As Krywald and Stein walked around the corner, they spotted the policeman immediately. He was leaning against a wall in the shade, opposite a scruffy white house, and smoking with the cigarette cupped in his hand. As the two men appeared he dropped the stub to the ground, trod it out and straightened his uniform jacket.
Stein walked over to him. ‘We’re from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control,’ he announced in Greek, and displayed one of the ID cards that he and Krywald had faked by using the laptop computer, a portable printer and a mugshot acquired from a passport-photograph booth before they left Rethymno.
One of the major problems with an identity card is that unless the person to whom it is presented knows exactly what the real one looks like, he has no idea whether it’s the genuine article. This particular policeman had spent his entire life and career on Crete, and had never even heard of the CDC until Inspector Lavat had told him earlier that the team from Atlanta was expected on the island. The card he studied looked perfectly correct to him, so he just nodded and handed it back.
Stein pulled a notebook from his pocket. ‘Is this the house where Mr Spiros Aristides lived?’
‘Yes, sir,’ the officer replied. ‘The door is not locked, and his body is still upstairs in the bedroom.’
‘Thank you.’ Stein and Krywald then pulled on surgical gloves and paper face masks. ‘Make sure nobody else goes inside until we have completed our examination of the premises.’
‘Do you want to check inside?’ Lavat asked. The three men stood in the street outside Jakob’s bar, eyeing the faded and peeling paintwork on the door and windows.
Hardin shook his head. ‘Not particularly. I don’t believe for a moment that the infective agent was encountered in the bar, otherwise we’d be looking at a dozen deaths by now, not just two. So, exactly where is Aristides’s house from here?’
Lavat pointed along the dusty street, and the three men turned as one to glance that way.
‘Again,’ Hardin said, ‘I don’t know what we’re looking for, or even if there’s anything here to find. Just be careful, and always look but don’t touch. If you see anything, anything at all, that seems in any way unusual or out of place, inform me immediately. But, I repeat, don’t touch it, OK?’ Lavat and Gravas both nodded. ‘Right, masks on. Spread out and let’s make a start.’
Each man pulled a disposable paper mask over his nose and mouth, and they set off, walking very slowly down the centre of the street, their eyes roaming the ground, the walls of houses, even the trees and bushes.
‘Nothing here,’ Krywald muttered. ‘We’ll try upstairs.’
They’d searched the tiny patio garden, and then the downstairs rooms first as they had been taught, moving swiftly and working efficiently, but it was quickly obvious, once they’d checked the various rooms and pulled open the doors of all the cupboards, that nothing the size of the steel case described to them could possibly be hidden there. Only then did Krywald lead the way up the old wooden staircase.
‘Hell of a smell in here,’ Krywald remarked as they reached the upper landing.
‘According to that cop outside, the Greek’s body is still lying dead in here somewhere.’
‘OK, we’ll just ignore it. I want to be out of here in five minutes.’
They checked the spare bedroom first, but found nothing there, then Krywald walked across the landing and stopped outside the closed door of the only other bedroom.
‘Hear that?’ he asked, leaning his head close to the door panels.
‘What?’
‘I dunno – kind of a faint buzzing sound. Like a chopper a long way off, but it seems to be coming from in here.’
‘I don’t hear it,’ Stein said.
Krywald listened for a few more seconds, then shook his head and pushed open the door. The faint buzzing noise was suddenly loud enough for Stein to hear it too.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Krywald said, stopping dead in the doorway and looking across the room. ‘What the hell happened to him?’
Like Krywald, Stein was no stranger to death, sudden or otherwise, but the sight of the blood-soaked bed, and Aristides’s bloody corpse, turned him pale. ‘Fuck knows,’ he said, ‘but at least now we know what you were hearing a minute ago.’
Krywald looked where Stein was pointing, and realized that what he had initially taken for dried blood covering Aristides’s corpse was actually moving – and buzzing. It was a carpet of what looked like thousands of flies, black, blue and green, their bodies heaving and wriggling in an almost solid mass as they fed greedily upon the dead man’s body.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Krywald said again. ‘OK, let’s make it quick.’
Two minutes later they were out of the bedroom and back on the tiny landing, having checked every possible nook and corner in the bedroom that could have concealed the steel case. They had found nothing.
‘Shit,’ Krywald said. ‘If he ever had it, he’s hidden it somewhere. There’s no way it’s still in this house. Let’s hope our friend Nico took it home with him.’
The two men walked quickly down the stairs and headed out of the house. As they opened the door to the street they both unconsciously took a long, deep breath of the fresher air, but it would be a long time before they would get the smell of that house out of their memories. They nodded briefly to the policeman on guard, then walked back the way they had come.
After having found exactly nothing in the intervening streets that looked as if it shouldn’t be there, the other three men also arrived outside Spiros Aristides’s house.
‘Is this it?’ Hardin asked.
Lavat nodded and gestured to the police officer standing near by.
‘I’ve had a guard outside ever since we found the body.’
‘OK,’ Hardin said, ‘as I explained before, there’s nothing much I can do until my own people get here, but I will go in now and at least take a look at him. Dr Gravas, could you give me a hand?’
Hardin walked over to the red fibreglass box positioned close to the wall opposite the house. Biohazard symbols – similar to the familiar radiation warning markers but with their own distinctive spiky appearance – adorned the lid and sides. He removed his jacket and hung it on a rusty nail protruding from the wall at a convenient height, then snapped open the catches on the box and flipped up the lid.
It contained all the basic equipment needed to carry out a field investigation: masks, gloves, caps, syringes and needles, microscope slides and covers, glass and plastic sample tubes, sealable plastic bags in a variety of sizes for organ storage, reagents for specimen testing, scalpels, forceps, saws and other dissection instruments, packs of scalpel blades and stainless steel pins for holding apart sections of an organ during a post-mortem examination. The box also contained a host of other, non-medical, equipment such as torches, batteries, paper, pens, pencils, erasers, Magic Markers, adhesive tape of various types, two portable recorders with spare cassettes and batteries, and even a bottle of bleach.
On top of all this was, neatly folded, a lightweight orange Racal biological space suit, which Gravas eyed with interest. Hardin noted his keen attention.
‘It’s made of an airtight fabric called Tyvek,’ he explained, pulling the suit out of the box. ‘It’s not like the ones we use back in Atlanta in the Level Four lab,’ he added. ‘We call those “blue suits”. They’re made by a company called Chemturion and are connected to a central compressed air system to provide positive pressure within the suit and also supplies the air we breathe. They’re noisy to work in because of the air constantly rushing in, so trying to talk to other people or use a telephone is difficult, verging on the impossible, unless you’re prepared to switch off your air supply for a few seconds.
‘This suit isn’t pressurized because there’s just no practical way to do that out in the field. It’s just a neutral-pressure whole-body suit, but the hood – it’s called a Racal hood – is pressurized to protect the lungs and the eyes, which contain two of the membranes most vulnerable to virus attack.’
As he was speaking, Hardin had unfolded the suit and stepped carefully into it, pulling the orange Tyvek up his legs and then thrusting his arms into the sleeves. He slipped off his shoes and pulled on rubber boots, then spent several minutes taping the legs of the suit over the boots, to make sure there were no gaps and that the
