Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  There was a single small cupboard with a mirrored door attached to the wall above the sink. It contained pretty much what one would expect: a bar of soap, a small bottle of shampoo, a twin-blade razor with half a dozen spare blades, and two cans of shaving foam. There was nothing else of interest.

  Back in the main room, Hardin switched on the centre light, glanced around and then walked across to the scarred wooden table. There was an empty Scotch bottle more or less in the middle, and next to it an empty beer bottle. This, Hardin deduced, probably meant that Spiros had been drinking Scotch while his nephew had drunk the beer, or perhaps vice versa. Assuming, of course, that Nico had returned here with his uncle after their meeting at Jakob’s, which seemed likely.

  All that appeared normal. What struck Hardin as he looked more closely at the table was that the other things on it were not quite what one would expect to find on a piece of furniture used for eating meals. There were a couple of screwdrivers, a pair of pliers and a hacksaw with a damaged blade, all of which properly belonged in the toolbox.

  Hardin bent down and peered very closely at one corner of the table. Small but perfectly clear: definite scratch marks. Fresh scratch marks, as if some work involving the tools scattered across the table had been done there recently. Hardin stood up and looked around the room, wondering if he was just chasing shadows, if he was inferring something complex from what might have been some simple domestic chore. Maybe the Greek had trouble opening a jar of olives or something, and had simply used these tools to wrench off the top.

  He glanced around again, and was heading for the door into the hall when his subconscious stopped him. He’d seen something out of the corner of his eye, something that didn’t fit. He turned back and looked down behind the table, at the dusty flag-stoned floor. Something small and red was lying there against the wall, something he hadn’t spotted when he’d first looked round the room.

  Hardin carefully moved the chair away from the table and eased himself down into a crouch to study what he’d found. At first, he couldn’t make out what it was: it looked like a thin red cylinder of some sort.

  Ever conscious of the possibility of damage to his protective clothing, and the potential dangers lurking within this house, Hardin stood up again without touching the object. He walked out into the hall, picked up the small instrument bag he had brought with him and pulled out a pair of long-handled forceps. Back in the room, he crouched down again and cautiously prodded the strange object with the end of the instrument.

  It moved and rolled and then Hardin realized exactly what it was – a length of thick red wax, cut off the neck of a bottle or something similar, which had curled itself up again, re-forming into its original shape.

  ‘Curious,’ he murmured, and picked up the wax by threading the end of the forceps through the centre of the coil. He stood up, placed the wax on the table and examined it, but in the gloom it was difficult to see much detail. Hardin reached out and touched the switch on the standard lamp that stood next to the table, flooding it with light.

  Then he realized something else. The standard lamp didn’t belong where it was now standing. The electric cable was plugged into a socket nearly ten feet away, close to the fireplace, and was stretched to its limit, though there was another power socket closer to the table, less than three feet from the lamp base. That didn’t really make sense. Hardin stepped back and glanced around him.

  The room’s central ceiling light was comparatively dim – only a sixty-watt bulb, Hardin guessed – so the owner would probably want a stronger light by the two easy chairs beside the fireplace. That was where a man would take his book or newspaper, to sit in one of the more comfortable chairs and toast his feet against the fire in the comparative cool of a winter evening. Hardin walked across and peered down at the floor beside each chair.

  Faintly visible there was a circular area that didn’t reveal the same amount of dust as the rest of the floor around it in that corner. Hardin estimated its diameter at just over a foot, so he walked back and studied the base of the standard lamp. Also about a foot.

  He nodded in satisfaction. He didn’t know exactly what Aristides had been up to, but it looked certain that he had been opening something at the table in this room. Something that had been sealed with red wax. He or they had dragged the standard lamp over so that they could see better, while using the tools still scattered across the table.

