Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  But an aircraft’s registration number, just like that for a car, is issued only once, so either the FAA had made a mistake and the details Westwood was looking at on the screen were incorrect, which seemed extremely unlikely, or the registration of the aircraft referred to in the CIA database was wrong.

  Or, Westwood suddenly thought, maybe not. There was a possible way in which they could both be right.

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  As Krywald and Stein walked around the corner, they spotted the policeman immediately. He was leaning against a wall in the shade, opposite a scruffy white house, and smoking with the cigarette cupped in his hand. As the two men appeared he dropped the stub to the ground, trod it out and straightened his uniform jacket.

  Stein walked over to him. ‘We’re from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control,’ he announced in Greek, and displayed one of the ID cards that he and Krywald had faked by using the laptop computer, a portable printer and a mugshot acquired from a passport-photograph booth before they left Réthymno.

  One of the major problems with an identity card is that unless the person to whom it is presented knows exactly what the real one looks like, he has no idea whether it’s the genuine article. This particular policeman had spent his entire life and career on Crete, and had never even heard of the CDC until Inspector Lavat had told him earlier that the team from Atlanta was expected on the island. The card he studied looked perfectly correct to him, so he just nodded and handed it back.

  Stein pulled a notebook from his pocket. ‘Is this the house where Mr Spiros Aristides lived?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the officer replied. ‘The door is not locked, and his body is still upstairs in the bedroom.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Stein and Krywald then pulled on surgical gloves and paper face masks. ‘Make sure nobody else goes inside until we have completed our examination of the premises.’

  ‘Do you want to check inside?’ Lavat asked. The three men stood in the street outside Jakob’s bar, eyeing the faded and peeling paintwork on the door and windows.

  Hardin shook his head. ‘Not particularly. I don’t believe for a moment that the infective agent was encountered in the bar, otherwise we’d be looking at a dozen deaths by now, not just two. So, exactly where is Aristides’s house from here?’

  Lavat pointed along the dusty street, and the three men turned as one to glance that way.

  ‘Again,’ Hardin said, ‘I don’t know what we’re looking for, or even if there’s anything here to find. Just be careful, and always look but don’t touch. If you see anything, anything at all, that seems in any way unusual or out of place, inform me immediately. But, I repeat, don’t touch it, OK?’ Lavat and Gravas both nodded. ‘Right, masks on. Spread out and let’s make a start.’

  Each man pulled a disposable paper mask over his nose and mouth, and they set off, walking very slowly down the centre of the street, their eyes roaming the ground, the walls of houses, even the trees and bushes.

  ‘Nothing here,’ Krywald muttered. ‘We’ll try upstairs.’

  They’d searched the tiny patio garden, and then the downstairs rooms first as they had been taught, moving swiftly and working efficiently, but it was quickly obvious, once they’d checked the various rooms and pulled open the doors of all the cupboards, that nothing the size of the steel case described to them could possibly be hidden there. Only then did Krywald lead the way up the old wooden staircase.

  ‘Hell of a smell in here,’ Krywald remarked as they reached the upper landing.

  ‘According to that cop outside, the Greek’s body is still lying dead in here somewhere.’

  ‘OK, we’ll just ignore it. I want to be out of here in five minutes.’

  They checked the spare bedroom first, but found nothing there, then Krywald walked across the landing and stopped outside the closed door of the only other bedroom.

  ‘Hear that?’ he asked, leaning his head close to the door panels.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I dunno – kind of a faint buzzing sound. Like a chopper a long way off, but it seems to be coming from in here.’

  ‘I don’t hear it,’ Stein said.

  Krywald listened for a few more seconds, then shook his head and pushed open the door. The faint buzzing noise was suddenly loud enough for Stein to hear it too.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Krywald said, stopping dead in the doorway and looking across the room. ‘What the hell happened to him?’

