Pandemic (31 page)

There hadn’t been much doubt in Krywald’s mind, though, even before he ran his tape measure over it – having never before seen a steel case with two locks and an over-centre
catch to secure the lid. Even this cursory examination had convinced him that they’d found the right one.

Before Krywald went to bed that night, he sent an encrypted email to McCready, which simply advised him that phase one was completed. He suggested that they would probably complete phase two
– the destruction of the wreck of the Learjet – the following day.

They slept late the next morning, the effects of their long journey catching up with both Stein and Krywald. Elias slept even longer – being much less used to longdistance travel –
and he didn’t appear in the hotel dining room until gone ten-thirty. He spotted Krywald in a far corner of the room and walked over to him. The remains of a leisurely breakfast were spread
across the table, and as Elias reached him Krywald pushed across a small wicker basket containing some rolls. ‘There’s coffee in the pot,’ he gestured.

‘Where’s Stein?’ Elias asked.

‘He’s out running an errand,’ Krywald replied. ‘As soon as he gets back, we need to go.’

‘An early flight?’ Elias asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

‘What?’

‘An early flight back to the States.’ Elias said. ‘I mean,’ he glanced up at Krywald and motioned towards the black case sitting on the floor right beside the table,
‘you’ve got the case, so that’s it, isn’t it? We can go home?’

Krywald grinned but shook his head. ‘The job’s not over yet. Getting the case was the most important thing, but we’ve still got some cleaning up to do, and that’s where
you come in. Best you don’t eat too much, Mr Elias, because this afternoon you’re going for a swim. A long, deep one, too.’

Kandíra, south-west Crete

‘We therefore have
two
hot zones to investigate and, equally obviously, two bodies,’ Hardin continued. He glanced towards the rear of the tent where Dr
Gravas was now standing alongside Inspector Lavat – again properly dressed in the uniform of a Cretan police officer – and listening with interest to the briefing. ‘We have been
helped considerably by the prompt actions of Inspector Lavat here, and his cordon around the village should have limited the possibility of the pathogen spreading.’

But even as he said these words, Hardin realized with a sudden sick feeling that in all probability the mystery virus had already been carried a considerable distance away from Kandíra.
He just hoped that whoever had taken the container would have the good sense to keep it sealed.

‘We’ll proceed as far as we can using standard field procedures. By that I mean CRIEIPA.’ Hardin pronounced it ‘creeper’, and Mark Evans nodded in recognition.
‘I need hardly remind you what that involves, but for the sake of our visitors I’m going to anyway. First,
Containment
– that’s pretty much been done already, thanks
to our two colleagues here. The village has been cordoned off by the local police ever since Dr Gravas first suspected a filovirus. Almost nobody has been allowed in or out since then.

‘Second,
Restriction of access
. The two hot zones have also been secured by the police, and nobody will be allowed access to either building unless vouched for personally by either
Dr Gravas or Inspector Lavat. That’s something of a stable-door reaction, given that both scenes have already been visited by unidentified men, but better security is now firmly in place.
This restriction is primarily to avoid contamination of the scenes themselves, as I don’t think there’s much danger of any further outbreaks.’ Hardin added with a smile as Jerry
Fisher opened his mouth to challenge his statement: ‘That may seem like a case of hypothesizing without data, but I’m basing my belief on what actually happened here so far.

‘Four people entered the room where the first body was found on Tuesday morning, three of them wearing no protection at all, and they’re all well and healthy after about forty-eight
hours. Both the victims appeared to be completely normal at about midnight on Monday, but both were dead within twelve hours. That means we’re looking for a hot agent that acts incredibly
fast, but whose infective period is extremely short. Either that or the two victims ingested or perhaps injected the agent, though I can’t imagine why they’d do that with an unknown
substance.’

