Pandemic (30 page)

‘In a diving tender out in the middle of the Mediterranean?’ Hawkins’s tone was mocking.

‘You’d be surprised how many boats pass to and fro there,’ Nicholson replied. ‘Fishing boats, yachts, cruise ships, ski boats. If he’d found something he
didn’t want anyone to know about, it’s logical that he would have had a careful look around before he pulled it on board.’

Hawkins nodded, reluctantly. ‘OK, John. I concede that your scenario does make sense, though it is still entirely circumstantial. Because you’re here talking to me, I assume
you’ve already taken some action. What have you done to retrieve the situation?’

‘I’ve sent a team out to Crete – in fact they should be there by now. I’ve briefed them to find and totally destroy the remains of the Learjet, after retrieving the case
with the flasks.’

‘And the file too, I hope?’

‘Yes, and the file too.’

‘What about this diver? Could N-PIC identify the diving tender? Can you trace the diver through his boat?’

Nicholson shook his head. ‘I don’t think we’ll need to trace the diver.’

‘Why not?’

‘I checked the database before I called you, looking for any developments that might be related. There were two new entries that I think kind of tie everything together. First, this
morning a Greek newspaper reported the death of a man called Spiros Aristides on Crete. He was an unlicensed diver. Second, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta have just responded to a
request for assistance from the local Cretan medical authorities.’

Nicholson looked keenly at Hawkins, whose face now seemed paler in the fading daylight around the car. ‘Why the CDC?’ Hawkins asked. ‘What was the nature of their problem? And
what killed the diver?’

‘A possible epidemic. The Cretans have reported that Aristides had probably been killed by Ebola, or some other kind of filovirus, but real fast-acting.’

Hawkins leaned back in his seat, and stared sightlessly through the windshield. ‘So that’s it,’ he said at last. ‘You’re right. It’s the only explanation that
makes any kind of sense. This diver discovered the wreck, pulled out the case, then opened it up and found the flasks. And now he’s dead because he opened a flask as well. Dear God, what a
mess. I thought – I hoped – that after all this time we’d heard the last of it.’ He shook his head. ‘So what now? What secondary actions will you be taking?’

Nicholson didn’t reply immediately, but glanced around the deserted area outside the car to check that they were still unobserved. When he spoke, his voice was low and almost sad.
‘We – or rather I – have to protect the Company, and America. I’m the only one left inside the Agency who knows exactly what happened, and why we had to do what we did.
Under no circumstances can details of CAIP be allowed to leak out. That means I’ve had to take some hard decisions – and none, CJ, has been harder for me than this one.’

He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small-calibre black automatic pistol with a silencer attached. He pointed it directly at Hawkins’s chest.

‘I’m truly sorry about this, CJ,’ Nicholson continued, as the old man tensed and his face turned even paler, ‘and you must believe this isn’t easy for me. But I
have to make sure there are no possible loose ends, and that means ensuring that all the agents involved in CAIP keep total silence. I’m afraid this is the only way I can be completely
certain of that.’

For a long moment Hawkins stayed rigid, and Nicholson wondered if he might make a futile attempt to wrest the gun from his hands. Then Hawkins relaxed, seeming to accept the inevitable as he
stared into the eyes of the younger man. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said, ‘but I would never have talked, you know. You don’t need to do this.’

‘You can say that,’ Nicholson replied, ‘but if they ever recovered the file they’d put you and the others under intense pressure. Your name and face would be splashed
over the newspapers. You’d be publicly disgraced and humiliated. Then you might talk, just to explain what happened. I really can’t take that risk. If you were in my position,
you’d do the same.’

‘Perhaps, perhaps not,’ Hawkins muttered, then without warning swung a wild punch at Nicholson’s jaw. The blow connected, but Nicholson had anticipated something of the sort
and rode with it. He grabbed the older man’s wrist with his left hand and forced his arm back. The pistol’s aim barely wavered.

‘This won’t help, CJ,’ Nicholson said, raising his voice and gesturing with the pistol. ‘You know I have to do this, and it’s up to you whether it’s easy or
hard.’ Hawkins tensed again, and then relaxed, finally recognizing the futility of any attempt to overpower Nicholson: he was unarmed, twenty-five years older and seventy pounds lighter than
his captor.

‘I hate guns,’ Hawkins murmured, slumping back into his seat.

‘I can offer you a choice.’ Nicholson reached into his pocket and tossed Hawkins a small twist of paper. In his safe at home, Nicholson kept a number of things he had acquired during
his career with the CIA. One of them was a screw-top jar containing a dozen or so small brown pills obtained from Fort Detrick many years earlier.

Hawkins looked across at Nicholson, then undid the paper and stared at the pill.

‘Just swallow it, CJ,’ Nicholson said softly. ‘I promise you it won’t hurt. You’ll just fall asleep. If you don’t cooperate, I’ll have to use
this’ – he motioned slightly with the silenced automatic – ‘and that
will
hurt.’

Hawkins stared at his former colleague for a long moment, then across the Potomac at the last sunset he would ever see. ‘You will take care of my wife, won’t you?’ he asked.
Nicholson nodded as Hawkins took a last long look at the water in front of him, then swallowed the pill.

