Pandemic (61 page)

He stopped about fifty yards from the Merlin, switched off the engine and climbed out of the vehicle. The chopper’s engines were running and the rotors turning, so he knew that at least
some of the crew had to be on board. A ground marshaller was standing in front of the Merlin, wands crossed below his waist in the ‘park’ position. Richter moved across to him and spoke
into his ear.

‘Are all the crew still on board the chopper?’

The marshaller glanced at him. ‘No, sir. One of the guys from the back got out a few minutes ago. He’s over in that building to your right.’

‘Thanks.’

The building indicated was about seventy metres away, and as Richter approached the door it opened and a man wearing flying overalls stepped out. Richter recognized him immediately as one of the
814 Squadron aircrewmen.

‘Is that for me?’ Richter asked, gesturing at the buff envelope the man held in his hand.

‘Oh – hullo, sir. Yes, it’s for you.’ He took a crumpled sheet of paper out of one of the pockets of his overalls and proffered it. ‘It’s classified Secret,
sir, so you’ll have to sign for it.’

Richter scribbled something approximating his signature in the space the aircrewman indicated, then took the buff envelope from him. He ripped it open and pulled out the message form. The text
was brief and specific:

Richter walked back to the Renault and dropped into the driver’s seat. He read the message again, then made a decision. He pulled out the Enigma mobile phone and dialled
FOE in London. Five minutes later he was talking to Simpson himself.

‘I was called up by your old pal John Westwood,’ Simpson began, ‘and when he found out it was you that was opening cans of worms all over the Mediterranean, he thought the two
of you should get together.’

‘Get together on what, exactly?’ Richter asked.

‘Good question. I don’t know, and nor does Westwood, but it looks as if someone in the States is going around permanently silencing CIA personnel who were involved in a deep black
operation the Company ran in the early seventies.’

‘So?’

‘So there’s a link to what happened on Crete. A direct link. Pretty much all Westwood has been able to dig up is the name of the operation. Everything else – all the
documentary evidence and all records on the CIA’s database – seems to have been destroyed. But the name’s interesting. It was called “CAIP”, spelt Charlie, Alpha,
India, Papa,’ Simpson added. ‘The same as the initials on that steel flask and the file you’ve recovered from those Yankee comedians.’

Sunday
RC-135 callsign ‘Trent Two Four’, mid-Atlantic

Richter was feeling the strain. His sleep on Friday night had been interrupted by the news that Stein’s hire car had been spotted, and Saturday had been, by any
standards, a very full day. He was sitting in a surprisingly comfortable seat in the darkened rear compartment of the RC-135 – none of the electronic surveillance devices had been switched
on, and three of the consoles were shielded by tied-on shaped plastic sheeting so he couldn’t even see the displays – and he was now trying to make some sense of the CAIP file.

The problem was, it was full of what looked like complex medical information, none of which meant anything to Richter: his medical expertise basically encompassed taking an aspirin whenever he
had a headache. He hadn’t yet found any explanation of what ‘CAIP’ meant, or even what the initials stood for, and he guessed that this file wasn’t a stand-alone. As far as
he could see, it dealt only with the strictly medical aspects of whatever CAIP involved. No doubt there had been other files at Langley – presumably already destroyed if what Simpson had said
was accurate – which would have contained more general information about the concept and scope of the operation.

Stein’s briefcase lay on the seat beside him, the sealed flask tucked beside Richter’s two mobile phones and his Browning Hi-Power, none of which he’d found the time or the
inclination to return to the ship. The steel case was still wrapped in its black dustbin bags but was now, as an additional precaution, locked in a sealed heavy-duty plastic box and tucked away
under an adjacent seat. Next to it was Richter’s overnight bag, noticeably bulkier than when he’d packed it on board the
Invincible
what seemed like weeks ago.

The X-ray machine operator in the military departure lounge had thrown a fit when he’d registered what was in the briefcase, and another one when Richter had put his overnight bag through,
but that hadn’t stopped him taking the two cases onto the aircraft unopened. Richter could be very persuasive, and the orders that had caused the ground crew to start pre-flighting the RC-135
had come from a level whose authority couldn’t be ignored.

