Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  ‘They look like professional killings,’ Gravas said, pulling off a pair of surgical gloves. ‘The police officer was struck from behind, then somebody smashed his nasal bone upwards into his brain. That’s a killing blow taught in certain schools of martial arts. They also crushed his larynx to stop him crying out. The two old men were basically strangled, but only after receiving crippling blows to their bodies.’

  ‘I’m really sorry about this, Inspector,’ Hardin said eventually into the long silence that followed the doctor’s remarks, ‘but we have to move on now. Dr Gravas, could you use the hand-sprayer, please?’

  Gravas nodded and opened Hardin’s bag, which he himself had carried from Spiros Aristides’s house. The hand-sprayer it contained was fed with a bleach solution from an attached bottle. As Hardin stood in the middle of the street with his arms outstretched, Gravas walked all around him, spraying this solution liberally over the CDC investigator’s Tyvek suit. As instructed, he started at the head, then worked his way slowly down to the American’s booted feet.

  The bleach was a high-concentration solution, which filled the still evening air with a stinging pungency.

  ‘Normally we’d put this stuff in a biohazard bag and just dispose of it,’ Hardin explained, as he pulled off the strips of tape to remove his hood, ‘but we’ve limited equipment here on Crete and I’ve been very careful not to touch either body, so I intend to re-use this suit. That bleach solution will kill all known pathogens.’

  Hardin bundled the suit into the biohazard bag Lavat had brought with him, added the hood and blower assembly, and closed the zipper. Lavat had a separate, smaller, biohazard bag, into which Hardin put both the pairs of surgical gloves he’d used, then sealed it. That bag and its contents would be destroyed by fire in due course. Hardin picked up the two biohazard bags and the three men began walking back towards the main street that ran through the village.

  ‘So,’ Gravas said, glancing back up the alley, ‘no container.’

  ‘No, so we have to assume that Nico had it in his possession and that whoever killed my police officer and then entered the property has now retrieved it. We also have to consider the possibility that Spiros found more than one container. We can be fairly certain that they opened one of them, but the fact that somebody has since been onto this scene…’ Hardin suddenly halted, and Gravas turned to him curiously.

  Something had been gnawing at Hardin’s subconscious ever since he’d stepped out of the elder Aristides’s house. Something he’d seen or heard that didn’t seem quite right, but exactly what it was he hadn’t been able to remember. Like a half-seen figure in fog, it had been too indistinct to discern but was equally obviously there. And suddenly he knew exactly what it was.

  ‘God, I’ve been slow,’ Hardin said. ‘I should have realized back at the first house. I think you told me you closed his bedroom door after you, Dr Gravas?’

  ‘Yes. I closed all the internal doors – it seemed a routine precaution.’

  ‘But when I went upstairs, both bedroom doors were wide open. That means somebody else had access before I got there. I think we’re up against somebody who knows exactly what’s going on here and what they were looking for. And the fact that they’re prepared to kill a police officer and two innocent bystanders tells me that the stakes are high, and are only going to get higher.’

  Lower Cedar Point, Virginia

  A little after eight that evening Hawkins arrived at Lower Cedar Point and parked his car close to the water’s edge, his watery pale blue eyes gazing across the Potomac towards Dahlgren and the setting sun. To the north there was a constant stream of traffic crossing the Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge, which carries US 301 from Virginia to Maryland.

  After a few minutes, the passenger door opened and he turned to greet the man who had telephoned him earlier. He was grey haired, big and bulky, and despite the warm weather was wearing a long black leather coat.

  ‘John,’ Hawkins said in brief greeting.

  ‘CJ.’

  ‘How did this happen?’ Hawkins asked. ‘I thought the wreck was too deep for divers to find it.’

  ‘It should have been, but when the Lear was hit it looks like the pilot managed to retain some directional control and pointed the aircraft towards the nearest landmass, which happened to be Crete. That shouldn’t have been a problem, because the water at that end of the Mediterranean is really deep, but unfortunately when the Lear finally speared in it was right between two islands about twenty miles south-east of Crete.

