Pandemic (25 page)

‘So now what?’ Stein asked, after they rounded a corner that took them well out of sight of the police manning the cordon around the village.

‘We find the house where this Greek diver died, get inside it and search it.’

‘How?’

‘Easy,’ Krywald replied. ‘We’re inside the village now, so everyone will assume that we’re supposed to be here. You speak Greek – so we’ll stop somebody
and ask the way.’

Sitting on the steps of a white-washed cottage they found an elderly Cretan man, wrinkled and burnt umber by the sun, smoking a foul-smelling cigarette, obviously hand-rolled. Stein stopped to
explain that he and Krywald were part of the American specialist team, then asked directions to Aristides’s house.

The old man wrinkled his eyes against the glare of the sun, and looked up at the two Americans. He took his time removing the cigarette from his mouth, then replied briefly in his native
language.

‘What did he say?’ Krywald demanded.

‘He asked “Which one?”’ Stein replied.

‘What the hell does that mean? The one that’s dead, of course.’

Stein switched back to Greek and addressed the old man again. ‘We’re looking for the house belonging to the Aristides who died because of this illness we’re
investigating.’

The old Cretan grinned up at him and took another drag on his cigarette. ‘Which one?’ he asked again.

‘Either this guy’s an idiot or Spiros isn’t the only dead Aristides in this village,’ Stein muttered to Krywald, then turned back to the Cretan. ‘Do you mean
there’s more than one man here dead with this disease?’ he asked.

The old man nodded. ‘Spiros Aristides and Nico Aristides – and both of them are dead.’

‘OK,’ Stein took a small notebook from his pocket. ‘Can you tell me where they lived?’

Wednesday
Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

His check of the FAA Registry hadn’t helped Westwood much, or even at all, so he turned his attention to the CIA’s own database, known to Agency insiders as
‘Walnut’, which had been the source of his interest in the first place. Walnut is actually several databases, some containing purely unclassified background information, being data in
the public domain, and others allotted varying security classifications, some with heavily restricted access.

Using the custom-designed search engine, which accepted almost every kind of permutation within its parameters including Boolean logic, he keyed in a simple enough search –
‘Mediterranean+aircraft+crash’ – specified the entire database rather than just a particular section of it, sat back and waited.

A little over three seconds later the first page of results appeared on the screen in front of him. There had been a surprising number of aircraft crashes in the Mediterranean, it seemed. Maybe
this indicated that there was a ‘Maltese Triangle’, Westwood thought with a wry smile, mirroring the so-called Bermuda Triangle on the other side of the world, about which so much
complete and unsubstantiated rubbish has been written over the years. Or maybe it was just that the airspace over the Mediterranean is particularly busy, and has been ever since man first took to
the air.

Westwood realized he was going to have to tighten his search if he didn’t want to spend all day reading through aircraft crash reports that were of no interest to him. He read through the
Greek newspaper article again and then entered a new search command, looking within the results the system had already generated, and specifying only aircraft that had crashed since 1960.

That still threw up a couple of dozen reports, so he refined the search again, using the registration letters reported for the crashed aircraft: ‘N’, ‘1’, ‘7’
and ‘6’. The screen cleared and he was now looking at three reports only, all classified ‘Restricted’ – the lowest possible rating above ‘Unclassified’
– and all referring to the same incident: a Learjet that vanished somewhere over the Eastern Mediterranean in 1972. The first file was the reported loss, the second a compilation detailing
the various stages of the surface search that had been mounted, and the third noted when the search had been abandoned without result. Westwood printed them all as hard copy and began to read
through them.

It wasn’t a great leap of logic to connect this report with the wreckage of the aircraft that the Greek diver had reportedly found at the bottom of the Mediterranean, particularly as the
registration number of the missing aircraft was N17677, but as he studied the printed pages in front of him Westwood realized that something didn’t gel.

