Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  There had been a twenty-minute delay in landing the 747 and, despite their best efforts to get to the departure gate in time, they’d missed their connection to Crete. Nearly three hours later, most of it spent sitting around in startlingly uncomfortable seats in the departure lounge, they’d boarded the next available flight to Irakleío. The taxi ride to Réthymno had seemed interminable and, when they finally arrived, the hotel was hardly five star.

  So it was, perhaps, not altogether surprising that Elias simply walked into his room, dropped his bag on the floor, took off his jacket, tie and shoes, and then crashed out on the bed. Within three minutes he was sound asleep.

  Krywald and Stein were made of sterner stuff, or perhaps they were just more used to such things. They had been booked into adjoining rooms – Elias was occupying a single down the corridor – and as soon as they’d stowed their gear and cleaned up, Krywald switched on his laptop computer, plugged in the connecting lead to his mobile phone, and dialled an unlisted service provider in the United States.

  There were three email messages waiting, all signed McCready but which had actually been sent by Nicholson. All three messages were scrambled using the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption program, but it took Krywald only minutes to decrypt them. The first simply confirmed the details of the overt support Nicholson had arranged – where they should go to collect the hire car, the boat and Elias’s diving equipment, and so on – while the second message provided similar information for obtaining the covert support, like the explosives, detonators and personal weapons. The third email was perhaps the most interesting – or rather the most alarming.

  Nicholson had sent it soon after he had read the translated newspaper report on the CIA database of the apparent filovirus death at Kandíra. The message was brief and to the point: Krywald and his team were to amend their pre-briefed roles. They were to pose now as either American journalists or CDC personnel investigating the medical emergency on Crete. They were to enter Kandíra as soon as possible, gain access to Spiros Aristides’s house and search it thoroughly. Nicholson had a plan for them that, Krywald thought to himself as he scanned the email for the third time, might even work.

  The case containing the flasks, Nicholson suggested, was probably still in the dead man’s home, overlooked or ignored by the local police. Destruction of the wrecked aircraft was now to become the secondary priority.

  ‘Just as well,’ Stein remarked, somewhat sourly, ‘as our highly trained diver is sound asleep down the hall and in no fit state to get into a bathtub without help, never mind dive to the bottom of the ocean.’

  ‘Right,’ Krywald agreed. ‘OK, let’s do things in order. You go collect the car. I’ll pick up some maps of this goddamned island, then we’ll grab a drink and work out how the hell we’re going to get inside this Kandíra place.’

  Popes Creek, Virginia

  Charles Jerome ‘CJ’ Hawkins had retired from the Central Intelligence Agency over twelve years earlier, but unlike most of his contemporaries – who had moved their entire families south to Florida, ‘God’s waiting room’, as soon as they’d completed their time with the Company – he had elected to remain in the area where he had lived and worked for so much of his life.

  His home was an elegant four-bedroom property on the edge of the small town of Popes Creek, overlooking the Potomac a few miles south of Washington, DC. He and his wife Mary lived there quietly, their three children long grown up and with families of their own, two living in Idaho and one up in Michigan.

  For most of his career with the Company, Hawkins had worked in the Operations Directorate, much of it in the Covert Action Staff, responsible for disinformation and propaganda. He had been involved in hundreds of operations during his employment, some successful, many not, but the only one that he ever thought about these days still gave him sleepless nights. Not because of the operation itself – Hawkins had believed totally at the time in what they were doing – but in the possible consequence for both the Central Intelligence Agency, and even America itself, if details of it ever leaked out.

  And early this morning, that nightmare from the past had suddenly loomed in front of him. It began, innocuously enough, with a phone call. The voice at the other end was familiar, although it was five years since they had last spoken together.

  ‘We need to meet,’ the man said. ‘It’s been found.’

  Hawkins was silent for a few moments, and when he spoke there was a slight tremor in his speech. ‘When?’

  ‘A few days ago.’

  ‘Have you told the others?’

  ‘I’ve told Richards. Butcher is in a coma in a hospital in Baltimore, and the prognosis isn’t good.’

  ‘The meeting – when and where?’ Hawkins asked.

  ‘Tonight. We have to move quickly. Take a drive out to Lower Cedar Point, just west of Morgantown. Arrive at eight fifteen and park close to the water. I’ll find you.’

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  John Westwood had been head of the Foreign Intelligence (Espionage) Staff for a little over three years, after a career spent entirely in the CIA’s Operations Directorate, most of it located outside the United States. He hadn’t been particularly impressed with the idea of driving a desk after so many years in the field, but he had recognized the inevitability of the promotion and, being head of department, he was still deeply involved in the conduct of operations abroad.

  One of the things that he had always done, as a matter of routine ever since his appointment, was to scan the main database for all new entries given an importance classification of ‘3’ or higher, and especially those from geographical regions ‘D’, ‘E’ and ‘G’ – respectively the Confederation of Independent States, Eastern Europe and the Middle East – those being the areas in which most CIA espionage operations were kept running for most of the time. But he also scanned the other regions as well, and the ‘F2’ code with an attached headline ‘Cretan epidemic linked to crashed aircraft’ was sufficiently intriguing for him to not simply read the entire translation, but also to print it as hard copy.

