Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  There was a brief silence as the CDC personnel absorbed this information.

  ‘That,’ Jerry Fisher said slowly, ‘makes no sense whatsoever. BLV only attacks cattle, and it’s really slow-acting. As far as I know there’s never been a case of the virus having any effect whatsoever on a human being, and even if it did, it would probably cause a cancer gestating over a period of years. What it definitely couldn’t do is kill two healthy men within twelve hours.’

  ‘They didn’t say that it was BLV,’ Hardin pointed out. ‘They just said it looked more like BLV than anything else they’ve got recorded in their database. I’ve said it before: I think we’re dealing here with a brand-new virus, something that works like a filovirus or an arena-virus – a cross between Ebola and Lassa Fever, say – but a hell of a lot faster. Dr Gravas’s tag of “Galloping Lassa” is actually pretty close to the mark.’

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  John Westwood hadn’t found anything yet, but what he had not found was concerning him.

  His search through the Company vacation and sabbatical requests for 1971 and 1972 hadn’t helped, simply because neither Hawkins nor Richards had, according to the records, either submitted a request for a sabbatical or taken one. That directly contradicted what their personnel records had stated, and suggested to Westwood that he was on the right track.

  Both men, it now seemed clear, had been involved in some kind of covert operation starting in mid 1971. An operation so covert that all details of it had been expunged from their personnel files and the bland ‘sabbatical’ reference substituted in its place.

  Westwood picked up the telephone, intending to contact the Registry Archive to request copies of all operation files active between July 1971 and July 1972, but then he hesitated and replaced the receiver.

  He’d wanted to avoid using the CIA computer system where possible, but this time he couldn’t see any other way to get the information he needed. He turned now to his computer keyboard and initiated a search of Walnut specifying the same parameters he’d intended to request from the Archive. There were, viewing the search results, hundreds of entries, far more than he could possibly search through if he wanted to get any other work done. There was an obvious way to reduce the total to a manageable number, so he specified a search within the results he’d generated, and added the names ‘Hawkins’ and ‘Richards’ to its parameters.

  That search produced only two results: both men had been assigned to operations in mid July 1972, immediately after they’d returned from their supposed ‘sabbaticals’. Westwood swiftly checked the details of each operation, but neither was highly classified nor in any way contentious, and he was more sure than ever that it was during late 1971 and early 1972 that he should be looking.

  And then Westwood realized what he was overlooking, and what he was doing wrong. The CIA computer database is a secure source of information, and data entered into it has to conform to certain basic rules. One of these is that even if a file is sealed, the file date, file name and the names of the responsible CIA officers are hard-coded into the database, and cannot be deleted – a basic security measure – even if everything else has been sanitized. Westwood had so far been looking for active operations, and hence active files. With a sense of growing excitement, he entered the names ‘Hawkins’ and ‘Richards’ again, but this time specified sealed and inactive files only.

  Then he sat back and watched as the computer monitor displayed a single file name, with a date in July 1971, and the names of six senior CIA agents. Two of those names were Charles Hawkins and James Richards.

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

  The aircrewman expertly spun O’Reilly round, grabbed the back of his harness and pulled him into the rear compartment, paying out cable from the winch as he did so. As soon as O’Reilly’s feet touched the floor he clipped his safety harness to a nearby strap, then stepped out of his loop harness and bent over the black-clad body lying face-down in the helicopter’s rear compartment.

  Together, O’Reilly and the aircrewman turned the body over. For a second the pair just stared down at the bloody and unrecognizable mess that had once been a human face, then O’Reilly seized the top of the diver’s wetsuit hood and pulled it off. His probing fingers felt for a pulse in the neck but found nothing.

  The aircrewman was saying something, but O’Reilly couldn’t hear him over the noise of the rotors and engines. He pulled on a headset, and immediately the din dropped to a more bearable level. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Who is it?’ the aircrewman asked him again, and O’Reilly gazed down at the still figure lying on the floor.

  ‘I don’t know,’ and O’Reilly realized that he really didn’t. It wasn’t Crane – the ship’s own diving officer was markedly taller than this man – and Richter’s hair was very fair. The body in front of him was average height and had light brown hair. And as O’Reilly looked more carefully he realized something else. This man had been shot, shot in the head. ‘I don’t know,’ O’Reilly repeated, ‘but I’m sure it isn’t either Crane or Richter. So who the hell is it? And where the hell are they?’

  As he spoke these words, the pilot’s voice echoed in his headset. ‘I can see two others in the water, left eight o’clock at fifty yards.’ O’Reilly immediately felt the Merlin lift and turn to port and moments later the helicopter was again in a hover and he found himself looking straight down at Richter and Crane in the sea below him. Four minutes later, the two men were also standing drying off in the rear compartment of the helicopter, looking at the body of the unidentified diver sprawled on the floor.

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  John Westwood stared at his computer screen with a certain amount of satisfaction, not to say déjà vu. It was all, he realized, slowly coming together. The amount of stuff his search had extracted from the database was very limited, but at last he had something he could show to Walter Hicks.