Hardin paused to take a sip of water: his throat was getting dry. ‘OK, that’s about as far as we’ve got to date. The next phase is
Investigation
. We’ll start at
the first victim’s house, and begin with his body. We’ll need to collect all the usual specimens – starting with blood, urine and stool samples, then whatever other specimens are
indicated by the initial results. That will be followed by a full post-mortem, which I will undertake. Obviously I’ll check for needle marks, just in case these two guys got their kicks by
shooting up something they’d found somewhere, but I very much doubt if that’s the case. I’ll also want a full and thorough search of the house. Some traces of this agent might
still be evident in the property, so look out for dust, unidentified liquids, smears, anything like that.

‘If we can’t find anything at that scene, we’ll repeat the whole process at the second victim’s residence. Until we’ve got some sort of handle on what this agent
actually is, we’re going nowhere. The last three phases –
Examination
,
Identification
and
Procedural Actions
– will have to wait until we know exactly what
we’re dealing with.’

Hardin looked up towards the back of the tent as the flap opened and another police officer entered, walked across to speak softly to the inspector, then handed him a slip of paper. Lavat
glanced up at Hardin and stepped forward.

‘You have a visitor, Mr Hardin,’ he said, glancing down at the paper in his hand. ‘A man called Richer – no, Richter. He’s just appeared at the barrier across the
main road and asked for you by name.’

NAS Soúda Bay, Akrotíri, Crete

Stein braked the Ford Focus to a stop at the counter-weighted barrier guarding the main entrance to the Soúda Bay facility and wound down his window as the armed
sentry approached.

‘Good morning, sir. May I . . .?’ the sentry started to inquire but stopped as Stein opened a small black leather folder containing his genuine CIA identification, and held it up in
front of the soldier’s face.

‘The name’s Stein and I have an appointment to see Captain Levy.’

The sentry looked carefully at the picture and then at Stein, then stepped back a pace, snapped off a rapid salute and scanned the paper attached to his clipboard. ‘Yessir, Captain Levy at
eleven-thirty. Have you visited here before, Mr Stein?’

As Stein shook his head, the sentry gave him crisp directions to the closest parking area and eight minutes later Stein walked into Levy’s office.

Levy was tall, slim and coal-black, and one of two Company assets stationed at Soúda Bay. CIA officers do not normally wear a uniform of any description, but in some circumstances it is
necessary, and NAS Soúda Bay was one of them. Like all US bases, Soúda Bay employs a number of civilian staff, but in the main they do fairly menial jobs. For several reasons the CIA
needed an officer on the base in a position of some authority, and for the past two years Nathan Levy, Captain, United States Air Force, had officially been flying a desk here instead of the F-16
Falcons he had normally flown.

That, at least, was the official line. In fact, Levy wasn’t a serving officer in the USAF, had never flown a Falcon – in fact, he had seen one exactly twice – and had no flying
qualifications whatsoever. But he knew enough about aviation to hold a conversation without making a fool of himself, even with specialist aircrew, because he always pointedly refused to talk about
his flying career, and nobody ever pressed him. A rumour had started almost as soon as he arrived on Crete that he had been involved in an accident that had killed his wingman, and that his desk
job here was an attempt to stabilize him before getting him back in the air. Levy knew all about the rumour – in fact, he’d started it – and it suited his purposes very well.

‘I’m Stein,’ the visitor announced.

‘I’m sure you are,’ Levy said, ‘but I’ll still need to see some ID.’

Stein fished out his black leather folder again and passed it across to him. Levy studied it carefully, compared the number on the card with that on a signal resting on his desk, then closed the
folder and handed it back. ‘OK, Mr Stein. I’ve had a coupla signals from Langley about you, and they sent me a shopping list on the last one. The personal weapons were no problem. There
are three of you so I’ve picked up three SIG P226s with silencers and two spare clips each; that’s the SIG 220 variant with the fifteen-round magazine.’

‘I know the weapon,’ Stein said.

In fact, the ‘shopping list’ signal had instructed Levy to provide silenced personal weapons for Krywald’s team, and to deliver another pistol of a very different sort, as well
as a rifle that was even more unusual, to a hotel in Réthymno. Levy was going to give Stein an hour or so to get out of the area, then he was going to pick up the other two weapons in their
innocent-looking cardboard boxes and deliver them himself.

