Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  HMS Invincible, Sea of Crete

  Paul Richter’s cabin was on the starboard side of Two Deck, almost directly below the Harrier tie-down spot, a fact that quickly became obvious to him at a little after eight ten that morning when the 800 Squadron maintainers began slam checks on a Harrier that had just had an engine change. With about half an inch of steel plate and pretty much no sound insulation between him and a Rolls-Royce Pegasus running at full power, Richter woke up fast and stayed awake.

  He shaved and showered and decided not to bother with breakfast. He grabbed a cup of coffee in the Wardroom, then walked up to the Harrier briefing-room on Two Deck to be in time for Shareholders. He didn’t actually need to attend, as he was in reality little more than a passenger, and there were no more fixed-wing flying operations planned until after the ship left Piraeus, but Richter made the effort anyway.

  Just after nine he wandered up to the bridge and sat down in Commander (Air)’s swivel chair in Flyco, staring out at the Mediterranean.

  Invincible was maintaining station about five miles north of Réthymno, so the north coast of Crete was clearly visible to the south of the ship, extending from left to right as far as the eye could see. The Merlin that had been used earlier to ferry the CDC specialist to Kandíra from Irakleío was lashed down on three spot, rotors folded, and the Flight Deck was more or less deserted, apart from a handful of goofers peering through cameras and binoculars at the distant shoreline.

  He had been sitting there ten minutes when somebody spoke from behind him. ‘A penny for them, Spook.’

  Richter recognized Roger Black’s voice immediately. ‘Hi, Blackie. Just taking a last look around. Don’t know when – or even if – I’ll ever be aboard this war canoe again.’

  ‘Oh. I thought you might be bored here: no flying, nobody shooting at you.’

  ‘Nope.’ Richter grinned. ‘Boredom’s a state of mind, not a state of place. I never get bored, even when nobody’s shooting at me.’ He took a last glance round the horizon, then got up from the seat. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you a coffee.’

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  The three men sat in silence for a few minutes, seemingly stunned by the possible implications of what had happened in the quiet village.

  ‘OK,’ Hardin said, rousing himself. ‘The diagnosis can come later. Before I get suited up to take a look at this man, I’ve got a few more questions. First, you said that both Spiros and Nico Aristides were drinking in a bar last night. Have you traced anybody else that was there? Anyone who saw them, I mean.’

  Lavat nodded. ‘Yes, we interviewed the owner, who’s also the bartender. He saw the two men together, but said they were acting normally – no signs of illness or anything else. We spent most of yesterday afternoon locating the other customers from the bar that night, and all those we managed to trace seem fine. No health problems, and none recalled anything unusual about Spiros or Nico.’

  ‘Apart from finding the aircraft, that is,’ Gravas murmured.

  ‘Aircraft? What aircraft?’ Hardin demanded.

  ‘It’s probably unrelated,’ Lavat said, ‘but two drinkers overheard Spiros telling Nico about a crashed aircraft he had found somewhere off the coast. He’s a diver – he was a diver, I mean. To be exact, he was an unlicensed diver. Unfortunately, those two locals turned up outside the cordon and talked to one of our local reporters, with the result that the papers have been splashing a lot of nonsense about some poisonous germ from the seabed all over their front pages.’

  Hardin grunted. ‘Another question. Did Spiros and Nico arrive at the bar together or separately?’

  ‘They met there,’ Lavat said firmly. ‘Apparently Spiros arrived first, in a bad mood, and sat drinking whisky for quite some time before Nico walked in. The barkeeper’s impression – but he’s definitely not the best of witnesses – was that Spiros didn’t expect to see his nephew, and was pleased when he showed up.’

  ‘Ah,’ Hardin said, ‘that could be important.’

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ Gravas murmured.

  ‘I’m trying to work through the timescales involved,’ Hardin replied. ‘We have to assume that we’re dealing with an unknown pathogen that possesses some of the gross characteristics of Ebola, but which is real fast acting. We know that these two men were drinking together in a bar on Monday night, and we also know that less than twelve hours later they were both dead.