The location of the missing Learjet was necessarily imprecise, as the aircraft had been outside radar cover when it went down, and the search teams had simply extrapolated the aircraft’s
predicted route from its filed flight plan, and then concentrated on the area the aircraft should have reached when the en route controlling authority lost radio contact with it. But the location
where the Greek diver had apparently found the wreckage was nowhere near either this predicted course or the original search area. It was a long way to the north, which suggested that the pilot of
the Learjet had for some reason waited until his aircraft was outside radar cover, then turned north towards Crete, and that didn’t make any sense unless the aircraft was lost – which
was most unlikely – or on some kind of covert mission.

Westwood turned back to his computer terminal and on a hunch typed in a new search solely for ‘N17677’.

The result surprised him. Realistically, he had been expecting to see only the same three reports that the system had already generated, but the more specific search had now added a fourth file.
Its title was ‘N17677’.

That didn’t make sense. The search parameters he had entered previously – the partial registration number ‘N176’ – should also have located this file. Westwood bent
over the keyboard again and entered ‘N*7677’, then pressed the ‘Enter’ key. The ‘*’ symbol is a wildcard that can mean any letter, number or symbol, so that
search string should bring up the ‘N17677’ file reference – but it didn’t. Once again, Westwood was gazing at only the original three references.

He tried again, this time inputting ‘Learjet N17677’, but with the same result: only the same three Restricted reports about the missing aircraft. That had to mean that the
‘N17677’ file was protected. It could only be located by typing in the exact filename – a primitive, but actually quite effective, means of ensuring that the file could only be
accessed by somebody who already knew about it.

Again, Westwood typed in ‘N17677’ and glanced at the screen. Next to the filename was its classification, ‘Ultra’ – one of the highest classification levels above
‘Top Secret’ – and the cryptic note ‘Cross-reference: CAIP’. Beside this was a warning: ‘Access prohibited. File sealed July 02, 1972’.

‘What the hell is CAIP?’ Westwood muttered to himself. He tapped the letters into the search field and pressed ‘Go’. Almost as he had expected, the result was virtually a
mirror image of what he had already seen – ‘Cross-reference: N17677. Access prohibited. File sealed July 02, 1972’ – and again the security classification
‘Ultra’. The only additional information provided were the names of the six senior CIA officers who had been responsible for CAIP, whatever it was, but Westwood had never heard of any
of them.

For a couple of minutes he sat silently, staring at his computer monitor. Then he opened Internet Explorer, moved the cursor into the ‘address’ field, and typed in
‘www2.faa.gov’, the address of the Federal Aviation Administration’s website. He selected ‘Information’ and ‘Pilots and Aircraft Owners’, then
‘Services’ and ‘Query the Aircraft database’. He clicked the link at the bottom of the ‘Aircraft Inquiry Site’ page, waited while the ‘FAA Registry
Aircraft Registration Inquiry page’ loaded and chose ‘N-Number’. In the query field he typed ‘17677’ and pressed ‘Go’.

Then he leaned back from the screen and shook his head. In front of him were details of the aircraft bearing the North American registration N17677. It was a Learjet 23, exactly the same type of
aircraft as the one that had been lost in the Mediterranean in 1972, but according to the FAA database, it hadn’t crashed or gone missing – it had been retired from service in 1979.

But an aircraft’s registration number, just like that for a car, is issued only once, so either the FAA had made a mistake and the details Westwood was looking at on the screen were
incorrect, which seemed extremely unlikely, or the registration of the aircraft referred to in the CIA database was wrong.

Or, Westwood suddenly thought, maybe not. There was a possible way in which they could both be right.

Kandíra, south-west Crete

As Krywald and Stein walked around the corner, they spotted the policeman immediately. He was leaning against a wall in the shade, opposite a scruffy white house, and
smoking with the cigarette cupped in his hand. As the two men appeared he dropped the stub to the ground, trod it out and straightened his uniform jacket.

Stein walked over to him. ‘We’re from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control,’ he announced in Greek, and displayed one of the ID cards that he and Krywald had faked by using
the laptop computer, a portable printer and a mugshot acquired from a passport-photograph booth before they left Réthymno.

