‘OK, OK, let’s do it,’ Elias grunted, and climbed into the driver’s seat. Stein and Krywald got into the back, crouching down below window level. Elias started the engine and the car moved off, over the rise and down the track towards Kandira.
Directly in front of Elias the road ran straight into the village, but there were barriers across it, manned by policemen, and several of their vehicles parked close by. Following Krywald’s directions, Elias turned right, towards the coast, and drove around the village on the track which they assumed led to the beach or harbour. Just short of the cliffs he stopped the car and turned it round, parking it in the shade of an olive tree about thirty metres from the temporary barricade. Then he got out, clutching the tourist map Krywald had bought earlier and also a Greek phrasebook, and walked over towards one of the policemen standing by the village perimeter, watching him.
‘Excuse me,’ Elias said in halting Greek, his finger tracing each word on the page of the phrasebook as he said it. ‘I am looking for the town of Palaiochora.’ He distorted the name as much as he could, which wasn’t difficult for him. The policeman looked at him blankly, so Elias repeated his inquiry, making a further conscious effort to mangle the Greek. Then in English he asked if the policeman spoke English, which it soon became apparent he didn’t.
At this point, just as Krywald had predicted, the policeman waved to his colleague, who wandered over to help them. Elias was the first other person they’d needed to talk to since their shift had started nearly three hours earlier, and any diversion, no matter how mundane, seemed welcome. Elias placed his back squarely towards the spot where he’d parked the hire car, and opened up the map. As both policemen studied it, it meant their backs were towards the vehicle as well.
Crouching in the car beside the olive tree, Krywald nodded to Stein and quietly opened the rear passenger door on the side of the car opposite the village. He and Stein slipped out and crouched behind their vehicle, pushing the door to, but not audibly closing it. As Krywald glanced across at Elias, both policemen had their backs still towards them. One was pointing up the track leading out of Kandira, towards the west, indicating the direction in which Sougia lay, and beyond that Anydroi and Palaiochora.
The two men stood up and walked calmly, and without haste, towards the nearest houses. The distance they needed to cover was less than forty yards, so within seconds they were out of sight, heading down a narrow twisting street towards the village centre.
The Central Intelligence Agency isn’t the only organization that reads newspapers gathered from around the world.
The British Secret Intelligence Service, popularly and incorrectly known as MI6, has a section which is given very much the same remit as that for which Jerry Mulligan worked at Langley. The source they were using was different: the SIS man on the spot in Athens had missed the local press but had picked up a broadcast on one of the radio stations. He had then telephoned three of his local contacts – two of whom were newspaper reporters and believed that he was too – and within an hour he had amassed pretty much the same information as Mulligan had gleaned from the newspaper.
Rather than wait for the normal end-of-business encrypted email to Vauxhall Cross, the SIS officer had then written, enciphered and dispatched a one-off high-priority email to SIS London, with a copy to his opposite number on Crete.
In London, after the message was decrypted and its originating station identified, it was automatically diverted into the electronic ‘in-box’ of the head of the Western Hemisphere Controllerate. He scanned it, and copied it to his number two, with a bald instruction to investigate and report.
Ninety minutes after this email had arrived at Vauxhall Cross, Richard Simpson, who’d arrived at Hammersmith from Heathrow Airport less than ten minutes earlier, was looking at a hard-copy printout of the message, which was annotated with the ‘investigate’ request from SIS.
Simpson hated computers and refused to have a terminal in his office, which meant that every message for which the Foreign Operations Executive was an action addressee had to be printed out and presented to him. This caused a considerable amount of irritation to – and a lot of extra work for – the staff at Hammersmith, but as Simpson was the head of the department there wasn’t a lot, apart from muttering and complaining to each other in the canteen, that anyone could do about it.
‘Typical of bloody Six,’ Simpson muttered sourly into his empty office, putting down the printed message. Then he glanced at his desk calendar, nodded, picked up his telephone and pressed three keys for an internal number.
‘Simpson,’ he said when his call was answered. ‘Come up, please.’
The Intelligence Director walked into Simpson’s office four minutes later and sat down in front of his desk.
‘Have you seen this?’ Simpson demanded, passing the printed sheet across.
The ID looked at it and nodded. ‘Yes. It could, of course, just be a bad case of Asian ’flu, but I doubt it. I have been wondering whether it might be some kind of biological weapon test. The obvious worry is that al-Qaeda or some other group of terrorists might have developed a biological weapon of mass destruction and they’re trying it out on Crete as a sort of test run. If so, it would be somewhat reminiscent of the Aum sect in Japan.’
Simpson looked irritated. He had great respect for the Intelligence Director’s breadth of knowledge, but had always found his pedantic delivery and frequently incomplete answers somewhat annoying. He was, however, well aware of the details of the Tokyo attack.
In March 1995 the Aum sect – its full name was Aum Shinrikyo, which translates more or less as ‘Aum Supreme Truth’, and it was led by Shoko Asahara who was half-blind and certainly more than half-mad – launched a gas attack using sarin on the Tokyo subway on a Monday morning in the middle of the rush hour. Twelve people died and over five and a half thousand had to receive hospital treatment. The low mortality rate was attributed to impurities in the sarin nerve gas manufactured by the cult. Because of the inevitably confined space and lack of fresh air in the subway, the death toll would have been hundreds or even thousands if the sect had developed a pure strain.
‘And what exactly has a gas attack in Tokyo got to do with a virus infection on Crete?’ Simpson demanded.
‘Nothing directly, but it might indicate the same kind of pattern. What isn’t generally known is that before the Tokyo attack the Aum sect carried out a trial run in Australia of the sarin gas it had itself developed. They bought a remote sheep ranch – the Banjawarn Station deep in the outback of Western Australia – specifically to test their concocted strain. It was an expensive test, since the ranch alone cost them four hundred thousand Australian dollars.’
‘Casualties?’ Simpson asked.
‘Twenty-nine sheep, no humans, but that was because the only people in the area were Aum technicians wearing full biological space suits. Despite its impurities, the Australian test proved that the sarin they had manufactured was lethal – which was all Asahara needed to know. The Aum sect is long gone, but what worries me is if al-Qaeda are following a similar path and they’ve chosen Crete as a testing-ground for some bioweapon they’ve developed or, worse, bought illicitly.’
‘From Russia?’
‘From Russia, or Britain or America or Iran or Syria or China or any one of about a dozen other nations. There are hundreds of biological and chemical weapon stockpiles dotted around the world, and making such agents isn’t actually that difficult as long as you possess the right facilities. Sarin – its chemical title is isopropyl methylphosphonfluoridate – is basically an insecticide, so its ingredients are readily available. You have to take care in making it, to ensure that there are no leaks, but any reasonably well-equipped chemical laboratory could manufacture it easily.’
‘The Tokyo death toll seems low. How dangerous is sarin?’
‘Very,’ the Intelligence Director replied. ‘The lethal dose is about six milligrams – that’s about decimal zero zero zero two of an ounce – and it doesn’t have to be inhaled. Just getting a drop of it on your skin is enough to kill you. And sarin is benign compared with some of the more modern concoctions.’
‘And you think this might be a bioweapon attack using sarin?’
The Intelligence Director shook his head.