  ‘It seems reasonable to assume that the victim of any pathogen capable of killing that quickly would show signs of illness fairly soon after becoming infected. Now, if Spiros and Nico had been together when they entered the bar on Monday night, they might already have been incubating the agent. The fact that they arrived separately, and met there by chance, suggests to me that they were both uninfected when they left the bar.

  ‘And that,’ he added, ‘means that they had to have come into contact with the pathogen somewhere here in Kandíra, so we’ve got to find the source real quick before somebody else goes down. It also means that this hot agent, whatever the hell it is, works exponentially faster than anything that I’ve encountered before.’

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  The Central Intelligence Agency has a section whose multilingual personnel do nothing all day but read the world’s newspapers and magazines, searching for any snippet of information that might be of value, or simply of interest, to the Company. Another section does precisely the same thing with books, whether non-fiction or fiction. As a result, the officers employed in these two sections are probably the best-informed men and women on the planet, but you’d never know it because, like all CIA officers without publishing contracts, they never talk about their work.

  At 0713 local time, Jerry Mulligan – who despite his Anglicized names had been born on Corfu and spoke fluent Greek and workable Turkish – pulled up a scanned image of the front page of an Athens paper on the twenty-one-inch computer monitor in front of him.

  Most major newspapers, and almost all of the international ones, publish extracts of their daily editions on the Internet. Smaller papers don’t have either the money or the resources to do the same, which was why since the 1960s a CIA agent or asset in every city in the world has been employed to purchase daily copies of all local papers. Originally the newspapers were analysed there on site and any relevant cuttings sent to Langley by mail, but the growth of the Internet and the availability of email has greatly automated the process, effectively eliminating any kind of local analysis. These days, agents just scan the entire paper into a computer, one page at a time, and then send the scanned images as email attachments to one of several CIA-owned email accounts over in the States.

  The Athens paper in question was definitely the product of a smaller publisher. Parochial in content, and lacking the advertising clout of its bigger brothers, it was nevertheless interesting, and Mulligan actually looked forward each time to reading it.

  The ‘Cretan epidemic’ had made its front page, and as Mulligan read the text he immediately realized that this item was of potential interest to the Company for at least two reasons. Any kind of epidemic or outbreak of unexplained illness was relevant to them, because it might indicate some terrorist organization testing a biological weapon, or even foreshadow the start of a full-scale biological attack, while finding the remains of a crashed aircraft might close a still open Company file.

  Mulligan flicked the trackball and sent the cursor shooting across the screen to the top left-hand corner of the news item. He depressed the left-hand key with his thumb, and with fingers made sensitive by years of practice, used the trackball to move the cursor down the screen, highlighting the entire text of the story. He pressed ‘Ctrl’ and ‘C’, the keyboard shortcut to copy the text, opened up a new file in the word processor and pasted the text into it. Then he quickly read the article again to make sure that the optical character recognition software hadn’t made any errors, like reading a capital ‘i’ instead of
the letter ‘l’ or the number ‘1’, added the source of the story and the publication date, and saved it.

  That was the easy bit. Next he ran the automatic translation program to produce a first-draft version of the whole article in English. This would be accurate in that it was an exact translation from the Greek, but difficult to read because of the inevitably stilted nature of the grammar and unusual sentence construction. Mulligan spent another twenty minutes smoothing out the rough edges, then he read the translation through one more time. Satisfied, he saved the final version, together with the original, and loaded them both onto the Agency’s central computer system’s main database as text files.

  The last action he had to take was technically easy, but almost always took him some minutes to complete. All data – including photographs, text files, communications intercepts and even unattributed gossip – that was loaded onto the database had to be allocated both a security classification and a so-called ‘importance’ code.

  Mulligan had no trouble deciding the classification – the source of the story was a newspaper so anything extracted from it had to be considered unclassified – but he mulled over the importance code for a couple of minutes.