Levy had been with the Company for a long time, and was used to the devious ways its personnel operated, but the current operation was a first, even for him. He had no definite knowledge of what
exactly was going on, but the very nature of the weapons he had been instructed to procure allowed him to make an educated guess. Not for the first time in his career Levy wondered if he ought not
to get out of the CIA and start working for an organization that applied higher moral standards to itself, like the Mafia or the Yardies, for example.

‘OK,’ Levy said, ‘they’ve been sanitized. The serial numbers have been removed and even if somebody uses an X-ray machine to recover them, the trace will lead straight to
the FBI.’

‘Now that’s a nice touch.’

‘I’ve got plenty of plastic – I picked out four M118 demolition charges with a bunch of extra C4 added – but the detonators were a tad difficult. Real specialized
items.’

‘But you did get them?’ Stein asked.

Levy nodded. ‘Sure, I got them. Had to call in a coupla favours, and for sure that’ll cost me somewheres down the road, but I did get them.’ Levy reached down behind him,
pulled up a large and apparently heavy red haversack and placed it carefully on his desk. Something in the haversack gave a metallic clunk as the fabric settled, and Stein smiled for the first time
since he’d walked into the room.

Kandíra, south-west Crete

Paul Richter leaned against the driver’s door of the Volkswagen Golf and waited patiently in the late-morning sunshine. The car wasn’t air-conditioned, and
even with all the windows open, the heater set on cold and the fan going full blast, it had still been a long, hot, sticky and extremely slow drive down to Kandíra. He was hoping he could
find out what Simpson wanted and get the hell out of Crete and back to the air-conditioned cool of the ship that same afternoon, or tomorrow at the latest.

He looked up as two men approached the barricade and walked over to meet them. One was very obviously a police officer, in uniform, and the other a middle-aged man wearing civilian clothes.

‘Mr Hardin?’ Richter asked, and Hardin nodded. ‘My name’s Richter, from the warship
Invincible
.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Hardin said. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’

‘You have?’

‘We won’t be needing transportation until this afternoon at the earliest, but we will certainly have specimens ready to send to Irakleío first thing tomorrow morning, so could
we have a helicopter here by eight-thirty?’

‘I think,’ Richter said slowly, ‘you have me confused with somebody else.’ Light dawned as he remembered the helicopter squadron’s outline briefing.
‘I’m not part of the
Invincible
’s Air Operations team, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’ll be coming out later today, by helicopter, and he’ll be
wearing a uniform and carrying a radio – neither of which I’m equipped with, as you can see.’

‘Oh, OK,’ Hardin said, and stared down at a piece of paper in his hand. ‘So what can I do for you, Mr Richter?’

Richter reached into his hip pocket and extracted a slim wallet, which he opened and from it removed a laminated card. It identified him as a member of the British Medical Research Council and
was one of a dozen or so cards Richter carried as a matter of routine. ‘With the number of British tourists visiting Crete every year, we’re obviously very concerned about this
infection you’re investigating,’ he said. ‘If you’ve time now, could you brief me on what your team has found out so far?’

Hardin smiled somewhat ruefully. ‘So far,’ he said, ‘we haven’t found very much, but I can give you at least some information. Look, the rest of my team members are
waiting to get started on this. Could you wait a few minutes while I finish my briefing, and then I’ll tell you what we know?’

Richter nodded his assent and followed Hardin and the police officer through the barricade and into a large canvas tent that had been positioned adjacent to the main street. Hardin waved him to
a bench at a table situated towards the back of the tent, then five minutes later walked back in and sat down opposite him.

‘One thing I’m not clear about, Mr Richter. You identified yourself as a member of the MRC, but you told me you’d come from the
Invincible
, which is a British Royal Navy
warship. That I don’t understand.’

‘Both are correct,’ Richter said easily. ‘I’m a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Naval Reserve and I was doing continuation training on the ship, but I’m also
employed by the MRC as an investigator.’

Not too bad, Richter thought. One half of the statement was absolutely true, and the other completely false – normally he reckoned he was doing well if just one in three of the things he
claimed had some basis in fact.

‘You’re not a doctor, then?’ Hardin asked.