Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  ‘Time,’ Westwood muttered to himself, pacing the carpet while wondering whether another shot of caffeine would help pummel his brain into action. Time.

  Suddenly he stopped short. Time? That would be another way of looking at the data. A timeline of both men’s careers side by side. Westwood forgot all about getting himself another cup of coffee and returned to his desk.

  He took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote ‘RICHARDS’ and ‘HAWKINS’ in capital letters at the top of it. Then he checked the two deceased agents’ personnel files and on the left-hand side of the page below the name he wrote the month and year that James Richards had joined the CIA – August 1958.

  For a few moments Westwood just sat and stared at the date: nearly half a century ago. What possible relevance could there be in such ancient history? He shook his head, picked up James Richards’s personnel file and began scanning through it, recording the start and finish dates of every course, every posting and every operation that the man had been involved in. When he’d finished, he did exactly the same for agent Charles Hawkins.

  St Spiridon Forensic Laboratory, Irakleío, Crete

  ‘What is it?’ the supervisor asked, peering over the technician’s shoulder at the image on the screen. You don’t look through a scanning electron microscope: the samples being examined are held in a vacuum chamber and the ‘viewing’ is carried out on a closed-circuit television screen positioned beside the apparatus itself.

  Typically, the SEM offers a range of magnifications from about fifteen up to around two hundred thousand, allowing progressively finer and finer details of the object to be observed. The sample needs to be very carefully prepared to withstand the vacuum inside the chamber, and also has to be modified to conduct electricity because the sample is scanned with a stream of electrons, not light waves. This process is usually done by coating it with a very thin layer of gold.

  Once made ready, the specimen is placed carefully on a small tray attached to the inside of the door of the vacuum chamber, the door itself is then closed and sealed and the air pumped out. Once a vacuum has been created, a gun at the top of the microscope fires a beam of electrons downwards through a series of magnetic lenses, which focus the beam on a very tiny area.

  That spot of energy is then moved backwards and forwards across the surface of the sample by a series of coils: this is the ‘scanning’ part of the SEM. As the beam hits the specimen, secondary electrons are dislodged from its surface. These are counted by a detector, which sends the information to an amplifier, and the final image that appears on the screen is created by counting the electrons emitted by the sample.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the technician replied. ‘It looks like some kind of a spore, but not one I’ve ever seen before.’

  ‘Where did it originate?’

  ‘I found it in the scrapings from the dining table in the house belonging to this man Spiros Aristides – the index case.’

  The black-and-white image of a handful of spherical objects appeared on the screen – because the SEM uses electrons the image will never appear in colour, although printed images often have false colour added. The detail generated by the equipment was remarkable, but even with a magnification of one hundred and fifty thousand there was, frankly, little to see: just a collection of tiny spore-like items.

  ‘Actually,’ the technician said, swiftly readying the electron microscope to receive the second specimen, ‘that wasn’t what I wanted you to see.’ As soon as the vacuum had been dispelled she unlocked and pulled open the airtight door, then removed the first specimen and replaced it with the second one. ‘When I saw those things, I wondered if they were lying dormant. So I added a small amount of water to a second sample, prepared that for the SEM and then examined it too. This,’ she finished, as the screen came to life, ‘is what I wanted you to look at.’

  The supervisor leaned closer, his mouth dropping open in astonishment. The microscopic spherical objects were still there, but all, without exception, had burst open and the sample was now a mass of what looked like virus particles, but not, the supervisor noted immediately, with the characteristic thread-like shape of a filovirus.

  ‘Well, the good news is it’s definitely not Ebola or Marburg,’ he said. ‘The bad news is that I don’t know what it is. If I had to guess, I’d say it was some kind of bovine virus. The only thing I’ve seen that looks anything like it is BLV – Bovine Lymphotrophic or Leukaemia Virus – but that makes no sense at all. That virus only infects cattle and it’s very slow-acting: it attacks the lymph glands and can eventually cause cancer. There’s no way that it can kill a healthy human being in less than twenty-four hours.’

  Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

  For Richter, time seemed to have stopped. He hung motionless in the water, figuring the angles. He could see the two demolition charges under the seat in front of him and he knew perfectly well that if either or both of them exploded the biggest remnant of his body anybody might subsequently find would be a tooth.

  Naturally, that worried him. What also worried him was the fact that the charges he could see appeared to have been tossed into the cabin at random: for a proper demolition job they should have been placed in strategic locations to ensure the total destruction of the aircraft. The casual manner in which they had been dumped suggested that possibly there were others scattered under the seats, in the piles of debris, or even outside the fuselage.

  They now had, he realized, exactly two choices: they could quickly search the cabin and try to locate and defuse all the charges before they went off or they could get the hell out of there. It wasn’t a difficult decision for him.

  Richter whirled round and gestured upwards with his thumb. Crane nodded and the two men immediately swam out of the gaping hole in the front of the cabin and headed back along the thin cord Crane had paid out towards the detached wing. With imminent death lurking in the dark waters behind them, they moved as quickly as they could.