  The code consisted of a two-digit alphanumeric and was simple enough to interpret. The first letter indicated the region which was the source of the incident. ‘A’ was mainland America; ‘B’ was South America; ‘C’ was Canada; ‘D’ was what used to be termed the Eastern Bloc and which is now the Confederation of Independent States and the various satellite nations; ‘E’ the rest of Eastern Europe; ‘F’ Western Europe; ‘G’ the Middle East; ‘H’ the Far East including China and Japan; ‘I’ all other countries and locations, such as Antarctica, and ‘J’ was used for any non-region-specific reports, such as atmospheric or oceanographic events.

  The numbers ran from ‘1’ to ‘6’. ‘1’ was the highest code and implied that the incident had probable direct and urgent relevance to the CIA, to America or to one of America’s allies. At the bottom of the scale, ‘6’ meant that the incident possessed interest only, but no particular relevance or urgency.

  The letter was simple – obviously it had to be ‘F’ for Western Europe – and Mulligan eventually decided it merited a class ‘2’ coding for importance and relevance. He added the ‘F2’ code to the text, closed the file and moved on to the second page of the same Athenian newspaper.

  HMS Invincible, Sea of Crete

  Paul Richter walked into the Wardroom after lunch, poured himself a cup of coffee from the urn by the door and crossed to a chair in the corner of the large room. He picked up a travel magazine from the table in front of him and began flicking through it.

  Richter didn’t often take holidays, because he usually didn’t have anybody to go anywhere with, and when Simpson allowed him any time off he normally went down to his tiny cottage on the east side of the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall and spent a few days playing with his motorcycles.

  But he had travelled around most of the world, or at least the wet bits of it, courtesy of the Royal Navy’s Grey Funnel Line cruising organization, when he had been employed as a regular pilot in 800 Squadron and earlier when he’d flown helicopters, so he liked looking at the pictures. He’d been sitting there for about ten minutes when he heard his name called in a tannoy broadcast: ‘Lieutenant Commander Richter is requested to report to the Communications Centre.’

  ‘They’re playing your tune, Spook,’ John Moore called from the adjacent table, and Richter grinned at him.

  ‘If it’s what I think it is, it’s not going to be a fun few minutes,’ he said. ‘I’m already right at the top of my boss’s shit list and my guess is he’s about to drain all over me again.’

  ‘Something went wrong in Italy, I presume?’ Moore asked.

  ‘He seems to think so,’ Richter replied, ‘but from where I was standing everything worked out pretty much the way I’d planned it.’

  In the CommCen on Five Deck, Richter was directed to a secure telephone apparatus in one corner of the room. All around him was the hum of electronic equipment, the clattering of teleprinters and the sound of the Communications staff talking to each other. He picked up the handset and said one word: ‘Richter.’

  ‘And about bloody time too. Do you know how long I’ve been kept hanging on this line?’

  Simpson’s voice was quite unmistakable, and he sounded extremely irritated, but he was, in Richter’s experience, irritated most of the time, so that was probably understandable.

  ‘No, of course I don’t,’ Richter said. ‘I’ve only just been called down from the Wardroom. Where are you?’

  ‘Not that it’s any business of yours, but I’m still in Italy.’

  ‘Brindisi?’

  ‘Rome,’ Simpson snapped. ‘For reasons that don’t make any sense to me, you can’t fly direct from Brindisi to anywhere useful, so I’m in the Six office in Rome, waiting for the afternoon Alitalia from Fiumicino to Heathrow.’

  ‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘what do you want?’

  There was a short appalled silence on the line, and Richter could sense – in fact, he could almost feel – Simpson’s anger building.

  ‘What the fuck do you mean what do I want? What do you think I want? I want to talk about that fiasco in Italy.’

  ‘Well, there’s a surprise.’