One of the major problems with an identity card is that unless the person to whom it is presented knows exactly what the real one looks like, he has no idea whether it’s the genuine
article. This particular policeman had spent his entire life and career on Crete, and had never even heard of the CDC until Inspector Lavat had told him earlier that the team from Atlanta was
expected on the island. The card he studied looked perfectly correct to him, so he just nodded and handed it back.

Stein pulled a notebook from his pocket. ‘Is this the house where Mr Spiros Aristides lived?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the officer replied. ‘The door is not locked, and his body is still upstairs in the bedroom.’

‘Thank you.’ Stein and Krywald then pulled on surgical gloves and paper face masks. ‘Make sure nobody else goes inside until we have completed our examination of the
premises.’

‘Do you want to check inside?’ Lavat asked. The three men stood in the street outside Jakob’s bar, eyeing the faded and peeling paintwork on the door and
windows.

Hardin shook his head. ‘Not particularly. I don’t believe for a moment that the infective agent was encountered in the bar, otherwise we’d be looking at a dozen deaths by now,
not just two. So, exactly where is Aristides’s house from here?’

Lavat pointed along the dusty street, and the three men turned as one to glance that way.

‘Again,’ Hardin said, ‘I don’t know what we’re looking for, or even if there’s anything here to find. Just be careful, and always look but don’t touch.
If you see anything, anything at all, that seems in any way unusual or out of place, inform me immediately. But, I repeat, don’t touch it, OK?’ Lavat and Gravas both nodded.
‘Right, masks on. Spread out and let’s make a start.’

Each man pulled a disposable paper mask over his nose and mouth, and they set off, walking very slowly down the centre of the street, their eyes roaming the ground, the walls of houses, even the
trees and bushes.

‘Nothing here,’ Krywald muttered. ‘We’ll try upstairs.’

They’d searched the tiny patio garden, and then the downstairs rooms first as they had been taught, moving swiftly and working efficiently, but it was quickly obvious, once they’d
checked the various rooms and pulled open the doors of all the cupboards, that nothing the size of the steel case described to them could possibly be hidden there. Only then did Krywald lead the
way up the old wooden staircase.

‘Hell of a smell in here,’ Krywald remarked as they reached the upper landing.

‘According to that cop outside, the Greek’s body is still lying dead in here somewhere.’

‘OK, we’ll just ignore it. I want to be out of here in five minutes.’

They checked the spare bedroom first, but found nothing there, then Krywald walked across the landing and stopped outside the closed door of the only other bedroom.

‘Hear that?’ he asked, leaning his head close to the door panels.

‘What?’

‘I dunno – kind of a faint buzzing sound. Like a chopper a long way off, but it seems to be coming from in here.’

‘I don’t hear it,’ Stein said.

Krywald listened for a few more seconds, then shook his head and pushed open the door. The faint buzzing noise was suddenly loud enough for Stein to hear it too.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Krywald said, stopping dead in the doorway and looking across the room. ‘What the hell happened to him?’

Like Krywald, Stein was no stranger to death, sudden or otherwise, but the sight of the blood-soaked bed, and Aristides’s bloody corpse, turned him pale. ‘Fuck knows,’ he said,
‘but at least now we know what you were hearing a minute ago.’

Krywald looked where Stein was pointing, and realized that what he had initially taken for dried blood covering Aristides’s corpse was actually moving – and buzzing. It was a carpet
of what looked like thousands of flies, black, blue and green, their bodies heaving and wriggling in an almost solid mass as they fed greedily upon the dead man’s body.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Krywald said again. ‘OK, let’s make it quick.’

Two minutes later they were out of the bedroom and back on the tiny landing, having checked every possible nook and corner in the bedroom that could have concealed the steel case. They had found
nothing.

‘Shit,’ Krywald said. ‘If he ever had it, he’s hidden it somewhere. There’s no way it’s still in this house. Let’s hope our friend Nico took it home
with him.’

The two men walked quickly down the stairs and headed out of the house. As they opened the door to the street they both unconsciously took a long, deep breath of the fresher air, but it would be
a long time before they would get the smell of that house out of their memories. They nodded briefly to the policeman on guard, then walked back the way they had come.