Pandemic (34 page)

‘Just what I said at the start of the meeting, John. Liaison. Frank will be handling the strictly criminal aspects of this investigation. What I want you to do is dig back through the old
files here at Langley. Identify all the cases that Hawkins and Richards worked on together, just in case what we’re looking at here is some kind of revenge killing spree – a guy
assassinating Company agents who were involved in some operation that went wrong, or even went right.’

‘Not quite so many of those, Walter,’ Westwood said with a smile.

Hicks just looked at him. ‘Smart answer,’ he muttered. ‘And, while you’re doing that, identify everybody else who was involved with these two guys, just in case we can
stop any other retired employees getting themselves knocked off.’

Kandíra, south-west Crete

Tyler Hardin heard the throb of the Merlin’s rotors as it swept over Kandíra on its way back to the
Invincible
. It had, he assumed, just brought the
Operations Officer who would liaise with the ship to provide flights as and when required. What he did know for certain was that the man who’d called himself Richter was now on board the
helicopter and returning to the
Invincible
.

The Brit was a puzzle. Hardin knew very little about the British Medical Research Council, but what he did know didn’t fit at all with what Richter had been saying. The MRC was certainly
involved in research – that was, after all, what the letter ‘R’ stood for – but not at all the kind of research that Richter had referred to. Hardin had never heard of the
MRC sending out field investigators to the site of a medical emergency and, if they had done, he was certain that they would be qualified doctors. Sending a lay person to investigate a complex
medical crisis would be completely pointless.

No, he was quite satisfied that Richter was nothing whatever to do with the MRC, but was obviously some kind of investigator of considerable importance, otherwise they would not be ferrying him
about the Mediterranean on board a British warship. No doubt, Hardin mused, he would find out the truth eventually.

Mark Evans stood on the opposite side of their makeshift mortuary table. The two men, wearing Tyvek biological space suits and Racal hoods for safety, had set up a trestle table in the smaller,
spare bedroom of Aristides’s house, simply because Hardin didn’t yet want to risk moving the corpse out of the building. Downstairs, Fisher and Kane were beginning an exhaustive search
of the property, looking for any remaining trace of the infective agent.

Once Hardin’s instrument boxes had been brought upstairs, they’d picked up Aristides’s body and carried it carefully from the room in which he had died, laid it flat on its
back, and prepared to go to work.

In broad terms, a hot autopsy – meaning the dissection of a potentially biohazardous corpse – is performed in very similar fashion to a normal post-mortem, but a range of additional
precautions are put in place to protect the personnel involved. In a hospital or morgue, the body is placed on a specially designed mortuary trolley called a pan, incorporating a trough underneath
to catch any fluid or other debris that might drop from the corpse and contaminate the floor. Additionally, the body is encased in at least two biohazard bags, both of which remain completely
sealed until the autopsy itself is about to commence.

The procedure will be carried out on a stainless-steel autopsy table, its upper surface made of either mesh or perforated steel. Above the table, below banks of high-wattage fluorescent lights,
several microphones will be suspended to enable the pathologist to provide a running commentary.

Unless the body is considered to be dangerously contaminated, full biohazard suits will not usually be worn. Although they provide the ultimate protection, they are cumbersome and uncomfortable,
making it difficult to carry out the delicate procedures required. The tendency of the face masks to mist up doesn’t help either.

Instead it is usual for the mortuary staff to wear three layers of lighter protection: over the normal scrub suits worn in operating theatres they wear surgical gowns, and over the gowns plastic
waterproof aprons. Their hair is then covered with surgical caps, and their theatre shoes have plastic or paper covers fitted.

The delicate areas most vulnerable to infection are the eyes, nose and mouth, so plastic safety goggles will be worn, and a surgeon’s mask made of biofilter material designed to trap
biological particles. The hands are arguably the most likely parts of the body to become infected, due to the sharp instruments used, so at least one and usually two pairs of surgical gloves will
be worn, with an additional pair of heavier rubber kitchen gloves over them.

