Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  Hardin glanced at his three colleagues in turn. ‘In either case we are confronting something demonstrably deadly and almost certainly unfamiliar to us. You must take all the usual precautions in applying the rules for dealing with a potential Level Four Hot Agent. I know that’s going to be difficult out here in the field, and we’ll have to improvise, but it’s essential that all of us exercise extreme care. Watch everything and everybody, and if you see anything that concerns you, stop the procedure immediately. Extreme caution is essential.

  ‘My final point is somewhat unusual. I mentioned a container that I believe held this hot agent. What you should also know is that we haven’t found it, nor expect to, simply because it seems somebody else has already removed it.’ Hardin looked down at three astonished faces. ‘When Dr Gravas realized Spiros Aristides might have died from some form of filovirus infection he took the basic precaution of closing all the doors before he left the house. When I subsequently entered, all the interior doors were standing open.

  ‘Inspector Lavat had stationed a policeman outside the house to ensure that no one entered the property. When we questioned him, he was adamant that nobody had been in or out – except for the CDC personnel that he had been told to expect. What actually happened was that two men wearing white coveralls with the letters “CDC” stamped on them appeared at the house, showed him what appeared to be CDC identity cards, entered the building and then left a few minutes later.’

  Hardin smiled mirthlessly, then explained what had happened at Nico’s apartment. ‘I myself believe that we’re almost certainly dealing with either the raw material for a new weapon,’ he continued, ‘or even something that’s already been weaponized, and we have to assume that these killers now have the container in their possession. We know there are at least two men involved because of the evidence of the policeman stationed outside the scene of the first death.

  ‘One of these men was carrying a case, it seems, and it’s no great leap of logic to assume that when they didn’t find the container at Spiros’s house, they went on to look in Nico’s apartment. These men haven’t been seen since, and their descriptions provided by the policeman himself aren’t particularly helpful – Caucasian, mid-forties, average height, average build. One of them spoke Greek fluently but he wasn’t a native-born speaker. We have to assume that they found the container and have now left Kandíra. It’s a very small village, so if they were still here I’m quite certain we would know about it.’

  Réthymno, Crete

  Hardin was quite right: Krywald and Stein were nowhere near Kandíra, and the flask was long gone. The steel case Aristides had recovered from the Learjet was locked in the larger suitcase they’d brought with them. They hadn’t opened the steel case or even examined it except to confirm that it was the one they had been sent to recover. At his briefing, McCready had been most specific – they were under no circumstances to open the case or try to inspect its contents. They were simply to return it to the United States and hand it over to him personally.

  Confirming they had found the right case hadn’t been that easy. It had no markings of any sort, and its original leather covering had long since vanished. McCready’s description of the case had, however, been extremely detailed, including its precise measurements and the types of locks and catch fitted to it. As soon as they’d driven a mile or so away from Kandíra the previous evening, Elias had stopped the hire car while Krywald compared the object they’d recovered with Nicholson’s description, just in case they’d somehow picked up one that was only similar.

  There hadn’t been much doubt in Krywald’s mind, though, even before he ran his tape measure over it – having never before seen a steel case with two locks and an over-centre catch to secure the lid. Even this cursory examination had convinced him that they’d found the right one.

  Before Krywald went to bed that night, he sent an encrypted email to McCready, which simply advised him that phase one was completed. He suggested that they would probably complete phase two – the destruction of the wreck of the Learjet – the following day.

  They slept late the next morning, the effects of their long journey catching up with both Stein and Krywald. Elias slept even longer – being much less used to longdistance travel – and he didn’t appear in the hotel dining room until gone ten-thirty. He spotted Krywald in a far corner of the room and walked over to him. The remains of a leisurely breakfast were spread across the table, and as Elias reached him Krywald pushed across a small wicker basket containing some rolls. ‘There’s coffee in the pot,’ he gestured.

  ‘Where’s Stein?’ Elias asked.

