Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  Stein used the central locking to open the boot, put both his bags inside and slammed the lid shut. As he straightened up, he felt more than saw a swift movement to his right. He span round, grabbing for his pistol, but he was far too slow. His world exploded in a sudden blaze of stars and lights and he slumped to the ground, car keys and pistol both spinning from his hands.

  Murphy had been concentrating on the rear exits of the hotels. He’d seen the old Cretan wander off the street into the car park but, just like Stein, he’d disregarded him, not least because the old man had been hanging around there for most of the morning. He hadn’t even seen Stein because his target had approached not from one of the hotels but from the opposite direction, and had thus been hidden behind parked vehicles.

  He was suddenly aware of an engine starting, then saw the rear of the Seat Cordoba swing out towards him, its reversing lights on, and immediately the car moved swiftly away and bounced out of the car park, accelerating rapidly down the road.

  Murphy cursed – how the hell had Stein slipped past him? He span the starter, slipped the Peugeot into first gear, and pulled away from the kerb. He reached the main road in seconds and swung his car right to follow the Seat. As he straightened up and accelerated, he gave a puzzled frown. He was almost certain he had seen two people in the Seat. But Elias and Krywald were both dead, so who the hell was in the car with Stein?

  South of Zounáki, western Crete

  ‘I need you to check some names,’ Richter spoke into the Enigma mobile. He’d got through to Hammersmith three minutes earlier and briefed the Duty Officer – Simpson not being in the building – on developments overnight. Now he had the fat red file open on his lap, and he was about to read out the names of senior personnel he’d found listed inside the front cover.

  ‘I imagine these are all CIA agents,’ Richter said, ‘so I suggest you make an initial check with Langley. OK, their names are James Wilson, Jerry Jonas, Henry Butcher, George Cassells, Charles Hawkins, William Penn, James Richards and Roger Stanford.’

  ‘This is important, is it, Richter? I mean, you do know you’re right at the top of Simpson’s current shit list, and if he thinks you’re just fannying about down there on Crete he’ll crucify you when you get back here.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Richter said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve already had the bollocking. Just run that check, will you?’

  ‘And what’s your source for these names? Are they important?’ Richter gave him a brief summary of what he had discovered so far. ‘Right, you’ve convinced me. All you have to do now is convince Simpson. I’ll get those names across to Langley this afternoon.’

  ‘One more thing. Do me a favour and run a check on the name “CAIP”, and see if it’s in anybody’s database. I’ll give you a call later today.’

  ‘You’ve got it.’ The Duty Officer broke the connection.

  Richter switched off the mobile phone – he didn’t want it ringing while he questioned ‘George Jones’ – placed it on the dashboard and glanced around outside the car, which he’d parked a little way off the road leading south from Zounáki to Nterés. There were no houses, vehicles or people anywhere within his view. He turned slightly to look behind him.

  Stein, sitting on the rear seat, was at last showing signs of coming round, having been unconscious for the better part of an hour. Richter had tied his wrists together using plastic cable ties, then secured them to the grab handle above the right-hand passenger door. Stein’s arms were pulled uncomfortably upwards as his torso slumped forwards, but Richter wasn’t bothered about his comfort. As far as he was concerned Stein was already dead: it was just a matter of when he’d actually stop breathing. But he had wanted to ensure that the American agent was completely immobilized.

  Stein lifted his head, his eyes blinking slowly as he looked around him. The first thing he saw was Richter staring back at him, and the second thing he noticed was the muzzle of a 9mm Browning Hi-Power pointing at his head.

  ‘Try to move,’ Richter growled, ‘and you’ll never move again.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’ Stein’s voice was low and racked with pain. ‘You were that goddamn old man I saw working the street.’

  Within ten minutes of the call from Fitzpatrick, Richter had been sitting in his Renault Clio hire car holding eighty miles an hour, en route from Réthymno to Máleme. As he’d reached the outskirts of the town he’d seen an old man shuffling along in the gutter and hauled the car to a stop. Using a selection of hand gestures and the handful of Greek words that he’d picked up since he’d arrived on Crete, he’d managed to do a convenient deal. The old man’s hat and coat in exchange for enough money for him to have an overcoat custom-made for him in London, unlikely though that possibility might be.

