Pandemic (20 page)

In the car, McCready’s body lurched to the right, then left, crashing into the driver’s door, his seat belt tensioning automatically and the airbags deploying. In a normal crash,
that might have been enough to save him, but this was far from normal.

The airbag forced McCready back into his seat, tearing his hands from the steering wheel and turning him into a helpless passenger as the Ford lurched under the colossal impact of the forty-ton
weight of the Mack truck. For maybe half a second McCready thought that the Ford would stay upright as the truck’s speed fell away, but then he felt the unmistakable lurch as the car was
lifted onto its left-side wheels and it slammed over, rolling onto its roof.

The last image that registered in McCready’s brain was the grooved tread of an immense tyre, inches from his door, just before the left-hand front wheel of the Mack lifted up and over the
Ford’s chassis and crushed the vehicle beyond recognition. The momentum of the massive truck bounced the left rear wheels of the cab over the wreck, finishing the job the front wheel had
started, and when the Mack finally stopped the Ford was just a mess of twisted steel and leaking fluids.

Murphy pulled the Chevrolet onto the shoulder a hundred yards or so beyond the wreck and stopped the car. He took a pair of compact binoculars from his pocket, turned round in the seat and
looked carefully back up the Parkway. Cars and trucks had stopped at all angles, hazard lights flashing, their drivers staring in horror at what was left of the Ford, which lay, like some obscene
roadkill, half-under the trailer of the Mack. Already people were milling around, talking on mobiles, pointing at the car. One guy was even taking pictures.

He couldn’t see clearly, but Murphy was as certain as he could be that McCready was dead. The left wheels of the Mack’s cab seemed to have gone right over the passenger section of
the Ford and the whole of the bodywork looked as if it had been flattened. Even if he hadn’t been killed outright, McCready would probably be dead long before the fire service and paramedics
could cut him out.

Murphy tossed the binoculars onto the passenger seat, pulled the shift into ‘drive’ and eased the Chevrolet down the road. As he accelerated away, he switched on the radio, found an
easy-listening station and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel rim in time to the music as he drove. Faintly in the distance he heard the wail of a police siren and automatically checked his
speed, then smiled slightly. His ‘extra’ job for Nicholson had gone without a hitch, as he’d expected.

McCready’s death would be classed as just another unfortunate traffic accident on a busy stretch of road. It didn’t really matter if anyone had noticed the manoeuvres he’d
performed in the Chevy. The police would likely assume the driver had been drunk or on drugs, and would probably disbelieve any witness who claimed that the driver’s actions – actions
which Murphy had been specially trained to execute – were deliberate.

He’d stolen the car in Tysons Corner late that morning, and he was going to dump the vehicle once he got clear of the Parkway. Even if somebody had been able to note down the plate number,
and the police tracked it, there would be nothing in the car to provide a link to Murphy. He’d worn thin rubber gloves when he’d jacked the Chevy, and he’d leave them in the car
when he walked away from it. In the glove box was a small incendiary charge, slim enough to slide into the fuel tank, fitted with a time switch. Once that blew, any forensic evidence he’d
left would burn up along with the car.

Murphy pulled off the Parkway onto State Route 123, heading for McLean. He’d dump the Chevy there and catch a cab back to Falls Church. He’d already set the timer on the incendiary
charge for ninety minutes, so all he had to do was flip the switch and slide it into the gas tank as he left the car. He glanced at his watch: if he didn’t meet any problems, he’d be
halfway to the airport at Baltimore before it blew.

Irakleío, Crete

It had taken the editor less than twenty minutes to be persuaded to put the story of the mysterious epidemic at Kandíra on the front page of the following
day’s paper.

The reporter had taken the few crumbs he had extracted from the policemen guarding the barricades and from the two village men he had interviewed, and he had concocted a story that sounded
dramatic in almost every way. It was dramatic in what it said, which was actually very little, and in what it implied, which encompassed almost every possible permutation of the ‘Unknown
Pathogen Kills Villager’ angle. And most of all in the heading, which screamed the story across the top of the front page:
Biological warfare in the Mediterranean. Diver killed by deadly
germ found on seabed
.

Arlington, Virginia

Nicholson was just about to leave the safe house when his mobile phone rang.

‘Yes?’

Murphy didn’t bother introducing himself, because he had no idea who might be listening in to either his or Nicholson’s mobile. The fact that both numbers were unlisted provided some
security, but these days you never knew. It was better to be circumspect. ‘That matter we discussed,’ he said. ‘It’s been taken care of.’

‘Good,’ Nicholson replied, and ended the call.

He put the mobile down on the desk, reached inside his jacket pocket and extracted a slim black diary. All the entries in it were entirely innocent and innocuous, apart from those on a single
page at the back. That contained seven lines of what appeared to be code.

In fact, the lines looked very much like the product of a single or double transposition cipher, created by nothing more complicated than two memorized key-words and a knowledge of how to encode
and decode a message. One of the characteristics of a message enciphered in this way is that all the groups are the same length, usually four, five or six letters. The lines in Nicholson’s
diary were all five-letter groups:

If any security organization did get possession of the book, he imagined that they would spend tens of hours trying to make some kind of sense of what he’d written, because his
‘code’ was logically uncrackable by conventional cryptanalysis for one very simple reason: he had picked all the letters entirely at random, with the exception of the first and third
letters of the groups in the left-hand column. With that knowledge, the decode was childishly simple; the ‘code’ was simply a list of seven names – McCready, Hawkins, Richards,
Butcher, Elias, Stein and Krywald.

Nicholson opened the diary at the note page and laid it flat on the desk in front of him. He took a black Mont Blanc fountain pen from his pocket and a ruler from the desk drawer and drew a
single line through the first two letter groups. McCready was dead, and so the entry was no longer required.

