Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, off Andikíthira, Sea of Crete

  Lieutenant Commander Mike O’Reilly leaned back from the display in front of him and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think that’s it either. These shapes are too regular and too similar in size. I think this is dumped cargo, or maybe pig-iron ballast, something like that.’

  Richter had been leaning against one of the equipment racks to look over the Senior Observer’s shoulder. He stood up as O’Reilly glanced at him and nodded agreement.

  ‘You’re the expert,’ Richter said. ‘If you say it’s pig-iron, I’ll believe you. To be honest, I think the most likely site for our wreck is somewhere to the south of Crete – Andikíthira’s a bit of a long flog for a man in an open boat starting out from Kandíra. Anyway, that’s the last likely contact around here – let’s go and take a look at the Gávdos area.’

  O’Reilly pulled a navigation chart from a cubbyhole and studied it for a few moments, measuring the angles and directions by eye. ‘Pilot, Sobs,’ he next instructed on the intercom, ‘climb out of the hover and steer track one eight five, height two thousand feet.’

  ‘How far is it?’ Richter asked.

  ‘By the shortest route it’s about seventy nautical miles,’ O’Reilly explained, ‘but that means climbing way up over the mountains, talking to Soúda Bay and all the rest. So I’m taking us the pretty route instead. We’ll head south, clip the western end of Crete and then transit directly to Gavdopoúla. It’s the longer way round by about twenty miles, but in this baby that’s less than ten minutes extra.’

  Richter nodded and sat on a pull-down seat on the starboard side of the cabin. He looked at his watch and began figuring times and distances. It was almost midday, which meant they’d already spent nearly one and a half hours in their search with absolutely nothing to show for it. He just hoped that this next site would prove rather more interesting.

  As the Merlin transitioned from the hover to begin its flight south towards Gavdopoúla, the chemical reactions within the pencil detonators on the four demolition charges scattered randomly through the cabin of the wrecked Learjet had already been running for a little over forty-three minutes.

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  John Westwood leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms up above his head. He seemed to have been in this building for hours, yet to have achieved remarkably little.

  The theory Walter Hicks had floated at the meeting in his office the previous day had then seemed to contain obvious merit – someone might well want to take revenge if he had suffered because of some operation those two Company men had been involved in – but the more Westwood examined the records, the less likely this scenario appeared. The obvious objection was the timing. Both Richards and Hawkins had left the CIA over ten years earlier – Hawkins had been retired for nearly thirteen years – and it seemed inconceivable to Westwood that anyone bent on revenge would wait around for over a decade and then kill two men and a woman on the same day.

  There was one possible explanation that he was still tossing around in his mind. The reason for the killer’s delay might simply be because he had been locked up all that time in a prison somewhere. But even that theory didn’t make a lot of sense. The three killings were so markedly different in execution. One victim had been shot, then beaten to death with a poker, but the other two had been forced to swallow poison capsules.

  Somebody coming to seek revenge would more likely want to be physical about it. They would want to make their victims suffer physically for whatever grievance had been done to them in the past. Forcing somebody to swallow a poison capsule that would produce unconsciousness in a matter of seconds didn’t really count as ‘suffering’ in Westwood’s book.

  And besides, all the evidence suggested the killer was known to both his male victims and to Hawkins’s wife as well. If the perp – or the unsub, to use Detective Delaney’s phrase – was a man the CIA had sent to prison years ago, it seemed inconceivable that Richards would have opened the door to him. And why on earth would Mary Hawkins have let the man so readily into her house?

  Quite possibly Charles Hawkins had met his killer by appointment, which implied that the two men knew each other quite well. If that was the case, it probably explained why the deaths had occurred in the sequence they did. With Hawkins lured out of his house the killer would have a window of opportunity to eliminate Mary Hawkins, while she would be there alone. Hawkins would be the next victim, already sitting alone in his car by the Potomac, waiting for his wife’s killer. Then Richards would follow. Maybe the unsub had originally intended to eliminate all his victims with poison capsules, but his plan had been thwarted when Richards fought back.

  The only scenario to make any sense was that the killer was somebody known to all three victims – Richards, Hawkins and Hawkins’s wife – and that probably meant somebody who had once been, or perhaps even still was, an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, Sea of Crete

  As the Merlin rounded the south-western end of Crete and passed due south of Paliochóra, Mike O’Reilly changed frequency on his UHF box and glanced over at Richter. ‘Let’s see if Ops Four is awake,’ he said, pressing the transmit button.

  ‘Fob Watch, this is Spook Two.’ There was absolutely no response. ‘He’s probably got his face full of sandwiches and coffee,’ O’Reilly muttered, and transmitted again. ‘Fob Watch, Fob Watch, this is Spook Two.’

  There was a click, a short burst of static, and then a clearly puzzled voice responded. ‘This is Fob Watch. Say again your callsign.’

  ‘This is Spook Two. We’re an ASW Merlin from Mother in transit from the western edge of Crete to Gavdopoúla, level at two thousand feet on the Regional Pressure Setting. We’re presently two miles south of Paliochóra, heading one five zero and we’ll be holding at least two miles clear of the coast until we return to Mother. Have you any traffic for us?’

