Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  ‘And what exactly has a gas attack in Tokyo got to do with a virus infection on Crete?’ Simpson demanded.

  ‘Nothing directly, but it might indicate the same kind of pattern. What isn’t generally known is that before the Tokyo attack the Aum sect carried out a trial run in Australia of the sarin gas it had itself developed. They bought a remote sheep ranch – the Banjawarn Station deep in the outback of Western Australia – specifically to test their concocted strain. It was an expensive test, since the ranch alone cost them four hundred thousand Australian dollars.’

  ‘Casualties?’ Simpson asked.

  ‘Twenty-nine sheep, no humans, but that was because the only people in the area were Aum technicians wearing full biological space suits. Despite its impurities, the Australian test proved that the sarin they had manufactured was lethal – which was all Asahara needed to know. The Aum sect is long gone, but what worries me is if al-Qaeda are following a similar path and they’ve chosen Crete as a testing-ground for some bioweapon they’ve developed or, worse, bought illicitly.’

  ‘From Russia?’

  ‘From Russia, or Britain or America or Iran or Syria or China or any one of about a dozen other nations. There are hundreds of biological and chemical weapon stockpiles dotted around the world, and making such agents isn’t actually that difficult as long as you possess the right facilities. Sarin – its chemical title is isopropyl methylphosphonfluoridate – is basically an insecticide, so its ingredients are readily available. You have to take care in making it, to ensure that there are no leaks, but any reasonably well-equipped chemical laboratory could manufacture it easily.’

  ‘The Tokyo death toll seems low. How dangerous is sarin?’

  ‘Very,’ the Intelligence Director replied. ‘The lethal dose is about six milligrams – that’s about decimal zero zero zero two of an ounce – and it doesn’t have to be inhaled. Just getting a drop of it on your skin is enough to kill you. And sarin is benign compared with some of the more modern concoctions.’

  ‘And you think this might be a bioweapon attack using sarin?’

  The Intelligence Director shook his head.

  ‘Yes and no. Sarin is a nerve gas. That makes it a chemical agent, not a bioweapon. If sarin had been used and had been properly deployed it would have affected a large number of people – perhaps even the entire population of this village on Crete. It would also have affected them all at about the same time, and in more or less the same way. No, what we’re looking at here is almost certainly some kind of a biological agent, but it could also be entirely natural and nothing to do with any terrorist organization.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘In my opinion, this incident on Crete is one of two things. The most likely explanation is that it’s just an isolated outbreak of some already known but rare disease that the local doctor hasn’t recognized for some reason. Despite what the medical profession would like us to believe, no doctor knows everything, and a Cretan general practitioner is going to spend most of his time treating tourists for sunburn and stomach upsets. He isn’t likely to be familiar with some of the rarer illnesses, like Lassa Fever, Marburg or Ebola—’

  ‘Hang on,’ Simpson interrupted. ‘I know a bit about those myself, and they’re highly infectious, so we wouldn’t just be looking at a single case.’

  ‘That’s not necessarily true. Even if this Greek diver had contracted Ebola, the disease’s incubation period is long enough that he may have been infected with it some time ago. He could subsequently have infected other people, but they may not yet be showing any signs of the disease. Within a week or two, there might be another dozen cases.’

  ‘OK,’ Simpson brooded, ‘that makes sense. What’s the other explanation?’

  ‘The least likely, but most worrying, scenario is that it is some kind of a biological weapon, but one with a low mortality or low infectivity. Only one death has been confirmed, I understand, and unless there are a lot of other very sick people in that village right now that we haven’t heard about, it suggests the cause is an inefficient killer.’

  Simpson stroked his chin in silence for a few moments.

  ‘Right, the problem as I see it is that there’s no way of telling at this stage which explanation is the right one. The potential causes are completely different – a rare but naturally occurring virus or other biological agent, or some kind of manufactured bioweapon – but the result at this stage is the same: one man is dead and there are possibly a number of other people incubating the virus but not showing any signs of distress at the moment.’