The prosector or pathologist who physically performs the post-mortem examination also wears a stainless-steel chain-mail glove over his non-dominant hand. This is essential, because most
accidental injuries are to the hand that isn’t holding the surgical saw or scalpel. Over this, a rubber kitchen glove will be worn to provide a better grip.

Tyler Hardin looked around the spare bedroom and shrugged. The contrast between the gleaming and totally equipped mortuary suites in the States where he normally conducted his autopsies and this
small and scruffy bedroom could hardly have been greater.

Réthymno, Crete

Mike Murphy opened his eyes to look at the travelling alarm clock sitting on the small bedside table. For a few moments he had absolutely no idea where he was. Then
recollection and awareness returned. It was late afternoon, the room was bright with the sun slanting through the windows, and he found he’d slept for well over twelve hours.

For a few minutes he just lay there, listening to the noises of the hotel and the sound of the traffic on the road outside, then he swung his legs off the bed, walked into the bathroom and
turned on the shower. While he waited for the water temperature to rise to a level he considered acceptable, he opened his small case and pulled out his washing kit, then stripped off, tested the
temperature and stepped into the cubicle.

Once he’d dressed, he unconsciously mirrored the actions Roger Krywald had taken late the previous evening, switching on his laptop computer and using his mobile phone to log on to a
classified and unlisted service provider in America to check for any messages from Nicholson.

There was only one: a confirmation that phase one of the operation had been completed, and that the other group – named the First Team by Nicholson – had already located and
recovered the case. Murphy had no idea what was in the case, and he had no interest in finding out. His orders had been extraordinarily simple: he was to retrieve the case from the First Team, and
then eliminate all members of that team.

Nicholson had included two other pieces of information. The first was a note of the real names, aliases and descriptions of the three members of the First Team, and details of the hotel they had
been booked into. The second was a reminder to Murphy to expect a delivery at his own hotel imminently.

Fifteen minutes later Murphy descended the stairs to the lobby and crossed to the desk clerk. ‘My name’s White,’ he said, producing a genuine American passport bearing that
name, but which had never been anywhere near the US State Department. ‘I’m expecting a couple of packages to be delivered here. Some camera equipment, a tripod and so on.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the clerk replied, in heavily accented English. ‘They arrived earlier this afternoon.’ He reached down behind the desk and lifted up two heavy boxes.
‘Here you are.’

‘Thanks,’ Murphy said. ‘Do I need to sign for them?’ The clerk shook his head. ‘No, sir, they were delivered personally by your friend.’

Murphy had no idea who his ‘friend’ might be, nor again had the slightest interest in finding out. He remained one of the least curious people one could ever encounter, concerned
only with the essentials necessary to get a job done. He nodded his thanks, picked up the two packages and returned to his room.

Kandíra, south-west Crete

‘How many autopsies have you performed since med school, Mark?’ Hardin asked.

Evans lifted his eyes from Aristides’s corpse and met Hardin’s questioning gaze.

‘Exactly or approximately?’

‘Exactly.’

‘None at all,’ Evans said, and Hardin could see a smile forming on the younger man’s face.

‘OK,’ Hardin reached out to switch on the portable tape recorder. ‘I’m the prosector here and you’re my assistant, so if there’s anything you don’t
understand I’ll talk you through it. Now, normally a body would arrive at the dissection table on a gurney and contained inside a couple of biohazard bags. After weighing the cadaver
we’d unzip those, lift the body onto the table and have the bags themselves destroyed. We’ll consider that stage to have already been reached – so, what’s next?’

‘Observation?’ Evans replied. ‘The external exam.’

‘Exactly,’ Hardin nodded. ‘Never forget, a pathologist spends most of his time just looking and examining, and that’s particularly important once you’re doing
investigations out in the field. There may well be indicators on a body, on its clothing or in the surroundings, that you’d never get to see in a morgue, simply because in a normal autopsy
absolutely all you’ve got to work with is the body itself. So tell me, what do you see?’

