Pandemic

the wreck of the Learjet – the following day.

They slept late the next morning, the effects of their long journey catching up with both Stein and Krywald. Elias slept even longer – being much less used to longdistance travel – and he didn’t appear in the hotel dining room until gone ten-thirty. He spotted Krywald in a far corner of the room and walked over to him. The remains of a leisurely breakfast were spread across the table, and as Elias reached him Krywald pushed across a small wicker basket containing some rolls. ‘There’s coffee in the pot,’ he gestured.

‘Where’s Stein?’ Elias asked.

‘He’s out running an errand,’ Krywald replied. ‘As soon as he gets back, we need to go.’

‘An early flight?’ Elias asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

‘What?’

‘An early flight back to the States.’ Elias said. ‘I mean,’ he glanced up at Krywald and motioned towards the black case sitting on the floor right beside the table, ‘you’ve got the case, so that’s it, isn’t it? We can go home?’

Krywald grinned but shook his head. ‘The job’s not over yet. Getting the case was the most important thing, but we’ve still got some cleaning up to do, and that’s where you come in. Best you don’t eat too much, Mr Elias, because this afternoon you’re going for a swim. A long, deep one, too.’

Kandira, south-west Crete

‘We therefore have two hot zones to investigate and, equally obviously, two bodies,’ Hardin continued. He glanced towards the rear of the tent where Dr Gravas was now standing alongside Inspector Lavat – again properly dressed in the uniform of a Cretan police officer – and listening with interest to the briefing. ‘We have been helped considerably by the prompt actions of Inspector Lavat here, and his cordon around the village should have limited the possibility of the pathogen spreading.’

But even as he said these words, Hardin realized with a sudden sick feeling that in all probability the mystery virus had already been carried a considerable distance away from Kandira. He just hoped that whoever had taken the container would have the good sense to keep it sealed.

‘We’ll proceed as far as we can using standard field procedures. By that I mean CRIEIPA.’ Hardin pronounced it ‘creeper’, and Mark Evans nodded in recognition. ‘I need hardly remind you what that involves, but for the sake of our visitors I’m going to anyway. First, Containment – that’s pretty much been done already, thanks to our two colleagues here. The village has been cordoned off by the local police ever since Dr Gravas first suspected a filovirus. Almost nobody has been allowed in or out since then.

‘Second, Restriction of access. The two hot zones have also been secured by the police, and nobody will be allowed access to either building unless vouched for personally by either Dr Gravas or Inspector Lavat. That’s something of a stable-door reaction, given that both scenes have already been visited by unidentified men, but better security is now firmly in place. This restriction is primarily to avoid contamination of the scenes themselves, as I don’t think there’s much danger of any further outbreaks.’ Hardin added with a smile as Jerry Fisher opened his mouth to challenge his statement: ‘That may seem like a case of hypothesizing without data, but I’m basing my belief on what actually happened here so far.

‘Four people entered the room where the first body was found on Tuesday morning, three of them wearing no protection at all, and they’re all well and healthy after about forty-eight hours. Both the victims appeared to be completely normal at about midnight on Monday, but both were dead within twelve hours. That means we’re looking for a hot agent that acts incredibly fast, but whose infective period is extremely short. Either that or the two victims ingested or perhaps injected the agent, though I can’t imagine why they’d do that with an unknown substance.’

Hardin paused to take a sip of water: his throat was getting dry. ‘OK, that’s about as far as we’ve got to date. The next phase is Investigation. We’ll start at the first victim’s house, and begin with his body. We’ll need to collect all the usual specimens – starting with blood, urine and stool samples, then whatever other specimens are indicated by the initial results. That will be followed by a full post-mortem, which I will undertake. Obviously I’ll check for needle marks, just in case these two guys got their kicks by shooting up something they’d found somewhere, but I very much doubt if that’s the case. I’ll also want a full and thorough search of the house. Some traces of this agent might still be evident in the property, so look out for dust, unidentified liquids, smears, anything like that.

‘If we can’t find anything at that scene, we’ll repeat the whole process at the second victim’s residence. Until we’ve got some sort of handle on what this agent actually is, we’re going nowhere. The last three phases – Examination, Identification and Procedural Actions – will have to wait until we know exactly what we’re dealing with.’

Hardin looked up towards the back of the tent as the flap opened and another police officer entered, walked across to speak softly to the inspector, then handed him a slip of paper. Lavat glanced up at Hardin and stepped forward.

‘You have a visitor, Mr Hardin,’ he said, glancing down at the paper in his hand. ‘A man called Richer – no, Richter. He’s just appeared at the barrier across the main road and asked for you by name.’

NAS Souda Bay, Akrotiri, Crete

Stein braked the Ford Focus to a stop at the counter-weighted barrier guarding the main entrance to the Souda Bay facility and wound down his window as the armed sentry approached.

‘Good morning, sir. May I…?’ the sentry started to inquire but stopped as Stein opened a small black leather folder containing his genuine CIA identification, and held it up in front of the soldier’s face.

‘The name’s Stein and I have an appointment to see Captain Levy.’

The sentry looked carefully at the picture and then at Stein, then stepped back a pace, snapped off a rapid salute and scanned the paper attached to his clipboard. ‘Yessir, Captain Levy at eleven-thirty. Have you visited here before, Mr Stein?’

As Stein shook his head, the sentry gave him crisp directions to the closest parking area and eight minutes later Stein walked into Levy’s office.

Levy was tall, slim and coal-black, and one of two Company assets stationed at Souda Bay. CIA officers do not normally wear a uniform of any description, but in some circumstances it is necessary, and NAS Souda Bay was one of them. Like all US bases, Souda Bay employs a number of civilian staff, but in the main they do fairly menial jobs. For several reasons the CIA needed an officer on the base in a position of some authority, and for the past two years Nathan Levy, Captain, United States Air Force, had officially been flying a desk here instead of the F-16 Falcons he had normally flown.

That, at least, was the official line. In fact, Levy wasn’t a serving officer in the USAF, had never flown a Falcon – in fact, he had seen one exactly twice – and had no flying qualifications whatsoever. But he knew enough about aviation to hold a conversation without making a fool of himself, even with specialist aircrew, because he always pointedly refused to talk about his flying career, and nobody ever pressed him. A rumour had started almost as soon as he arrived on Crete that he had been involved in an accident that had killed his wingman, and that his desk job here was an attempt to stabilize him before getting him back in the air. Levy knew all about the rumour – in fact, he’d started it – and it suited his purposes very well.

‘I’m Stein,’ the visitor announced.

‘I’m sure you are,’ Levy said, ‘but I’ll still need to see some ID.’

Stein fished out his black leather folder again and passed it across to him. Levy studied it carefully, compared the number on the card with that on a signal resting on his desk, then closed the folder and handed it back. ‘OK, Mr Stein. I’ve had a coupla signals from Langley about you, and they sent me a shopping list on the last one. The personal weapons were no problem. There are three of you so I’ve picked up three SIG P226s with silencers and two spare clips each; that’s the SIG 220 variant with the fifteen-round magazine.’

‘I know the weapon,’ Stein said.

In fact, the ‘shopping list’ signal had instructed Levy to provide silenced personal weapons for Krywald’s team, and to deliver another pistol of a very different sort, as well as a rifle that was even more unusual, to a hotel in Rethymno. Levy was going to give Stein an hour or so to get out of the area, then he was going to pick up the other two weapons in their innocent-looking cardboard boxes and deliver them himself.

Levy had been with the Company for a long time, and was used to the devious ways its personnel operated,