Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  From what Spiros had told him, it seemed that the case had remained underwater for a long time, several years at least. It was therefore probably unlikely that anyone would take an interest in it now. And it was just a steel case after all, though specially constructed for carrying those strange flasks. The flasks themselves were something else. He still had no idea what the brown powder was, but it just had to be valuable to somebody somewhere, otherwise the comprehensive sealing and locking of the stoppers on the flasks made absolutely no sense. And if it was valuable, there was always the chance that someone might come looking for it.

  Nico stopped at the end of the street and considered for a few moments. It might be best to handle the steel case and its contents the same way he treated most of the other prizes that Spiros had wrested from the Mediterranean over the years. Taking it back to his home might be asking for trouble. On the other hand, it was late and he was tired. He could hide it somewhere else in the morning.

  Yes, he nodded, and turned right. Three minutes later he opened the door to his apartment and stepped inside, placed the steel case in the bottom of the free-standing wardrobe in his bedroom, and walked straight through into the bathroom.

  Spiros Aristides put down the toolbox just inside the kitchen door, walked back into his sitting room and looked sourly at the three fingers still remaining in the bottom of his bottle of Scotch. What the hell, he thought. He’d be in no fit state to dive tomorrow, but he hadn’t planned to go anywhere. He settled down at the table and poured himself another glass. He’d finish the bottle and then call it a night.

  Twenty minutes later, as he drained the last remnant of Scotch from his glass, and lay down fully clothed on his unmade bed, Spiros Aristides sneezed. Forty-five minutes after that, sitting on the edge of his own bed in the upstairs apartment on the northern edge of Kandíra, Nico Aristides sneezed as well.

  Chapter 4

  Tuesday

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  Christina Polessos was seventy-eight years of age, and had lived in Kandíra most of her life. Burnt brown by the sun, she invariably wore black – almost the Cretan national colour – in memory of her husband, dead some forty years. And that, coupled with her stooped posture, noticeably hooked nose, large dark eyes and thin and somewhat mean mouth, gave her a quizzical, crow-like appearance. Everyone knew her, but few really liked her. She knew everyone, and returned the favour by liking almost no one.

  She especially didn’t approve of Spiros Aristides. He was a mainland Greek for openers, and had never married, which were two strikes against him right away. He drank far too much, as she made sure everyone knew, and she was quite convinced that he was involved in something illegal every time he went out in his boat. In this, of course, she was perfectly correct, although her oft-repeated tales of gun-running and drug-smuggling bore no relation to the truth.

  And his house! In contrast to most of the whitewashed houses in the narrow street, it looked a disgrace. The paint on the shutters was faded and peeling, the tiny garden overgrown and weed-strewn, and even the roof tiles looked scruffy and ill cared-for. She deliberately averted her eyes every time she passed it, muttering imprecations under her breath.

  But even if on principle she didn’t look, she could certainly still listen as she trudged down the street, hoping maybe to hear some spoken titbit from within its walls that she could embellish and re-tell later to her few cronies in the square.

  And that morning she was rewarded: not by a snatch of incriminating conversation but by a long, pain-racked moan seeming to emanate from one of the upstairs rooms. This was so unexpected that she stopped dead in her tracks and looked up, listening intently. The sound was shortly repeated, then followed by a sobbing, bubbling noise that might almost have been an attempt at speech.

  She shook her head grimly, lowered her eyes and walked on. She was almost a hundred yards further down the street, and had nearly reached the square, when she stopped again, turned and looked round. Her brain had been niggling away at what she’d just heard, and some part of it had decoded the final sounds. It could, she suddenly realized, have been the single Greek word – ‘voíthya’ – ‘help me’.

  She looked back up the street. Nobody else had passed the elderly mainlander’s house since she’d walked by, and possibly nobody would – few of the villagers living beyond his property – at least not until later in the day. Had that been a cry for help or just the moaning of a man after far too much to drink the previous evening? No, there had been a peculiar choking sound about that utterance. Whatever was wrong with the old man, it was more than just simple drunkenness.

