Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  Merlin ‘Whisky Tango’

  The crew of the Merlin had been pre-briefed earlier in the day for the sortie. They hadn’t known exactly when they were due to fly to Kandíra but, as the duty HDS crew, they had expected to make that journey at least once. The aircraft had been kept fully fuelled and waiting on two spot, so the crew were being strapped in and ready for engine start less than ten minutes after the message had been received from Fob Watch.

  The short delay had been caused by Richter himself. As soon as he’d read the message from Tyler Hardin, he’d guessed that the ‘sick journalist’ mentioned was almost certainly one of the men who had entered the two properties in Kandíra. As far as could be deduced, the sole source of the infection that killed the two Greeks had been carried in a container that had been removed from Nico Aristides’s property by the two intruders. The only way anyone else could become infected was by immediate access to that container. Therefore this supposed ‘journalist’ had to be one of the intruders.

  Richter had quickly done three things before walking across the Flight Deck and climbing into the back of the Merlin. First, he’d drawn the Enigma phone from the CommCen – the T301 uses high-level encryption to provide secure communications with other users of the equipment on normal GSM networks, and Richter knew his section had several handsets available.

  Next he’d signalled Simpson, giving him the mobile number and requesting encrypted facilities be enabled at Hammersmith. He also asked for the assistance of a Secret Intelligence Service asset on Crete, and specified a recognition procedure. He’d classified the signal ‘Secret’ and gave it the precedence ‘Military Flash’, thus guaranteeing that Simpson would receive it within the hour.

  SIS maintains a fairly large team at Irakleío, mainly employed in monitoring radio transmissions from the Middle East and nations of the former USSR. Richter knew there had been at least two men posing as CDC officers in Kandíra, but there could easily be a whole opposition team involved, so he wanted back-up.

  The last thing he’d done, therefore, was to draw the pistol and thirty rounds of ammunition from the Invincible’s armoury.

  Réthymno, Crete

  Richard Stein was a desperately worried man. He’d seen the state of the bodies of Spiros and Nico Aristides, and he’d just spent a couple of hours sitting in a closed car next to Roger Krywald while his partner coughed up blood as his condition steadily worsened. The unknown biological agent that had killed the two Greeks was probably now going to kill Krywald, and Stein knew for certain that it was sitting – silent, lethal and invisible – in that case in the back of the hire car.

  But its location wasn’t his problem. His anxiety was that maybe it was all around him right now, in the air, in Krywald’s blood smears on his jacket lapels – maybe even on the adjacent seat his partner had been sitting in. To say that he was terrified it might attack him too was considerably understating the case.

  As soon as he’d propelled Krywald through the doors of the Chaniá hospital, Stein had pulled off his blood-stained jacket and tossed it into the back of the Ford. He climbed back into the car and gunned the engine, ignoring the speed limits as he headed east for Réthymno and the illusory sanctuary of the hotel. He stopped twice on the way back: once to buy petrol and the second time to purchase a pack of large black trash bags.

  The moment he arrived at the hotel, Stein locked the car carefully, leaving the case that Krywald had been guarding so assiduously inside it. He grabbed the room key from the desk clerk, virtually ran up the stairs to his room and locked the door behind him. He tore off all his clothes and dumped them unceremoniously into one of the trash bags. He tied the neck of it with a double knot, then stuck the bag inside another one and secured that as well. After that he walked straight into the bathroom and under the shower.

  Having read somewhere that bacteria and viruses thrive in warm conditions, he set the temperature control firmly on ‘cold’, turned the tap on full and stood, shivering and teeth chattering, under the flow for five minutes, soaping his hair and whole body repeatedly. Then he brought the temperature up to warm and washed himself again, before climbing out and putting on fresh clothes.

  Twenty minutes after he’d rushed up the stairs, Stein was again on his way out of the hotel, surgical gloves on both hands and holding the black bag containing his clothes at arm’s length. He walked a few yards down the street, found an open trash bin and lobbed the bag inside. Then he pulled off the gloves and threw them in as well.