  ‘That’s a fair summary.’

  ‘Well, Vauxhall Cross have asked us to investigate it, so we’d better do something. What are your recommendations?’

  ‘There’s not a lot we can do from here. No doubt the Americans will be taking satellite pictures of the island that we’ll be granted access to, and I’m sure Sky News and CNN and the rest of the news organizations will be sending teams out to the Mediterranean if they haven’t already done so. Six have got a small presence on the island. Probably our best option is to analyse the data already in the public domain and supplement that with satellite and local intelligence.’

  Simpson nodded. ‘I agree with that for background and general analysis, but I’ve a better idea. Richter.’

  The Intelligence Director looked interested – puzzled, but interested. ‘Sorry?’ he asked, glancing over at Simpson.

  ‘Richter. He’s been taking a holiday on that floating gin palace in the Med, and when I spoke to him this afternoon he told me the ship was loitering off Crete to help with this medical emergency, so he’s right on the spot. After the cock-up he made in Italy he can bloody well start earning his money again. Tell the duty Ops Officer to signal him to find out what’s going on. Richter’s good at digging. If there’s anything we need to know about happening in Crete, he’ll find it for us.’

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  ‘So what now?’ Dr Gravas asked. ‘I presume you’ll want to examine the bodies of the victims?’

  Hardin’s answer surprised him.

  ‘No, not yet. I’m quite satisfied with your preliminary diagnosis of what killed these two men, at least in broad terms. It was definitely some kind of fast-acting hot agent, perhaps a filovirus, or maybe something totally unknown. Once my people get here we’ll be able to do complete autopsies, take tissue samples and so on, but if I go and look at the bodies, pretty much all I’ll be able to confirm is that they’re dead, and that isn’t a lot of help to us right now.

  ‘The normal procedure in an investigation is to take blood samples from anyone who may be infected. Then we separate the serum from the red blood cells using a centrifuge: there’s a small battery-powered unit in one of the cases I brought. Then we separate the different sera into aliquots, label them, pack them in dry ice and send them back to Atlanta. Our technicians there will try to confirm the virus, and even its precise strain, by identifying specific antibodies within the sera.

  ‘Our problem here is that the subjects are dead and their blood will by now have degraded, so will probably be useless for that kind of test procedure. This case is very different, and not simply because the only two victims known to have contracted this illness are already dead. Our first priority, I suggest, is to try to find out how and where Spiros and Nico Aristides became infected. If we can localize the source, we might be able to prevent any further casualties.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’ Lavat demanded.

  Hardin grinned somewhat ruefully. ‘I don’t have a comprehensive answer to that, Inspector,’ he said, ‘so all we can do is apply simple logic and start from the last place the two men were seen together alive.’

  ‘The kafeníon?’

  ‘Exactly. We start from Jakob’s bar and work our way slowly along towards Spiros Aristides’s house.’

  ‘And what will we be looking for?’ Gravas asked.

  ‘I have no idea. All we can assume is that somewhere along that route they saw
something sufficiently interesting or unusual that they stopped and touched it, or tasted it, or otherwise allowed the infection to enter their systems. I’m just hoping that we’ll see and recognize the same thing.’

  ‘Suppose they picked up whatever this thing is and took it into Aristides’s house with them?’

  ‘Then we’ll find it there, I guess,’ Hardin replied. ‘OK, could you ask a couple of your men to take the bigger of my two cases over to Spiros Aristides’s house? I’ll need to put on a space suit before I go inside, but I don’t think we’ll need to take any precautions until we actually get there.’

  ‘Why? Isn’t there a risk that this agent is still outside somewhere, and still infectious?’

  ‘Yes, of course, but whatever the source is, I don’t think it uses airborne transmission.’

  Lavat looked quizzical, but it was Gravas who answered. ‘Look at the timescale, Inspector,’ he explained. ‘Spiros and Nico were drinking in that pigsty Jakob calls a bar until around midnight, but by mid-morning next day Spiros was dead, and probably Nico as well. The two women went into Spiros’s house just after he died, and they’re still both fit and well and complaining about having to stand around in the street without their clothes on.