  And this was, she realized, a golden opportunity to establish for herself that the inside of Aristides’s property was just as disgusting as the outside. But to find out what was wrong with him, she would have to actually go into the Greek’s house, and she couldn’t do that alone, as a widowed woman. That would be highly improper and would set tongues wagging, something she couldn’t tolerate.

  She pursed her thin lips, walked on into the tiny square, and looked around her. Maria and Luisa were usually to be found there at this time of the morning, chatting outside one of the small handful of shops before heading home to prepare lunch. Luisa, she saw, wasn’t anywhere in sight, but then Maria Coulouris appeared around the corner, shopping basket in hand, and almost bumped into her.

  ‘Good. Come with me.’ Christina grabbed the younger woman by the arm.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘That old Greek’s house. I think he may be dying,’ Christina said with some relish.

  ‘What?’

  Christina explained to her the sounds she had heard minutes earlier.

  ‘He’s probably just drunk again,’ Maria hazarded.

  Christina shook her head. ‘He may well be, but the sounds I heard were strange. I’m sure there’s something else wrong with him, something much more serious.’

  They walked back up the street together, Maria still protesting ineffectually. Outside the tiny house they paused and listened, but no sounds floated down now from the upstairs windows.

  ‘We’ll shout out,’ Christina announced, and yelled ‘Aristides!’ in a surprisingly loud voice.

  There was no response, no sound at all.

  ‘Perhaps he’s gone out.’

  ‘No. I walked past here no more than five minutes ago. He was in one of the upstairs rooms then. We’ll just have to go inside and look.’

  ‘Must we, Christina? I have so many things to do.’

  The older woman ignored her half-hearted protest and seized the handle of the street door. Like just about every property in Kandíra, it was unlocked. Some of the other doors in the village didn’t even possess locks. She pushed the door open and both women peered inside. The narrow hall was empty, the house silent as the grave. Maria suddenly sneezed and Christina frowned at her.

  ‘Sorry. It’s the dust.’

  ‘Aristides!’ Christina called again, with the same lack of response.

  ‘I don’t like this at all.’

  ‘We have to go upstairs,’ Christina said firmly, and the two women began slowly and quietly to ascend the wooden staircase.

  At the top, Maria halted suddenly. ‘What’s that smell?’ she muttered.

  Christina sniffed suspiciously, then shook her head. ‘I can smell it too, but I don’t know what it is.’

  There were only two doors leading off the tiny landing. One stood open and they could see clearly that it was a spare bedroom, with a wooden-slatted steel-frame bed pushed against the far wall, a small chest of drawers opposite it. No mattress or bedding was visible. The other door was closed, and the two women approached it.

  Christina knocked firmly twice on the wooden panel, again calling out the old Greek’s name, but still without apparent result. She looked questioningly at Maria, who nodded, then she turned the worn brass handle and pushed against the door.

  They both stepped into the doorway and stared. Then Maria began to scream.<
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  Aeroporto di Brindisi, Papola-Casale, Puglia, Italy

  Richter and Simpson had spent the night in a hotel in Brindisi as the guest of the SISDE, but early the following morning Simpson had been whisked off in a chauffeur-driven car to attend some kind of briefing or liaison meeting – he had seemed somewhat evasive when questioned – leaving Richter to cool his heels.

  Actually, that had suited him quite well. He’d first grabbed a light breakfast in the hotel dining room, then used his credit card to obtain some cash and gone shopping. There were two items he had particularly wanted to buy, and he came upon both of them in the fourth shop he tried.

  The 800 Squadron maintainers arrived from the Invincible by Merlin late that same morning. They had first been briefed by the Squadron Engineering Officer, and then Commander (Air) had taken the Chief Petty Officer in charge aside for a few minutes, and explained exactly what he wanted the team to do here at Brindisi.