  ‘Everywhere else in the area the seabed is far enough down that only really specialized equipment can reach it, but right where the Lear crashed the water’s only about a hundred feet deep. It’s not my field, but apparently that’s pretty deep for a free diver using an aqualung, but it’s not an impossible depth to reach as long as the diver knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘How sure are you that the right plane’s been found?’ Hawkins said after a few moments. ‘There must be lots of wrecked aircraft at the bottom of the Mediterranean. What’s your evidence?’

  John Nicholson shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘It’s mainly circumstantial at the moment, but I think it’s convincing enough. You remember the satellite watch we placed on the crash site?’ Hawkins nodded. ‘OK. A few days ago a work boat, which N-PIC later identified as a diving tender, was spotted in the area. In fact, it was anchored within a quarter of a mile of the original impact point. Only one image was available and that showed no activity – just the boat riding at anchor with nobody on board.’

  ‘And from that it was inferred that there were divers underwater and at the wreck site? That sounds very thin, John.’

  Nicholson nodded. ‘I agree,’ he said, ‘but I did regard it as a wake-up call and requested N-PIC to take additional pictures there every time the bird passed overhead. There was no other activity for a couple of days, then another series of images all showing the same scene – the same diving tender in the same place. This time, we could see the diver as well, and he was hauling three aqualung sets back into the boat. My diving specialist tells me that using three aqualungs suggests either a very lengthy or a very deep dive, and the logical conclusion is that he went down deep. Very few divers will stay in mid-water, as the most interesting marine activity is usually on or just above the seabed.’

  ‘It still sounds circumstantial to me,’ Hawkins said. ‘What you’ve got is a diving tender spotted in the area. That doesn’t prove the diver found the wreck itself. In fact, we don’t even know for sure that there’s anything left to find after thirty years underwater.’

  Nicholson nodded again. ‘Yes, but there’s more. The last frame received showed that one end of the rope he’d secured his aqualungs to was still in the water and there was almost certainly something else still attached to it.’

  ‘Could have been a weight,’ Hawkins suggested, ‘or just another aqualung, maybe.’

  ‘Yes, indeed it could,’ Nicholson agreed, ‘but I don’t think so. N-PIC counted the aqualung racks visible on the tender, and that number matched the sets you can see in the pictures, so I don’t think it was an extra lung. Furthermore, the diver cleated down the rope after he’d got the aqualungs up on deck. If all that was still in the water was a weight at the end of the rope, why would he bother to do that?’

  Hawkins shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘I think this diver found the wreck and retrieved something from it. The reason he didn’t haul it straight into the boat was because he wanted to make sure that nobody was watching him.’

  ‘In a diving tender out in the middle of the Mediterranean?’ Hawkins’s tone was mocking.

  ‘You’d be surprised how many boats pass to and fro there,’ Nicholson replied. ‘Fishing boats, yachts, cruise ships, ski boats. If he’d found something he didn’t want anyone to know about, it’s logical that he would have had a careful look around before he pulled it on board.’

  Hawkins nodded, reluctantly. ‘OK, John. I concede that
your scenario does make sense, though it is still entirely circumstantial. Because you’re here talking to me, I assume you’ve already taken some action. What have you done to retrieve the situation?’

  ‘I’ve sent a team out to Crete – in fact they should be there by now. I’ve briefed them to find and totally destroy the remains of the Learjet, after retrieving the case with the flasks.’

  ‘And the file too, I hope?’

  ‘Yes, and the file too.’

  ‘What about this diver? Could N-PIC identify the diving tender? Can you trace the diver through his boat?’

  Nicholson shook his head. ‘I don’t think we’ll need to trace the diver.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I checked the database before I called you, looking for any developments that might be related. There were two new entries that I think kind of tie everything together. First, this morning a Greek newspaper reported the death of a man called Spiros Aristides on Crete. He was an unlicensed diver. Second, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta have just responded to a request for assistance from the local Cretan medical authorities.’