  ‘He’s out running an errand,’ Krywald replied. ‘As soon as he gets back, we need to go.’

  ‘An early flight?’ Elias asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

  ‘What?’

  ‘An early flight back to the States.’ Elias said. ‘I mean,’ he glanced up at Krywald and motioned towards the black case sitting on the floor right beside the table, ‘you’ve got the case, so that’s it, isn’t it? We can go home?’

  Krywald grinned but shook his head. ‘The job’s not over yet. Getting the case was the most important thing, but we’ve still got some cleaning up to do, and that’s where you come in. Best you don’t eat too much, Mr Elias, because this afternoon you’re going for a swim. A long, deep one, too.’

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  ‘We therefore have two hot zones to investigate and, equally obviously, two bodies,’ Hardin continued. He glanced towards the rear of the tent where Dr Gravas was now standing alongside Inspector Lavat – again properly dressed in the uniform of a Cretan police officer – and listening with interest to the briefing. ‘We have been helped considerably by the prompt actions of Inspector Lavat here, and his cordon around the village should have limited the possibility of the pathogen spreading.’

  But even as he said these words, Hardin realized with a sudden sick feeling that in all probability the mystery virus had already been carried a considerable distance away from Kandíra. He just hoped that whoever had taken the container would have the good sense to keep it sealed.

  ‘We’ll proceed as far as we can using standard field procedures. By that I mean CRIEIPA.’ Hardin pronounced it ‘creeper’, and Mark Evans nodded in recognition. ‘I need hardly remind you what that involves, but for the sake of our visitors I’m going to anyway. First, Containment – that’s pretty much been done already, thanks to our two colleagues here. The village has been cordoned off by the local police ever since Dr Gravas first suspected a filovirus. Almost nobody has been allowed in or out since then.

  ‘Second, Restriction of access. The two hot zones have also been secured by the police, and nobody will be allowed access to either building unless vouched for personally by either Dr Gravas or Inspector Lavat. That’s something of a stable-door reaction, given that both scenes have already been visited by unidentified men, but better security is now firmly in place. This restriction is primarily to avoid contamination of the scenes themselves, as I don’t think there’s much danger of any further outbreaks.’ Hardin added with a smile as Jerry Fisher opened his mouth to challenge his statement: ‘That may seem like a case of hypothesizing without data, but I’m basing my belief on what actually happened here so far.

  ‘Four people entered the room where the first body was found on Tuesday morning, three of them wearing no protection at all, and they’re all well and healthy after about forty-eight hours. Both the victims appeared to be completely normal at about midnight on Monday, but both were dead within twelve hours. That means we’re looking for a hot agent that acts incredibly fast, but whose infective period is extremely short. Either that or the two victims ingested or perhaps injected the agent, though I can’t imagine why they’d do that with an unknown substance.’

  Hardin paused to take a sip of water: his throat was getting dry. ‘OK, that’s about as far as we’ve got to date. The next phase is Investigation. We’ll start at the first vic
tim’s house, and begin with his body. We’ll need to collect all the usual specimens – starting with blood, urine and stool samples, then whatever other specimens are indicated by the initial results. That will be followed by a full post-mortem, which I will undertake. Obviously I’ll check for needle marks, just in case these two guys got their kicks by shooting up something they’d found somewhere, but I very much doubt if that’s the case. I’ll also want a full and thorough search of the house. Some traces of this agent might still be evident in the property, so look out for dust, unidentified liquids, smears, anything like that.

  ‘If we can’t find anything at that scene, we’ll repeat the whole process at the second victim’s residence. Until we’ve got some sort of handle on what this agent actually is, we’re going nowhere. The last three phases – Examination, Identification and Procedural Actions – will have to wait until we know exactly what we’re dealing with.’

  Hardin looked up towards the back of the tent as the flap opened and another police officer entered, walked across to speak softly to the inspector, then handed him a slip of paper. Lavat glanced up at Hardin and stepped forward.