  The Athens newspaper had picked up the story from the first report filed by the journalist based on Crete, and comprehensive information on the incident was somewhat lacking. However, the two locals sitting in Jakob’s bar that night had overheard just enough of what Spiros had said to make the story compelling. And because what he said was so intriguing, they had remembered enough to re-tell it later to a newspaper reporter – suitably embellished, no doubt.

  But, even without embellishment, there was actually quite a lot of hard data. The crashed aircraft was definitely small, there had been bodies inside, its registration began with the letter ‘N’ and contained at least three numbers, and it was lying on the seabed somewhere near Crete.

  Westwood read through the report three times, and each reading persuaded him that this was something worth looking into, not least because the ‘N’ in the wrecked aircraft’s number meant that it had been originally registered in the States, and the fact that the diver had found bodies suggested that there might somewhere be a still-open file on that missing aircraft – a file that could now perhaps be closed.

  The first thing, he decided, was to try to identify the aircraft, which shouldn’t be that difficult if the Greek diver had noted down the right letter and numbers and, perhaps more importantly, had remembered them correctly when he wrote them on the piece of paper he’d handed to his nephew. And, of course, if the reporter who had talked to the two Cretans had transcribed them correctly when he wrote the story. Westwood mentally corrected his ‘shouldn’t be that difficult’ assumption to a definite maybe.

  But he tried it anyway. Westwood used his desktop PC to log on to the Federal Aviation Administration database through the Internet and input ‘N176’ in the search field. That turned up a light aircraft, certainly not an executive jet, and it was still flying around – at least as far as the FAA knew.

  Within three minutes
Westwood knew he was wasting his time. The initial letter confirmed the aircraft’s country of registration, but the missing one or two digits – even assuming that the three the diver had reported were correct, and in the right order – expanded the number of possible aircraft to a huge extent, not least because one or both could be letters or numbers. He would have to try a different approach.

  Outside Kandíra, south-west Crete

  Stein was driving the rental car – a white four-door Ford Focus – that he had collected from the agency in Réthymno. Krywald was sitting beside him, studying a tourist map of the island. David Elias sat in the back seat, bleary-eyed and yawning, as the Ford bounced over the rough road – actually little more than a track through the olive groves – out of Soúgia towards Kandíra.

  The car crested a slight rise and Kandíra lay before them. Stein pulled the car off the road, and for a couple of minutes Krywald studied the scene before him through a small pair of binoculars. It looked much like any of the other small villages they’d already passed through on their seemingly interminable drive over the mountains from Máleme, where they’d left the main road. A cluster of white-painted houses perched almost at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. To one side a path snaked away towards the cliff itself, presumably leading down to a beach or a small harbour. On the slopes to the north of the village, their bases hidden by the stunted olive trees that covered the hillside, three circular white windmills sat, with their fabric-clad skeletal sails turning slowly in a gentle breeze.

  ‘OK,’ Krywald said, turning to Stein. ‘They’ve got a cordon in place around the village, but it’s real thin, just a local cop every fifty yards or so. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble getting in.’

  Stein nodded and swivelled in his seat. ‘You ready, Elias?’

  David Elias smothered another yawn and nodded.

  ‘Right,’ Krywald said, and gestured down the hill towards a point next to the cliffs and well away from the open space where three large tents had been erected within the cordon.

  ‘We’ll do it over there. There are two cops, one by the cliffs, the other about fifty yards inland. They can see each other, but I don’t think they can see any of the other guys forming the cordon, because there’s a stone outbuilding right next to them, blocking their view that way. Let’s get ready.’

  Stein started the engine, turned the car around and drove it a short distance down the track away from Kandíra. Once out of sight of the village, he stopped the vehicle and all three men climbed out.

  Stein opened the boot and pulled out two pairs of white coveralls which he and Krywald pulled on over their other clothes. Each had the initials ‘CDC’ roughly stencilled on the left breast. There was one small case in the boot, black and square, the kind that might well be carried by a doctor or a forensic scientist. It was empty but big enough to accommodate the steel case whose dimensions had been supplied by McCready at their briefing in Virginia. Stein pulled out the case and handed it to Krywald.

  ‘You know what to do?’ he asked Elias.

  Elias nodded. ‘I know what we discussed, but I’m not sure I can carry it off. I know just about enough Greek to order a cup of coffee.’

  ‘That’s exactly the point,’ Krywald said. ‘You’ll have to use a phrasebook and that’s going to spin everything out. That’ll give us time to get into the village. Look, David,’ he added, his tone friendly and persuasive, ‘I know you’re an analyst and this really isn’t your scene or anything that you’ve been trained for, but there’s just the three of us here, so you’re going to have to pull your weight.’

  ‘OK, OK, let’s do it,’ Elias grunted, and climbed into the driver’s seat. Stein and Krywald got into the back, crouching down below window level. Elias started the engine and the car moved off, over the rise and down the track towards Kandíra.

