Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  ‘And had he?’ Richter asked.

  ‘Almost certainly not. I’ve been able to eliminate Ebola – or at least the two known strains which are called Sudan and Zaïre – because of the timescale involved. Even Ebola Zaïre, which is the most deadly variant, takes a week to ten days to kill its victim. Whatever this sucker is, it kills within hours.’

  ‘Hours? Jesus!’ Richter muttered.

  ‘What Dr Gravas spotted did look remarkably like Ebola, because the gross effects of this agent are superficially very similar,’ Hardin continued. ‘We’ve found two victims so far, and both exhibited broadly the same symptoms. That’s copious bleeding from every orifice, probably with convulsions, although that’s a guess based upon a cursory inspection of the second victim. Internally, my belief is that we’ll find that the majority of their organs have simply stopped working because they’ve been effectively drowned in blood. The actual cause of death may be simply blood loss, but I’ll be able to confirm that later today.

  ‘The other reason that I’m sure we’re not dealing with Ebola is that the first victim apparently managed to call out literally minutes before he died. Ebola produces a dramatic effect on brain functions as the skull fills with blood, and in its latter stages the victim invariably goes into a deep and irreversible coma. No Ebola victim can utter a sound once the terminal phase is reached.’

  Hardin’s matter-of-fact delivery and the implications of what he was saying stunned Richter for a moment.

  ‘So what is it then,’ he asked, ‘if it’s not Ebola? And what level of lethality and infectivity are we talking about here?’

  Hardin shrugged his shoulders. ‘At this stage,’ he replied, ‘I have no idea. My gut feeling is that it could be some kind of unknown filovirus, but extremely fast-acting. I’ve only seen two victims so far and they’re both dead, so to date its lethality has been exactly one hundred per cent, which makes this agent the species-killer to end all species-killers. Even Ebola Zaïre can only manage a lethality of around eighty to ninety per cent.

  ‘The sole good news is that, whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be particularly infectious. Three people entered the bedroom of the first victim, without wearing any kind of protection, yet they’re all still alive and healthy two days later.

  ‘That suggests one of two things: either this agent isn’t spread by airborne particles but by some form of body fluid transfer – blood, semen or saliva – or it can’t survive for very long outside the victim’s body. Maybe it decays if subjected to heat or light, or merely even exposure to the air. At this stage we just don’t know, but I am now convinced we won’t see an epidemic here on Crete. If that was going to happen, we’d already be piling the dead in the streets.’

  ‘You don’t paint a very attractive picture, Mr Hardin,’ Richter said.

  Hardin smiled briefly. ‘I’m just trying to be realistic.’ Then his face clouded. ‘And there’s something else you should know,’ he added. ‘At the first location I found evidence that the hot agent itself came from a small container, probably a vacuum flask, which suggests somebody had collected it and then stored it to use for research purposes.’

  ‘Or,’ Richter interrupted, ‘to develop as some kind of bioweapon. And the other possibility is that it had already been weaponized. I take it from what you said that you didn’t find this container?’

  Hardin shook his head. ‘No, there was no sign of anything like that at either location. And we’ve had a report of unidentified and unauthorized intruders at both hot zones: two men masquerading as CDC employees, one of them carrying a large case. At the second property they killed a police officer and two elderly villagers. We have no idea who these two men are or where they’re from, but the conclusion is fairly obvious.’

  Richter raised his eyebrows, then nodded, realizing immediately that his chances of getting back to the Invincible any time soon, with this investigation safely put to bed, were almost exactly nil. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it looks to me like the original developers of whatever killed those two Greeks came back to collect their property.’

  Réthymno, Crete

  In fact, Elias didn’t get to dive that afternoon, simply because Krywald hadn’t realized quite how long it would take to get where they were going and to get things organized.