  Nicholson looked keenly at Hawkins, whose face now seemed paler in the fading daylight around the car. ‘Why the CDC?’ Hawkins asked. ‘What was the nature of their problem? And what killed the diver?’

  ‘A possible epidemic. The Cretans have reported that Aristides had probably been killed by Ebola, or some other kind of filovirus, but real fast-acting.’

  Hawkins leaned back in his seat, and stared sightlessly through the windshield. ‘So that’s it,’ he said at last. ‘You’re right. It’s the only explanation that makes any kind of sense. This diver discovered the wreck, pulled out the case, then opened it up and found the flasks. And now he’s dead because he opened a flask as well. Dear God, what a mess. I thought – I hoped – that after all this time we’d heard the last of it.’ He shook his head. ‘So what now? What secondary actions will you be taking?’

  Nicholson didn’t reply immediately, but glanced around the deserted area outside the car to check that they were still unobserved. When he spoke, his voice was low and almost sad. ‘We – or rather I – have to protect the Company, and America. I’m the only one left inside the Agency who knows exactly what happened, and why we had to do what we did. Under no circumstances can details of CAIP be allowed to leak out. That means I’ve had to take some hard decisions – and none, CJ, has been harder for me than this one.’

  He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small-calibre black automatic pistol with a silencer attached. He pointed it directly at Hawkins’s chest.

  ‘I’m truly sorry about this, CJ,’ Nicholson continued, as the old man tensed and his face turned even paler, ‘and you must believe this isn’t easy for me. But I have to make sure there are no possible loose ends, and that means ensuring that all the agents involved in CAIP keep total silence. I’m afraid this is the only way I can be completely certain of that.’

  For a long moment Hawkins stayed rigid, and Nicholson wondered if he might make a futile attempt to wrest the gun from his hands. Then Hawkins relaxed, seeming to accept the inevitable as he stared into the eyes of the younger man. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said, ‘but I would never have talked, you know. You don’t need to do this.’

  ‘You can say that,’ Nicholson replied, ‘but if they ever recovered the file they’d put you and the others under intense pressure. Your name and face would be splashed over the newspapers. You’d be publicly disgraced and humiliated. Then you might talk, just to explain what happened. I really can’t take that risk. If you were in my position, you’d do the same.’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps not,’ Hawkins muttered, then without warning swung a wild punch at Nicholson’s jaw. The blow connected, but Nicholson had anticipated something of the sort and rode with it. He grabbed the older man’s wrist with his left hand and forced his arm back. The pistol’s aim barely wavered.

  ‘This won’t help, CJ,’ Nicholson said, raising his voice and gesturing with the pistol. ‘You know I have to do this, and it’s up to you whether it’s easy or hard.’ Hawkins tensed again, and then relaxed, finally recognizing the futility of any attempt to overpower Nicholson: he was unarmed, twenty-five years older and seventy pounds lighter than his captor.

  ‘I hate guns,’ Hawkins murmured, slumping back into his seat.

  ‘I can offer you a choice.’ Nicholson reached into his pocket and tossed Hawkins a small twist of paper. In his safe at home, Nicholson kept a number of things he had acquired during his career with the CIA. One of them was a screw-top jar containing a dozen or so small brown pills obtained from Fort Detrick many years earlier.

  Hawkins looked across at Nicholson, then undid the paper and stared at the pill.

  ‘Just swallow it, CJ,’ Nicholson said softly. ‘I promise you it won’t hurt. You’ll just fall asleep. If you don’t cooperate, I’ll have to use this’ – he motioned slightly with the silenced automatic – ‘and that will hurt.’

  Hawkins stared at his former colleague for a long moment, then across the Potomac at the last sunset he would ever see. ‘You will take care of my wife, won’t you?’ he asked. Nicholson nodded as Hawkins took a last long look at the water in front of him, then swallowed the pill.