  Directly in front of Elias the road ran straight into the village, but there were barriers across it, manned by policemen, and several of their vehicles parked close by. Following Krywald’s directions, Elias turned right, towards the coast, and drove around the village on the track which they assumed led to the beach or harbour. Just short of the cliffs he stopped the car and turned it round, parking it in the shade of an olive tree about thirty metres from the temporary barricade. Then he got out, clutching the tourist map Krywald had bought earlier and also a Greek phrasebook, and walked over towards one of the policemen standing by the village perimeter, watching him.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Elias said in halting Greek, his finger tracing each word on the page of the phrasebook as he said it. ‘I am looking for the town of Palaiochóra.’ He distorted the name as much as he could, which wasn’t difficult for him. The policeman looked at him blankly, so Elias repeated his inquiry, making a further conscious effort to mangle the Greek. Then in English he asked if the policeman spoke English, which it soon became apparent he didn’t.

  At this point, just as Krywald had predicted, the policeman waved to his colleague, who wandered over to help them. Elias was the first other person they’d needed to talk to since their shift had started nearly three hours earlier, and any diversion, no matter how mundane, seemed welcome. Elias placed his back squarely towards the spot where he’d parked the hire car, and opened up the map. As both policemen studied it, it meant their backs were towards the vehicle as well.

  Crouching in the car beside the olive tree, Krywald nodded to Stein and quietly opened the rear passenger door on the side of the car opposite the village. He and Stein slipped out and crouched behind their vehicle, pushing the door to, but not audibly closing it. As Krywald glanced across at Elias, both policemen had their backs still towards them. One was pointing up the track leading out of Kandíra, towards the west, indicating the direction in which Soúgia lay, and beyond that Ánydroi and Palaiochóra.

  Perfect. Krywald estimated they had at least a couple of minutes.

  The two men stood up and walked calmly, and without haste, towards the nearest houses. The distance they needed to cover was less than forty yards, so within seconds they were out of sight, heading down a narrow twisting street towards the village centre.

  Hammersmith, London

  The Central Intelligence Agency isn’t the only organization that reads newspapers gathered from around the world.

  The British Secret Intelligence Service, popularly and incorrectly known as MI6, has a section which is given very much the same remit as that for which Jerry Mulligan worked at Langley. The source they were using was different: the SIS man on the spot in Athens had missed the local press but had picked up a broadcast on one of the radio stations. He had then telephoned three of his local contacts – two of whom were newspaper reporters and believed that he was too – and within an hour he had amassed pretty much the same information as Mulligan had gleaned from the newspaper.

  Rather than wait for the normal end-of-business encrypted email to Vauxhall Cross, the SIS officer had then written, enciphered and dispatched a one-off high-priority email to SIS London, with a copy to his opposite number on Crete.

  In London, after the message was decrypted and its originating station identified, it was automatically diverted into the electronic ‘in-box’ of the head of the Western Hemisphere Controllerate. He scanned it, and copied it to his number two, with a bald instruction to investigate and report.

  Ninety minutes after this email had arrived at Vauxhall Cross, Richard Simpson, who’d arrived at Hammersmith from Heathrow Airport less than ten minutes earlier, was looking at a hard-copy printout of the message, which was annotated with the ‘investigate’ request from SIS.

  Simpson hated computers and refused to have a terminal in his office, which meant that every message for which the Foreign Operations Executive was an action addressee had to be printed out and presented to him. This caused a considerable amount of irritation to – and a lot of extra work for – the staff at Hammersmith, but as Simpson was the head of the department there wasn’t a lot, apart from muttering and
complaining to each other in the canteen, that anyone could do about it.

  ‘Typical of bloody Six,’ Simpson muttered sourly into his empty office, putting down the printed message. Then he glanced at his desk calendar, nodded, picked up his telephone and pressed three keys for an internal number.

  ‘Simpson,’ he said when his call was answered. ‘Come up, please.’

  The Intelligence Director walked into Simpson’s office four minutes later and sat down in front of his desk.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ Simpson demanded, passing the printed sheet across.

  The ID looked at it and nodded. ‘Yes. It could, of course, just be a bad case of Asian ’flu, but I doubt it. I have been wondering whether it might be some kind of biological weapon test. The obvious worry is that al-Qaeda or some other group of terrorists might have developed a biological weapon of mass destruction and they’re trying it out on Crete as a sort of test run. If so, it would be somewhat reminiscent of the Aum sect in Japan.’

  Simpson looked irritated. He had great respect for the Intelligence Director’s breadth of knowledge, but had always found his pedantic delivery and frequently incomplete answers somewhat annoying. He was, however, well aware of the details of the Tokyo attack.

  In March 1995 the Aum sect – its full name was Aum Shinrikyo, which translates more or less as ‘Aum Supreme Truth’, and it was led by Shoko Asahara who was half-blind and certainly more than half-mad – launched a gas attack using sarin on the Tokyo subway on a Monday morning in the middle of the rush hour. Twelve people died and over five and a half thousand had to receive hospital treatment. The low mortality rate was attributed to impurities in the sarin nerve gas manufactured by the cult. Because of the inevitably confined space and lack of fresh air in the subway, the death toll would have been hundreds or even thousands if the sect had developed a pure strain.