Pandemic

sight, and nothing moving apart from an elderly marmalade cat cleaning itself in the shade of the fig tree on the other side of the narrow lane. No sound but the ever-present cicadas zithering their drowsy salute to the late- afternoon sun, that was now shading into evening. It was a good time to return home for a man who didn’t particularly want to meet any of his neighbours. Aristides nodded his satisfaction, pulled the door closed, locked it and walked back to where he’d placed the sack.

To one side of the room was a small sturdy oak table and two upright chairs, the table still bearing the remains of Aristides’s simple breakfast – a bowl containing a few black olives, a small piece of feta cheese on a plate, and a cup half-full of the thick black coffee he favoured. He flapped his hand ineffectively at the flies crawling sluggishly over the remnants, then removed the debris to the kitchen. After that he gave the top of the table a cursory wipe with a damp cloth. Before doing anything else, Aristides walked across the room and seized the standard lamp that stood next to one of the easy chairs positioned either side of the small fireplace. He dragged it across to the table, stretching it to the very end of its lead and switched it on.

Bending down, he loosened the draw-string closing the neck of the sack, then carried his prize to the table and put it down carefully. He’d scraped off most of the marine growth before he’d started the Gardner diesel of the Nicos and hauled up the anchor. His neighbours were quite used to the smell of decaying seaweed emanating from his property, but he would still rather avoid them asking awkward questions.

The case was bulky, in size about mid-way between a briefcase and a small suitcase. It was made of metal – steel or perhaps aluminium – and had originally been covered with leather or plastic since in places there were still small patches of coarse, dark material adhering to it. Aristides pulled a clasp knife from his pocket and snapped it open, then ran the point of it lightly along the side of the case for a couple of centimetres. The knifepoint barely scratched the metal, so he knew it was steel.

When he’d hauled it out of the sea and into the Nicos, Aristides had been surprised at how light in weight his discovery seemed. He’d realized, because of the way he’d found it floating, that it was airtight, but he had still been hoping for something of substance inside it.

He sat down at the oak table and studied the outside of the case for a few moments. There were no distinctive markings of any sort that he could see, not even a manufacturer’s name or number. The case had one large central catch and a lock on either side of it, both quite simple affairs and each with an over-centre latch holding the lid closed. Aristides guessed that the primary security of the case and its contents had been the man carrying it, whose wrist had originally been secured to the handcuff still dangling from a steel chain welded to the case – a man whose bones now lay lost and unremembered ninety feet below the surface of the Mediterranean.

Underneath the old stone sink in his kitchen, Aristides kept a metal toolbox containing an assortment of screwdrivers, pliers, files and a hammer, useful items for tackling the odd household problem. He got up to collect the toolbox and placed it beside the mysterious case on the table. He selected a small screwdriver and measured the size of its point against the keyhole in one of the locks. A little too small. He picked one slightly larger, stuck the point into the keyhole and gave the handle a sharp rap with the hammer. The point drove about half a centimetre into the lock. Aristides seized the handle firmly and twisted the screwdriver – gently at first, then with increasing force. With a snap, the lock gave, the screwdriver turned, and Aristides freed the latch.

He pulled the tool out of the ruined lock and repeated the treatment on the second one. The catch, between them, had no lock, so he simply unclipped it and eased the lid open slightly. There was a sudden hiss of escaping air. Aristides leaned back, then opened the lid all the way and peered cautiously inside.

Aeroporto di Brindisi, Papola-Casale, Puglia, Italy

Richter just stared at Simpson, ice-blue eyes unblinking as his mind span back through the years to the last, in fact the only, time he’d seen Andrew Lomas. And whenever he thought of Lomas, Richter remembered Raya Kosov.