  On the screen in front of him was revealed a very brief entry. The filename was ‘CAIP’, which he immediately recognized from his earlier, unofficial searches for details of the Learjet crash. The file’s initiation date was 3 July 1971, and the names of the six senior Company agents responsible for conducting this operation were Henry Butcher, George Cassells, Charles Hawkins, William Penn, James Richards and Roger Stanford. No details of the operation itself were listed, or even the geographical area in which it had been conducted, although Westwood could take an intelligent guess at that, because of the one other piece of information provided by the system. As soon as Westwood had seen the filename he had predicted what the final part of this entry would be. The last line on the screen displayed the note: ‘Cross-reference: N17677. Access prohibited. File sealed July 02, 1972’, and the security classification ‘Ultra’.

  It was clear to him that in mid 1971 the CIA had become involved in some kind of highly covert operation, probably in the eastern Mediterranean. Whether this operation had succeeded or failed Westwood had no idea, but what he did know was intriguing enough. Almost exactly one year to the day after CAIP had been initiated, and one month after the State Department-owned Learjet registration N17677 had plunged to the bottom of the Mediterranean, well away from the area that was subsequently searched for the wreckage, the operation file had been sealed and all possible details expunged from the database.

  For a few minutes Westwood just stared at the data in front of him. He knew that a sealed file could always be unsealed – it was not an irreversible process. All that was required was the agreement and approval of the officer who had sealed it, or that of a higher-ranking officer in the same department or one of the Company’s senior officers – a supergrade – to over-ride the sealing order. Granted, that could take some time to achieve, especially with an old or large and complex file that might have to be read first by a number of senior officers to determine its suitability for unseal
ing, but it was certainly possible.

  Westwood didn’t know the exact procedure he would have to follow to get this file opened, but it wouldn’t take him long to find out. There were a couple of things he could do before he went that route, however, and he could initiate them immediately.

  First, he called up the sealing instruction and checked the authorization. Inevitably this would consist of a bunch of initials – the CIA, like most large organizations, is more or less governed by acronyms – but when the brief entry suddenly appeared on the screen, Westwood didn’t, for a moment, recognize it because it was something he’d never seen before within the CIA. When he did recognize the acronym, he whistled softly and sat back in his seat. In that instant he knew the file was going to stay sealed, no matter what he or anyone else tried to do about it.

  The other thing he could try was quite simple. He called up the directory listing for the CAIP file and requested details. This displayed additional information that included the date each file was created, and last modified, and crucially its size. He scanned down this list until he reached ‘CAIP’, read the figure beside the name and noted it down. He changed directories and repeated the process with the ‘N17677’ file. He then made a short telephone call to the IT section, just to confirm what he already knew.

  Westwood still didn’t know the significance of any of this, but at least he had a little more to go on. It looked as if, the moment the wreckage of the Learjet had been found, somebody had begun taking steps to ensure the permanent silence of all the former senior CIA agents involved in CAIP. There were six names on his list and he knew already that two of them were dead: he obviously had to take immediate action to check on the others.

  Westwood dialled the Registry and asked for the personnel files on Henry Butcher, George Cassells, William Penn and Roger Stanford. He also, more or less as an after-thought, requested any files relating to CAIP and to the Learjet registration N17677, though he very much doubted if the Registry Archive staff would find anything there.

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

  ‘I presume that was what kept you?’ Richter asked, gesturing towards the body lying on the floor of the Merlin.

  O’Reilly nodded. ‘I spotted the body in the water as we approached the site of the explosion, and ordered the aircraft to reverse course so we could carry out a rescue. Turned out we were a little too late for this guy though. And while we were sorting him out, we had the chopper facing away from where you two were bobbing around, so we didn’t see you.’

  Richter nodded and stepped over to the corpse. He looked down for a few moments at the shattered face, then lifted and turned the head slightly before lowering it. He bent down to pick up the wetsuit hood from the floor where O’Reilly had dropped it, and examined it carefully. ‘You were definitely too late,’ he said. ‘This man’s been shot in the back of the head with a large calibre pistol or maybe a rifle. It looks to me like there might be some powder burns on the wetsuit hood, which would suggest a pistol, but it’s hard to tell on the neoprene.’

  ‘Has he been dead long?’ O’Reilly’s experience of dead bodies was extremely limited: the corpse on the floor was the first he had ever seen in the flesh, so to speak.

  Richter shook his head. ‘Not long,’ he decided. ‘The body’s limp and still warm, which means rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet. Something’s been feeding on what’s left of his face but if he’d been in the water for long he’d be in a much worse mess. My guess is he was alive just a few hours ago, certainly this morning.’

  O’Reilly shuddered slightly. ‘Any idea who he was?’

  ‘I’ve never seen him before,’ Richter replied, ‘but I can make a guess. I think he was the diver who placed the explosives that have just blown the remains of the Learjet into a million pieces. Presumably there was a falling-out among the team members, or maybe they just figured he was expendable. Either way, I suppose you could say the body’s evidence, so we’d better get it ashore and let the Cretan police sort things out.’