  Only then did he relax and start thinking clearly again. He stood on the pavement for a few seconds, then headed a hundred yards further down the street, sat down at a café table and ordered a coffee while he worked out what he was going to do next.

  Stein barely noticed the short dark man sitting at a café table on the opposite side of the street, his head bent over a magazine, but the man had already positively identified him.

  And Murphy was puzzled. His orders had listed three CIA agents, and now he was sitting looking at just one of them, so where the hell were the other two? And had they already completed phase two? He’d have to contact Nicholson as soon as possible and try to find out what the fuck was going on.

  Merlin ‘Whisky Tango’, over Crete

  Tyler Hardin stood with Dr Gravas at the edge of the landing site as the Merlin settled onto the dusty open ground. He had brought a bulky bag with him, which Gravas helped him lift into the rear compartment of the aircraft. Once Hardin and the Cretan doctor had strapped themselves in and pulled on their headsets, the helicopter lifted off and headed north towards Chaniá.

  ‘What’s in the bag?’ Richter asked.

  ‘My biological space suit and air filtration unit,’ Hardin replied. ‘I’m not going anywhere near this Curtis character without all the protection I can get.’

  ‘How do you think he became infected?’

  Hardin looked at him quizzically. ‘I think you know the answer to that as well as I do, Mr Richter,’ he said. ‘Whatever this mysterious agent is, it at least doesn’t seem to be particularly infectious. Nobody else who entered either property in Kandíra has suffered any ill-effects, so my obvious conclusion is that Curtis was one of the two intruders, and that he recently opened the container.

  ‘Our latest information from the lab in Irakleío says that in the scrapings from Aristides’s dining table they found some microscopic spore-like objects, and when these are subjected to moisture, they rupture to release what look like virus particles.’

  ‘What kind of a virus?’ Richter asked.

  ‘That’s the puzzle. We were expecting a filovirus or perhaps an arenavirus, purely because of the effects of the agent on the two bodies. But according to the senior supervisor at the lab, this agent looks more like BLV than anything else.’

  Richter looked blank, so Hardin took pity on him. ‘Bovine Leukaemia Virus.’ He enunciated the words slowly. ‘It’s a fairly common infective agent that attacks cattle, often causing cancer. Anyone genuinely working for the Medical Research Council, even as a consultant, would at least have heard of it. So I think we can drop the MRC fiction, don’t you, Mr Richter? You’re obviously some kind of investigator, which is why I suggested you come with me to Chaniá to look at this American, but you’re certainly not employed by the MRC.’

  ‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘I admit it. It just seemed a convenient persona to adopt in the circumstances. So tell me about this virus – if it’s not very infectious, why has this American suddenly been attacked by it?’

  ‘I think the answer lies in the spores,’ Hardin explained. ‘As far as we can tell at this early stage, the spores themselves are reasonably inert, but the moment they become moist they rupture. I’m only guessing, but I think this guy Curtis probably opened the container and breathed some in, or maybe even got the spores on his fingers before touching his face. The moisture present in the mouth or on the mucous lining of the nose would be enough to make them open up and for the infection to start.’

 
Richter nodded. ‘But you still don’t know what this virus is?’

  ‘No. As I said, it apparently looks like BLV but that obviously has to be a coincidence. BLV is specific to cattle and it’s also a slow-acting virus. What we have here is something that works like Ebola or Lassa Fever, but infinitely quicker. Spiros Aristides died by drowning: his lungs filled with blood.

  ‘This virus seems to attack the endothelial cells in the blood vessels and the platelets. The result is leaking blood vessels, and blood that won’t clot. It starts with those vessels with the thinnest walls – typically the eyes and mouth – then gradually other organs are attacked. The gross effect is that the victim will begin to bleed, and the blood will just keep on pouring out through the walls till eventually he will die from fluid filling the lungs, as Aristides did, or maybe simply from massive blood loss.’