  Richter was meanwhile back at the airfield, standing outside the squadron building and wondering what to do about lunch, and also why he hadn’t bought something to read in the airport shop, when he heard the distinctive clatter of the Merlin’s rotors. The helicopter approached Brindisi from the south-east at five hundred feet, dropped down to fifty feet once inside the airfield boundary, then air-taxied over to the dispersal area where Richter’s Sea Harrier was parked. Once the big helicopter had settled on the ground, its engines shut down and the rotors stopped, Richter walked over and waited while the squadron maintainers climbed out.

  The CPO spotted Richter immediately – it wasn’t difficult, as he was the only person anywhere on the dispersal who wasn’t wearing either an Italian air force uniform or maintainer’s overalls – and walked over to join him. ‘Wings had a word with me before we left the ship, sir,’ the Chief said, ‘so I know what we’re supposed to be doing.’

  Richter grinned in a conspiratorial fashion. He knew exactly what Wings had told the CPO, because he had spent half an hour with the Commander explaining precisely what was going to happen, before he left the ship. ‘Thanks, Chief. Can you just make sure she’s fully fuelled and ready to fly before you leave? I may need to get out of here fairly quickly.’

  ‘Consider it done, sir. Do you want us to pre-flight her as well?’

  ‘Yes, please, that’s a good idea. Turn the aircraft round so that she’s facing the taxiway. When you’re working on her, don’t forget that the Aden cannon are loaded. I know it’s not SOP, but could you remove all the external locks and pull and stow all the pins except for the ejection seat and the MDC. Oh, and can you leave a ladder attached, so I don’t need to bother the ground staff?’

  ‘No problem.’ The CPO winked.

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  The police arrived first because, from the telephone description furnished by a tremulous Christina, supplemented by hysterical squeals from her friend Maria, it was clear that Spiros Aristides had been murdered – hacked to death.

  The first two police cars arrived from Chaniá an hour and a half after Christina’s excited phone call, and the officers immediately set up a cordon around the victim’s house. The senior officer pulled on latex gloves, then opened the street door, entered the building and climbed the staircase to the upper floor. There he took one look inside the bedroom and quickly closed the door. It would definitely be better, he decided immediately, to wait for the arrival of the forensic team and scene-of-crime officers he’d requested from the main police station in Irakleío.

  Ninety minutes later a white van arrived. Three men wearing white overalls and carrying plastic cases full of gloves, pads, bags, tweezers, cameras and all the other paraphernalia of criminal investigation, climbed out of it. The forensic scientist in charge – who also happened to be a medical doctor – introduced himself to the senior policeman.

  ‘Dr Gravas,’ he said, ‘Theodore Gravas. And you are?’

  ‘Inspector Lavat. The house is cordoned off, and nobody’s been inside except those two women’ – he gestured across the street where a grim-faced Christina stood with one arm protectively around the shoulders of her tearful friend – ‘and me. I wore gloves, of course, and touched nothing inside the house apart from the bedroom door handle. I didn’t even enter the bedroom, nor, I understand, did the women.’

  ‘They found the body?’

  ‘Yes. According to the older one, she heard a moaning sound from the bedroom window.’

  ‘Hacked to death, I believe?’ Gravas said.

  Lavat nodded. ‘I didn’t approach the body closely, but that’s certainly what it looks like.’

  ‘Right.’ Gravas turned to brief the other two members of his team. ‘I’ll go up myself first to confirm that death has occurred and to perform an initial examination. Then we’ll follow the standard procedure, starting with the bedrooms and working down through the house.’

  Gravas pulled on plastic overshoes, thin latex gloves, and a paper mask to cover his mouth and nose. He picked up his small scene-of-crime bag, and stepped over to the door, turned the handle and eased it open. He climbed the stairs slowly, peered inside the spare bedroom, then switched his attention to the closed bedroom door across the landing. He slowly and carefully opened it wide, then propped it open with a chair from the landing. Only then did he turn his attention to the corpse lying on the bed.

  His first impression was that the attack must have been almost incredibly brutal. The old man’s entire face was a mask of blood, only the very top of the forehead and his hair seeming untouched by the viscous red liquid. Below, his chest was a carpet of red, and the bedding beneath him soaked through. It looked almost as if the body had been completely drained of blood, there was so much of it evident around him.

