Pandemic (9 page)

She especially didn’t approve of Spiros Aristides. He was a mainland Greek for openers, and had never married, which were two strikes against him right away. He drank far too much, as she
made sure everyone knew, and she was quite convinced that he was involved in something illegal every time he went out in his boat. In this, of course, she was perfectly correct, although her
oft-repeated tales of gun-running and drug-smuggling bore no relation to the truth.

And his house! In contrast to most of the whitewashed houses in the narrow street, it looked a disgrace. The paint on the shutters was faded and peeling, the tiny garden overgrown and
weed-strewn, and even the roof tiles looked scruffy and ill cared-for. She deliberately averted her eyes every time she passed it, muttering imprecations under her breath.

But even if on principle she didn’t look, she could certainly still listen as she trudged down the street, hoping maybe to hear some spoken titbit from within its walls that she could
embellish and re-tell later to her few cronies in the square.

And that morning she was rewarded: not by a snatch of incriminating conversation but by a long, pain-racked moan seeming to emanate from one of the upstairs rooms. This was so unexpected that
she stopped dead in her tracks and looked up, listening intently. The sound was shortly repeated, then followed by a sobbing, bubbling noise that might almost have been an attempt at speech.

She shook her head grimly, lowered her eyes and walked on. She was almost a hundred yards further down the street, and had nearly reached the square, when she stopped again, turned and looked
round. Her brain had been niggling away at what she’d just heard, and some part of it had decoded the final sounds. It could, she suddenly realized, have been the single Greek word –
‘
voíthya
’ – ‘help me’.

She looked back up the street. Nobody else had passed the elderly mainlander’s house since she’d walked by, and possibly nobody would – few of the villagers living beyond his
property – at least not until later in the day. Had that been a cry for help or just the moaning of a man after far too much to drink the previous evening? No, there had been a peculiar
choking sound about that utterance. Whatever was wrong with the old man, it was more than just simple drunkenness.

And this was, she realized, a golden opportunity to establish for herself that the inside of Aristides’s property was just as disgusting as the outside. But to find out what was wrong with
him, she would have to actually go into the Greek’s house, and she couldn’t do that alone, as a widowed woman. That would be highly improper and would set tongues wagging, something she
couldn’t tolerate.

She pursed her thin lips, walked on into the tiny square, and looked around her. Maria and Luisa were usually to be found there at this time of the morning, chatting outside one of the small
handful of shops before heading home to prepare lunch. Luisa, she saw, wasn’t anywhere in sight, but then Maria Coulouris appeared around the corner, shopping basket in hand, and almost
bumped into her.

‘Good. Come with me.’ Christina grabbed the younger woman by the arm.

‘Where to?’

‘That old Greek’s house. I think he may be dying,’ Christina said with some relish.

‘What?’

Christina explained to her the sounds she had heard minutes earlier.

‘He’s probably just drunk again,’ Maria hazarded.

Christina shook her head. ‘He may well be, but the sounds I heard were strange. I’m sure there’s something else wrong with him, something much more serious.’

They walked back up the street together, Maria still protesting ineffectually. Outside the tiny house they paused and listened, but no sounds floated down now from the upstairs windows.

‘We’ll shout out,’ Christina announced, and yelled ‘Aristides!’ in a surprisingly loud voice.

There was no response, no sound at all.

‘Perhaps he’s gone out.’

‘No. I walked past here no more than five minutes ago. He was in one of the upstairs rooms then. We’ll just have to go inside and look.’

‘Must we, Christina? I have so many things to do.’

The older woman ignored her half-hearted protest and seized the handle of the street door. Like just about every property in Kandíra, it was unlocked. Some of the other doors in the
village didn’t even possess locks. She pushed the door open and both women peered inside. The narrow hall was empty, the house silent as the grave. Maria suddenly sneezed and Christina
frowned at her.

‘Sorry. It’s the dust.’

‘Aristides!’ Christina called again, with the same lack of response.

‘I don’t like this at all.’

‘We have to go upstairs,’ Christina said firmly, and the two women began slowly and quietly to ascend the wooden staircase.

At the top, Maria halted suddenly. ‘What’s that smell?’ she muttered.