Richter closed the file, replaced it in the briefcase and snapped the lid shut. None of it made much sense to him. His best guess was that thirty odd years ago a bunch of American scientists had
found, or stolen, or maybe even bought, the lethal bug that was sealed in those remaining steel flasks. They’d been returning to the States when fighter interceptors from some hostile power,
maybe Libya, had shot down their aircraft, plunging them and the deadly pathogen they carried to the bottom of the Mediterranean. A subsequent search, if there’d been one, hadn’t found
the wreckage, and eventually almost everyone had forgotten about the lost Learjet.

Over the intervening years world opinion had shifted, and now it was no longer acceptable for any nation – and certainly not America, the world’s supposed peacekeeper – to be
seen as involved in any aspect of biological warfare. So when that Greek diver had stumbled across the wrecked Lear, somebody at Langley had decided that the once-buried evidence should be
re-buried permanently, and had sent a team of agents over to Crete to recover what they could and destroy the rest.

That more or less made sense, but why all the killings? That was what he didn’t get. Killing everyone involved seemed an extreme reaction if Richter’s ‘lethal bug collected for
research’ hypothesis bore any relation to the facts. What had started out as an obscure thirty-year-old puzzle had rapidly turned into a massacre, with three CIA agents and the mysterious
Murphy – who Richter guessed had been a Company-employed hitman – all now dead. Plus five Cretans: the police officer; Spiros Aristides, his nephew and the two villagers.

In fact, Richter’s hypothesis was wrong in every respect bar one: a team had indeed been sent to Crete to recover what they could and destroy the rest. All his other assumptions were
inaccurate, however, because he was looking at the problem from the wrong end.

He was still trying to make some sense of it all as he drifted into sleep.

Norfolk, Virginia

‘So who do you reckon is knocking off your ex-CIA wrinklies?’ Richter asked, before yawning prodigiously as Westwood threaded his Chrysler Voyager through the
light late-morning traffic heading for Interstate 64.

When the RC-135 touched down, Westwood had been waiting for him at the airbase in Norfolk and had whisked Richter away as soon as the aircraft had come to a stop in the dispersal. The plastic
box containing the steel case was now in the back of the car, and Stein’s briefcase and Richter’s overnight bag were both sitting on the rear seats.

Westwood shook his head. ‘I wish I knew – and I wish I knew why. I’m hoping you and I can get our heads together and sort this mess out.’

‘We’ll do our best. Thanks for organizing the ride – pretty impressive stuff, getting the use of an RC-135 as an executive jet. They could improve the in-flight catering,
though. Coffee from a Thermos and a couple of packs of sandwiches won’t ever get them into the “My Favourite Airline” charts.’

‘You’re lucky you even got that.’ Westwood changed lanes and accelerated. ‘I had to call in a bunch of favours first and then clear it with my boss.’

‘You heard what happened on Crete, I suppose?’

Westwood nodded. ‘Yes, your Mr Simpson briefed me on a secure telephone link, not that it was much help to me. What I still can’t figure out is why anybody would decide a
thirty-year-old covert op is still so sensitive that any people involved with it have to be killed on the off-chance that they might talk about it.’

‘I think
I
can,’ Richter said.

‘Go on. I’m listening.’

‘I think Stein was more or less right. I think the guys involved in CAIP had found some lethal bug somewhere, and were taking it back to the States for use as the basis for a biological
weapon. According to the CDC people on Crete, the bug contained in the flasks acts a bit like a combination of Ebola and Lassa Fever, but it’s much, much faster than either of them. Lassa
kills in weeks, Ebola within a few days, but catch this one and you’re dead in a matter of hours.

‘That suggests to me that they’d probably found this bug somewhere in the African rain forest, because that’s where most of the real nasties like Marburg and Ebola have come
from. Perhaps they’d staged out of Egypt or Israel, or somewhere similar, just stopped for a refuel, and their next stop was going to be a Spanish or British airfield for another top-up
before the hop across the pond.’

