Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  Aristides’s bladder and rectum were next sectioned and examined; both showed clear evidence of blood inside them, which served to confirm what the external examination of the body had indicated – the Greek had bled from every orifice. The kidneys, like the liver, appeared basically normal, but again showed signs of weeping blood vessels.

  Hardin then turned his attention to the brain. There were no obvious external signs of anything abnormal there, but when Hardin bisected it laterally the two men spotted the same indications of weeping capillaries and veins. ‘It’s the same thing, Mark,’ Hardin said. ‘The minor blood vessels in particular show signs of seepage through the walls. That’s a classic sign of Ebola or some other viral haemorrhagic fever, caused by the damage done to the endothelial cells that line the blood vessels.’

  ‘But you still don’t think it’s actually Ebola?’ Evans asked.

  ‘It’s definitely not Zaïre or Sudan, which means that if it is Ebola it’s a new and unknown strain,’ Hardin replied. ‘The effects on the body itself, and on the organs we’ve examined so far, are certainly consistent with the early to middle stages of an Ebola infection, or the terminal phases of an attack by Lassa Fever. That’s an arenavirus not a filovirus, of course, though the whole family – apart from the commonest form, lymphocytic choriomeningitis, which is a Level Three Agent – are still classed as Level Four Hot Agents. But nothing we’ve seen up to now could actually have caused death. Discomfort and pain, yes, but not death itself. Something else must have killed this man.’

  Hardin took samples from six areas of the brain for further investigation, then wiped down the cutting board while Evans replaced the brain in the steel dish. ‘The brain appears generally normal, apart from the same sort of capillary bleeding that we’ve noted in the other internal organs.’ Hardin watched as Evans lifted the large steel dish containing Aristides’s lungs, placed it on the scales to be weighed and wrote down the result.

  Hardin positioned the lungs on the board and for a few moments just looked down at the specimen while Evans weighed the steel dish and calculated the actual weight of the organs.

  ‘They’re heavy,’ Evans said, showing Hardin the sheet of paper on which he’d written down the two figures. ‘Well outside the normal range.’

  Hardin nodded. ‘Full of blood, I suspect. OK, external examination first.’ He studied the lungs for some minutes, noting carefully their colour and feeling their texture as well as he could through the multiple layers of gloves he was wearing. ‘The lungs appear larger than normal for a man of this age, but that is probably a function of his lifestyle. Divers, like athletes, tend to develop larger lungs than most people. Their colour is darker than normal, and there is evidence of external bleeding from both major and minor vessels on the outer surface. This is a subjective observation, especially through these damn gloves, but his lungs feel very pulpy, as if the alveoli are full of fluid.’

  He took a fresh scalpel, positioned the tip of the blade carefully at the top of the left lung, and slid it down smoothly. The two halves of the lung separated and almost fell apart and, with a rush, about half a pint of blood slopped over the board and onto the rubber sheets that covered the floor.

  ‘OK,’ Hardin said, ‘now we know what killed him.’

  Réthymno, Crete

  Murphy waited until dusk had fallen before carrying the Dragunov down the hotel’s back stairs and stowing it in the boot of his hire car. As a precaution, he’d removed the loaded magazine, but would keep that with him at all times. With the weapon stored out of sight, and with the Daewoo still tucked into the rear waistband of his trousers under his light summer jacket, Murphy left the hotel car park and moved away down the street.

  To a casual observer, he would have looked like any other aimless tourist out for his pre-dinner stroll, but Murphy actually had a specific destination in mind. He’d already picked up a hotel map of Réthymno and, despite not yet having Nicholson’s go-ahead, had decided to reconnoitre the area where he was likely to find his targets.

  When Murphy reached the hotel where Krywald, Stein and Elias were staying, he glanced up and down the pavement and then selected a café on the opposite side of the street. At a table offering a clear view of the hotel, he ordered a beer, then opened his copy of an American car magazine.