  Nicholson had spent some time trying to hire a boat for them on the island of Gávdos itself, to minimize the time they would take reaching the dive site. He finally gave up when it became apparent that the island had a population of less than fifty, virtually nothing in the way of infrastructure apart from a couple of tavernas, and the only form of motorized transport available was a handful of tractors used primarily for transporting goods, goats and tourists, but not necessarily in that order. He’d checked on Gavdopoúla, too, but as far as he was able to discover it was inhabited entirely by goats, so he had turned his attention to mainland Crete, picking Chóra Sfakia as the closest point to the dive site, and started again on the telephone.

  Stein had left to make the pick-up at Soúda Bay as soon as he finished his breakfast. While they were waiting for him to return, Krywald checked the information ‘McCready’ had sent and then studied his tourist map. He wasn’t pleased with what it showed him.

  Chóra Sfakia was on the south coast of Crete, not all that far from Kandíra, in fact. The problem was the road, or lack of it. Looking again at the map, Krywald realized the distinct advantages of operating in a country like America or France, where the population understood the needs of the car. On Crete, it looked to him as if most of the roads were simply metalled goat-tracks, meandering from place to place as the whim of their original creators had inspired them.

  There were only two ways to get to Chóra Sfakia, and he didn’t like the look of either of them. The first option was to take the coast road and head west out of Réthymno as far as Vrýses and then turn left and follow the narrow and twisting mountain road through Káres and Ímpros down to the coast. The second route was probably worse: drive south from Réthymno on the main road towards Spíli, then turn right through Selliá and follow an even longer twisting road down to, and then along, the south coast of the island.

  By the time Stein returned to the hotel, Krywald and Elias had packed overnight bags for the three of them and were waiting for him in a café along the street. As soon as Stein drove up they both climbed into the hired Ford. The steel case went with them, still securely locked inside the larger case: Krywald wasn’t prepared to let it out of his sight now that they’d recovered it.

  ‘Which way?’ Stein asked, sliding the Focus into first gear and pulling away from the kerb.

  ‘Head for Vrýses,’ Krywald said sourly.

  ‘Jesus,’ Stein muttered. ‘I’ve only just come from there. It’s nearly as far as Soúda Bay.’

  ‘Yeah? Well you should know the way, then,’ Krywald retorted and lapsed into a sullen silence.

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  ‘The big question, of course, is where did an elderly Greek living in a tiny village on a small island in the eastern Mediterranean come across a sealed container filled with an unknown and totally lethal pathogen?’ Richter asked.

  Hardin shook his head. ‘I have no idea. My involvement here is purely to identify the infective agent and to put measures in place to contain the epidemic, if there is one. Because this pathogen was apparently stored in some kind of flask, that makes it more a matter for the police. So let me introduce you to Inspector Lavat.’

  Lavat wasn’t that much help – not because of being obstructive in any way, but simply because he didn’t know the answer. ‘All I can tell you is that Aristides was a diver all his life, and according to the locals still used to go out diving most days, despite having no permit. He owned a day boat moored in the bay down below Kandíra.’

  ‘Why would he need a permit?’ Richter asked.

  ‘The seabed round here is littered with wrecks. Some of them date back two or three thousand years and contain archaeological treasures tha
t should be properly recovered by trained professionals. What the Department of Antiquities definitely doesn’t want is a bunch of cowboy divers looting these wrecks indiscriminately and selling off whatever they’ve found. So all scuba divers must obtain a permit before they can legally put on an aqualung.’

  ‘And this Spiros didn’t bother, I suppose?’

  ‘No, Spiros didn’t bother. I understand that he frequently hauled up artefacts from the bottom of the sea and gave them to his nephew to sell. Nico’s name came up a few times in police records hereabouts in connection with the unauthorized sale of archaeological relics to tourists who should have known better, but nothing was ever proved.’

  ‘OK,’ Richter mused, ‘that might tie in with those Greek newspaper reports suggesting that Aristides found some kind of wrecked aircraft. Normally I don’t believe anything I read in the papers but maybe this time there’s a grain of truth in the story. He could have discovered something in a wreck on the seabed, then brought it home and opened it. What that still doesn’t answer is exactly where he found it. Does anybody in the village know where he went diving recently?’