  ‘What can you do about it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Hardin said shortly. ‘As far as I can see, there is no possible treatment at this stage. Oh, we could inject an agent that would make the blood clot once it leaves the body, but if the internal blood vessel walls are still leaking, that wouldn’t help us much. Remember that Ebola has been known since the late nineteen seventies. It works very much like this new virus, but nobody has yet come up with any kind of a treatment. If somebody catches Ebola, all the medics can do is stick him into a secure biological isolation facility and wait for him to either die or recover. Most victims die,’ he added, with a faint sad smile.

  In the long silence that followed, the note of the helicopter’s engines changed slightly and Richter glanced out of the side door. They were in descent towards a patch of open ground at the edge of Chaniá, and he spotted a white vehicle waiting in the road close by. Gravas pointed towards it. ‘I asked the hospital to send transport to pick us up,’ he said.

  Two minutes later the aircraft was on the ground, the Merlin’s rotors a solid blur above their heads as they climbed out of the rear compartment and strode across to the minibus.

  Réthymno, Crete

  Stein had made up his mind. He’d been employed by the Company for a long time, and he knew the importance that the Agency attached to the success of its every mission. He couldn’t just give up and walk away from the assignment: if he did, he’d be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. He had to deliver the case they had retrieved to McCready, but he was also determined not to take any unnecessary personal risks in doing so.

  The first thing he had to do was hire another car. The Focus might be fine, might be uncontaminated, but he wasn’t prepared to chance that. He’d hire a car, transfer the suitcase containing the steel case to it, and leave the Ford right where it was currently parked. That was step one. Then he’d go back to the hotel and use Krywald’s laptop to email McCready to arrange his pick-up from Crete. He could still be on his way off this island within twenty-four hours, easy.

  He dropped some coins onto the table, stood up and headed back up the street towards the hotel.

  Chaniá, Crete

  Richter wasn’t interested in actually seeing Curtis, or whatever the man’s real name was, for himself – he was quite happy to leave that to the expert, Hardin – but he was interested in knowing how he’d arrived at the hospital and what address, if any, had been given to the reception staff. Like every other foreign language apart from Russian, Greek was – quite literally in this case – all Greek to Richter, but with Gravas standing beside him to translate, he had no trouble in finding out what he wanted to know.

  ‘This patient Curtis,’ he asked, ‘did he arrive here by himself?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ the receptionist volunteered eagerly. ‘He was very, very weak, coughing and choking and with blood all over his face. He could hardly stand, so his friend had to almost carry him in here. We put him on a trolley and took him straight into one of the examination rooms – down the corridor there.’

  Richter glanced in the direction she was pointing. ‘This friend of his,’ he asked, ‘did he give you his name?’

  The receptionist flicked back through a loose-leaf binder and ran a well-manicured finger down the handwritten entries. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Here we are. He gave us Mr Curtis’s details, and the address of the hotel they’re staying at here in Chaniá. His name was Watson – Richard Watson.’ She wrote both the names and the address of the hotel on a slip of paper and passed it over the desk.

  ‘Can you remember what this Mr Watson looked like?’

  The receptionist thought for a few seconds, then shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We were all so concerned about Mr Curtis that I don’t think any of us paid too much attention to the other man.’

  ‘That was easy, Mr Richter,’ Gravas said as he turned away towards the corridor where Hardin was waiting.

  ‘Far too easy,’ Richter grunted. ‘I’ll bet this Watson character just gave her the name of a hotel he drove past on his way to the hospital, and Curtis and Watson are certainly going to be aliases. Wherever these two jokers have been staying I’m reasonably certain it isn’t Chaniá. But at least it gives me somewhere to start.’

  Réthymno, Crete

  The new car, which Stein had hired by using some of his own documents rather than those issued by the CIA, was a light blue Seat Cordoba. He’d wanted a saloon car – he’d actually asked for a ‘sedan’, which had just confused the booking clerk – because he had no intention of sharing the new vehicle with the steel case containing the flasks and their lethal contents. Though it might not make any practical difference, he wanted that case securely locked in the trunk, not sitting right behind him in the luggage compartment of a hatchback.