‘But it’s still ancient history,’ Westwood objected. ‘That plane went down over thirty years ago. Why the hell should anyone care about it now?’

‘Maybe because the US has always vehemently denied any involvement in biological warfare. Your government always maintains that all its research is aimed at defensive, not offensive,
measures. Imagine the outcry if somebody found proof that the CIA was involved in discovering naturally occurring viruses, which Fort Detrick or wherever was then developing into biological weapons
for offensive purposes.’

Westwood remained silent for a few moments, then shook his head. ‘Sorry, Paul, I don’t buy it. In that case, all we’d have to do is claim that the bugs in those flasks were
intended for delivery to the CDC, to allow us the opportunity to develop antidotes. Who could ever say that that wasn’t the truth? You talked about
proof
, and the flasks don’t
prove anything, not really.’

‘OK,’ Richter conceded, ‘that does make sense. But maybe your phantom killer is a lot more paranoid than either of us, and he’s not willing to take a chance on his name
being linked with this operation.’

‘Maybe. We’ll get him, though. With what’s in the file, I’m hoping we can nail this bastard real quick.’

‘There’s one thing I’ve just remembered that might help,’ Richter said. ‘I had quite a little chat with Stein back on Crete, and the only really solid piece of
information he gave me was the name of his briefing officer, which was “McCready”.’

Westwood looked interested, then shook his head. ‘I don’t recall that name from the research I’ve done,’ he said. ‘I can check it out at Langley tomorrow, of
course, but my bet is that he was either employed solely as a briefing officer for this operation, and not beyond that, or else he was using an alias. That would have been pretty much standard
procedure for an operation of this classification.’

‘And there’s something else,’ Richter said. ‘Something that really worries me.’

‘What?’

‘The steel case,’ Richter replied. ‘According to Stein there were four flasks inside it. Three were still sealed and one had been opened by the Greek diver, but there were
spaces for twelve flasks altogether. So who’s now got the other eight? Did Aristides sell them on to someone, or did somebody take them out of the aircraft even before Aristides found it? If
opening a single flask can kill everyone who comes close to it, do you have any idea what sort of damage a terrorist group could do with eight containers of this bug?’

‘Shit. You got any more bad news I should know about?’

Lake Ridge, Virginia

About once an hour since he’d got up, Nicholson had been using his home computer to access the classified server, but he was still waiting for a read receipt from
either Murphy or Stein to signify that they’d now opened the emails he’d sent them. On repeated attempts to contact their mobiles, each time the system had reported the phones were
switched off.

This was the worst possible news. It suggested that both men were either dead or imprisoned, or otherwise unable to get access to their computers or phones, and that almost certainly meant that
somebody else had now gained possession of the flasks and the classified file. As far as Nicholson knew, no other intelligence services had any interest in the matter, so the most likely
organization to have become involved was the Cretan police force.

That might or might not be a good thing, but he had to find out exactly what had happened, because until he knew he couldn’t take any remedial action. For some minutes Nicholson sat and
considered his options, but he realized virtually immediately that he really had only one choice. The sole usable asset he now had on Crete was the CIA agent living and working the
persona
of Captain Nathan Levy, United States Air Force, and all he could ask of him was to investigate, since Levy was strictly a support agent. For anything beyond that, Nicholson was going to have to
fly yet more people out to the island.

He checked a small notebook in which he’d listed – quite illegally according to CIA regulations – the contact details of all the people he had already tasked in any connection
with this operation on Crete. He opened his email client, copied Levy’s address into the ‘To’ field, composed a message, marked it High Priority, added a read request, and then
pressed ‘Send’.

With the message on its way, Nicholson began to feel better, but he knew it would probably be Monday midday, Crete time, before Levy would reply. However, the time difference meant that his
reply should be posted on the classified server by the early hours of Monday morning, Eastern Standard Time, so he wouldn’t have that long to wait.