  ‘No,’ Lavat replied, ‘if anybody knows, they’re not telling – or at least not telling me. These outlying villages have no respect for the law, so the chances of any of the locals confiding in a police officer are virtually nil.

  ‘I’ve looked at Aristides’s boat,’ Lavat continued, ‘but found nothing of interest. There was nothing on board that shouldn’t be there, apart from his diving gear, of course. I’ve checked his navigation charts, too, but none of them has any positions marked, nothing to indicate where he had been. I suspect he probably knew this area so well that he never bothered about using charts – he just kept them aboard as any other responsible boat owner would do.

  ‘So if you’re going to go out looking for the source of this pathogen, Mr Richter, I wish you luck. The Mediterranean covers about two and a half million square kilometres. Which bit are you going to start with?’

  Richter smiled slightly. ‘It shouldn’t be that difficult. If Aristides found this container while he was diving, the location has to be somewhere fairly close to Crete. You said yourself he only had a day boat, so he had to be able to motor out to his chosen site, carry out his dive and then get back to Kandíra that evening. Even if he was spending the night away from home – say at Irakleío – he would still have the same kind of constraint. He would need to get back to port somewhere the same day as he sailed. His boat probably has a maximum speed of about ten or twelve knots, so assuming he motored out to sea for five hours or so, that gives a radius of fifty, maybe sixty, miles maximum from the coast of Crete.’

  ‘That’s still a huge area – probably fifteen to twenty thousand square kilometres.’

  ‘Yes,’ Richter nodded, ‘but again I can reduce it. Unless Aristides was using fairly sophisticated diving equipment, he couldn’t have gone below about one hundred or maybe a hundred and fifty feet. A lot of the seabed around Crete is much deeper than that, which eliminates most of the surrounding area. And if he was hauling up archaeological relics from the seabed he’d want to be safe from prying eyes, even when he got back into harbour. He lived in Kandíra, and my guess is he used only Kandíra as his base. That means I’ll be concentrating on possible sites lying to the south and west of this end of Crete.’

  ‘You seem to know quite a lot about diving, Mr Richter.’

  ‘It’s been a hobby,’ Richter said shortly.

  Lavat was eyeing him curiously. ‘You’re also raising the kind of questions that I wouldn’t expect from a medical investigator. I believe you told Mr Hardin that you worked for the British Medical Research Council?’

  ‘I have got another job,’ Richter replied.

  Lavat nodded. ‘I assumed as much. And are you now going to try and find where the Greek discovered this pathogen that killed him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Richter said, ‘I am definitely going to find the source of those germs. And I’m really sorry that you lost a police officer over this business.’

  Chóra Sfakia, Crete

  In fact, the mountain road wasn’t anything like as good as Krywald had hoped, but it was better than he had feared, so they reached Chóra Sfakia by mid afternoon. It wasn’t a big place, and locating the diving supplies shop was easy. Finding the owner, or at least somebody to open the door so that they could collect the equipment Nicholson had booked for them, proved much more difficult.

  The Spanish have the word mañana, but there’s no word in the Greek language that conveys quite the same sense of urgency.

  This realization dawned on Krywald when the shop’s proprietor, a lanky, bald and burnt-brown Greek Cypriot named Monedes, finally turned up a little after five-thirty, weaving from side to side as he made his unsteady progress down the street. He smiled happily at Krywald and Stein and belched at them an unwholesome mix of stale garlic and tsikoudia – the lethal Cretan distilled spirit made from the residue of the wine-press and containing some thirty-seven percent alcohol by volume.

  Monedes clearly spoke nothing but Greek, and frankly Krywald was surprised he could still remember any language at all after the prolonged and largely liquid lunch he had obviously enjoyed. Stein therefore handled the negotiations, such as they were, in that language.

  ‘You have a booking for us, I hope, in the name of Wilson? A boat and some diving equipment?’

  Monedes stared at him as though through a haze. ‘A booking?’ he echoed as he leaned against the shop doorway while fumbling with a large bunch of keys.

