The house was exactly as Lavat and Gravas had described it, so Hardin knew precisely where he was going. But he didn’t immediately head for the stairs. First he looked carefully around the tiny hall, checking to see if he could spot anything out of place, anything that looked as if it shouldn’t be there. Nothing was evident.
Then Hardin walked through to the kitchen. He looked in the stone sink, above which a handful of flies buzzed in erratic circles. The sink contained a single plate bearing a small piece of cheese, a bowl holding half a dozen black olives and a number of olive pits, and a slightly grubby cup half-full of what looked like strong, almost black, coffee. He carefully pulled open the single drawer, which held assorted bits of mismatched cutlery, and inspected the two cupboards, which contained plates of different sizes and other pieces of crockery, and about half a dozen pans. The cooker yielded nothing, but Hardin spent a couple of minutes looking through the contents of the toolbox he found beside the kitchen door.
Another door, at the rear of the kitchen, led to a tiny bathroom, obviously a later addition to the property, which contained a toilet, a small sink and a narrow shower stall, down the inside of which a constant stream of rusty-brown water trickled from the shower head. It didn’t look as if Spiros Aristides had used this shower very often. On the other hand, Hardin reflected with a wry smile, if he went diving in the Mediterranean most days he probably wouldn’t need to.
There was a single small cupboard with a mirrored door attached to the wall above the sink. It contained pretty much what one would expect: a bar of soap, a small bottle of shampoo, a twin-blade razor with half a dozen spare blades, and two cans of shaving foam. There was nothing else of interest.
Back in the main room, Hardin switched on the centre light, glanced around and then walked across to the scarred wooden table. There was an empty Scotch bottle more or less in the middle, and next to it an empty beer bottle. This, Hardin deduced, probably meant that Spiros had been drinking Scotch while his nephew had drunk the beer, or perhaps vice versa. Assuming, of course, that Nico had returned here with his uncle after their meeting at Jakob’s, which seemed likely.
All that appeared normal. What struck Hardin as he looked more closely at the table was that the other things on it were not quite what one would expect to find on a piece of furniture used for eating meals. There were a couple of screwdrivers, a pair of pliers and a hacksaw with a damaged blade, all of which properly belonged in the toolbox.
Hardin bent down and peered very closely at one corner of the table. Small but perfectly clear: definite scratch marks. Fresh scratch marks, as if some work involving the tools scattered across the table had been done there recently. Hardin stood up and looked around the room, wondering if he was just chasing shadows, if he was inferring something complex from what might have been some simple domestic chore. Maybe the Greek had trouble opening a jar of olives or something, and had simply used these tools to wrench off the top.
He glanced around again, and was heading for the door into the hall when his subconscious stopped him. He’d seen something out of the corner of his eye, something that didn’t fit. He turned back and looked down behind the table, at the dusty flag-stoned floor. Something small and red was lying there against the wall, something he hadn’t spotted when he’d first looked round the room.
Hardin carefully moved the chair away from the table and eased himself down into a crouch to study what he’d found. At first, he couldn’t make out what it was: it looked like a thin red cylinder of some sort.
Ever conscious of the possibility of damage to his protective clothing, and the potential dangers lurking within this house, Hardin stood up again without touching the object. He walked out into the hall, picked up the small instrument bag he had brought with him and pulled out a pair of long-handled forceps. Back in the room, he crouched down again and cautiously prodded the strange object with the end of the instrument.
It moved and rolled and then Hardin realized exactly what it was – a length of thick red wax, cut off the neck of a bottle or something similar, which had curled itself up again, re-forming into its original shape.
‘Curious,’ he murmured, and picked up the wax by threading the end of the forceps through the centre of the coil. He stood up, placed the wax on the table and examined it, but in the gloom it was difficult to see much detail. Hardin reached out and touched the switch on the standard lamp that stood next to the table, flooding it with light.
Then he realized something else. The standard lamp didn’t belong where it was now standing. The electric cable was plugged into a socket nearly ten feet away, close to the fireplace, and was stretched to its limit, though there was another power socket closer to the table, less than three feet from the lamp base. That didn’t really make sense. Hardin stepped back and glanced around him.
The room’s central ceiling light was comparatively dim – only a sixty-watt bulb, Hardin guessed – so the owner would probably want a stronger light by the two easy chairs beside the fireplace. That was where a man would take his book or newspaper, to sit in one of the more comfortable chairs and toast his feet against the fire in the comparative cool of a winter evening. Hardin walked across and peered down at the floor beside each chair.
Faintly visible there was a circular area that didn’t reveal the same amount of dust as the rest of the floor around it in that corner. Hardin estimated its diameter at just over a foot, so he walked back and studied the base of the standard lamp. Also about a foot.
He nodded in satisfaction. He didn’t know exactly what Aristides had been up to, but it looked certain that he had been opening something at the table in this room. Something that had been sealed with red wax. He or they had dragged the standard lamp over so that they could see better, while using the tools still scattered across the table.
Hardin bent over to inspect the coiled wax more carefully. It looked as if it had originally encased some kind of small bottle or flask. Still using the forceps he opened it out, checking the inside of the loose cylinder it formed. It was completely smooth, so he looked again at the outside. Clearly visible there was a cross-hatched pattern, as if the wax had been encased in some kind of securing wire.
He stepped back from the table and scanned the floor behind it, then murmured in satisfaction and bent forward to again use his forceps. He dropped the tangle of wires – they formed a kind of loose cage, the ends of the strands bright where somebody had cut them with pliers – on the table next to the coil of wax. Hardin studied both objects for a few moments, considering.
Then he headed back into the kitchen and inspected the contents of the small rubbish bin. Next he peered outside the rear door, then checked again in every cupboard and drawer. No sign of any kind of a flask or bottle, so maybe the nephew Nico had taken it away with him.
But even without the hard evidence of a flask, he knew his diagnosis made sense, and it probably explained why Spiros and Nico were both dead, and why nobody else in Kandira was apparently affected. Both men had been killed by an unknown pathogen stored in some kind of a small flask, which had been heavily sealed with both wax and wire. They had presumably opened the flask here inside Spiros’s house, infecting themselves immediately, and both were dead within a few hours.
Hardin still didn’t know what had killed these two men, but he already knew much more than he had when he’d entered the house. He could still be dealing with some rare but naturally occurring pathogen, a lethal virus or such like, which for some reason was stored in a heavily sealed flask, which the two Greeks had unfortunately opened. But the other, more likely, possibility was that this pathogen was a manufactured agent, a bioweapon deliberately created in some unacknowledged and secret Level Four laboratory – an illegal, fast-acting and clearly lethal virus or toxin.
It was warm in the house, and Hardin was sweating inside his biological space suit, but still he shivered at the thought.
Chapter 12
Wednesday
‘So what do you want us to do?’ Commander (Air) asked Richter, who was leaning against the bulkhead in Flyco on the port side of the bridge.
‘My instructions are somewhat vague,’ Richter said, with a slight smile. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘they often are. What my section wants me to do is go ashore in Crete and find out if this epidemic is natural or if it’s been caused
