but the current operation was a first, even for him. He had no definite knowledge of what exactly was going on, but the very nature of the weapons he had been instructed to procure allowed him to make an educated guess. Not for the first time in his career Levy wondered if he ought not to get out of the CIA and start working for an organization that applied higher moral standards to itself, like the Mafia or the Yardies, for example.
‘OK,’ Levy said, ‘they’ve been sanitized. The serial numbers have been removed and even if somebody uses an X-ray machine to recover them, the trace will lead straight to the FBI.’
‘Now that’s a nice touch.’
‘I’ve got plenty of plastic – I picked out four M118 demolition charges with a bunch of extra C4 added – but the detonators were a tad difficult. Real specialized items.’
‘But you did get them?’ Stein asked.
Levy nodded. ‘Sure, I got them. Had to call in a coupla favours, and for sure that’ll cost me somewheres down the road, but I did get them.’ Levy reached down behind him, pulled up a large and apparently heavy red haversack and placed it carefully on his desk. Something in the haversack gave a metallic clunk as the fabric settled, and Stein smiled for the first time since he’d walked into the room.
Paul Richter leaned against the driver’s door of the Volkswagen Golf and waited patiently in the late-morning sunshine. The car wasn’t air-conditioned, and even with all the windows open, the heater set on cold and the fan going full blast, it had still been a long, hot, sticky and extremely slow drive down to Kandira. He was hoping he could find out what Simpson wanted and get the hell out of Crete and back to the air-conditioned cool of the ship that same afternoon, or tomorrow at the latest.
He looked up as two men approached the barricade and walked over to meet them. One was very obviously a police officer, in uniform, and the other a middle-aged man wearing civilian clothes.
‘Mr Hardin?’ Richter asked, and Hardin nodded. ‘My name’s Richter, from the warship
‘Oh, yes,’ Hardin said. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’
‘You have?’
‘We won’t be needing transportation until this afternoon at the earliest, but we will certainly have specimens ready to send to Irakleio first thing tomorrow morning, so could we have a helicopter here by eight-thirty?’
‘I think,’ Richter said slowly, ‘you have me confused with somebody else.’ Light dawned as he remembered the helicopter squadron’s outline briefing. ‘I’m not part of the
‘Oh, OK,’ Hardin said, and stared down at a piece of paper in his hand. ‘So what can I do for you, Mr Richter?’
Richter reached into his hip pocket and extracted a slim wallet, which he opened and from it removed a laminated card. It identified him as a member of the British Medical Research Council and was one of a dozen or so cards Richter carried as a matter of routine. ‘With the number of British tourists visiting Crete every year, we’re obviously very concerned about this infection you’re investigating,’ he said. ‘If you’ve time now, could you brief me on what your team has found out so far?’
Hardin smiled somewhat ruefully. ‘So far,’ he said, ‘we haven’t found very much, but I can give you at least some information. Look, the rest of my team members are waiting to get started on this. Could you wait a few minutes while I finish my briefing, and then I’ll tell you what we know?’
Richter nodded his assent and followed Hardin and the police officer through the barricade and into a large canvas tent that had been positioned adjacent to the main street. Hardin waved him to a bench at a table situated towards the back of the tent, then five minutes later walked back in and sat down opposite him.
‘One thing I’m not clear about, Mr Richter. You identified yourself as a member of the MRC, but you told me you’d come from the
‘Both are correct,’ Richter said easily. ‘I’m a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Naval Reserve and I was doing continuation training on the ship, but I’m also employed by the MRC as an investigator.’
Not too bad, Richter thought. One half of the statement was absolutely true, and the other completely false – normally he reckoned he was doing well if just one in three of the things he claimed had some basis in fact.
‘You’re not a doctor, then?’ Hardin asked.
Richter shook his head. ‘No, I’m just an investigator. I get sent out to look into reported cases of any kind of serious medical emergency or emerging disease. I collect the information, write a report and hand it over once I get back to Britain.’
‘OK,’ Hardin said, ‘then I’ll keep it as simple and non-medical as I can. First, have you ever heard of a filovirus?’
‘I’ve heard of them, that’s all. You’re talking about Ebola and Marburg, right?’
Hardin nodded. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘We – that’s the Centers for Disease Control – got involved because the local doctor, a man called Gravas who you’ll meet soon, I guess, thought he’d identified a case of Ebola here on the island.’
‘And had he?’ Richter asked.
‘Almost certainly not. I’ve been able to eliminate Ebola – or at least the two known strains which are called Sudan and Zaire – because of the timescale involved. Even Ebola Zaire, which is the most deadly variant, takes a week to ten days to kill its victim. Whatever this sucker is, it kills within hours.’
‘Hours? Jesus!’ Richter muttered.
‘What Dr Gravas spotted did look remarkably like Ebola, because the gross effects of this agent are superficially very similar,’ Hardin continued. ‘We’ve found two victims so far, and both exhibited broadly the same symptoms. That’s copious bleeding from every orifice, probably with convulsions, although that’s a guess based upon a cursory inspection of the second victim. Internally, my belief is that we’ll find that the majority of their organs have simply stopped working because they’ve been effectively drowned in blood. The actual cause of death may be simply blood loss, but I’ll be able to confirm that later today.
‘The other reason that I’m sure we’re not dealing with Ebola is that the first victim apparently managed to call out literally minutes before he died. Ebola produces a dramatic effect on brain functions as the skull fills with blood, and in its latter stages the victim invariably goes into a deep and irreversible coma. No Ebola victim can utter a sound once the terminal phase is reached.’
Hardin’s matter-of-fact delivery and the implications of what he was saying stunned Richter for a moment.
‘So what is it then,’ he asked, ‘if it’s not Ebola? And what level of lethality and infectivity are we talking about here?’
Hardin shrugged his shoulders. ‘At this stage,’ he replied, ‘I have no idea. My gut feeling is that it could be some kind of unknown filovirus, but extremely fast-acting. I’ve only seen two victims so far and they’re both dead, so to date its lethality has been exactly one hundred per cent, which makes this agent the species-killer to end all species-killers. Even Ebola Zaire can only manage a lethality of around eighty to ninety per cent.
‘The sole good news is that, whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be particularly infectious. Three people entered the bedroom of the first victim, without wearing any kind of protection, yet they’re all still alive and healthy two days later.
‘That suggests one of two things: either this agent isn’t spread by airborne particles but by some form of body fluid transfer – blood, semen or saliva – or it can’t survive for very long outside the victim’s body. Maybe it decays if subjected to heat or light, or merely even exposure to the air. At this stage we just don’t know, but I am now convinced we won’t see an epidemic here on Crete. If that was going to happen, we’d already be piling the dead in the streets.’
‘You don’t paint a very attractive picture, Mr Hardin,’ Richter said.
Hardin smiled briefly. ‘I’m just trying to be realistic.’ Then his face clouded. ‘And there’s something else you should know,’ he added. ‘At the first location I found evidence that the hot agent itself came from a small container, probably a vacuum flask, which suggests somebody had collected it and then stored it to use for