  ‘You have a visitor, Mr Hardin,’ he said, glancing down at the paper in his hand. ‘A man called Richer – no, Richter. He’s just appeared at the barrier across the main road and asked for you by name.’

  NAS Soúda Bay, Akrotíri, Crete

  Stein braked the Ford Focus to a stop at the counter-weighted barrier guarding the main entrance to the Soúda Bay facility and wound down his window as the armed sentry approached.

  ‘Good morning, sir. May I…?’ the sentry started to inquire but stopped as Stein opened a small black leather folder containing his genuine CIA identification, and held it up in front of the soldier’s face.

  ‘The name’s Stein and I have an appointment to see Captain Levy.’

  The sentry looked carefully at the picture and then at Stein, then stepped back a pace, snapped off a rapid salute and scanned the paper attached to his clipboard. ‘Yessir, Captain Levy at eleven-thirty. Have you visited here before, Mr Stein?’

  As Stein shook his head, the sentry gave him crisp directions to the closest parking area and eight minutes later Stein walked into Levy’s office.

  Levy was tall, slim and coal-black, and one of two Company assets stationed at Soúda Bay. CIA officers do not normally wear a uniform of any description, but in some circumstances it is necessary, and NAS Soúda Bay was one of them. Like all US bases, Soúda Bay employs a number of civilian staff, but in the main they do fairly menial jobs. For several reasons the CIA needed an officer on the base in a position of some authority, and for the past two years Nathan Levy, Captain, United States Air Force, had officially been flying a desk here instead of the F-16 Falcons he had normally flown.

  That, at least, was the official line. In fact, Levy wasn’t a serving officer in the USAF, had never flown a Falcon – in fact, he had seen one exactly twice – and had no flying qualifications whatsoever. But he knew enough about aviation to hold a conversation without making a fool of himself, even with specialist aircrew, because he always pointedly refused to talk about his flying career, and nobody ever pressed him. A rumour had started almost as soon as he arrived on Crete that he had been involved in an accident that had killed his wingman, and that his desk job here was an attempt to stabilize him before getting him back in the air. Levy knew all about the rumour – in fact, he’d started it – and it suited his purposes very well.

  ‘I’m Stein,’ the visitor announced.

  ‘I’m sure you are,’ Levy said, ‘but I’ll still need to see some ID.’

  Stein fished out his black leather folder again and passed it across to him. Levy studied it carefully, compared the number on the card with that on a signal resting on his desk, then closed the folder and handed it back. ‘OK, Mr Stein. I’ve had a coupla signals from Langley about you, and they sent me a shopping list on the last one. The personal weapons were no problem. There are three of you so I’ve picked up three SIG P226s with silencers and two spare clips each; that’s the SIG 220 variant with the fifteen-round magazine.’

  ‘I know the weapon,’ Stein said.

  In fact, the ‘shopping list’ signal had instructed Levy to provide silenced personal weapons for Krywald’s team, and to deliver another pistol of a very different sort, as well as a rifle that was even more unusual, to a hotel in Réthymno. Levy was going to give Stein an hour or so to get out of the area, then he was going to pick up the other two weapons in their innocent-looking cardboard boxes and deliver them himself.

  Levy had been with the Company for a long time, and was used to the devious ways its personnel operated, but the current operation was a first, even for him. He had no definite knowledge of what exactly was going on, but the very nature of the weapons he had been instructed to procure allowed him to make an educated guess. Not for the first time in his career Levy wondered if he ought not to get out of the CIA and start working for an organization that applied higher moral standards to itself, like the Mafia or the Yardies, for example.

  ‘OK,’ Levy said, ‘they’ve been sanitized. The serial numbers have been removed and even if somebody uses an X-ray machine to recover them, the trace will lead straight to the FBI.’

  ‘Now that’s a nice touch.’

  ‘I’ve got plenty of plastic – I picked out four M118 demolition charges with a bunch of extra C4 added – but the detonators were a tad difficult. Real specialized items.’