  They passed the Learjet’s wing, and began to swim even faster, following the cord towards the lead anchor and the rope that led to the buoy up on the surface. Crane spotted it first, braked abruptly and began swimming upwards, his left hand grabbing and then encircling the rope. Richter was right behind him all the way.

  In the wreckage of the Learjet, the four pencil detonators had been active for a little over two hours and forty minutes, so the remaining thickness of membrane separating the switches and batteries from the sea water could now be measured only in microns. Making chemical-activated detonators has never been an exact science, because there are so many different circumstances that cannot be factored in. The water depth and hence the pressure, the water temperature, and even the force used to snap the end of the pencil and initially arm the detonator: all could affect the time elapsing before the device would explode. The fuses Stein had collected from Soúda Bay were of good quality, pretty much state of the art, but still they were going to blow some minutes before the full three hours were up.

  Richter and Crane deliberately slowed their pace as they ascended – going up to the surface too fast kills more divers than almost anything else because it doesn’t allow the absorbed nitrogen in the blood to come out of solution gradually. Crane had arranged aqualung sets at twenty and then at ten feet below the surface, and Richter slowed himself even further as they approached the lower of the two sets. But Crane waved him on, and they stopped together just ten feet below the surface, seizing hold of the buoy cable.

  Crane started his stopwatch, then checked his dive watch. He then consulted a dive table printed on a plastic board attached to his weight belt and made some swift calculations, working out how long they’d been submerged and at what depths. These two factors would determine the length of time they had to spend decompressing before they could surface safely. Once he’d arrived at an answer, he did the whole check over again.

  At this point Crane wrote ‘WHAT THAT?’ on the waterproof board and passed it across to Richte
r, who had just opened the air valve on one of the two aqualung sets attached to the buoy cable and swapped mouthpieces.

  Richter took the pencil and scribbled ‘BOMB’ in reply, then added ‘WHEN SURFACE?’ below it. Crane checked his stopwatch and wrote ‘6 MIN’. Richter wrote: ‘TOO LONG – GO UP IN 4’. The diving officer at first shook his head, but both he and Richter ascended as soon as four minutes had elapsed, clambered into the life raft and tore off their masks.

  ‘You shouldn’t fuck around with decompression tables,’ Crane warned, adding ‘sir’ as a grudging afterthought. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Not half as dangerous as getting your head blown off by fifty pounds of plastic,’ Richter retorted.

  ‘We were down at about one hundred feet for over thirty minutes,’ Crane said. ‘We should have decompressed for nine minutes at ten feet. I cut two minutes off that time, which is dangerous enough, and you lopped another two minutes off that, meaning we surfaced four minutes too early.’

  Richter grinned at him across the life raft. ‘You could have stayed down there,’ he said.

  ‘Not fucking likely,’ Crane replied. ‘What were those packages?’

  ‘They were modified demolition charges. Normally they’re made up of four half-pound sheets of C4 plastic explosive, so each one contains just under one kilo, but the ones down there looked a lot bigger, maybe a couple of kilos or more. C4 is very efficient and you really don’t want to be around when it goes off.’

  ‘Are we safe here?’ Crane asked.

  ‘No idea,’ Richter replied. ‘It depends how much explosive’s actually been placed in that wreck. I spotted just two charges, but there could easily be others scattered in the debris or under the fuselage. Where’s that fucking chopper?’

  The Merlin had meanwhile landed on a stretch of flat ground at the south-east end of the island of Gavdopoúla, scattering a dozen goats in its descent, and Mike O’Reilly had since been watching the life raft carefully through binoculars. As soon as he saw the divers surface, he turned and instructed the pilot to take-off. Seconds later the helicopter lifted into the air and made straight for their position.

  The Merlin had covered most of the distance towards the two men when the sea around them erupted and boiled.

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Westwood closed Hawkins’s file and picked up the paper on which he’d noted down the briefest possible summaries of the lives of the two dead former CIA agents. In fact, he’d had to use three sheets of paper to get all the dates down, because of the long careers both men had enjoyed with the Company. He leaned back in his chair and began comparing the two records, year by year.

  Strangely enough, although both men had worked in the Operations Directorate, their paths didn’t seem to have crossed all that often. They’d attended two courses together, fairly early in their careers, but as far as Westwood could see they had never worked together on a single operation of any sort. But if Hicks’s theory was correct, the record had to be wrong, or at least incomplete, so Westwood studied the dates again.

  Then he noticed something he hadn’t expected. In mid 1971 both men had taken sabbaticals, each being away from the Agency for just under twelve months. The dates of their absences were not an exact match, but both started and ended within a week of each other. Westwood had been looking for operations, not vacations – and it was only when he compared the timelines side by side that he saw the coincidence. Only perhaps it wasn’t just a coincidence.

  He drummed his fingers on the desk impatiently. This wasn’t what he had been hoping to find, but it was something. Maybe they’d gone off on vacation together, hunting or the like, and something had happened during that period, something that had, over thirty years later, sent a man after them with a gun. God, that was thin, but it was the only patch of ground Westwood had so far uncovered, so he had no option but to start digging.

