Pandemic (8 page)

Spiros looked at him appraisingly. ‘Something valuable inside, maybe?’

‘Maybe, maybe,’ Nico replied. ‘This was sealed just like the others?’

‘Yes. I cut the wire away and stripped off the wax.’

‘It’s very light, but there must be
something
inside, otherwise it makes no sense to seal it.’ He looked over at his uncle. ‘I don’t think we can pick this
lock,’ he said, ‘but we could still open the flask. Do you have a hacksaw handy?’

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

‘Elias? It’s the Director. I need to pick your brains for a minute. You’ve done plenty of recreational diving, right? Why would a diver attach aqualungs
to a rope dropped underneath a boat?’ On the top floor at Langley, the CIA officer leaned back in his chair and gazed out of the window as he waited for David Elias, a junior officer in his
own section, to reply.

‘That’s easy, Director. If you dive using compressed air cylinders – what you would normally call an aqualung – below a particular depth for longer than a certain time,
you have to decompress yourself before you surface, otherwise you could suffer from the bends.’

‘That’s a bit vague. “Particular depth” and “certain time”? What depth, and what time?’

Three floors below, David Elias unconsciously mimicked his superior officer, leaning back in his seat and staring out of the window. ‘I can’t tell you precisely, sir,’ he said.
‘It’s variable, depending on a lot of different factors. Should I come up? I can explain it better in person.’

‘Yes, do that.’

Elias entered four minutes later, holding a dark blue book in his hand. John Nicholson waved him to a chair and watched as his subordinate opened the book.

‘I’ve some idea about the bends, but what’s the actuality of them?’

‘It’s all to do with pressure, sir. The deeper you dive, the greater the pressure on the human body from the water surrounding you. The pressure increases by about one atmosphere for
every thirty feet of depth. When there’s significant pressure, say when you dive below about sixty feet, the nitrogen in the compressed air mixture you’re breathing isn’t expelled
completely from your lungs, but starts going into solution in your bloodstream.’

‘Is that dangerous?’

‘Not as long as your body is under pressure, no. The problem comes when you re-surface. If you come up too fast without decompressing, the nitrogen comes out of solution as bubbles in the
blood, usually at your joints. That will cause excruciating pain and often forces the sufferer into physical contortions, hence the name. To prevent that, a diver must pause at certain depths on
the way back up to the surface and wait for the nitrogen to emerge from the bloodstream gradually.

‘The simplest way to cope is to lower a line with a heavy weight on the end from the diving tender, and attach separate sets of aqualungs to the line at the correct decompression depths.
Then all the diver has to do is ascend until he reaches the lowest set, wait there for the appropriate time, then ascend to the next one. You have to use these additional compressed air
cylinders,’ he accurately anticipated his superior’s next question, ‘because after a very long or deep dive the diver would use up all the remaining air in his aqualung long
before he could safely surface.’

Elias gestured to the book he’d opened on the desk in front of him.

‘These tables show the recommended decompression depths and times for particular diving depths and durations, sir. Unfortunately, as I said on the phone, the equations are highly variable,
and to complicate things there are a whole bunch of different tables to consider. The US Navy’s tables, as a matter of interest, acquired themselves some notoriety for getting divers out of
the water quickest but also into the decompression chamber fastest.’

Nicholson looked at him blankly, and Elias explained.

‘It’s a kind of joke, sir. If a diver surfaces too quickly, which anybody using the US Navy tables would almost certainly do, getting them straight into a decompression chamber is
the only way to stop them suffering from the bends. The chamber is basically a pressurized cylinder carried on the deck of the bigger diving tenders, which allows divers to get re-pressurized in
controlled conditions. No aqualungs involved, so no hanging around twenty feet below the surface for half an hour.

‘To give you an example, sir, the US Navy tables list a total decompression time of only twenty-one minutes for a dive of half an hour down to a depth of one hundred and thirty feet. The
Buhlmann tables give twenty-eight minutes as a minimum, and the DECOM tables, which are derived from the Buhlmann figures, recommend thirty-eight minutes, which is nearly twice as long as the US
Navy suggest. Me, I’d go for the DECOM figures every time.’