  He didn’t anticipate actually spotting any of his three targets – he knew they were somewhere else on the island completing the second phase of their tasking – but Murphy had always found, in his grisly trade, that time spent checking out his area of operations was never wasted. There was no such thing as too much preparation.

  Despite his apparent absorption in his motoring magazine, Murphy was actually figuring the angles. His major problem was to be facing three CIA agents. The fact that they were fellow Americans and CIA employees didn’t bother him in the slightest: what concerned him was the reaction of the remaining two once he’d eliminated the first one.

  They were going to be operational agents, probably armed and certainly experienced. If he were to simply set up his sniper rifle and shoot the first target as he walked out of the hotel, Murphy knew the other two would then do their best to hunt him down. He’d be lucky to escape with his life if he didn’t account for all three. No, what he needed here was cunning and a couple of accidents.

  HMS Invincible, Sea of Crete

  There were no private cubicles or anything like that in the Communications Centre on Five Deck, next to the Operations Room, and Richter was particularly keen that anything he said on the telephone to Simpson should be heard by Simpson and by no one else. After discussion with the Communications Officer, Richter retreated to his cabin on Two Deck and waited for the crucial call to be patched through to him there.

  Once the telephone rang, Richter picked up the receiver. Behind the crackles he heard a voice. ‘Commander Richter? This is the CommCen – we’re connecting you now. Go ahead, sir.’

  There was a loud click, followed by a moment of echoing silence, then a distant voice spoke. ‘Richter? Richter? Can you hear me?’ Simpson’s voice was faint, but perfectly clear.

  ‘Yes.’ Richter sat down on his day bed. He’d made some notes while he was waiting for this call to be connected, and he scanned them quickly.

  ‘Where are you?’ Simpson asked.

  ‘Right now,’ Richter said, ‘I’m in my cabin on board the Invincible, and the ship’s still holding position a few miles off the north coast of Crete.’

  ‘And what have you found out?’ Simpson demanded. ‘It had better be good to justify all this buggering about with secure lines.’

  ‘It’s not good,’ Richter said. ‘In fact, it’s bad. What caused the deaths of the two victims here on Crete is, in the opinion of the CDC specialist, either an unknown but naturally occurring virus, or a manufactured bioweapon. Whatever it is, it kills its victims within about twelve hours of infection, and so far it’s proving one hundred per cent lethal.’

  ‘How does he know?’

  ‘He doesn’t. He’s just making assumptions based on the evidence that’s available to him.’

  Richter explained concisely what Hardin had found in Kandíra, the American’s deduction about the sealed container, and finally the suggestion that Spiros Aristides might have found the virus in the remains of a sunken aircraft.

  ‘That’s all a bit circumstantial,’ Simpson said. ‘There could be other explanations.’

  ‘Like what?’ Richter demanded. ‘The corpses are real enough, and they certainly didn’t die from old age or heart attacks. Something got inside them that left them spewing blood like a lawn sprinkler. And there’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two men entered both properties in the village and almost certainly took away the container that held the virus, and they killed a policeman and two villagers to do it. They’re probably working for the people who created whatever was in that container, and came to Crete to retrieve their property. What worries me is what they’re going to do n
ow they’ve got the stuff back.’

  ‘Did anybody get a description?’

  ‘Yes,’ Richter replied, ‘but it won’t help much. Caucasian, average height, average build. You won’t get much of a photofit from that.’

  ‘So what leads have you got?’

  ‘Right now,’ Richter said, ‘only one. Most of the water round here is too deep for free diving, which limits the number of places where the Greek could have discovered the aircraft. I’m plotting possible locations on a navigation chart and I’ve requested a Merlin to get airborne first thing tomorrow morning to try to locate the wreck using its dunking sonar. Once we’ve found it, I’m going down to take a look.’

  Chapter 16

  Friday

  Chóra Sfakia, Crete

  Monedes still wasn’t completely sober when Stein and Elias pushed open the door of his shop just after nine that morning, but at least he was upright. Stein guessed that the previous night he’d probably slept right where he’d fallen over, behind the counter. That was fortunate because it meant that he hadn’t locked the door and, according to a hand-written notice taped to the shop window, it wasn’t supposed to open until ten.

