of some repair. Down one side ran a battered oak bar behind which Jakob – that wasn’t his real name, but the previous incumbent had been called Jakob and old habits died hard in Crete – stood wearing a once-white apron and dispensing drinks with the kind of ill grace that frequently made his clientele wonder why he hadn’t opted for a different profession, like tax collector or maybe New York yellow cab driver.

  As far as Aristides could tell, the bar hadn’t changed in any significant way since he had first arrived in Kandíra a little over eight years earlier, and nor had its occupants. Every evening the old men of the village trickled in, in their ones and twos, took their usual seats at the discoloured tables and, without a word being exchanged, were served their usual tipples by Jakob. Then they talked or just sat in silence. Sometimes a pack of cards would be produced and the usual bar noises would be punctuated by the slap of pasteboard on a table and the cries of exultation or recrimination as some game progressed.

  After Aristides pushed the door closed behind him, the murmur of conversation began again. Two or three of the customers smiled or lifted a hand to acknowledge the Greek, gestures to which Aristides responded with a nod, but most of the old men ignored him. He was, after all, a relative newcomer who wasn’t even Cretan, and he was still considered by many of them to be a suspicious foreigner.

  Aristides walked across to the bar and looked at Jakob, who looked straight back at him. The Greek had been drinking in the bar three or four nights every week for the past eight years, but Jakob still pointedly regarded him as a stranger.

  ‘Whisky,’ Aristides snapped. Greek he might be, but he didn’t have a Greek’s palate for retsina or ouzo.

  Jakob slapped a small glass on the bar and pou
red a measure of golden liquid into it from a bottle labelled ‘Glenfiddich’, but which Aristides was quite certain the man kept topped up with the cheapest whisky he could find on his weekly trips to the supermarkets in Chaniá. He had never, since he first walked into this bar, seen the bottle anything other than half-full, and he had never seen Jakob open a new bottle of Scotch of any brand. There were two other permanently half-full bottles of whisky on the shelves behind the bar, one of them labelled ‘Johnnie Walker’ and the other ‘Famous Grouse’, and the contents of all three tasted absolutely identical. Only their prices were different.

  Aristides drained the Scotch in two gulps, gestured for Jakob to refill his glass, then dropped some coins on the bar, picked up his drink, walked across the room and sat down at an unoccupied table in the corner.

  He’d been sitting there for something over half an hour and three Scotches, when the bar’s door opened yet again. Like everyone else, Aristides looked up at the new arrival and, for the first time since he’d walked in, he smiled. The man at the door smiled back and walked over to join him at the corner table.

  ‘I tried your house, but it was in darkness, so I guessed you’d be here.’

  ‘Sit down, Nico, sit down. A beer? Something stronger?’

  Nico Aristides, one of Spiros’s numerous extended family, pulled up a chair and sat down. He gestured to Jakob, and the swarthy unsmiling Cretan plopped a beer bottle and a chipped and dirty glass down on the table in front of him. Nico took one look at the glass and decided to drink straight from the bottle.

  ‘You were out again today?’ Nico said, more of a statement than a question. ‘Anything?’

  Nico had never enjoyed diving but he had numerous clients on Crete, and scattered around the Eastern Mediterranean, who were always keen to purchase any interesting objects that his uncle recovered from the bottom of the sea. And, whenever possible, Spiros obliged, hauling up ancient artefacts that the archaeologists, given the choice, would far rather were left in situ. Nico, in effect, acted as his uncle’s fence.