  ‘Negative, Spook Two, and good afternoon, sir.’ The Air Operations Chief Petty Officer – ‘Ops Four’ – had obviously recognized the 814 Squadron Senior Observer’s voice. ‘I have nothing known at this time. The next scheduled flight isn’t due here until around fifteen hundred this afternoon.’

  ‘Roger, Fob Watch. We’ll be carrying out anti-submarine exercises in the vicinity of Gavdopoúla, and we’ll check in again when we climb out of the area.’

  Forty minutes later the Merlin was sitting in the hover some two miles off the eastern coast of Gavdopoúla, and the dunking sonar body was on its way down.

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  John Westwood was worried. Worried and puzzled. On his desk in front of him lay the analysis report of the poison used to kill Charles Hawkins and his wife. As Detective Delaney had said the day before, the lethal agent in question had been confirmed as coniine, a toxic vegetable alkaloid derived from the hemlock plant.

  Westwood was puzzled because there were literally thousands of common poisons more readily available, and even the compiler of the analysis report had never previously encountered the use of coniine – at least, not since the days of Socrates, who himself had been executed using a preparation of hemlock.

  Coniine, which is more accurately described by its chemical designation 2-propyl piperidine, is one of the simplest and most toxic of the vegetable alkaloids – with a fatal dose for human beings amounting to less than zero decimal two of a gram. In its pure form it’s a colourless and slightly oily liquid with an unpleasant smell and bitter taste. The source plant – hemlock – has a long history of medicinal use, having been employed by the Arabs as well as the Greeks as a sedative and painkiller, but always with the greatest care because of the very small difference between a therapeutic and a lethal dose.

  The coniine that had killed Hawkins and his wife was highly concentrated. Taking hemlock first causes stimulation – it’s related to nicotine,
another vegetable alkaloid, and has a similar initial effect – followed by depression of the nervous system, then loss of feeling in the limbs, drowsiness, paralysis and ultimately death after perhaps an hour – not unconsciousness in seconds. Whoever had chosen coniine had selected an unusual and rare poison, in sufficiently concentrated form to produce a dose that would be almost immediately fatal.

  This was not easy to achieve, and suggested a fairly well-equipped laboratory staffed by experienced doctors and technicians. From his time in the Company, Westwood knew that private laboratories willing to turn out lethal poisons were somewhat thin on the ground, at least in America, so that possibly meant Fort Detrick was involved.

  Fort Detrick is the current home of USAMRIID, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, located in the foothills of the Catoctin Mountains in western Maryland. Officially and actually, USAMRIID is part of the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command and is the principal research laboratory of the American Biological Defense Research Program. Fort Detrick contains one of the only two Biosafety Level 4 laboratories in America, intended to assist its personnel in the fight both against naturally occurring viruses or other pathogens, and in combating the biological weapons – bioweapons – manufactured by foreign regimes.

  That’s the official story at least, but Fort Detrick has a secret and murkier past – and present. One of the conundrums of scientifically developing counter-measures to biological weapons is that you need to have a supply of the bioweapon you’re seeking defence against. So Fort Detrick holds – and has always held – stocks of a vast range of such agents including anthrax, botulinus toxin and so on. But developing antidotes or inoculations against them is only half the story.

  Predicting how your enemy might modify anthrax, say, is something of a guessing game, and the only practical way to produce counter-measures to modified biological agents is to modify them yourself in order to develop more efficient strains, and then to develop effective antidotes. By default, therefore, Fort Detrick itself has to be constantly involved in the biological warfare business.

  Although the CIA is officially forbidden to engage in assassinations, at numerous times in the past this rule has been relaxed sufficiently for attempts to be made to eliminate certain people whose intentions seemed diametrically opposed to those of the Agency. A classic example was Fidel Castro, who survived four CIA-sponsored attempts to assassinate him using poisons, supplied by the scientists at Fort Detrick, and at least the same number of attempts using alternative methods.

  The first attempt employed regular poison pills, but the agent chosen to administer them couldn’t get anywhere near Castro. The second time they tried a scatter-gun approach, supplying a mixed bag of goodies, which included a poison pen, a cigar impregnated with botulinus toxin – one of the most lethal substances known to man and nowadays most notorious by being associated with ageing Hollywood stars trying to remove their wrinkles – and various substances containing biological agents. This attempt, delegated to a Cuban dissident living in Havana, also failed, of course.

  The third time round, organized crime figures working under contract to the CIA identified a Cuban employed in a restaurant favoured by Castro, who was prepared, for a fee, to poison the Cuban leader’s food. Poison pills were duly supplied, but by the time the plan came together Castro had switched his affections to a different restaurant.

  A year after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Company tried yet again, once more resorting to their contacts within organized crime and providing poison pills. This time the Cuban dissident agreeing to make the attempt wanted his payment in kind – demanding weapons and radio equipment instead of money. This was supplied to him by CIA front companies operating out of Florida before the assassination attempt was due to be made. Once again the attempt failed, and it’s possible that the Cuban never even tried to get near to Castro, once he’d received what he wanted.