  Having no idea when his target would leave the hotel, Richter had spent hours wandering about in the vicinity of the car park where he had seen the blue Seat. He had been seriously wondering if the American calling himself Watson or Jones was going to stay in his hotel all day, when he had at last spotted the man himself approaching the vehicle.

  ‘Did McCready send you?’ Stein suddenly asked from the back seat.

  ‘Who’s McCready?’

  Stein leaned back in the seat, easing the pressure on his aching arms. For a moment he said nothing.

  ‘I just asked you a question,’ Richter said. ‘Who’s McCready?’

  Instead of answering, Stein studied him curiously. ‘You’re a Brit,’ he decided.

  ‘Full marks for deduction,’ Richter said, ‘but you still haven’t answered me and I’m not a patient man. Tell me, who’s McCready?’

  Stein shook his head. ‘McCready doesn’t matter,’ he muttered. ‘He was just our briefing officer back home, and I was kinda expecting him to have sent a welcoming committee here, after all the fuck-ups.’

  ‘Fuck-ups like killing the unarmed man in Réthymno? That kind of thing?’

  ‘Listen,’ Stein said, ‘I’m real sorry about that. He looked to me like he was going for a weapon.’ Richter just stared at him, saying nothing. ‘I’m sorry,’ Stein repeated. ‘I thought he was carrying. And who are you, anyway? Who are you working for?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  But Stein shook his head. ‘It might be,’ he said. ‘Are you a cop, or what?’ Still Richter didn’t reply. ‘OK, then I’ve got nothing to tell you,’ Stein added, finality in his voice.

  What the hell? Richter thought. Whether or not this American knew who employed him probably didn’t matter.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I work for British Intelligence. I presume you’re with the Company?’

  Stein nodded, an expression of relief on his face. ‘OK, then, great. We’re on the same side.’

  ‘No fucking way,’ Richter snapped. ‘Any “special relationship” ended the moment you fired your pistol in Réthymno. Your itchy trigger finger killed a senior British SIS officer.’

  ‘I told you, that was an accident.’ Stein’s face grew pale as the implications of his action dawned on him. ‘I didn’t know who he was, I swear.’

  ‘You might be telling the truth,’ Richter said, ‘but I don’t see it that way, and neither will SIS.’

  ‘What are you going to do with me?’

  Richter paused for a few moments before replying. ‘I haven’t decided yet. A lot depends on what you’re prepared to tell me. What was your function in this operation?’

  ‘I was only the linguist,’ Stein said, deciding to dumb down his role. ‘I speak fluent Greek, which was needed to get the job done. Look, I’ve about had it with this op. My partner’s as good as dead and I’m hauling around a file I don’t understand and a bug that’ll kill you in under a day. You work for an allied intelligence service, so if you want that fucking case and the file, you take ’em. Just let me get the hell out of here.’

  ‘It’s not that easy,’ Richter said, ‘and I’ve still got some questions. Who else was in the team?’

  For a moment Stein didn’t reply, appare
ntly considering his options.

  Richter leaned slightly closer to him, and his voice, when he spoke, was frigid with menace. ‘Let me explain things. You have exactly two options. You talk to me, answer my questions, and there’s just a chance you can walk away from this. Clam up on me, and you’re just so much dead weight. I’ll haul you out of the car right now and put a bullet in your head. Is that clear enough?’

  Stein looked at the Englishman, and didn’t for one second doubt that he meant exactly what he’d said. He gave a brief shrug. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘the diver was a guy named David Elias. He was an analyst, not from Operations, and he was only along because we needed somebody who could dive deep enough to place the charges.’

  ‘And once he’d done that he became expendable, right?’ Richter demanded.