Richter had been the totally expendable bait in a complex trap laid by Richard Simpson to ensnare a high- level traitor somewhere within British Intelligence. Sent to Austria on what purported to be a courier assignment, Richter had unwittingly been set up as the tethered goat to attract the tiger. Not knowing where the traitor was employed, Simpson had disseminated his story throughout all arms of the intelligence community. He had portrayed Richter as a disaffected Russian cipher clerk, a renegade from the SVR, a man running from his former masters and carrying documentary evidence that would expose the traitor. His confrontation with Gerald Stanway, the treacherous SIS officer, had nearly cost Richter his life, but when the shooting stopped it had been Stanway who lay dead.

Then, in a bizarre example of reality imitating art, a genuine cipher clerk – in fact the deputy manager of the SVR computer network – had run from Russia to seek sanctuary in the West. Raya Kosov had had her own agenda and her own reasons for running, and she had applied her own conditions. One of these was that she would not meet with any serving or even retired member of British Intelligence. Richter was not only on the spot, he was the only man Simpson could find who met all the criteria that Raya had specified, and Simpson was desperate to access the information she possessed before the CIA, or even worse the SVR, found her.

It was only after Richter had met Raya, and the two were making their way through France to Britain, that he had learnt the reason for her refusal to be handled by a ‘proper’ intelligence officer. She knew the identity of a traitor so highly placed in the British Secret Intelligence Service that she wasn’t prepared to trust anybody in that organization or in any of the other arms of the intelligence community. And the man she could identify wasn’t Gerald Stanway.

With both SVR hit-squads and SIS assassination teams looking for them, Richter and Raya had literally run for their lives and, perhaps inevitably, had become ‘involved’ with each other. Finally they had made it to London, where an analysis of the data Raya had obtained pointed at one man – Sir Malcolm Holbeche, the head of the SIS – and Richter and Simpson had confronted him together.

And then, as the operation wound down, Holbeche’s own Russian case officer, Alexei Lomosolov – a deep- cover illegal using the cover name Andrew Lomas – had counter-attacked. With Holbeche dead, and the operation over as far as Richter was concerned, he had let his guard slip and had been followed back to the hotel where he had hidden Raya.

Ten minutes after he got in, there had been a knock at the door. Without thinking, Richter had opened it and looked straight into Andrew Lomas’s dark, almost black, eyes for less than a second before the taser dart had stabbed into his stomach. When he had come round, he found himself lying on the bed – and Raya’s horribly mutilated body was lying beside him. The only good news was that Simpson had already taken custody of the disks and data that Raya had smuggled out of Moscow.

‘Where is he?’ Richter growled, finally.

‘Here in Italy – somewhere near Taranto, to be exact,’ Simpson replied. ‘At least, that’s what the Italians think. They’ve got a couple of photographs of somebody who matches Lomas’s description, and also a copy of the photofit you did back in London. But you need to confirm his identification, because you’re the only person in the service who’s known to have met him in the flesh, so to speak. And Richter,’ Simpson warned, ‘we – that’s myself as well as the Italians – want Lomas in one piece, not diced, sliced or blown away.’

Kandira, south-west Crete

Spiros Aristides slumped back in his chair, disappointment evident in every line of his face. He didn’t know exactly what he’d been expecting, but what he’d actually found definitely wasn’t it. The case was lying on the floor, where he’d tossed it in irritation, and its contents were now spread across the table in front of him. The biggest and heaviest item was a thick file enclosed in a bright red cover. Aristides had opened it and looked at some of the papers it contained, but they’d been meaningless to him. He’d simply recognized that the writing was in English, a language he didn’t speak, though he could read the odd word.

The only other things in the case were four small heavily sealed steel vacuum flasks, each bearing a white label with the legend ‘CAIP’ on it, and below that a number. Their tops were held in place with red wax and wire, and the flasks had been fitted snugly into shaped and padded recesses inside the case. There were also spaces for a further eight flasks of the same size, but none of these had been occupied.

The flasks were light and, as far as Aristides could tell, empty, but that made no kind of sense. Why would anyone seal up empty flasks and lock them securely in a briefcase then chained to a courier and carried on board