‘So,’ the Director asked, ‘taking a hypothetical case, what would be your best guess at a dive depth that required three aqualung cylinders for the decompression
pauses?’

‘It’s impossible to be sure,’ Elias replied, ‘but if I had to guess I’d say you were looking at either a very deep dive – down to maybe one hundred and fifty
feet – or an unusually long dive at some intermediate depth.’

When the door had closed behind Elias, Nicholson opened the wide central drawer in his desk, pulled out the photographs and spread them out in front of him again. He was once more examining the
fifth picture through his magnifying glass when the telephone rang.

‘This is the Duty Interpreter at N-PIC, sir, with a follow-up call. On the Keyhole’s next pass, the diving tender was no longer in the area. We’re doing a wide area survey to
see if we can pick it up in port somewhere, but that might be difficult. That area of the Med is full of boats just like the one in question, and it’ll be a real needle-in-a-haystack job to
find it.’

‘Did you have any other assets in range between the Keyhole’s passes?’

‘No, sir, sorry. It’s a low-interest area.’

‘OK, do the best you can. On my authority, identifying and finding that boat is now a Class Two priority task. Use all available assets, but do not deviate any of the birds from their
normal routes.’

‘Understood.’

The Director replaced the telephone and bent again over the photographs. The fifth picture had been taken at a somewhat oblique angle, as the satellite was moving away from the target, which
paradoxically made it slightly clearer than all but one of the preceding shots, because the sun was no longer reflected off the surface of the sea directly towards the camera. Of course, the
surface of the Mediterranean was still dappled with light reflected from wavelets, but the area on the port side of the diving tender was comparatively dark.

But there in the water, close to the protuberance identified as a cleated-down rope by N-PIC, was a small bright blob. Even using the magnifying glass, Nicholson was unable to determine what it
was. To his naked eye it looked like either an unusually square-shaped wavelet or something metallic hanging suspended just below the surface. Through the magnifying glass it looked exactly the
same, only bigger.

He thought back over what Elias had just told him. This could be merely the weight the diver had used to anchor the rope to which he had attached his compressed air cylinders. But, in that case,
why hadn’t he recovered the rope and its weight immediately? Why would he stop hauling in the rope with the weight so close to the surface, cleat it down and go to the wheel-house? Perhaps
he’d received a call on his radio, if he possessed one. Or maybe he’d gone to make a radio call. An urgent call?

No, that didn’t make sense. Only one possible sequence of events made sense, and that was the one that for thirty years he had endured nightmares about.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he muttered grimly. He shook his head and reached out a hand to the black telephone.

Kandíra, south-west Crete

Spiros didn’t own a vice, so he clamped the flask as firmly as he could against the edge of the wooden table with his hands and a towel, while Nico began to use the
hacksaw on its neck. The blade was blunt, with teeth missing, which didn’t help, and the steel was tougher than it looked. And Spiros’s hands shook a little after so much whisky.

But finally the blade began to bite, and after five minutes Nico had cut about a quarter of an inch into the neck of the flask. He stopped for another swig of beer, and then they turned the
flask over to rest on its base before he continued cutting, just in case any contents escaped through the incision before he finished. Holding the flask upright against the pressure of the hacksaw
was much more difficult, and it took another twenty minutes before the last unsevered fraction of steel finally parted and the top of the flask tumbled to the floor.

Nico put the hacksaw down on his chair and opened up the metal case resting on the table. Then he positioned the flask over the lid, carefully tipped it on its side and gently tapped its base. A
thin trickle of grey-brown dust emerged, then with a rush a small piece of what looked like dried mud shot out of the flask, and landed on the centre of the case’s lid.

‘What is it?’ Spiros asked.

‘I have no idea,’ Nico replied, prodding at the strange lump with a screwdriver. As the blade touched it, the solid piece crumbled into the same grey-brown dust.

‘Drugs?’ Spiros inquired hopefully, pinching some of the powder between forefinger and thumb and smelling it.

‘I don’t know. It could be heroin, perhaps. I’ve heard that some of the very pure varieties are brown in colour.’