  ‘McCready’s orders.’ Stein paused. ‘We didn’t like it at all, but—’

  ‘But you killed him anyway? Just like that police officer in Kandíra? And the two old villagers?’

  Stein nodded reluctantly. ‘Krywald killed the cop,’ he said, ‘not me.’

  ‘Who else was involved? And what’s your real name?’

  ‘It’s Richard Stein. There were just the three of us. The guy in charge was Roger Krywald.’

  ‘And the briefing?’ Richter pressed.

  ‘Just the bare minimum to get the job done,’ Stein muttered.

  ‘What exactly did the briefing officer tell you?’

  ‘We had to fly to Crete, locate some guy called Aristides, recover the case from him and destroy the wrecked aircraft.’

  ‘Did he explain why?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. You know about CIA covert ops, don’t you? He just told us it was classified Cosmic Top Secret and real urgent – Priority One. Recovery of the case and its contents was paramount; all other considerations were secondary.’

  ‘How were you supposed to be getting off the island?’ Richter changed tack.

  ‘McCready arranged a helicopter pick-up for me this afternoon out to the west of Plátanos.’

  ‘And the big question,’ Richter said, ‘is what’s in those flasks?’

  ‘I didn’t look inside the case,’ Stein explained, ‘but Krywald mentioned there were only four of them although the case has spaces for twelve. He said one of them had been opened. I can’t tell you what’s in them because I don’t know, but it’s something fucking dangerous.’ Stein decided in that instant to say nothing about the file summary he’d found. ‘Krywald looked through the file, and so did I, but it didn’t mean a hell of a lot to us. Just a bunch of letters and memos and real long words. We worked out it involved some kind of operation in Africa, but that was about all. Krywald reckoned that the stiffs in the aircraft were a bunch of scientists who’d pulled some kind of lethal bug out of the rain forest, to develop it as a biological weapon.’ That made sense to Richter. It was an open secret that despite America’s official stance on biological and chemical warfare, to develop antidotes requires possession of the biological agents themselves. Of necessity, therefore, America has always possessed a huge variety of bioweapons, so extracting a new virus out of the rain forest so as to develop an antidote for it was indeed a likely scenario.

  At that very moment Mike Murphy was little over two hundred yards away from the blue Seat, his Peugeot hire car tucked off the road and well out of sight. He was lying prone on the dusty ground, peering through a pair of compact binoculars up the hill towards the Cordoba from the shelter of a stunted bush. Beside him was the long cardboard box containing the Dragunov SVD sniper rifle, and as soon as he’d worked out what the hell was happening up there, he was planning on using it.

  He’d picked up the Seat within a couple of minutes of the vehicle leaving the hotel car park in Máleme and he’d followed it easily enough as the driver picked up the main road and headed west. What he hadn’t anticipated had been the Seat turning off the road at Tavronítis, and Murphy had had to close the gap between the two vehicles quickly so as not to lose sight of his quarry.

  He’d been a quarter of a mile behind the Seat as it left the village of Zounáki. The moment he’d seen the other car pull off the road, Murphy had turned his own vehicle around, driven a short distance back and parked out of sight. He’d opened the boot, grabbed the Dragunov and run to the top of the gentle hill in search of what he’d hoped was a good vantage point.

  He’d just settled down to watch the Seat when the driver’s door opened and a man climbed out, glanced around him, then opened the right-hand rear passenger door and leaned inside. A few seconds later he’d closed the door and climbed back into the driver’s seat. Murphy had braced himself, wondering if he was going to drive away, which would mean a hard run down the hill back to his Peugeot, but there was no sign yet of the Seat’s engine starting.

  Murphy hadn’t even got a decent look at the man – he’d still been focusing his binoculars when the stranger had climbed out of the car – but he was certain he’d never seen him before. What he’d registered was a fair-haired male, and that was about all. Having had some previous experience of John Nicholson’s operating methods, for a brief while Murphy wondered if he’d been set up, whether Nicholson had sent somebody else to help Stein get off the island, but a few moments’ thought told him this idea was a non-starter. So that really left only one possibility: some other intelligence organization had somehow got involved, and they had got to Stein before Murphy could complete his contract.