Christina sniffed suspiciously, then shook her head. ‘I can smell it too, but I don’t know what it is.’

There were only two doors leading off the tiny landing. One stood open and they could see clearly that it was a spare bedroom, with a wooden-slatted steel-frame bed pushed against the far wall,
a small chest of drawers opposite it. No mattress or bedding was visible. The other door was closed, and the two women approached it.

Christina knocked firmly twice on the wooden panel, again calling out the old Greek’s name, but still without apparent result. She looked questioningly at Maria, who nodded, then she
turned the worn brass handle and pushed against the door.

They both stepped into the doorway and stared. Then Maria began to scream.

Aeroporto di Brindisi, Papola-Casale, Puglia, Italy

Richter and Simpson had spent the night in a hotel in Brindisi as the guest of the SISDE, but early the following morning Simpson had been whisked off in a
chauffeur-driven car to attend some kind of briefing or liaison meeting – he had seemed somewhat evasive when questioned – leaving Richter to cool his heels.

Actually, that had suited him quite well. He’d first grabbed a light breakfast in the hotel dining room, then used his credit card to obtain some cash and gone shopping. There were two
items he had particularly wanted to buy, and he came upon both of them in the fourth shop he tried.

The 800 Squadron maintainers arrived from the
Invincible
by Merlin late that same morning. They had first been briefed by the Squadron Engineering Officer, and then Commander (Air) had
taken the Chief Petty Officer in charge aside for a few minutes, and explained exactly what he wanted the team to do here at Brindisi.

Richter was meanwhile back at the airfield, standing outside the squadron building and wondering what to do about lunch, and also why he hadn’t bought something to read in the airport
shop, when he heard the distinctive clatter of the Merlin’s rotors. The helicopter approached Brindisi from the south-east at five hundred feet, dropped down to fifty feet once inside the
airfield boundary, then air-taxied over to the dispersal area where Richter’s Sea Harrier was parked. Once the big helicopter had settled on the ground, its engines shut down and the rotors
stopped, Richter walked over and waited while the squadron maintainers climbed out.

The CPO spotted Richter immediately – it wasn’t difficult, as he was the only person anywhere on the dispersal who wasn’t wearing either an Italian air force uniform or
maintainer’s overalls – and walked over to join him. ‘Wings had a word with me before we left the ship, sir,’ the Chief said, ‘so I know what we’re supposed to
be doing.’

Richter grinned in a conspiratorial fashion. He knew exactly what Wings had told the CPO, because he had spent half an hour with the Commander explaining precisely what was going to happen,
before he left the ship. ‘Thanks, Chief. Can you just make sure she’s fully fuelled and ready to fly before you leave? I may need to get out of here fairly quickly.’

‘Consider it done, sir. Do you want us to pre-flight her as well?’

‘Yes, please, that’s a good idea. Turn the aircraft round so that she’s facing the taxiway. When you’re working on her, don’t forget that the Aden cannon are
loaded. I know it’s not SOP, but could you remove all the external locks and pull and stow all the pins except for the ejection seat and the MDC. Oh, and can you leave a ladder attached, so I
don’t need to bother the ground staff?’

‘No problem.’ The CPO winked.

Kandíra, south-west Crete

The police arrived first because, from the telephone description furnished by a tremulous Christina, supplemented by hysterical squeals from her friend Maria, it was clear
that Spiros Aristides had been murdered – hacked to death.

The first two police cars arrived from Chaniá an hour and a half after Christina’s excited phone call, and the officers immediately set up a cordon around the victim’s house.
The senior officer pulled on latex gloves, then opened the street door, entered the building and climbed the staircase to the upper floor. There he took one look inside the bedroom and quickly
closed the door. It would definitely be better, he decided immediately, to wait for the arrival of the forensic team and scene-of-crime officers he’d requested from the main police station in
Irakleío.

Ninety minutes later a white van arrived. Three men wearing white overalls and carrying plastic cases full of gloves, pads, bags, tweezers, cameras and all the other paraphernalia of criminal
investigation, climbed out of it. The forensic scientist in charge – who also happened to be a medical doctor – introduced himself to the senior policeman.