  Stein drove the Seat into the half-empty car park at the back of his hotel and slotted it conveniently into the space next to the Ford Focus. He first glanced round the car park to ensure that he wasn’t being observed, then pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and swiftly opened the boots of both vehicles.

  Unfortunately, Stein hadn’t looked around thoroughly enough. Mike Murphy wasn’t actually in the car park itself, but was sitting in his own hire car about eighty metres up the street. He’d been waiting there for over an hour, using a set of compact but powerful binoculars to watch the Ford that Nicholson said had been originally hired by Krywald and Stein. He hadn’t expected Stein to turn up in another vehicle, and Murphy wasn’t quite sure now which car the American would be using, so he carefully noted the number and colour of the Seat as he continued observing Stein’s activities.

  His problem was that he was facing the fronts of the two cars. He could see that Stein had opened the boots of both vehicles, and was moving between the two, presumably transferring something from one to the other. But from his vantage point he couldn’t identify what the American was shifting.

  The black case was right where Krywald had left it earlier. Stein gingerly stretched out an arm to seize the handle, then lifted the case and placed it carefully inside a black rubbish bag, which he quickly sealed. Then he took another bag and repeated the procedure. With the outer one secured as well as he could make it, he carried it over to the blue Seat, dropped it into the boot and slammed the lid shut. He next pulled Krywald’s briefcase and his own overnight bag out of the boot of the Ford, leaving his blood-stained jacket inside it, then secured the boot lid and finally pulled off and discarded his gloves. He wasn’t intending to touch the case again, or even open the boot of the Seat, until he was ready to climb into whatever aircraft McCready would arrange to fly him off Crete.

  In his hotel room, Stein put Krywald’s briefcase on the desk and opened it. Then he stopped dead and backed away. The CAIP file that Krywald had been so insistent Stein should read was sitting right on top of the laptop computer. Obviously after he’d removed it from the steel case, he’d decided to keep it readily available so he could refer to it again. And sitting beside the laptop was a small stainless-steel flask, heavily sealed and with a faded label on its side.

  For perhaps half a minute Stein just stared at the
briefcase, remembering what Krywald had said earlier. There had been some sort of dust or dirt on the file cover, which his partner had brushed away with his hand, and that was why he was now lying in intensive care in the hospital at Chaniá, and there might still be some of the stuff lurking on or in the file, or elsewhere inside the briefcase. But Stein had to get the file out of there in order to make use of the laptop – because that was the only way he could contact McCready in the States.

  He backed away further and sat down on the bed, his eyes still fixed on the open briefcase. Then he realized something that he had forgotten. When he and Krywald had entered those two houses in Kandíra, at least the first one of them had to have been full of virus particles, yet neither he nor Krywald had suffered any ill effects at that stage. And, Stein rationalized – unwittingly reaching almost the same conclusion as Tyler Hardin – the reason that they were not infected was that they had been wearing gloves and masks. Obviously the contaminants, whatever the hell they were, couldn’t pass through the fabric or rubber.

  Actually, Stein wasn’t correct in the full detail of his deduction, because when active the virus particles could easily penetrate the comparatively coarse fabric of a mask, but that didn’t matter now. The fact was that wearing a mask and gloves prevented any of the virus spores from coming into contact with the mucous membranes of the nose or mouth. The only risk was therefore to the eyes.

  Stein got up off the bed and rummaged round in his case, finally pulling out a mask and surgical gloves, which he swiftly put on. Still cautious, he closed the lid of the briefcase slowly and carefully, so as not to disturb anything, and carried it through into Krywald’s adjoining room. There, he placed it on the bed and opened it to face away from him. He then reached over the lid and used both hands to carefully remove the file and place it beside the briefcase. He did the same for the laptop and its power adaptor, the cable to connect it to the mobile phone, the phone itself, and finally the flask. Then he closed the briefcase and put it on top of the free-standing wardrobe in one corner of the room. He wouldn’t touch it again and, as far as Stein was concerned, if some Cretan chambermaid spotted it and took it home with her, that was her lookout. He had his own almost identical case in the room next door, and everything could now go in that.