  ‘Whatever this thing is, the one thing we do know for certain is that it attacks really quickly. If the two women had breathed in any virus particles – assuming for the moment that it is a virus – I would have expected one or both of them by now to be showing some signs of physical distress. I mean bleeding, choking, vomiting or something, to show that the infection had taken a hold.’

  Lavat nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That makes sense. I think you’re probably right.’

  ‘And,’ Gravas added, ‘I’m pleased to say that the same logic applies to us as well. We’ve been inside both properties without wearing the right protective equipment – the paper mask would help, but it’s certainly not a proper defence against an airborne pathogen – and we’re still fine.’

  ‘So now what?’ Stein asked, after they rounded a corner that took them well out of sight of the police manning the cordon around the village.

  ‘We find the house where this Greek diver died, get inside it and search it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Easy,’ Krywald replied. ‘We’re inside the village now, so everyone will assume that we’re supposed to be here. You speak Greek – so we’ll stop somebody and ask the way.’

  Sitting on the steps of a white-washed cottage they found an elderly Cretan man, wrinkled and burnt umber by the sun, smoking a foul-smelling cigarette, obviously hand-rolled. Stein stopped to explain that he and Krywald were part of the American specialist team, then asked directions to Aristides’s house.

  The old man wrinkled his eyes against the glare of the sun, and looked up at the two Americans. He took his time removing the cigarette from his mouth, then replied briefly in his native language.

  ‘What did he say?’ Krywald demanded.

  ‘He asked “Which one?”’ Stein replied.

  ‘What the hell does that mean? The one that’s dead, of course.’

  Stein switched back to Greek and addressed the old man again. ‘We’re looking for the house belonging to the Aristides who died because of this illness we’re investigating.’

  The old Cretan grinned up at him and took another drag on his cigarette. ‘Which one?’ he asked again.

  ‘Either this guy’s an idiot or Spiros isn’t the only dead Aristides in this village,’ Stein muttered to Krywald, then turned back to the Cretan. ‘Do you mean there’s more than one man here dead with this disease?’ he asked.

  The old man nodded. ‘Spiros Aristides and Nico Aristides – and both of them are dead.’

  ‘OK,’ Stein took a small notebook from his pocket. ‘Can you tell me where they lived?’

  Chapter 11

  Wednesday

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  His check of the FAA Registry hadn’t helped Westwood much, or even at all, so he turned his attention to the CIA’s own database, known to Agency insiders as ‘Walnut’, which had been the source of his interest in the first place. Walnut is actually several databases, some containing purely unclassified background information, being data in the public domain, and others allotted varying security classifications, some with heavily restricted access.

  Using the custom-designed search engine, which accepted almost every kind of permutation within its parameters including Boolean logic, he keyed in a simple enough search – ‘Mediterranean+aircraft+crash’ – specified the entire database rather than just a particular section of it, sat back and waited.

  A little over three seconds later the first page of results appeared on the screen in front of him. There had been a surprising number of aircraft crashes in the Mediterranean, it seemed. Maybe this indicated that there was a ‘Maltese Triangle’, Westwood thought with a wry smile, mirroring the so-called Bermuda Triangle on the other side of the world, about which so much complete and unsubstantiated rubbish has been written over the years. Or maybe it was just that the airspace over the Mediterranean is particularly busy, and has been ever since man first took to the air.

  Westwood realized he was going to have to tighten his search if he didn’t want to spend all day reading through aircraft crash reports that were of no interest to him. He read through the Greek newspaper article again and then entered a new search command, looking within the results the system had already generated, and specifying only aircraft that had crashed since 1960.