  ‘But you did get them?’ Stein asked.

  Levy nodded. ‘Sure, I got them. Had to call in a coupla favours, and for sure that’ll cost me somewheres down the road, but I did get them.’ Levy reached down behind him, pulled up a large and apparently heavy red haversack and placed it carefully on his desk. Something in the haversack gave a metallic clunk as the fabric settled, and Stein smiled for the first time since he’d walked into the room.

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  Paul Richter leaned against the driver’s door of the Volkswagen Golf and waited patiently in the late-morning sunshine. The car wasn’t air-conditioned, and even with all the windows open, the heater set on cold and the fan going full blast, it had still been a long, hot, sticky and extremely slow drive down to Kandíra. He was hoping he could find out what Simpson wanted and get the hell out of Crete and back to the air-conditioned cool of the ship that same afternoon, or tomorrow at the latest.

  He looked up as two men approached the barricade and walked over to meet them. One was very obviously a police officer, in uniform, and the other a middle-aged man wearing civilian clothes.

  ‘Mr Hardin?’ Richter asked, and Hardin nodded. ‘My name’s Richter, from the warship Invincible.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Hardin said. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘We won’t be needing transportation until this afternoon at the earliest, but we will certainly have specimens ready to send to Irakleío first thing tomorrow morning, so could we have a helicopter here by eight-thirty?’

  ‘I think,’ Richter said slowly, ‘you have me confused with somebody else.’ Light dawned as he remembered the helicopter squadron’s outline briefing. ‘I’m not part of the Invincible’s Air Operations team, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’ll be coming out later today, by helicopter, and he’ll be wearing a uniform and carrying a radio – neither of which I’m equipped with, as you can see.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ Hardin said, and stared down at a piece of paper in his hand. ‘So what can I do for you, Mr Richter?’

  Richter reached into his hip pocket and extracted a slim wallet, which he opened and from it removed a laminated card. It identified him as a member of the British Medical Research Council and was one of a dozen or so cards Richter carried as a matter of routine. ‘With the number of British tourists visiting Crete every year, we’re obviously very concerned about this infection you’re investigating,’ he said. ‘If you’ve time now, could you brief me on what y
our team has found out so far?’

  Hardin smiled somewhat ruefully. ‘So far,’ he said, ‘we haven’t found very much, but I can give you at least some information. Look, the rest of my team members are waiting to get started on this. Could you wait a few minutes while I finish my briefing, and then I’ll tell you what we know?’

  Richter nodded his assent and followed Hardin and the police officer through the barricade and into a large canvas tent that had been positioned adjacent to the main street. Hardin waved him to a bench at a table situated towards the back of the tent, then five minutes later walked back in and sat down opposite him.

  ‘One thing I’m not clear about, Mr Richter. You identified yourself as a member of the MRC, but you told me you’d come from the Invincible, which is a British Royal Navy warship. That I don’t understand.’

  ‘Both are correct,’ Richter said easily. ‘I’m a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Naval Reserve and I was doing continuation training on the ship, but I’m also employed by the MRC as an investigator.’

  Not too bad, Richter thought. One half of the statement was absolutely true, and the other completely false – normally he reckoned he was doing well if just one in three of the things he claimed had some basis in fact.

  ‘You’re not a doctor, then?’ Hardin asked.

  Richter shook his head. ‘No, I’m just an investigator. I get sent out to look into reported cases of any kind of serious medical emergency or emerging disease. I collect the information, write a report and hand it over once I get back to Britain.’

  ‘OK,’ Hardin said, ‘then I’ll keep it as simple and non-medical as I can. First, have you ever heard of a filovirus?’

  ‘I’ve heard of them, that’s all. You’re talking about Ebola and Marburg, right?’

  Hardin nodded. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘We – that’s the Centers for Disease Control – got involved because the local doctor, a man called Gravas who you’ll meet soon, I guess, thought he’d identified a case of Ebola here on the island.’