  Gravas sniffed, trying to identify conflicting odours. Blood, definitely and unarguably. Urine, faeces – and something else? Something faint, unfamiliar and unpleasant.

  He walked across the room to the bed, eyes flicking from side to side as he looked for any clues, any sign of a weapon or anything out of place. Any incongruity, in fact.

  He stopped beside the bed and looked down. One glance at the body told him this was a complete waste of effort, but he stretched out his hand and felt for a pulse in the side of the man’s bloodied neck. Nothing, of course. Then he bent forward and gently touched the flesh of the face with his gloved fingertips. He looked more carefully, then used both hands to search for the wounds that he was sure were there.

  Two minutes later he turned his attention to the torso, and five minutes after that he stepped back from the bed. Behind the mask, his expression was puzzled. Nothing that he’d seen and felt on this body made any sense.

  Spiros Aristides was undeniably dead, and from the initial approximate body temperature measurement – obtained simply by placing a long thermometer in the dead man’s armpit for two minutes – he had probably expired about three to four hours earlier. But at that precise moment Gravas had not the slightest idea what had killed him.

  He was reasonably certain that death had not been caused by any kind of sharp-edged weapon, nor as far as he could see, probing the skin underneath the sodden clothing, by a bullet. He had found no lesions of any kind on the face or head. The torso was another matter, because there could be wounds he had failed to detect still hidden beneath the carpet of blood. For a definitive answer he would have to wait until he got the corpse back to the mortuary.

  What he did know was that whatever had killed the Greek had caused virtually all his blood supply to haemorrhage from every orifice. The bloody facial mask was the result not of some frenzied attack by a machete-wielding homicidal maniac, but of blood pouring from eyes, nose, ears and mouth.

  And that was something Gravas had never seen before, and hoped never to see again.

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  David Elias had just decided to lock up his desk and office safe, and head off for an early-morning coffee and a crap, not necessarily in that orde
r, when his internal phone rang.

  ‘Elias? I’ve got a few questions for you. Come up.’

  The coffee would have to wait, Elias decided. By now the crap couldn’t, but he’d have to be quick. ‘On my way, Director.’

  When he reached the top floor, John Nicholson’s door was already open, but Elias knocked anyway and waited for a response before entering and standing beside the leather armchair that faced the big oak desk. The Director, he thought, looked somewhat irritated, and Elias wondered which of his own recent reports was responsible, and exactly how severe a dressing-down he was about to receive.

  Elias was essentially an analyst, and had only worked in the Intelligence Directorate for a little over a year, although altogether he’d been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency for almost ten years. He had been drafted into Intelligence from Administration, where he’d worked as a bean-counter, after a senior officer had noticed that he spoke fluent Malay and workable Japanese. He now specialized in the Pacific Rim, and enjoyed what he did.

  ‘Sit down, Elias,’ Nicholson said, looking up from the open file lying on the desk in front of him. ‘This has nothing to do with your work here,’ he began. Elias relaxed noticeably, but still felt puzzled. ‘Tell me about your diving skills.’

  ‘What? Sorry, Director?’ Elias’s puzzlement increased.

  ‘Your diving. Have you had formal training or is it just a hobby for you?’

  ‘Both, really, sir. I got given my first scuba outfit when I was a teenager, and it just sort of took off from there. I joined the local sub-aqua club, got all the qualifications I could, and I’ve been diving ever since. I’m a qualified blue water instructor, and I’ve spent about, oh, fifteen hundred hours underwater, I guess.’

  ‘You done any deep diving, then?’

  Elias nodded. ‘I was involved in a couple of projects down in Florida, where we worked at depths in excess of a hundred feet. I’ve used exotic gases a few times, done a bit of saturation work.’ Nicholson now looked puzzled, so Elias enlightened him. ‘You can’t dive safely to great depths by just using compressed air,’ he said. ‘You remember I explained to you earlier about the bends, and about decompressing before you surface?’