  Like Krywald, Stein was no stranger to death, sudden or otherwise, but the sight of the blood-soaked bed, and Aristides’s bloody corpse, turned him pale. ‘Fuck knows,’ he said, ‘but at least now we know what you were hearing a minute ago.’

  Krywald looked where Stein was pointing, and realized that what he had initially taken for dried blood covering Aristides’s corpse was actually moving – and buzzing. It was a carpet of what looked like thousands of flies, black, blue and green, their bodies heaving and wriggling in an almost solid mass as they fed greedily upon the dead man’s body.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Krywald said again. ‘OK, let’s make it quick.’

  Two minutes later they were out of the bedroom and back on the tiny landing, having checked every possible nook and corner in the bedroom that could have concealed the steel case. They had found nothing.

  ‘Shit,’ Krywald said. ‘If he ever had it, he’s hidden it somewhere. There’s no way it’s still in this house. Let’s hope our friend Nico took it home with him.’

  The two men walked quickly down the stairs and headed out of the house. As they opened the door to the street they both unconsciously took a long, deep breath of the fresher air, but it would be a long time before they would get the smell of that house out of their memories. They nodded briefly to the policeman on guard, then walked back the way they had come.

  After having found exactly nothing in the intervening streets that looked as if it shouldn’t be there, the other three men also arrived outside Spiros Aristides’s house.

  ‘Is this it?’ Hardin asked.

  Lavat nodded and gestured to the police officer standing near by.

  ‘I’ve had a guard outside ever since we found the body.’

  ‘OK,’ Hardin said, ‘as I explained before, there’s nothing much I can do until my own people get here, but I will go in now and at least take a look at him. Dr Gravas, could you give me a hand?’

  Hardin walked over to the red fibreglass box positioned close to the wall opposite the house. Biohazard symbols – similar to the familiar radiation warning markers but with their own distinctive spiky appearance – adorned the lid and sides. He removed his jacket and hung it on a rusty nail protruding from the wall at a convenient height, then snapped open the catches on the box and flipped up the lid.

  It contained all the basic equipment needed to carry out a field investigation: masks, gloves, caps, syringes and needles, microscope slides and covers, glass and plastic sample tubes, sealable plastic bags in a variety of sizes for organ storage, reagents for specimen testing, scalpels, forceps, saws and other dissection instruments, packs of scalpel blades and stainless steel pins for holding apart sections of an organ during a post-mortem examination. The box also contained a host of other, non-medical, equipment such as torches, batteries, paper, pens, pencils, erasers, Magic Markers, adhesive tape of various types, two portable recorders with spare cassettes and batteries, and even a bottle of bleach.

  On top of all this was, neatly folded, a lightweight orange Racal biological space suit, which Gravas eyed with interest. Hardin noted his keen attention.

  ‘It’s made of an airtight fabric called Tyvek,’ he explained, pulling the suit out of the box. ‘It’s not like the ones we use back in Atlanta in the Level Four lab,’ he added. ‘We call those “blue suits”. They’re made by a company called Chemturion and are connected to a central compressed air system to provide positive pressure within the suit and also supplies the air we breathe. They’re noisy to work in because of the air constantly rushing
in, so trying to talk to other people or use a telephone is difficult, verging on the impossible, unless you’re prepared to switch off your air supply for a few seconds.

  ‘This suit isn’t pressurized because there’s just no practical way to do that out in the field. It’s just a neutral-pressure whole-body suit, but the hood – it’s called a Racal hood – is pressurized to protect the lungs and the eyes, which contain two of the membranes most vulnerable to virus attack.’

  As he was speaking, Hardin had unfolded the suit and stepped carefully into it, pulling the orange Tyvek up his legs and then thrusting his arms into the sleeves. He slipped off his shoes and pulled on rubber boots, then spent several minutes taping the legs of the suit over the boots, to make sure there were no gaps and that the joins were completely air-tight.

  ‘Doctor, if you please.’ Hardin handed Gravas a small paper sachet.

  ‘Talcum powder?’ Gravas hazarded, and Hardin nodded.