  Monedes regarded the two men through red-rimmed and bleary eyes that held no sign of recognition whatsoever. Stein handled the negotiations with a certain inevitable feeling of déjà vu.

  ‘You have a booking in the name of Wilson, for a day boat and some diving equipment? It was made from America this week?’

  Monedes nodded and swallowed, his face grey, then reached under the counter. For a second Stein wondered if he was reaching for the bottle of tsikoudia and a ‘hair of the dog’, but instead he pulled out a red loose-leaf binder, placed it carefully on the counter, and began flicking through it.

  ‘Wilson?’ he muttered, as he searched the pages. ‘Yes, here it is,’ he said at last. ‘A day boat, one aqualung set with four spare bottles. Plus a wetsuit, mask, fins, weight belt and everything else. The suit is for you yourself?’ he asked, looking at Stein.

  ‘No, for my friend.’ Stein gestured towards Elias.

  Monedes looked Elias up and down. ‘No problem,’ he said, and led the way towards a door at the rear. The two Americans followed and found themselves entering a room lined with shelves groaning under the weight of various pieces of diving equipment.

  Monedes said something to Stein, who turned to his colleague and pointed at the shelves. ‘He says you can help yourself,’ Stein explained, guessing that either bending down or reaching up might be beyond Monedes’s capabilities in his present fragile state.

  Elias was in his element here. He selected a black neoprene two-piece wetsuit complete with hood, and added separate bootees and gloves. The aqualungs were stored in racks at the back of the room, and Elias checked the demand valves on three sets before he declared himself satisfied with one of them. He picked out four full compressed air cylinders as spares, weighing them by hand, then added demand valves, air hoses and mouthpieces to them. He chose a weight belt and a couple of dozen weights, a stainless-steel diving knife and calf sheath, a depth gauge, a compass, a one-hundred-metre coil of thin cord and another one-hundred-metre coil of orange polypropylene rope and a lead weight to anchor it. Then he selected fins, a mask, snorkel, a life-saving inflatable jacket, two powerful underwater torches, and a large string bag – as was used for collecting specimens – to complete the outfit.

  Monedes watched Elias’s progress around the storeroom with a certain weary detachment. He turned to Stein as Elias added the last items to his growing pile. ‘Your friend knows what he’s doing, and he’s going deep, I think.’

  Stein nodded without comment, then bent down to help Elias carry the equipment out to the car, parked right outside the door. While Elias was stowing the last item in the boot, Stein headed back into the shop. ‘The hire fee should already have been paid?’ he inquired.

  Monedes nodded. ‘Yes, by American Express, but I will need your passport as security.’

  Stein didn’t demur – he was carrying three completely genuine American passports in different names – and he immediately handed over the one bearing the name ‘Wilson’.

  ‘Can I see your diving permit?’ Monedes asked, as something of an afterthought.

  Stein stared at him and shook his head. ‘What diving permit?’

  ‘You should have got a diving permit from the Department of Antiquities if your friend is going to dive here in Cretan waters. I am supposed to see it before I supply you with any equipment.’

  Stein’s face cleared. ‘No, he’s not,’ he said, thinking on his feet. ‘We’re diving well away from Crete – that’s why we need the boat.’

  Monedes still looked doubtful, so Stein passed over a handful of notes. ‘If anybody should ask you,’ he said, ‘perhaps you can confirm that you have seen our permit.’

  Monedes looked at the notes in his hand and nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said, pushing them into his hip pocket, ‘perhaps I can.’

  Stein grinned. ‘And the boat?’ he asked.

  Three minutes later their car was pulling up alongside a nearby jetty. Twenty minutes after that Krywald and Stein were sitting side by side on a bench in a grubby but sea-worthy blue-painted open wooden boat about fifteen feet in length. They watched as Elias started the inboard diesel engine and slowly began to manoeuvre the craft through the harbour and out to the open sea.