  ‘That’s why I was a few minutes late getting here,’ Nicholson murmured, as Hawkins’s eyes started to glaze over and his head slumped back in his seat. ‘I already have.’

  Three minutes later Nicholson checked for a pulse but found none. He got out of the car and strode off up the hill to where his own vehicle was parked. As he moved, he glanced at his watch, checking how much time he had before his second appointment of the evening – with a man named James Richards.

  Chapter 13

  Thursday

  Réthymno, Crete

  It wasn’t much of a hotel, but as far as Richter was concerned it was fine. He estimated he’d need a room for two nights, tops, and as long as the water was hot and the sheets were clean he was reasonably happy.

  The Merlin had dropped him off at Irakleío the previous evening, and he’d hired a car – a blue Volkswagen Golf – and driven along the coast as far as Réthymno. The second hotel he’d tried had three vacant rooms, so he had picked the one that overlooked the hotel car park and hauled up his leather overnight bag from the Golf.

  Richter didn’t normally bother with breakfast, but it was included in the room price, so he walked down to the dining room just before eight and crunched his way through a slice of hard toast and an almost equally hard roll, washed down with coffee that actually tasted like it had been made from beans rather than powder.

  Afterwards, he walked down the street to a souvenir shop and bought a map of Crete before collecting the Golf from the car park and heading further west along the main north-coast highway, destination Kandíra.

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  ‘So, in summary, there are really two aspects to this outbreak that we need to address,’ Tyler Hardin began. ‘The first, the one that we the CDC team will be concentrating on, is to identify the pathogen that caused the deaths of these two men. Now that we have our equipment with us, I hope that we can achieve that fairly quickly.’

  Hardin paused and looked round the tent that served as their makeshift base, set up by the main street that ran through Kandíra. His three CDC colleagues – Mark Evans, Jerry Fisher and Susan Kane – were sitting on collapsible chairs in front of him, mugs of coffee in hand and the remains of their breakfast scattered on the table behind them.

  All were qualified doctors and Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, Fisher with eight years’ experience, while Evans and Kane had only just completed their initial training at Atlanta. Hardin wasn’t surprised to find that exactly half of his team were ‘rookies’. The CDC had always believed that the best way to learn about investigating a sudden outbreak of a disease was to just go out and do it. It was the ultimate form of ‘on-the-job training’.

  It was standard
CDC procedure to deliver morning briefings before the field work started and this one was, in Hardin’s opinion, probably the most important, because it was the first. He had talked to them briefly the previous evening, but all three had been exhausted both by their intense activity back in the States preparing for this operation and by the series of flights they’d had to endure to reach the island.

  The last thing Hardin had wanted was to have tired and jet-lagged operatives messing with a Level Four Hot Agent, so as soon as they’d finished their evening meal he’d ordered them straight to bed – on camp-beds in the neighbouring tent – leaving it until late the next morning to brief them.

  ‘The one piece of equipment we haven’t got here is a scanning electron microscope, but there’s one in a research laboratory in Irakleío, which Dr Gravas tells me he has used in the past. Our investigation obviously has a very high priority, so we should be able to use that one more or less on demand. The most difficult part of conducting a microscopic investigation will be logistics. We’re not very far from Irakleío as the crow flies, but getting there by road would take hours. Fortunately, we have some help there. Last night you arrived here by helicopter courtesy of the British Royal Navy aircraft carrier Invincible, which is standing off Crete specifically to assist us. I’m told her helicopters will be available to ferry us wherever, and whenever, we want to go. A liaison officer from the ship should be arriving here sometime this morning. He’ll have a radio link to the Invincible and we’ll be able to organize any helicopter flights we need through him.

  ‘The second problem is the actual source of the infection. As I explained earlier, the evidence strongly suggests it was stored inside a heavily sealed container. If that is correct, we’re dealing either with some bioweapon or with an unknown virus that has been discovered in the wild. And there’s some other evidence that I’ll discuss in a minute.’