Pandemic

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:

MVCJV HWMZU

HFWGT JSWLY

RTCGU CHSKG

BQTFR NSKGP

ERIDG GFRDY

SQEXZ LSJVR

KEYTK QXPFG

The lines were a form of code, but Nicholson hadn’t used any kind of transposition cipher, or indeed any enciphering method at all, though he’d deliberately arranged the letters to look as if he had. He was fairly certain that his diary, which he kept with him at all times, was safe enough, but he hadn’t wanted a clear written record linking him to any of the people involved in the current operation. But as a methodical man, he had wanted to record their names for his own benefit, hence the code.

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:

MQRDF HDGTN

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 Chania 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 cliche. 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.