the hill to where his own vehicle was parked. As he moved, he glanced at his watch, checking how much time he had before his second appointment of the evening – with a man named James Richards.
Chapter 13
Thursday
It wasn’t much of a hotel, but as far as Richter was concerned it was fine. He estimated he’d need a room for two nights, tops, and as long as the water was hot and the sheets were clean he was reasonably happy.
The Merlin had dropped him off at Irakleio the previous evening, and he’d hired a car – a blue Volkswagen Golf – and driven along the coast as far as Rethymno. The second hotel he’d tried had three vacant rooms, so he had picked the one that overlooked the hotel car park and hauled up his leather overnight bag from the Golf.
Richter didn’t normally bother with breakfast, but it was included in the room price, so he walked down to the dining room just before eight and crunched his way through a slice of hard toast and an almost equally hard roll, washed down with coffee that actually tasted like it had been made from beans rather than powder.
Afterwards, he walked down the street to a souvenir shop and bought a map of Crete before collecting the Golf from the car park and heading further west along the main north-coast highway, destination Kandira.
‘So, in summary, there are really two aspects to this outbreak that we need to address,’ Tyler Hardin began. ‘The first, the one that we the CDC team will be concentrating on, is to identify the pathogen that caused the deaths of these two men. Now that we have our equipment with us, I hope that we can achieve that fairly quickly.’
Hardin paused and looked round the tent that served as their makeshift base, set up by the main street that ran through Kandira. His three CDC colleagues – Mark Evans, Jerry Fisher and Susan Kane – were sitting on collapsible chairs in front of him, mugs of coffee in hand and the remains of their breakfast scattered on the table behind them.
All were qualified doctors and Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, Fisher with eight years’ experience, while Evans and Kane had only just completed their initial training at Atlanta. Hardin wasn’t surprised to find that exactly half of his team were ‘rookies’. The CDC had always believed that the best way to learn about investigating a sudden outbreak of a disease was to just go out and do it. It was the ultimate form of ‘on-the-job training’.
It was standard CDC procedure to deliver morning briefings before the field work started and this one was, in Hardin’s opinion, probably the most important, because it was the first. He had talked to them briefly the previous evening, but all three had been exhausted both by their intense activity back in the States preparing for this operation and by the series of flights they’d had to endure to reach the island.
The last thing Hardin had wanted was to have tired and jet-lagged operatives messing with a Level Four Hot Agent, so as soon as they’d finished their evening meal he’d ordered them straight to bed – on camp-beds in the neighbouring tent – leaving it until late the next morning to brief them.
‘The one piece of equipment we haven’t got here is a scanning electron microscope, but there’s one in a research laboratory in Irakleio, which Dr Gravas tells me he has used in the past. Our investigation obviously has a very high priority, so we should be able to use that one more or less on demand. The most difficult part of conducting a microscopic investigation will be logistics. We’re not very far from Irakleio as the crow flies, but getting there by road would take hours. Fortunately, we have some help there. Last night you arrived here by helicopter courtesy of the British Royal Navy aircraft carrier
‘The second problem is the actual source of the infection. As I explained earlier, the evidence strongly suggests it was stored inside a heavily sealed container. If that is correct, we’re dealing either with some bioweapon or with an unknown virus that has been discovered in the wild. And there’s some other evidence that I’ll discuss in a minute.’
Hardin glanced at his three colleagues in turn. ‘In either case we are confronting something demonstrably deadly and almost certainly unfamiliar to us. You must take all the usual precautions in applying the rules for dealing with a potential Level Four Hot Agent. I know that’s going to be difficult out here in the field, and we’ll have to improvise, but it’s essential that all of us exercise extreme care. Watch everything and everybody, and if you see anything that concerns you, stop the procedure immediately. Extreme caution is essential.
‘My final point is somewhat unusual. I mentioned a container that I believe held this hot agent. What you should also know is that we haven’t found it, nor expect to, simply because it seems somebody else has already removed it.’ Hardin looked down at three astonished faces. ‘When Dr Gravas realized Spiros Aristides might have died from some form of filovirus infection he took the basic precaution of closing all the doors before he left the house. When I subsequently entered, all the interior doors were standing open.
‘Inspector Lavat had stationed a policeman outside the house to ensure that no one entered the property. When we questioned him, he was adamant that nobody had been in or out – except for the CDC personnel that he had been told to expect. What actually happened was that two men wearing white coveralls with the letters “CDC” stamped on them appeared at the house, showed him what appeared to be CDC identity cards, entered the building and then left a few minutes later.’
Hardin smiled mirthlessly, then explained what had happened at Nico’s apartment. ‘I myself believe that we’re almost certainly dealing with either the raw material for a new weapon,’ he continued, ‘or even something that’s already been weaponized, and we have to assume that these killers now have the container in their possession. We know there are at least two men involved because of the evidence of the policeman stationed outside the scene of the first death.
‘One of these men was carrying a case, it seems, and it’s no great leap of logic to assume that when they didn’t find the container at Spiros’s house, they went on to look in Nico’s apartment. These men haven’t been seen since, and their descriptions provided by the policeman himself aren’t particularly helpful – Caucasian, mid-forties, average height, average build. One of them spoke Greek fluently but he wasn’t a native-born speaker. We have to assume that they found the container and have now left Kandira. It’s a very small village, so if they were still here I’m quite certain we would know about it.’
Hardin was quite right: Krywald and Stein were nowhere near Kandira, and the flask was long gone. The steel case Aristides had recovered from the Learjet was locked in the larger suitcase they’d brought with them. They hadn’t opened the steel case or even examined it except to confirm that it was the one they had been sent to recover. At his briefing, McCready had been most specific – they were under no circumstances to open the case or try to inspect its contents. They were simply to return it to the United States and hand it over to him personally.
Confirming they had found the right case hadn’t been that easy. It had no markings of any sort, and its original leather covering had long since vanished. McCready’s description of the case had, however, been extremely detailed, including its precise measurements and the types of locks and catch fitted to it. As soon as they’d driven a mile or so away from Kandira the previous evening, Elias had stopped the hire car while Krywald compared the object they’d recovered with Nicholson’s description, just in case they’d somehow picked up one that was only similar.
There hadn’t been much doubt in Krywald’s mind, though, even before he ran his tape measure over it – having never before seen a steel case with two locks and an over-centre catch to secure the lid. Even this cursory examination had convinced him that they’d found the right one.
Before Krywald went to bed that night, he sent an encrypted email to McCready, which simply advised him that phase one was completed. He suggested that they would probably complete phase two – the destruction of