‘One down, six to go,’ Nicholson muttered, with a slight smile of satisfaction. He closed the diary, then opened it again and added a further, eighth, group:

M Q R D F       HD G T N

He would, he promised himself, deal with Murphy personally once the steel case had been retrieved and delivered to Langley. Nicholson nodded, slipped the diary back in his pocket and left the
room.

HMS
Invincible
, Sea of Crete

Paul Richter leaned against the aft guardrail on the Quarter Deck in the darkness of late evening and looked back at the wake stretching out behind the ship as
Invincible
ploughed through the Sea of Crete.

Astern and a mile or so to port he could see the lights of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker, and behind that one of the frigates, both ships keeping station on the carrier. And a long way out to
starboard, Richter could just make out a line of brightness, which marked the location of, he guessed, the town of Chaniá on the north coast of Crete.

Beyond the wake, above that faint trail of phosphorescence that stretched arrow-straight into the darkness, the sky was alive with stars. Without the constant glare of the lights of London to
dim their glory, they appeared brighter and more numerous to Richter, beyond counting or comprehension. He craned his neck to look up at them, turning left and right as he picked out the
constellations and individual stars. Orion, with Sirius blazing down to the apparent south-west. The Great Bear. Leo. Dracos. Some he knew, most he didn’t, but all were glorious to
behold.

He looked down again at the endless wake and thought back to the conversation over dinner, the light-hearted bantering that overlaid the total professionalism of the Air Group. Was he looking
forward to getting back to London, back to the covert life that he’d been coerced into living? No – no way. But even as that thought crossed his mind, he realized again that his time
here on the
Invincible
had been what amounted to a holiday, a brief return to a former life, and he also remembered why he’d left the Navy in the first place.

A cruise like this was the cream. Flying a state of the art jet fighter in wonderful weather, playing war games, relaxing in the Wardroom – just the cream. He thought back to the twenty or
so years he’d spent as a squadron pilot, first on Wessex and Sea King helicopters and then flying Sea Harriers, some of it on 800 Naval Air Squadron under an older, less congenial management,
and he remembered the other times, the other duties, that were less pleasant. The secondary duties, the divisional work, implementing change for the sake of change, and those pointless little jobs
that senior officers always seemed to think were essential and urgent, but which were usually little more than a comprehensive waste of time and effort.

And then there was Richter’s big problem, of course. When he’d first been appointed to 800 Naval Air Squadron the CO had disliked him on sight. Richter could have handled that
– nobody said you had to like the people you worked with – but he had never been able to tolerate fools, and the 800 Commanding Officer had definitely been a fool, one of a small number
of naval officers somehow promoted by the system into a position well above their abilities.

Richter’s mistake had been to point out to him, in unequivocally clear language, that he was an illiterate idiot. The mistake was not what Richter had actually said – that was
neither more nor less than the undeniable truth – but that he had said it with a large and attentive audience of senior officers present. An audience that neither forgot nor forgave his
blatant insubordination, and which had ensured Richter’s naval career was stymied from that moment on.

Richter shrugged at the memory. It was water – even a flood – under the bridge now, he thought, clutching at a convenient cliché. Look on the bright side. He was still in
employment, which a lot of ex-service fixed-wing aviators weren’t, there being very few openings for former Harrier pilots in the world of civil aviation, and he was getting paid reasonably
well, too.

And, despite the fact that he didn’t like his superior, Richard Simpson, and had frequent disagreements with him, he did actually enjoy what he did. The fact that he occasionally got shot
at when he wasn’t submerging amid terminal boredom in a sea of paperwork and files, did lend a certain frisson of excitement to his work. In fact, Richter realized that, despite his earlier
denial, he was actually looking forward to getting back to his small and rather grubby office in Hammersmith. And, even, back to his piles of files.

He shivered slightly as a cool breeze lanced off the sea and across the Quarter Deck. Red Sea Rig – open-necked shirt with his lieutenant commander rank badges on the epaulettes, black
trousers and a borrowed squadron cummerbund – was comfortable enough, but once the temperature dropped the wearer certainly knew about it.

Richter glanced out into the darkness again, casting an eye over the stars and the steadily unrolling wake, then looked down at the luminous dial of his watch. Just time for one final coffee in
the Wardroom, and then bed.

‘Good night,’ he called out to the anonymous figure standing at the aft port side of the Quarter Deck.

‘Good night, sir,’ the Lifebuoy Sentry murmured, and watched as Richter walked forward to the starboard-side door, leading through to the Wardroom on Five Deck. As soon as the door
had closed behind him, the Sentry reached into his trouser pocket, extracted a packet of cigarettes and lit one. He was gasping for it – he’d thought that WAFU two and a half would
never bloody well leave the Quarter Deck.

Wednesday
Outside Kandíra, south-west Crete

They spotted the helicopter long before they heard it. A dark grey speck against the blue sky over the two and a half thousand metre peak of Lefká Óri, it
grew rapidly in size as it descended the southern slope of the great mountain. Within seconds, it seemed, it was right above them, rotors clattering, jet engines roaring. The pilot swung the Merlin
around in a tight left-hand turn, to point the aircraft’s nose into wind, then settled the big helicopter on the ground.

Dust rose all around it, then began to settle again as the pilot dropped the collective and throttled back the engines. The door on the right-hand side of the aircraft slid open and the
aircrewman kicked down a set of folding steps. A slim middle-aged man descended them uncertainly. He was carrying two small bags, and looked around before walking over to the group of watching men.
Behind him, two aircrewmen began manoeuvring the first of two large cases out of the rear compartment of the aircraft.