and met there by chance, suggests to me that they were both uninfected when they left the bar.
‘And that,’ he added, ‘means that they had to have come into contact with the pathogen somewhere here in Kandira, so we’ve got to find the source real quick before somebody else goes down. It also means that this hot agent, whatever the hell it is, works exponentially faster than anything that I’ve encountered before.’
The Central Intelligence Agency has a section whose multilingual personnel do nothing all day but read the world’s newspapers and magazines, searching for any snippet of information that might be of value, or simply of interest, to the Company. Another section does precisely the same thing with books, whether non-fiction or fiction. As a result, the officers employed in these two sections are probably the best-informed men and women on the planet, but you’d never know it because, like all CIA officers without publishing contracts, they never talk about their work.
At 0713 local time, Jerry Mulligan – who despite his Anglicized names had been born on Corfu and spoke fluent Greek and workable Turkish – pulled up a scanned image of the front page of an Athens paper on the twenty-one-inch computer monitor in front of him.
Most major newspapers, and almost all of the international ones, publish extracts of their daily editions on the Internet. Smaller papers don’t have either the money or the resources to do the same, which was why since the 1960s a CIA agent or asset in every city in the world has been employed to purchase daily copies of all local papers. Originally the newspapers were analysed there on site and any relevant cuttings sent to Langley by mail, but the growth of the Internet and the availability of email has greatly automated the process, effectively eliminating any kind of local analysis. These days, agents just scan the entire paper into a computer, one page at a time, and then send the scanned images as email attachments to one of several CIA-owned email accounts over in the States.
The Athens paper in question was definitely the product of a smaller publisher. Parochial in content, and lacking the advertising clout of its bigger brothers, it was nevertheless interesting, and Mulligan actually looked forward each time to reading it.
The ‘Cretan epidemic’ had made its front page, and as Mulligan read the text he immediately realized that this item was of potential interest to the Company for at least two reasons. Any kind of epidemic or outbreak of unexplained illness was relevant to them, because it might indicate some terrorist organization testing a biological weapon, or even foreshadow the start of a full-scale biological attack, while finding the remains of a crashed aircraft might close a still open Company file.
Mulligan flicked the trackball and sent the cursor shooting across the screen to the top left-hand corner of the news item. He depressed the left-hand key with his thumb, and with fingers made sensitive by years of practice, used the trackball to move the cursor down the screen, highlighting the entire text of the story. He pressed ‘Ctrl’ and ‘C’, the keyboard shortcut to copy the text, opened up a new file in the word processor and pasted the text into it. Then he quickly read the article again to make sure that the optical character recognition software hadn’t made any errors, like reading a capital ‘i’ instead of the letter ‘l’ or the number ‘1’, added the source of the story and the publication date, and saved it.
That was the easy bit. Next he ran the automatic translation program to produce a first-draft version of the whole article in English. This would be accurate in that it was an exact translation from the Greek, but difficult to read because of the inevitably stilted nature of the grammar and unusual sentence construction. Mulligan spent another twenty minutes smoothing out the rough edges, then he read the translation through one more time. Satisfied, he saved the final version, together with the original, and loaded them both onto the Agency’s central computer system’s main database as text files.
The last action he had to take was technically easy, but almost always took him some minutes to complete. All data – including photographs, text files, communications intercepts and even unattributed gossip – that was loaded onto the database had to be allocated both a security classification and a so-called ‘importance’ code.
Mulligan had no trouble deciding the classification – the source of the story was a newspaper so anything extracted from it had to be considered unclassified – but he mulled over the importance code for a couple of minutes.
The code consisted of a two-digit alphanumeric and was simple enough to interpret. The first letter indicated the region which was the source of the incident. ‘A’ was mainland America; ‘B’ was South America; ‘C’ was Canada; ‘D’ was what used to be termed the Eastern Bloc and which is now the Confederation of Independent States and the various satellite nations; ‘E’ the rest of Eastern Europe; ‘F’ Western Europe; ‘G’ the Middle East; ‘H’ the Far East including China and Japan; ‘I’ all other countries and locations, such as Antarctica, and ‘J’ was used for any non-region-specific reports, such as atmospheric or oceanographic events.
The numbers ran from ‘1’ to ‘6’. ‘1’ was the highest code and implied that the incident had probable direct and urgent relevance to the CIA, to America or to one of America’s allies. At the bottom of the scale, ‘6’ meant that the incident possessed interest only, but no particular relevance or urgency.
The letter was simple – obviously it had to be ‘F’ for Western Europe – and Mulligan eventually decided it merited a class ‘2’ coding for importance and relevance. He added the ‘F2’ code to the text, closed the file and moved on to the second page of the same Athenian newspaper.
Paul Richter walked into the Wardroom after lunch, poured himself a cup of coffee from the urn by the door and crossed to a chair in the corner of the large room. He picked up a travel magazine from the table in front of him and began flicking through it.
Richter didn’t often take holidays, because he usually didn’t have anybody to go anywhere with, and when Simpson allowed him any time off he normally went down to his tiny cottage on the east side of the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall and spent a few days playing with his motorcycles.
But he had travelled around most of the world, or at least the wet bits of it, courtesy of the Royal Navy’s Grey Funnel Line cruising organization, when he had been employed as a regular pilot in 800 Squadron and earlier when he’d flown helicopters, so he liked looking at the pictures. He’d been sitting there for about ten minutes when he heard his name called in a tannoy broadcast: ‘Lieutenant Commander Richter is requested to report to the Communications Centre.’
‘They’re playing your tune, Spook,’ John Moore called from the adjacent table, and Richter grinned at him.
‘If it’s what I think it is, it’s not going to be a fun few minutes,’ he said. ‘I’m already right at the top of my boss’s shit list and my guess is he’s about to drain all over me again.’
‘Something went wrong in Italy, I presume?’ Moore asked.
‘He seems to think so,’ Richter replied, ‘but from where I was standing everything worked out pretty much the way I’d planned it.’
In the CommCen on Five Deck, Richter was directed to a secure telephone apparatus in one corner of the room. All around him was the hum of electronic equipment, the clattering of teleprinters and the sound of the Communications staff talking to each other. He picked up the handset and said one word: ‘Richter.’
‘And about bloody time too. Do you know how long I’ve been kept hanging on this line?’
Simpson’s voice was quite unmistakable, and he sounded extremely irritated, but he was, in Richter’s experience, irritated most of the time, so that was probably understandable.
‘No, of course I don’t,’ Richter said. ‘I’ve only just been called down from the Wardroom. Where are you?’
‘Not that it’s any business of yours, but I’m still in Italy.’
‘Brindisi?’
‘Rome,’ Simpson snapped. ‘For reasons that don’t make any sense to me, you can’t fly direct from Brindisi to anywhere useful, so I’m in the Six office in Rome, waiting for the afternoon Alitalia from Fiumicino to Heathrow.’
‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘what do you want?’
There was a short appalled silence on the line, and Richter could sense – in fact, he could almost feel – Simpson’s anger building.