  He picked up the internal telephone, dialled down to the Registry Archives and asked them to send up all the leave and sabbatical request records for the calendar years 1971 and 1972.

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

  The pilot of the Merlin instinctively hauled back on the collective and the control column, pulling the helicopter up into the air and away from the huge plume of spray and water rising from the sea in front of him.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ O’Reilly demanded as the aircraft lurched violently.

  ‘An underwater explosion. It looked to me like a depth charge going off, just like in those old Second World War films.’

  ‘Fuck,’ O’Reilly muttered. ‘Can you see our two divers?’

  ‘Not yet,’ the pilot replied. ‘The water’s disturbed as hell. The life raft’s been holed on one side, and I can’t see anybody near it.’

  The pilot tilted the nose of the Merlin downwards again and accelerated towards the partially submerged orange raft. He was still about fifty yards away when O’Reilly spotted a shape in the water directly below them.

  ‘Back up,’ he ordered. ‘Body in the water – there’s someone down there. Aircrewman, ready with the winch.’

  The pilot immediately swung the helicopter into a tight left-hand turn, scanning the surface below as the Merlin turned away from the focal patch of disturbed water and the swamped life raft. ‘Got it,’ he said, dropping the aircraft closer to the sea. ‘Right two o’clock at thirty yards.’

  The side door of the helicopter had been left open throughout the flight, there being no other way of keeping the rear compartment at a reasonable temperature. O’Reilly was now hanging out of it, looking down, and as the pilot’s position report echoed in his ears, he spotted the figure again. A black-clad body, no aqualung, no weight belt, floating limply and face down on the surface of the sea.

  O’Reilly didn’t hesitate. He took off his headset, unclipped his safety harness, then removed his boots and flying overalls. He put his safety harness on again, then pulled the loop attached to the end of the winch cable over his shoulders and secured it under his armpits. ‘Lower me,’ he shouted to the aircrewman, then stepped out of the Merlin’s door to dangle at the end of the cable.

  The pilot didn’t even bother engaging the flight computer. He just drove the helicopter down towards the surface, coming to a hover about fifteen feet above the waves as O’Reilly began to drop downwards, the winch cable paying out above his head. The Senior Observer entered the water about six feet away from the floating body, and with two swift strokes he was beside it. The harness had two loops, one for the aircrewman himself, and a second for the person to be rescued. O’Reilly grabbed one arm of the body, swiftly looped the harness over its head and under the other arm, then gave an urgent gesture to be raised.

  Almost immediately, he felt the cable tighten as the winch took the strain. With a jerk he was lifted clear of the water, the body rising with him. But O’Reilly guessed they were wasting their time. He had felt a total lack of movement in the body as he’d positioned the harness around it, so he was virtually certain that the man was dead.

  The only thing he didn’t know for sure was whether he had his arms round David Crane or Paul Richter.

  Chóra Sfakia, Crete

  Stein wasn’t making too bad a job of nosing the boat into the harbour, though he didn’t have anything like the same level of skill as Elias. Krywald had almost recovered from his nausea by the time they entered the harbour, though he still looked unwell as he stood in the bow, mooring rope in hand. Suddenly they heard a dull rumble somewhere out to sea behind them.

  Stein said nothing, concentrating on giving the boat just the right amount of reverse thrust to stop its forward motion. He switched off the engine as soon as Krywald had stepped safely onto the jetty and looped the mooring rope over a bollard, then took up the stern mooring rope to finish securing the boat. Only then did Stein check his watch. ‘Two hours fifty-five minutes, as near as makes no difference,’ he m
urmured. ‘I told you those were good detonators.’

  ‘Yup.’ Krywald stepped back into the boat and picked up the black case containing the steel one they’d retrieved what seemed like weeks ago from Nico Aristides’s apartment in Kandíra. ‘OK, that’s pretty much the end of it as far as we’re concerned. Let’s find the car and then get the hell off this island.’

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  Tyler Hardin had attached a note with Inspector Lavat’s mobile phone number to the samples he had sent to the Irakleío forensic laboratory so that he could be contacted as soon as any results were obtained. He was in conference with his team in one of the tents when Lavat entered, telephone in his hand. ‘For you, Mr Hardin,’ the inspector announced.

  The American took the phone and pressed it to his ear. ‘Hardin,’ he said shortly, and then he just listened for three minutes. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and added, ‘I’d like that in writing, please. Thank you again.’

  Snapping the telephone closed he handed it back to Inspector Lavat. ‘Well, this case gets stranger by the minute. That was Irakleío. They’re still analysing the specimens but they seem to have found something in the samples taken from Spiros Aristides’s house.’

  ‘A filovirus?’ Susan Kane inquired.

  Hardin shook his head firmly. ‘Definitely not,’ he said. ‘They found what looked like spores of a completely unknown type, which is interesting enough, but when they added some moisture to the sample, the spores burst open and released virus particles. Lots and lots of virus particles.’

  ‘Could they identify it?’ Kane asked.

  ‘That’s the interesting bit,’ Hardin said. ‘It appears to be of an unknown type, at least on examination using the electron microscope, but what it seems to resemble more than anything is Bovine Leukaemia Virus.’