  Gravas opened the sachet and sprinkled the white powder over Hardin’s hands, then handed the American a pair of thin rubber surgical gloves to pull on. Following further directions, Gravas taped the wrists of the biohazard suit over the gloves, ensuring an air-tight join there too. Then Hardin pulled another sachet of powder out of the box and a second pair of surgical gloves and repeated the procedure, but this time Gravas taped the gloves over the sleeves of the Racal suit.

  ‘Now the hood and blower,’ Hardin said. He secured a thick webbing belt around his waist and clipped on a heavy square battery box, a large purple filter and a blower.

  ‘That’s a special filter?’ Gravas asked.

  Hardin nodded. ‘Yes, a HEPA – High Efficiency Particle Arrestor. It’s designed to trap biological particles present in the air so that what I breathe in won’t kill me. At least, that’s what the manufacturer claims.’

  Gravas smiled at the weak joke, then helped Hardin settle the Racal hood over his head. The hood comprised a soft and fairly flexible breathing helmet, like a transparent plastic bubble connected to the blower and filter assembly at his waist. Hardin switched on the blower as Gravas checked the pipe connections for leaks. Satisfied, Gravas positioned the double flaps that hung down from the hood over Hardin’s chest and shoulders, then zipped up the biohazard suit over these flaps and sealed it at the neck.

  ‘How long does the battery last?’ Gravas asked.

  Hardin’s reply was somewhat muffled by the hood, but clear enough.

  ‘Eight hours, but I’ll be out long before then. Now, if you could just apply tape over the main zip and anywhere else that you think it needs it.’

  ‘That’s it.’ Gravas stepped back, satisfied, a couple of minutes later.

  ‘Thanks,’ Hardin said. ‘Just walk all round me and check if there are any tears or splits anywhere in this suit, please.’

  Three minutes later, Hardin picked up his small bag of instruments and approached the street door of the house that belonged to the late Spiros Aristides.

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Westwood accessed the FAA database again, and grunted in satisfaction. He hadn’t bothered looking before, but this time he checked carefully. The registered owner of the Learjet 23, registration number N17677, was the American Government. The State Department, in fact.

  That single fact meant there was a very good chance that the FAA aircraft registry and the CIA’s central database were both right, despite their apparently contradictory information.

  Westwood guessed that the Learjet had been a Company plane, but a ringer – one of two identical aircraft wearing the same tail numbers, thus allowing a measure of deniability if one were spotted somewhere that it shouldn’t be.

  What he wasn’t sure about was where he went from here, but he knew he was going to carry on digging. Thirty years ago, the Company had probably been involved in some form of covert operation in the Eastern Mediterranean, but that was hardly surprising news. Back in the 1970s the CIA had been involved in covert operations almost everywhere on the surface of the globe. And all he had here was a Learjet that had crashed off-route, somewhere near Crete: it was hardly another Watergate.

  Westwood checked the database again, looking for any clues to indicate what the Company might have been up to in 1972, but he found nothing to suggest that anything of any interest to either America or the CIA had been happening around Crete in that year.

  But still he sat and worried, about two things in particular. Why had both the CAIP and Learjet files been sealed since July 1972, a full two weeks before the search for the missing Learjet had been abandoned? And, even more fundamental, just what the hell was CAIP?

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  Tyler Hardin’s gaze took in the flaking white-wash on the walls and the faded light green paint of the door and windows. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but he was keenly aware that he was entering a potential hot zone, where something too small to be seen except through the magnified gaze of a scanning electron microscope was lurking in wait to kill him. He wouldn’t be able to see it, feel it, smell it or taste it, but that didn’t alter the fact that it was there, and all that stood between him and this unknown pathogen was a thin layer of Tyvek, a plastic helmet, two pairs of rubber gloves, a battery-driven blower and a HEPA filter.

  Inside his suit, Hardin shook his head slightly in self-admonishment, then lifted the latch, pushed open the solid old wooden door and stepped from the sunlight into the sudden cool darkness of the house.