  HMS Invincible, Sea of Crete

  The previous evening Richter had spent nearly two hours poring over a selection of navigation charts of the waters surrounding Crete. But he’d spent a few minutes preparing his criteria before even looking at them. He had decided to eliminate all areas within half a mile of the coast of Crete or any other inhabited islands, on the grounds that an aircraft wreck so close to the shore would have been discovered long before. He had also excluded all stretches of water greater than one hundred and fifty feet – fifty metres – in depth because of the difficulties of anyone diving that deep without specialized equipment.

  What surprised him was how small – not large – an area that left to be searched. At his self-imposed half-mile cut-off point, there were virtually no locations around the Cretan coast where the water was less than one hundred metres deep. About the only possible areas on the coast itself were the two north-facing bays at the western end of the island – Kólpos Chanión and Kólpos Kissámou – but Richter was fairly certain Aristides hadn’t been diving in either of them.

  Quite apart from anything else, both inlets contained popular holiday resorts, so anybody diving there would easily become the focus of numerous pairs of eyes and binoculars, not to mention cameras, and a man who earned his living by illegally recovering ancient artefacts from the seabed would hardly want such a large and attentive audience to witness his activities. No, on balance, Richter decided that Aristides would have been diving somewhere else.

  But there were numerous small islands around Crete itself, most of them uninhabited because they were simply too small to be developed, so the shallower water close to their shores was a definite possibility. Richter had already marked several of these, starting with Andikíthira and finishing with the Gávdos– Gavdopoúla pair.

  Privately, he put his money on three strong contenders: Paximáda in Órmos Mésaras, south-west of Agía Galíni; Chrýsi and its much smaller companion Mikronissi lying to the south of Ierápetra, though this area lay some way outside his theoretical radius of fifty to sixty miles from Kandíra; and finally the area extending between Gávdos and Gavdopoúla. The outside bet would be the Koufonísi group located south of the Stenon Konfonisou at the eastern tip of Crete. That was too far for Aristides to reach in a day and still get back to Kandíra, but it was still a possibility if the diver had spent one or two nights somewhere in the area.

  With his target areas established, Richter had worked out a route that would allow the Merlin to check the chosen sites in the most logical order in terms of speed. With Invincible still loitering out to sea north o
f Réthymno, he decided that the first site to investigate would be Andikíthira lying north-west of the western tip of Crete, followed by Gávdos and Gavdopoúla, and then Paximáda. Then probably a refuel, although that depended on the amount of time they would spend searching at each location, the Merlin having a top speed of over 160 knots and an endurance in excess of four hours.

  If refuelling was necessary, they’d fly north, straight over the Cretan mainland and back to the Invincible, undertake the long transit south-east to Chrýsi and Mikronissi, then a short flight east to Koufonísi and then back to the ship. If by that stage they’d found nothing, Richter was going to have to think again.

  ‘And we’re looking for what, exactly?’ Lieutenant Commander Michael (‘Mike’) O’Reilly was the 814 Naval Air Squadron Senior Observer – known inevitably as ‘Sobs’ – and he’d elected to fly this sortie when he’d heard the Merlin wouldn’t just be acting as an airborne taxi cab. They were in the Rotary Wing Briefing-Room on Two Deck, where the met officer had finished his spiel a few minutes earlier, and Richter had just outlined the route he intended the Merlin to take.

  ‘A wrecked aircraft on the seabed,’ Richter said. ‘Probably an executive jet of some sort – a Lear, Falcon, that sort of size – and it’s been at the bottom of the sea for a while, probably ten years or more. It was apparently shot down, so it’s almost certainly going to be severely damaged.’

  ‘Shot down – how do you know? Who by? And whose aircraft was it?’

  ‘That’s three questions,’ Richter replied, ‘and the three answers are: it was in the newspaper; no idea and no idea.’

  ‘In the newspaper?’ O’Reilly grinned broadly. ‘Is that where you spooks get the information you need? It’s hardly Echelon or Carnivore, is it?’