  Hardin bent over to inspect the coiled wax more carefully. It looked as if it had originally encased some kind of small bottle or flask. Still using the forceps he opened it out, checking the inside of the loose cylinder it formed. It was completely smooth, so he looked again at the outside. Clearly visible there was a cross-hatched pattern, as if the wax had been encased in some kind of securing wire.

  He stepped back from the table and scanned the floor behind it, then murmured in satisfaction and bent forward to again use his forceps. He dropped the tangle of wires – they formed a kind of loose cage, the ends of the strands bright where somebody had cut them with pliers – on the table next to the coil of wax. Hardin studied both objects for a few moments, considering.

  Then he headed back into the kitchen and inspected the contents of the small rubbish bin. Next he peered outside the rear door, then checked again in every cupboard and drawer. No sign of any kind of a flask or bottle, so maybe the nephew Nico had taken it away with him.

  But even without the hard evidence of a flask, he knew his diagnosis made sense, and it probably explained why Spiros and Nico were both dead, and why nobody else in Kandíra was apparently affected. Both men had been killed by an unknown pathogen stored in some kind of a small flask, which had been heavily sealed with both wax and wire. They had presumably opened the flask here inside Spiros’s house, infecting themselves immediately, and both were dead within a few hours.

  Hardin still didn’t know what had killed these two men, but he already knew much more than he had when he’d entered the house. He could still be dealing with some rare but naturally occurring pathogen, a lethal virus or such like, which for some reason was stored in a heavily sealed flask, which the two Greeks had unfortunately opened. But the other, more likely, possibility was that this pathogen was a manufactured agent, a bioweapon deliberately created in some unacknowledged and secret Level Four laboratory – an illegal, fast-acting and clearly lethal virus or toxin.

  It was warm in the house, and Hardin was sweating inside his biological space suit, but still he shivered at the thought.

  Chapter 12

  Wednesday

  HMS Invincible, Sea of Crete

  ‘So what do you want us to do?’ Commander (Air) asked Richter, who was leaning against the bulkhead in Flyco on the port side of the bridge.

  ‘My instructions are somewhat vague,’ Richter said, with a slight smile. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘they often are. What my section wants me to do is go ashore in Crete and find out if this epidemic is natural or if it’s been caused by the release of a manufactured agent. My section’ – Richter almost never mentioned the name of the organization that employed him – ‘is concerned that this may be some kind of a trial run for a terrorist attack.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  Richter shrugged. ‘Frankly, sir, I don’t know. The obvious worry is that al-Qaeda or some other terrorists have developed a biological or chemical weapon which they’re planning to use on a population centre, and that this is just a trial to confirm that the agent actually works. September the eleventh proved how these people have the resources and the determination to attack the West, and the beauty of these agents is that they can be triggered remotely, just by using a timer on a capsule of some sort. They don’t even need to recruit a suicide bomber to make them work.’

  ‘I can understand that if this involved an attack on London or New York,’ Commander (Air) said, ‘but Crete is hardly a hotbed of American or British interests. Why would they attack here?’

  ‘As I said, just as a trial, nothing more. The s
upposition is that some organization has chosen Crete simply to check if some agent they’ve cooked up, bought or stolen, is effective. If nobody dies, they go back to the drawing board and tweak it some more. If people die, that proves it works, and they then haul their box of bugs off to Islington or Washington or wherever, and open it up there for real. Anyway, all that I have to do for the moment is go ashore and talk to the CDC people, to find out what they think caused this little epidemic.’

  ‘Do you want to fly straight to Kandíra?’

  Richter shook his head. ‘No, I’ll need somewhere to stay and I need to be mobile as well. From what little we know of Kandíra, there’s no hotel and the most they’re likely to have for hire is a donkey. The airport at Irakleío will do fine. I can hire a car there, find a hotel for tonight and drive over to Kandíra tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Right,’ Wings said. ‘Rather you than me, but I’ll tell Ops One to put you on the next available chopper.’