  O’Reilly nodded somewhat abstractedly, then turned and gave instructions to the pilot. Seconds later the Merlin began to climb out of the hover and moved forward, heading towards the southern coast of Crete.

  ‘Where should we take him?’ O’Reilly asked. ‘Irakleío?’

  Richter shook his head. ‘No, go to Kandíra. I’ve already spoken to a police inspector there called Lavat about this wreck, and I think he’s more or less in charge of the investigation from the Cretan end. Whoever that diver was,’ Richter jerked a thumb towards the rear of the aircraft, ‘it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that he was probably one of the bad guys responsible for killing the policeman at Kandíra, so I guess Lavat would be only too pleased to get him, dead or alive.’

  ‘OK,’ O’Reilly said, and instructed the Merlin pilot to make for Kandíra. As the helicopter changed course slightly for the western end of the island, Richter and Crane finally began pulling off their wetsuits.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Crane pointed at the string bag containing the encrusted debris Richter had found in the wrecked aircraft.

  ‘I’ll show you.’ Richter pulled it out and laid it on the floor of the cabin. He took his diving knife and rapped at it sharply with the back of the blade. The encrustation fell away, coming off in chunks like the shell of a walnut, to reveal a stainless-steel Colt revolver.

  ‘I found this inside the Learjet,’ Richter said. ‘Remember, guns, like cars and aircraft, carry serial numbers, and through that number you can trace at least the first registered owner. I’m guessing, but I think that the Learjet and the Colt will both turn out to have been owned by the American Central Intelligence Agency, which will kind of add a new dimension to the cause of this little epidemic we have here on Crete.’

  Chapter 19

  Friday

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  As Westwood had expected, the Registry Archives came up with two ‘no trace’ responses to his request for files relating to CAIP and the crashed Learjet, but they had no trouble finding the personnel records for Henry Butcher, George Cassells, William Penn and Roger Stanford respectively.

  It took Westwood under three minutes to learn that Cassells, Penn and Stanford were all dead: Penn in an automobile accident and the other two of fully documented natural causes. Henry Butcher, though, was still alive, but only just. According to a note in his file, he lay in a coma in a hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Helpfully, the same note also listed the hospital telephone number and the name of the doctor – George Grant – who was treating him.

  Westwood got through to Grant almost immediately, which was something of a surprise. He decided to use his real name rather than some pseudonym that he might subsequently forget at a crucial moment. ‘My name’s John Westwood,’ he began. ‘I believe you’re treating a former colleague of mine called Henry Butcher?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Grant replied.

  ‘May I ask how he is?’

  ‘You’ll appreciate, Mr Westwood, that I can’t disclose confidential medical information over the telephone. All I can tell you is that Mr Butcher is very ill.’

  ‘I understand that,’ Westwood replied. ‘Would it be possible for me to visit with Henry at the hospital?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Grant said, ‘though I can’t say whether or not he’ll be conscious, or even recognize you if he is.’

  ‘Even so,’ Westwood said, ‘I’d like to make the effort.’ In fact, he really did have to make the effort – Henry Butcher, no matter what his mental state, was the only living link to CAIP that Westwood had been able to uncover so far, and he definitely needed to see him, if only to confirm that he couldn’t provide any further information about that operation from the seventies.

  ‘Very well. At your convenience, Mr Westwood. We have no set visiting hours for patients who are seriously ill.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be up there t
his afternoon,’ Westwood said, and rang off.

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  As soon as the Merlin touched down, Richter jumped out and headed across to the tents erected beside the road. Though Inspector Lavat wasn’t there, he appeared within minutes, attracted no doubt by the sound of the helicopter.

  ‘Mr Richter,’ he said as soon as he saw the Englishman, ‘we meet again.’ He didn’t sound or look surprised.

  ‘Hullo, Inspector. I’ve got a present for you.’ Richter led the way back towards the helicopter. ‘We’re in a hurry, so I’ll keep this short. We found the aircraft that Aristides had been diving on, and—’

  ‘How do you know it was the right aircraft?’ Lavat interrupted.

  ‘Because of what we found there and what happened after we found it. It was a Learjet, and there were three bodies inside it. There was pretty much nothing else visible after about a quarter of a century at the bottom of the Mediterranean, but fortunately my diving partner spotted some explosive charges inside.’

  ‘Old ones?’

  Richter stopped as he reached the Merlin. ‘No, brand new. They blew a minute or so after we reached the surface, so there’ll be nothing at all left of the wreck now.’ The door of the helicopter was open, and Richter pointed inside. ‘We picked up this guy floating in the water right above the aircraft wreckage. He wasn’t killed by the explosion. He was shot through the back of the head. I’m guessing he was the diver who planted the charges.’

  Lavat peered curiously into the helicopter. ‘I presume he was what the Americans would call an expendable asset – just like my police officer,’ he said bitterly.

  Richter nodded. ‘He might have been a local man hired for the job, or maybe some low-level operative flown in especially to perform the demolition. Either way, if you can identify him you might get a lead to the other people involved. Unfortunately,’ Richter added, ‘you certainly won’t be able to use a photofit picture – the bullet that killed him came out pretty much through his nose, and it took most of his face with it.’