  ‘Wilson. The name is Wilson,’ Stein repeated with as much patience as he could muster. ‘The booking was made by phone from America.’

  Monedes’s face cleared somewhat, but it was only because he had finally found the right key. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said cheerfully, turning the key in the lock and pushing open the door. The Cypriot staggered over to the counter and lurched behind it. ‘What can I get you?’ he asked as he reached down and pulled up a glass bottle half-full of a clear liquid with a very faint bluish tinge. The label identified it as ‘Raki’, an alternative name for tsikoudia – though not related to the Turkish intoxicant of the same name.

  Stein waved the bottle away and repeated his question, but Monedes appeared totally engrossed in removing the top.

  ‘We need a boat and some aqualungs,’ Stein said.

  ‘I have aqualungs,’ Monedes giggled. ‘Lots of aqualungs. You’ve come to the right place.’ He finally unscrewed the bottle cap, smiled at the two men, put the neck of it to his lips and took a gulp. Then he slammed the bottle back on the counter, gazed unsteadily at Stein for about a minute, pointed towards the open door with his left hand and slowly toppled sideways.

  ‘Shit,’ Krywald growled as the Greek hit the floor. ‘That’s all we needed right now.’

  Stein stepped forward to check that Monedes was still breathing, then rolled the unconscious man onto his side into the recovery position. ‘He’ll have the mother of all hangovers when he finally wakes up.’

  ‘Yeah, well that’s his problem. Our problem is that we still need to acquire a boat and some scuba equipment for Elias.’

  ‘That’s not really a problem. We can pick it up in the morning,’ Stein said. ‘Look, it’s too late for him to do any diving today anyway. We can go find a hotel, get back here first thing in the morning and we’ll still have the job done by lunchtime. That means we can be out of here tomorrow afternoon and on our way back to the States tomorrow night.’

  Krywald considered this for a moment. ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ he nodded. ‘Go fetch Elias and the car, and we’ll see what we can find here.’

  Chapter 14

  Thursday

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  ‘Hullo, John,’ Jayne Taylor murmured, as Westwood pushed open the outer door to the office of the Director of Operations (Clandestine Services) and walked in. ‘Good morning, Jayne. You’re looking good.’ As she invariably
did, in fact, Westwood thought, and wondered again at the rumours that periodically surfaced about the precise nature of the relationship between Walter Hicks and his personal assistant. Jayne Taylor’s coal-black hair and huge brown eyes had inspired more than one fantasy even in Westwood, who had a wife he adored and two children he doted on, though this mental image crumbled almost immediately he included the lumbering figure of Walter Hicks.

  ‘Thank you, kind sir.’ Jayne Taylor smiled back at him. ‘You can go right in – he’s expecting you.’

  Westwood headed across to the inner office door, knocked and entered.

  ‘Hi, John. Take a seat and grab a coffee.’ Hicks gestured towards the conference table where another man was already sitting. He was wearing a ‘Visitor’ tag so Westwood knew immediately that he wasn’t Company personnel.

  ‘Frank, this is John Westwood. He’s the head of the Foreign Intelligence Staff here at Langley, and he’ll act as your CIA liaison officer for the duration of this investigation.’

  ‘What investigation?’ Westwood asked.

  ‘All in good time, John,’ Hicks said. ‘Right, this is Detective Delaney of the Washington DC Police Department, who’s actually heading up this case.’

  Delaney was slightly overweight, had lost most of his hair and was perspiring gently even in the air-conditioned cool of the office. ‘The name’s Frank, Mr Westwood,’ he said, clambering to his feet and extending his hand.

  ‘And I’m John,’ Westwood replied, before sitting down opposite him.

  ‘OK,’ Hicks said. ‘John knows nothing about this yet, so perhaps you could fill him in on why you’re here, Frank.’

  ‘Sure.’ Delaney placed his arms squarely on the table in front of him. ‘Yesterday two former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency died in mysterious circumstances. One was certainly murdered and the other died as a result of a drug overdose, but we’re reasonably sure it wasn’t either an accident or suicide.’