  That still threw up a couple of dozen reports, so he refined the search again, using the registration letters reported for the crashed aircraft: ‘N’, ‘1’, ‘7’ and ‘6’. The screen cleared and he was now looking at three reports only, all classified ‘Restricted’ – the lowest possible rating above ‘Unclassified’ – and all referring to the same incident: a Learjet that vanished somewhere over the Eastern Mediterranean in 1972. The first file was the reported loss, the second a compilation detailing the various stages of the surface search that had been mounted, and the third noted when the search had been abandoned without result. Westwood printed them all as hard copy and began to read through them.

  It wasn’t a great leap of logic to connect this report with the wreckage of the aircraft that the Greek diver had reportedly found at the bottom of the Mediterranean, particularly as the registration number of the missing aircraft was N17677, but as he studied the printed pages in front of him Westwood realized that something didn’t gel.

  The location of the missing Learjet was necessarily imprecise, as the aircraft had been outside radar cover when it went down, and the search teams had simply extrapolated the aircraft’s predicted route from its filed flight plan, and then concentrated on the area the aircraft should have reached when the en route controlling authority lost radio contact with it. But the location where the Greek diver had apparently found the wreckage was nowhere near either this predicted course or the original search area. It was a long way to the north, which suggested that the pilot of the Learjet had for some reason waited until his aircraft was outside radar cover, then turned north towards Crete, and that didn’t make any sense unless the aircraft was lost – which was most unlikely – or on some kind of covert mission.

  Westwood turned back to his computer terminal and on a hunch typed in a new search solely for ‘N17677’.

  The result surprised him. Realistically, he had been expecting to see only the same three reports that the system had already generated, but the more specific search had now added a fourth file. Its title was ‘N17677’.

  That didn’t make sense. The search parameters he had entered previously – the partial registration number ‘N176’ – should also have located this file. Westwood bent over the keyboard again and entered ‘N*7677’, then pressed the ‘Enter’ key. The ‘*’ symbol is a wildcard that can mean any letter, number or symbol, so that search string should bring up the ‘N17677’ fil
e reference – but it didn’t. Once again, Westwood was gazing at only the original three references.

  He tried again, this time inputting ‘Learjet N17677’, but with the same result: only the same three Restricted reports about the missing aircraft. That had to mean that the ‘N17677’ file was protected. It could only be located by typing in the exact filename – a primitive, but actually quite effective, means of ensuring that the file could only be accessed by somebody who already knew about it.

  Again, Westwood typed in ‘N17677’ and glanced at the screen. Next to the filename was its classification, ‘Ultra’ – one of the highest classification levels above ‘Top Secret’ – and the cryptic note ‘Cross-reference: CAIP’. Beside this was a warning: ‘Access prohibited. File sealed July 02, 1972’.

  ‘What the hell is CAIP?’ Westwood muttered to himself. He tapped the letters into the search field and pressed ‘Go’. Almost as he had expected, the result was virtually a mirror image of what he had already seen – ‘Cross-reference: N17677. Access prohibited. File sealed July 02, 1972’ – and again the security classification ‘Ultra’. The only additional information provided were the names of the six senior CIA officers who had been responsible for CAIP, whatever it was, but Westwood had never heard of any of them.

  For a couple of minutes he sat silently, staring at his computer monitor. Then he opened Internet Explorer, moved the cursor into the ‘address’ field, and typed in ‘www2.faa.gov’, the address of the Federal Aviation Administration’s website. He selected ‘Information’ and ‘Pilots and Aircraft Owners’, then ‘Services’ and ‘Query the Aircraft database’. He clicked the link at the bottom of the ‘Aircraft Inquiry Site’ page, waited while the ‘FAA Registry Aircraft Registration Inquiry page’ loaded and chose ‘N-Number’. In the query field he typed ‘17677’ and pressed ‘Go’.

  Then he leaned back from the screen and shook his head. In front of him were details of the aircraft bearing the North American registration N17677. It was a Learjet 23, exactly the same type of aircraft as the one that had been lost in the Mediterranean in 1972, but according to the FAA database, it hadn’t crashed or gone missing – it had been retired from service in 1979.