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  At the northern end of Kandíra, another policeman had been stationed outside the house containing Nico Aristides’s small apartment, but again this officer had no idea what a genuine CDC identification card looked like, or even if such a document actually existed. However, unlike his colleague earlier, he didn’t just accept them at face value and step aside.

  ‘First, I must check with Inspector Lavat and obtain his permission,’ he insisted, and turned back towards the house. Stein noticed an old-fashioned, bulky two-way radio perched on one of the wide window sills and motioned to Krywald, but the other American was already moving.

  As the Cretan police officer stretched out his hand towards the window sill, Krywald stepped up directly behind him, lifted his right arm and brought a blackjack crashing down on the back of the man’s head. The officer staggered forward and crashed into the wall, but his peaked cap had deflected and reduced the impact of the blow. He cried out with pain, immediately reaching for the pistol at his belt.

  It would have been better for him to have just lost consciousness. Then he might have woken up a few hours later with a really bad headache.

  Krywald instantly moved forward and span him round until they were face to face. Dropping the blackjack, the American grabbed the policeman’s hand to stop him from drawing his weapon. For a few moments they struggled together, Krywald’s left hand clutching the police officer’s right wrist, as the other man swung a series of clumsy left-handed blows at his head.

  Krywald ducked and dodged easily, then seized his opportunity. He brought up the heel of his right hand, hard, against the officer’s nose, shattering the fragile nasal bone and maxilla and driving the fragments deep into his brain. The man’s head snapped backwards and he tumbled limply to the ground. He wasn’t dead, but he was dying quickly. He was also making a lot of noise about it, emitting a high-pitched wail that Stein feared would attract unwelcome attention within seconds. Krywald stopped this by kneeling down and smashing the side of his hand into the officer’s throat, crushing the man’s voice box and silencing him instantly.

  ‘Shit, another problem,’ Stein murmured. ‘We really didn’t need a local hero.’

  ‘He’s not a problem any more,’ Krywald said, ‘and I guess he’s a dead local hero. Here, give me a hand. Oh, and thanks for helping out here.’

  ‘The day you can’t take care of a hick cop, Krywald, is the day you should start seriously thinking about another career.’

  The policeman’s body was still twitching as they carried it across the road. At that exact moment two elderly Cretans walked round the corner and stopped dead, staring.

  Krywald and Stein reacted immediately, silently, without hesitation, in the way they’d been trained. They simply dropped the policeman’s body and charged towards the two Cretans, who stood rooted to the spot, with their eyes and mouths wide open. In any other context it might have been funny.

  Stein thought it would all be over in seconds, but just as he reached them, one old man raised his walking stick and brought it round in a vicious swinging arc. Stein was forced to stop sharply and dodge the gnarled end as it whistled past about an inch in front of his face.

  But the old man’s valiant swing had unbalanced him. Before he could bring his stick back ready for another blow, Stein stepped in close and slammed his right fist deep into the Cretan’s solar plexus. The air was expelled from the old man’s lungs in a wheezing gasp and he folded forwards as if hinged at the waist.

  As the man collapsed to the ground, Stein knelt down in front of him and reached out almost casually. He took a firm grip on either side of the Cretan’s slightly grubby shirt collar, rolled his fists so that his knuckles pressed against the sides of the neck and pushed inwards. The flow of blood through the carotid artery ceased almost immediately.

  The Cretan struggled briefly, but he had no chance at all. He lost consciousness within seconds, and was dead in little over a minute.

  Stein straightened up, then kicked the corpse onto its back. He next reached down, to grab the old man’s right arm and haul him roughly onto his shoulders in a travesty of a fireman’s lift. He glanced round to see Krywald already carrying the other Cretan towards a wide ditch running along beside the unmade track that snaked away into the open countryside to the east.

  Stein jogged across the track, the old man’s body bouncing grotesquely on his shoulders, where it followed Krywald’s victim into the ditch. Then, still without exchanging a word, the pair ran back to the policeman sprawled lifeless on the ground, picked him up between them and tossed his body on top of the other two.