‘Dr Gravas,’ he said, ‘Theodore Gravas. And you are?’

‘Inspector Lavat. The house is cordoned off, and nobody’s been inside except those two women’ – he gestured across the street where a grim-faced Christina stood with one
arm protectively around the shoulders of her tearful friend – ‘and me. I wore gloves, of course, and touched nothing inside the house apart from the bedroom door handle. I didn’t
even enter the bedroom, nor, I understand, did the women.’

‘
They
found the body?’

‘Yes. According to the older one, she heard a moaning sound from the bedroom window.’

‘Hacked to death, I believe?’ Gravas said.

Lavat nodded. ‘I didn’t approach the body closely, but that’s certainly what it looks like.’

‘Right.’ Gravas turned to brief the other two members of his team. ‘I’ll go up myself first to confirm that death has occurred and to perform an initial examination. Then
we’ll follow the standard procedure, starting with the bedrooms and working down through the house.’

Gravas pulled on plastic overshoes, thin latex gloves, and a paper mask to cover his mouth and nose. He picked up his small scene-of-crime bag, and stepped over to the door, turned the handle
and eased it open. He climbed the stairs slowly, peered inside the spare bedroom, then switched his attention to the closed bedroom door across the landing. He slowly and carefully opened it wide,
then propped it open with a chair from the landing. Only then did he turn his attention to the corpse lying on the bed.

His first impression was that the attack must have been almost incredibly brutal. The old man’s entire face was a mask of blood, only the very top of the forehead and his hair seeming
untouched by the viscous red liquid. Below, his chest was a carpet of red, and the bedding beneath him soaked through. It looked almost as if the body had been completely drained of blood, there
was so much of it evident around him.

Gravas sniffed, trying to identify conflicting odours. Blood, definitely and unarguably. Urine, faeces – and something else? Something faint, unfamiliar and unpleasant.

He walked across the room to the bed, eyes flicking from side to side as he looked for any clues, any sign of a weapon or anything out of place. Any incongruity, in fact.

He stopped beside the bed and looked down. One glance at the body told him this was a complete waste of effort, but he stretched out his hand and felt for a pulse in the side of the man’s
bloodied neck. Nothing, of course. Then he bent forward and gently touched the flesh of the face with his gloved fingertips. He looked more carefully, then used both hands to search for the wounds
that he was sure were there.

Two minutes later he turned his attention to the torso, and five minutes after that he stepped back from the bed. Behind the mask, his expression was puzzled. Nothing that he’d seen and
felt on this body made any sense.

Spiros Aristides was undeniably dead, and from the initial approximate body temperature measurement – obtained simply by placing a long thermometer in the dead man’s armpit for two
minutes – he had probably expired about three to four hours earlier. But at that precise moment Gravas had not the slightest idea what had killed him.

He was reasonably certain that death had not been caused by any kind of sharp-edged weapon, nor as far as he could see, probing the skin underneath the sodden clothing, by a bullet. He had found
no lesions of any kind on the face or head. The torso was another matter, because there could be wounds he had failed to detect still hidden beneath the carpet of blood. For a definitive answer he
would have to wait until he got the corpse back to the mortuary.

What he did know was that whatever had killed the Greek had caused virtually all his blood supply to haemorrhage from every orifice. The bloody facial mask was the result not of some frenzied
attack by a machete-wielding homicidal maniac, but of blood pouring from eyes, nose, ears and mouth.

And that was something Gravas had never seen before, and hoped never to see again.

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

David Elias had just decided to lock up his desk and office safe, and head off for an early-morning coffee and a crap, not necessarily in that order, when his internal
phone rang.

‘Elias? I’ve got a few questions for you. Come up.’

The coffee would have to wait, Elias decided. By now the crap couldn’t, but he’d have to be quick. ‘On my way, Director.’

When he reached the top floor, John Nicholson’s door was already open, but Elias knocked anyway and waited for a response before entering and standing beside the leather armchair that
faced the big oak desk. The Director, he thought, looked somewhat irritated, and Elias wondered which of his own recent reports was responsible, and exactly how severe a dressing-down he was about
to receive.