Nico was almost right. About ninety per cent of the heroin that finds its way to Western Europe, and particularly to Britain, is extracted from the opium poppies –
Papaver
Somniferum
– of Anatolia in Turkey. Known as Turkish Brown, among other pseudonyms, this heroin looks something like Demerara sugar, and it’s usually either smoked or the fumes
inhaled as the heroin is burnt in a spoon or piece of tinfoil held over a candle.

In contrast, the American addict’s heroin of choice is Thai White, culled from the poppy fields of Thailand’s Golden Triangle. Pure white, and suitable for snorting or injecting,
this is gram for gram the most expensive heroin, and hence by definition the most expensive illegal drug, in the world, worth about three times as much as Columbian Pure, which is the very best
quality cocaine.

Nico leaned forward to smell the powder and found it was almost odourless – perhaps just a slight hint of mushrooms. He dampened the end of one finger and applied it gently to the edge of
the little heap of powder, then touched it to his tongue. He grimaced and spat. ‘This is not heroin,’ he complained. ‘Whatever it is, it’s disgusting.’

‘That’s it, then,’ Spiros muttered. ‘This can go to the dump.’ He tossed the two pieces of the opened flask into the steel case and snapped it shut, securing the
lid with the over-centre catch. ‘Five days I’ve wasted on that aircraft wreck, and nothing at all to show for it.’

Nico shrugged and looked over at his uncle. ‘If you really don’t want it, I’ll take the case and see if I can get something for it.’

‘Take it, take it,’ Spiros grumbled. ‘And take the rest of this rubbish as well.’ He opened the case once again, dropped the three remaining flasks into their empty
recesses, added the red file, and slammed the lid shut.

Ten minutes later, Nico left Aristides’s house and began the short walk to his own apartment – actually three rooms, accessed by an outside staircase, on the upper
floor of a two-storey house owned by a friend – which lay on the northern edge of the village. As he walked through the silent streets, deserted but for a handful of near-feral cats noisily
disputing their territorial rights, Nico became more conscious of the weight of the object he grasped with his right hand.

From what Spiros had told him, it seemed that the case had remained underwater for a long time, several years at least. It was therefore probably unlikely that anyone would take an interest in
it now. And it was just a steel case after all, though specially constructed for carrying those strange flasks. The flasks themselves were something else. He still had no idea what the brown powder
was, but it just had to be valuable to somebody somewhere, otherwise the comprehensive sealing and locking of the stoppers on the flasks made absolutely no sense. And if it was valuable, there was
always the chance that someone might come looking for it.

Nico stopped at the end of the street and considered for a few moments. It might be best to handle the steel case and its contents the same way he treated most of the other prizes that Spiros
had wrested from the Mediterranean over the years. Taking it back to his home might be asking for trouble. On the other hand, it was late and he was tired. He could hide it somewhere else in the
morning.

Yes, he nodded, and turned right. Three minutes later he opened the door to his apartment and stepped inside, placed the steel case in the bottom of the free-standing wardrobe in his bedroom,
and walked straight through into the bathroom.

Spiros Aristides put down the toolbox just inside the kitchen door, walked back into his sitting room and looked sourly at the three fingers still remaining in the bottom of
his bottle of Scotch. What the hell, he thought. He’d be in no fit state to dive tomorrow, but he hadn’t planned to go anywhere. He settled down at the table and poured himself another
glass. He’d finish the bottle and then call it a night.

Twenty minutes later, as he drained the last remnant of Scotch from his glass, and lay down fully clothed on his unmade bed, Spiros Aristides sneezed. Forty-five minutes after that, sitting on
the edge of his own bed in the upstairs apartment on the northern edge of Kandíra, Nico Aristides sneezed as well.

Tuesday
Kandíra, south-west Crete

Christina Polessos was seventy-eight years of age, and had lived in Kandíra most of her life. Burnt brown by the sun, she invariably wore black – almost the
Cretan national colour – in memory of her husband, dead some forty years. And that, coupled with her stooped posture, noticeably hooked nose, large dark eyes and thin and somewhat mean mouth,
gave her a quizzical, crow-like appearance. Everyone knew her, but few really liked her. She knew everyone, and returned the favour by liking almost no one.