  All that showed clearly how the CIA was not averse to developing and utilizing lethal substances. So maybe the coniine used here had come from a secret chemical weapon stockpile somewhere within the Company itself. If so, Westwood’s earlier deduction about the possible source of the killer was probably justified.

  What he wasn’t sure about was where to go from there. If the killer was indeed a Company employee, he would certainly have covered his traces well. Even with his high-level security clearance, Westwood knew that there were areas on the CIA database that he himself was unable to access, and anyway he had no idea at all where to start looking for the source of the poison. He even toyed with the idea of just entering ‘coniine’ in the database search field to see what the system generated, then quickly decided not to. If the unknown assassin was still an active CIA agent, he could have left tripwires within the system to alert him if anybody started digging too close to him.

  Reluctantly, Westwood turned his attention back to the personnel records, searching for some link between James Richards and Charles Hawkins that made any kind of sense in the context of their deaths.

  Off Chóra Sfakia, Crete

  Stein and Krywald were only about four miles off Chóra Sfakia when they spotted the helicopter approaching from the west. At first it was just a curiosity to them, nothing more, but when it descended into the hover over the area of sea lying between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Stein began to worry.

  ‘That looks to me like an ASW bird,’ he murmured, peering southwards through a small pair of folding binoculars, ‘but I can’t identify it for sure. It could be a Sea King or one of the new Merlins.’

  ‘Who uses them primarily?’ Krywald asked. With every mile they’d covered in their approach to Crete, he had been feeling a little better, considerably cheered by the prospect of stepping onto dry land.

  ‘If it’s a Sea King, almost anyone,’ Stein replied, still studying the helicopter. ‘It’s a very good aircraft and a hell of a lot of nations operate them – Germany, Canada, Spain and Egypt for starters – and any of those could have warships in this area. If it’s a Merlin, Britain and Italy are the most likely.’

  ‘What’s it doing?’

  ‘From here I can’t be certain, but it looks as if it’s transitioned into a hover, so it’s probably using its dunking sonar.’

  ‘You think they’re looking for the Learjet?’

  ‘I doubt it. It’s probably just doing regular anti-submarine exercises. And even if it is looking for the wreck, those charges are going to blow real soon now.’

  ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

  Just over thirty minutes after the Merlin had begun its dunking sonar search, O’Reilly suddenly leaned forward, staring intently at the display in front of him.

  He then glanced up at Richter who was trying to peer over his shoulder. ‘This looks more like it,’ O’Reilly said. ‘A cylindrical object about thirty feet long which could well be part of an aircraft fuselage – it’s big enough for that – plus two flat plates, one right next to the cylinder and the other a short distance away and standing vertically upright.’

  ‘Wings?’ Richter queried.

  ‘That’s my guess,’ O’Reilly said. ‘One still attached to the wreckage, the other torn off by the impact with the sea. I’ve also got two very strong returns from fairly small objects, which I assume are the engines. This is the best candidate we’ve located so far,’ he added, ‘but it’s deep, around one hundred feet.’

  Richter looked at him. ‘OK, Mike, on a scale of one to ten, where do you reckon this contact scores?’

  O’Reilly thought for a moment. ‘At least a seven,’ he said, ‘maybe eight.’

  ‘That’s good enough for me.’ Richter turned towards the rear of the helicopter. ‘David, get suited up.’ Turning back to the Senior Observer, he added, ‘Mike, we’ll have to use the life raft, and we’ll need a buoy to mark the precise spot. Can you position the aircraft as near as you can to what you think is the fuselage?’

  �
�No problem.’ O’Reilly did some swift calculations. ‘Pilot, jump one three five, seven hundred yards.’

  As the helicopter climbed away from the hover, Richter joined Crane at the rear of the cabin and began pulling on a wetsuit.

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  John Westwood snapped the file closed. He got up from his chair, stretching his arms and rubbing his eyes, then paced the office carpet for a few moments. He had come in fairly early that morning, and ever since then he seemed to have done nothing but either stare at text on the computer screen or plough through dusty operation files.

  Hicks had been adamant there were answers to be found somewhere within the vast CIA database of information, and equally firm that he expected Westwood to find them, although not at the expense of his normal work. But ‘cracking the Walnut’, as Hicks had somewhat dismissively termed this operation, had not proved as easy as at first supposed.

  Westwood had initially searched the database to identify those cases and operations in which either Charles Hawkins or James Richards had participated. That had eventually produced a list he had output to his laser printer, but that, of course, was just the start. Once he’d identified the operations in which the men were involved, he was obliged to read through all the case files as well, and that was where his problems really started, just because of the sheer volume of data he was trying to analyse.

  James Richards and Charles Hawkins had both worked in the Operations Directorate for almost their entire professional careers, a total in Richards’s case of over thirty years. Hawkins had transferred to Administration for the last five years of his time at the Agency, but that still left twenty-eight years’ worth – over one hundred and twenty operations involving one man or the other – to be scanned and assessed.