  Stein looked around and found a sheet of rusty corrugated iron leaning against a fence, and pitched that over the three bodies. It wasn’t perfect cover by any means, but as long as nobody stumbled on the corpses for about fifteen minutes, that was going to be fine.

  They checked up and down the street but there was nobody in sight. Krywald led the way up the outside staircase and stopped at the single door at the top. He checked the door first, noting the splintered jamb and official seal, placed there on Lavat’s instructions, then pushed it open, ripping the fabric seal apart. The two men pulled on their face masks and surgical gloves and stepped inside.

  The search didn’t take long, because there were only three rooms to check – a double bedroom, a bathroom and a living room with a dining area and what the apartment’s developer had apparently hoped was an ‘American-style kitchen’ at one end.

  They found Nico in the bedroom, wearing just a pair of pyjama bottoms and lying beside the unmade double bed. Like his uncle, Nico’s body was covered in blood, as was the floor all around, and there were even splashes on the walls and the back of the door. Bloated blue and green flies fed on the blood and the body while others buzzed drunkenly around the room.

  ‘What the hell’s been going on here?’ Stein demanded. ‘Looks like somebody hacked him to death. And there’s that same goddamn smell.’

  ‘God knows, because I sure as hell don’t,’ muttered Krywald, then snapped. ‘OK, this is a real small place, so we should be out of here in no time. I’ll check the other rooms, you take a good look in here.’

  Krywald had barely reached the living room before he heard Stein call out to him from the bedroom.

  ‘Bingo,’ Stein said, gazing down at the steel case sitting in the bottom of the free-standing pine wardrobe.

  Four minutes after that they walked out of the house, the steel case now tucked inside the square black case that Stein had been carrying. They didn’t even glance towards the ditch that they’d turned into a temporary tomb for three innocent Cretans.

  Tyler Hardin opened the street door of Spiros Aristides’s house and stepped outside. Lavat and Gravas headed over towards him, but kept some four feet away from the American to avoid any possibility of physical contact with him or his space suit.

  ‘That was quick,’ Gravas said.

  Hardin shook his head. ‘I haven’t examined the body yet, but I think I know the sour
ce of the infection.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly what the agent itself was, but I believe I know what it was inside. I think the two men found a small bottle or flask, which they opened inside there,’ Hardin gestured back towards the small, shabby white house, ‘and whatever was in that container killed them.’

  There was silence for a few moments as the two Greeks digested this, then Gravas spoke. ‘So this can’t be Ebola or anything natural like that,’ he said. ‘You’re suggesting we’re dealing with some kind of manufactured agent – a biological weapon?’

  Hardin nodded. ‘It could be,’ he replied. ‘Or, possibly, it’s some kind of unknown natural virus that had been collected and stored inside the flask for research purposes. Thousands of laboratories store viruses that way, and some of them are lethal, like smallpox, anthrax and so on. You can even buy them on the Internet, if you know where to look.

  ‘What worries me is that I still have no idea what could have killed those two men so quickly. Viruses,’ he added, ‘are my business, but even I don’t know of any virus that can kill as quickly and efficiently as this sucker has. It’s more like some sort of chemical agent, but again I don’t know of any capable of producing this kind of result within this short a timescale. Whatever this thing is,’ he concluded, ‘I think it’s entirely new, something that’s never been seen before, and that really worries me.’

  ‘What about the flask you found?’ Lavat asked. ‘Can’t you identify the agent from the residue left inside it?’

  Hardin shook his head. ‘I didn’t say I’d found the flask. I said I’d found the wax and wire that had clearly been used to seal it, but there’s no sign of the container itself. That’s what I came out to tell you. I’ve looked all around the ground floor and if it’s there I haven’t spotted it. Obviously I’ll check upstairs as well, but there’s no particular reason why Spiros would hide the flask, so I’m assuming that it isn’t here. And that means—’