  So what should he do about this newcomer? Eliminating an American agent was bad enough: killing an agent of a foreign intelligence service could prove disastrous, especially when he had no idea which one of them was involved. The last thing Murphy wanted was to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for an assassin sent after him by the SVR or Mossad.

  Ideally, Murphy needed to email Nicholson to advise him of the changed situation and to request advice, but there was absolutely no way that he was going to have the luxury of doing that. Sooner or later, either Stein would emerge from the stationary car or it would drive away and Murphy would follow it again, until Stein did get out. Whatever scenario, Murphy had no option but to kill Stein and eventually probably the stranger as well.

  Then another thought struck him. Killing Stein was his remaining priority-two task. His highest priority was recovering the case and the file. He’d been assuming all along that Stein would have both items with him, but what if the stranger had kidnapped Stein and the case and file might be stuck in a hotel safe or even locked up inside another car? Maybe the killing of Stein would just have to wait a while.

  ‘So where’s the case?’ Richter demanded.

  ‘It’s in the trunk of this car,’ Stein replied. ‘Krywald opened it and he got infected, so I’ve wrapped it in a couple of garbage bags. I swear there’s nothing you can say or do that will make me open it up for you. You want it, you take it. You open it up, and in twelve hours you’ll be dead.’

  ‘I don’t want to open it,’ Richter said, ‘just make sure it’s really there. I’ll free your arms, and then we’ll go and check it together.’ He opened the door and slid out. Moving round the car, he opened the rear passenger door and reached in with a knife to slice through the cable tie securing Stein’s bound wrists to the grab handle. Then he seized the American agent and pulled him out of the back seat. They stepped around to the Seat’s rear and Richter popped open the boot.

  ‘That’s it,’ Stein nodded towards a bulky oblong object wrapped in heavy-duty black plastic. ‘I suggest you leave it right where it is.’

  Richter nodded, but nevertheless reached into the boot and grabbed the black plastic object, lifting it a few inches. Stein stepped back immediately, panic written all over his face.

  ‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘I believe you.’

  Murphy stared through his binoculars, watching the two men intently. Then he grunted in satisfaction, opened up the cardboard box beside him and hauled out the Dragunov. He spread the bipod legs, inserted the magazine, switched on th
e laser sight, and in one fluid movement hauled the rifle into his shoulder and chambered a round. He looked through the Bushnell scope towards the Seat Cordoba and the two men standing beside it.

  The black-wrapped object sitting in the trunk had to be the case, just because of the way Stein and the stranger were reacting to it, and if the case was in the trunk, then for sure the file must be there too or somewhere else in the car. That meant Murphy could complete his remaining priority-two task, killing Richard Stein, and get rid of the other man at the same time.

  Murphy picked his target, the Bushnell variable-power telescopic sight seeming to pull the two men towards him. He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, and then gently squeezed the trigger.

  Chapter 24

  Saturday

  South of Zounáki, western Crete

  For a few seconds Richter just stared at the innocent-looking black plastic bag in the open boot of the Seat Cordoba. It could have contained almost anything – a week’s worth of garbage, a collection of old clothes, even a dismembered corpse – but everything that he could imagine, even a corpse, would have been better than the invisible and utterly deadly pathogen that he knew was inside it.

  Something had been nagging away at Richter’s subconscious, since he’d started talking to the US agent. It was something Stein had said, or had maybe not said, and it had eluded him until this precise moment.

  ‘You said that Krywald was as good as dead,’ Richter said, ‘but in fact he died yesterday, in the hospital at Chaniá.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Stein replied. ‘He was pretty far gone when I took him to the emergency room, but there was no way I was going to go back to check on him.’

  Richter was watching Stein closely and, as far as he could tell, the man was telling the truth. This confirmed a nagging suspicion he’d entertained ever since Hardin explained how Roger Krywald had died.