Evans looked down at the table. ‘We have a white Caucasian male,’ he said, ‘aged about sixty-five to seventy, deeply suntanned over his whole body apart from the groin, where
the skin is noticeably lighter. There are no apparent indications of external injury to the anterior surface of the body, but large quantities of blood are evident. The subject appears to have bled
from eyes, ears, nose and mouth . . . and possibly from the penis.’

‘To save us turning the body over right now, Mark, Dr Gravas has already confirmed that he’s bled from the anus as well. OK, let’s get a couple of snaps. We’ll take
pictures at each stage of the procedure: meaning right now; then after the external examination is complete; after the chest cavity has been opened, and a couple of shots of each organ as
it’s removed.’

Evans stepped around to the end of the trestle table, raised a Polaroid camera to take one picture of Aristides’s body from the feet up, then another from the head down, and finally one
from each side, the camera whirring as each print was ejected. He put the prints and the camera back on a small chest of drawers and returned to the table.

‘Right,’ Hardin said. ‘We’ll clean him up now and then do a full external.’

Evans picked up a plastic bucket half-f of water, which contained a couple of cloths that Hardin had found in Aristides’s kitchen. Wringing out one of them, Evans started to remove the
heavily encrusted blood from the Greek’s body, the water in the bucket turning deep red almost immediately. Once the front of the corpse was clean, they turned it over and washed the back as
well. Then they started the external.

Working together, the two men carried out a minute examination, starting at the top of the Greek’s head and working down to the soles of his feet. They were looking for cuts, bruises,
punctures, needle marks, abrasions or any other external injuries, in fact anything unusual, such as a swelling, discoloured skin or evidence of broken bones. Once they’d finished the
anterior surface, they turned the body over and repeated the process on the posterior.

‘OK,’ Hardin said aloud, for the benefit of the tape recorder. ‘We can find no evidence of any recent external injury or trauma. There are several old scars, one badly healed,
but none appears to have any bearing on the cause of death.

‘The unusual features are the signs of bleeding from all orifices. An initial inspection shows that bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth has been caused by seepage of blood from
the smaller vessels. The eyes in particular are very red, and most of the veins in the eyeballs appear to have ruptured.’ He paused as Evans took three more pictures. ‘Right, I’ll
open him up now.’

Hardin took a scalpel firmly in his right hand, first checked that Evans was standing well clear of the table, then slid the blade into the tanned brown skin at Aristides’s right shoulder.
He ran the blade diagonally across and down the chest until he reached the sternum, then shifted his stance slightly and continued to cut all the way down to the top of the pubic hair, skirting
around the navel. Then he extracted the scalpel, inserted it in Aristides’s left shoulder and completed his initial Y-shaped incision.

The scalpel had cut deep, slicing through the skin and subcutaneous fat, but had not penetrated far enough to reach the ribs, so Hardin bent forward and began deepening the incisions and cutting
under the skin until he was able to reflect – or lay back – the three sections of skin and flesh and expose the ribcage. The upper section covered most of Aristides’s face.

Evans took more pictures, then Hardin picked up his pair of lopping shears and severed all the ribs on both sides of the body until he was able to lift out the chest plate and the central part
of the ribcage, exposing the contents of the abdomen. He passed the chest plate to Evans, who placed it on the floor beside him on a rubberized sheet Hardin had laid out for that purpose. Evans
used the camera to take two more shots, and then Hardin began dictating his report again.

‘Initial incision completed, chest walls reflected, ribs cut and chest plate lifted away.’

Only then did he and Evans lean forward and peer cautiously into the open red maw exposed before them.

‘Goddamnit, Tyler,’ Evans muttered. ‘What the hell is that?’

Réthymno, Crete

In his hotel room, Murphy locked the door and jammed a chair underneath the handle as an added precaution, then opened the two packages in turn. He’d told Nicholson
he’d need a rifle and a personal weapon, and he’d suggested using non-US manufactured arms, just in case he was forced to abandon them at the scene. As soon as Murphy opened the bigger
package he realized that Nicholson had taken him precisely at his word.