  HMS Invincible, Sea of Crete

  The communications rating stopped outside the open door to the Wardroom and peered inside hopefully, clutching a buff envelope and a clipboard with a single sheet of paper on it. He’d already tried Richter’s cabin on Two Deck and found that empty, and the Wardroom was his second, and last, option before requesting a tannoy broadcast.

  ‘Who is it you want?’ Malcolm Mortensen asked, approaching the rating from the starboard passageway.

  ‘Oh, Lieutenant Commander Richter, sir,’ the rating replied, turning to the young lieutenant.

  Mortensen walked into the Wardroom and peered round. ‘Right, he’s over in the far corner. Give that to me and I’ll take it to him.’

  To Mortensen’s surprise, the rating shook his head firmly. ‘Sorry, sir. I have to hand it to him personally and he has to sign for it.’

  Mortensen raised his eyebrows slightly, then nodded. ‘OK, wait here.’ He walked across the Wardroom to where Richter sat, an inevitable cup of coffee in front of him, leafing through a three-month-old copy of Country Life.

  ‘Spook, your presence is required.’

  Richter looked up, an expression of mild surprise on his face. ‘By whom, pray?’

  ‘There’s a lad at the door with a clipboard and a brown envelope. You’re to sign one and he’ll give you the other. I’ll leave it to you to work out which is which.’

  ‘Thanks, Malcolm,’ Richter said. He got up and shambled over towards the door. Mortensen watched him cross the Wardroom. Richter really was a scruff, he thought. He was amazed he’d actually got his half-stripe, but Mortensen supposed, correctly, that Richter’s undoubted flying ability had counted for more in the eyes of the Promotions Board than whether or not his shirts were properly pressed or his hair combed.

  ‘You’ve got something for me?’ Richter asked the communications rating, at the entrance to the Wardroom.

  ‘Yes, sir. Message classified Secret, precedence Immediate and for your eyes only,’ he added, with a hint of a smirk.

  ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  ‘No, sir, it really is. Just sign here.’

  Richter scrawled an approximation of his signature in the space indicated by the rating’s slightly grubby finger, added the date and time, and handed back the clipboard. He took the envelope and tore it open as the rating walked off along the passageway leading back towards the Communications Centre on Five Deck.

  Richter glanced at the red ‘SECRET’ stamps
at the top and bottom of the single sheet of paper. He quickly read the message printed in capital letters – all military communications printers generate their output in capital letters – and then he read it again, carefully.

  ‘Bugger,’ he said, and walked off towards the starboard-side staircase, heading for Flyco, because that’s where he expected to find Commander (Air).

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  The house was exactly as Lavat and Gravas had described it, so Hardin knew precisely where he was going. But he didn’t immediately head for the stairs. First he looked carefully around the tiny hall, checking to see if he could spot anything out of place, anything that looked as if it shouldn’t be there. Nothing was evident.

  Then Hardin walked through to the kitchen. He looked in the stone sink, above which a handful of flies buzzed in erratic circles. The sink contained a single plate bearing a small piece of cheese, a bowl holding half a dozen black olives and a number of olive pits, and a slightly grubby cup half-full of what looked like strong, almost black, coffee. He carefully pulled open the single drawer, which held assorted bits of mismatched cutlery, and inspected the two cupboards, which contained plates of different sizes and other pieces of crockery, and about half a dozen pans. The cooker yielded nothing, but Hardin spent a couple of minutes looking through the contents of the toolbox he found beside the kitchen door.

  Another door, at the rear of the kitchen, led to a tiny bathroom, obviously a later addition to the property, which contained a toilet, a small sink and a narrow shower stall, down the inside of which a constant stream of rusty-brown water trickled from the shower head. It didn’t look as if Spiros Aristides had used this shower very often. On the other hand, Hardin reflected with a wry smile, if he went diving in the Mediterranean most days he probably wouldn’t need to.