  ‘Don’t get clever with me, Richter. You tried to kill a helpless and unarmed man who had his hands tied behind his back while he was being held by two other men. To make things worse, you did it in front of witnesses. Then you beat up a police officer, stole a car and a helicopter, and finally you shot your way off the airfield at Brindisi, writing off one of their military trucks on the way. The Italians, in case you hadn’t noticed, are supposed to be our fucking allies.’

  ‘I was in a hurry,’ Richter said. ‘I’m sorry about the cop, but I didn’t have time to stand around and argue with him. I could have killed him instead of just giving him a headache. And I didn’t steal either the car or the helicopter: I just borrowed them for a while.’

  ‘Don’t quibble. Fortunately for you, the policeman will recover. The car and the chopper are incidental, the truck too, but what you did to Lomas isn’t. I’ve been fending off some heavyweight diplomatic pressure to have you arrested the moment your ship reaches port, and then extradited to Italy to face charges. The Italians are extremely annoyed about this, Richter, and so am I.’

  ‘Get used to it, Simpson. What’s done is done, and if I was in the same position tomorrow I’d do exactly the same again. Lomas was an animal, a vicious, rabid beast and I think of myself as the pest-control man. He deserved to die.’

  ‘Wrong tense, Richter,’ Simpson said, ‘and watch your tongue. I’ve stopped their extradition attempts so far, but I can always change my mind.’

  ‘What do you mean, “wrong tense”?’

  ‘Just what I said. Your little attempt to bisect Lomas didn’t succeed. A doctor turned up a few minutes after you’d headed for the hills and he managed to stop most of the bleeding. The air ambulance arrived straight afterwards, so Lomas made it to the hospital at Bari, went into surgery immediately and was still alive this morning. It’s going to be a long time before he’s walking around again, but it looks like he’ll pull through.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Richter said.

  ‘That, in fact,’ Simpson added, ‘is probably why the Italians haven’t been trying as hard as they might to get hold of you. They’ll have plenty of time to debrief Lomas once he’s out of danger, and he’ll be in no fit state to resist. What they probably won’t do, though, is share the take with us, which has certainly pissed me off and is hardly going to make you flavour of the month with Vauxhall Cross and Five when they find out about it.

  ‘It’s also worth your while remembering that Lomas has shown himself to be extremely vindictive. If he does recover from what you did to him, he’s going to want blood in return. You’ll need to watch your back.’

  ‘I’ve got used to th
at ever since I started working for you,’ Richter said. ‘I hope Lomas does come after me – I’d like to finish the job. So what’s next?’

  ‘In view of the hostile vibes you’re likely to receive if you come back to London right now, you might just as well stay on that ship for at least another week. Let things cool down a bit.’

  ‘Fine with me. I can’t fly back from Athens for the next few days, because we’re standing off Crete.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Some kind of medical emergency. The ship’s been positioned here to ferry goods and bodies around the place.’

  ‘OK, stay on board for the next seven days. If their operation runs on for more than a week, get yourself ashore and buy a ticket home from Crete. Economy class, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh, and Richter.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wouldn’t take a holiday in Rimini for a few years if I were you.’

  Chapter 10

  Wednesday

  Réthymno, Crete

  Sometimes it’s not the direction of travel, or even the duration of the journey, that causes the greatest discomfort and jet-lag. Sometimes it’s just the circumstances, nothing more.

  When he had driven his Lincoln to Langley the previous morning, all David Elias had been expecting was another routine day of analysing raw intelligence data from the Pacific Rim area and writing reports and summaries based upon that intelligence.

  What had actually happened was that he had been summoned to his first-ever operational briefing, where he had been given what were clearly highly edited instructions about his intended role, and received background information that frankly made little sense. Then he’d been appointed the third member of a covert team comprising two men he’d never met before, and who clearly weren’t particularly enamoured with the idea of a mere analyst hitching a ride with them, and finally hustled into a car and rushed to Baltimore to catch a Jumbo to London Heathrow.