‘That’s why I was a few minutes late getting here,’ Nicholson murmured, as Hawkins’s eyes started to glaze over and his head slumped back in his seat. ‘I already
have.’

Three minutes later Nicholson checked for a pulse but found none. He got out of the car and strode off up the hill to where his own vehicle was parked. As he moved, he glanced at his watch,
checking how much time he had before his second appointment of the evening – with a man named James Richards.

Thursday
Réthymno, Crete

It wasn’t much of a hotel, but as far as Richter was concerned it was fine. He estimated he’d need a room for two nights, tops, and as long as the water was
hot and the sheets were clean he was reasonably happy.

The Merlin had dropped him off at Irakleío the previous evening, and he’d hired a car – a blue Volkswagen Golf – and driven along the coast as far as Réthymno.
The second hotel he’d tried had three vacant rooms, so he had picked the one that overlooked the hotel car park and hauled up his leather overnight bag from the Golf.

Richter didn’t normally bother with breakfast, but it was included in the room price, so he walked down to the dining room just before eight and crunched his way through a slice of hard
toast and an almost equally hard roll, washed down with coffee that actually tasted like it had been made from beans rather than powder.

Afterwards, he walked down the street to a souvenir shop and bought a map of Crete before collecting the Golf from the car park and heading further west along the main north-coast highway,
destination Kandíra.

Kandíra, south-west Crete

‘So, in summary, there are really two aspects to this outbreak that we need to address,’ Tyler Hardin began. ‘The first, the one that we the CDC team
will be concentrating on, is to identify the pathogen that caused the deaths of these two men. Now that we have our equipment with us, I hope that we can achieve that fairly quickly.’

Hardin paused and looked round the tent that served as their makeshift base, set up by the main street that ran through Kandíra. His three CDC colleagues – Mark Evans, Jerry Fisher
and Susan Kane – were sitting on collapsible chairs in front of him, mugs of coffee in hand and the remains of their breakfast scattered on the table behind them.

All were qualified doctors and Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, Fisher with eight years’ experience, while Evans and Kane had only just completed their initial training at Atlanta.
Hardin wasn’t surprised to find that exactly half of his team were ‘rookies’. The CDC had always believed that the best way to learn about investigating a sudden outbreak of a
disease was to just go out and do it. It was the ultimate form of ‘on-the-job training’.

It was standard CDC procedure to deliver morning briefings before the field work started and this one was, in Hardin’s opinion, probably the most important, because it was the first. He
had talked to them briefly the previous evening, but all three had been exhausted both by their intense activity back in the States preparing for this operation and by the series of flights
they’d had to endure to reach the island.

The last thing Hardin had wanted was to have tired and jet-lagged operatives messing with a Level Four Hot Agent, so as soon as they’d finished their evening meal he’d ordered them
straight to bed – on camp-beds in the neighbouring tent – leaving it until late the next morning to brief them.

‘The one piece of equipment we haven’t got here is a scanning electron microscope, but there’s one in a research laboratory in Irakleío, which Dr Gravas tells me he has
used in the past. Our investigation obviously has a very high priority, so we should be able to use that one more or less on demand. The most difficult part of conducting a microscopic
investigation will be logistics. We’re not very far from Irakleío as the crow flies, but getting there by road would take hours. Fortunately, we have some help there. Last night you
arrived here by helicopter courtesy of the British Royal Navy aircraft carrier
Invincible
, which is standing off Crete specifically to assist us. I’m told her helicopters will be
available to ferry us wherever, and whenever, we want to go. A liaison officer from the ship should be arriving here sometime this morning. He’ll have a radio link to the
Invincible
and we’ll be able to organize any helicopter flights we need through him.

‘The second problem is the actual source of the infection. As I explained earlier, the evidence strongly suggests it was stored inside a heavily sealed container. If that is correct,
we’re dealing either with some bioweapon or with an unknown virus that has been discovered in the wild. And there’s some other evidence that I’ll discuss in a minute.’

Hardin glanced at his three colleagues in turn. ‘In either case we are confronting something demonstrably deadly and almost certainly unfamiliar to us. You must take all the usual
precautions in applying the rules for dealing with a potential Level Four Hot Agent. I know that’s going to be difficult out here in the field, and we’ll have to improvise, but
it’s essential that all of us exercise extreme care. Watch everything and everybody, and if you see anything that concerns you, stop the procedure immediately. Extreme caution is
essential.

‘My final point is somewhat unusual. I mentioned a container that I believe held this hot agent. What you should also know is that we haven’t found it, nor expect to, simply because
it seems somebody else has already removed it.’ Hardin looked down at three astonished faces. ‘When Dr Gravas realized Spiros Aristides might have died from some form of filovirus
infection he took the basic precaution of closing all the doors before he left the house. When I subsequently entered, all the interior doors were standing open.

‘Inspector Lavat had stationed a policeman outside the house to ensure that no one entered the property. When we questioned him, he was adamant that nobody had been in or out –
except for the CDC personnel that he had been told to expect. What actually happened was that two men wearing white coveralls with the letters “CDC” stamped on them appeared at the
house, showed him what appeared to be CDC identity cards, entered the building and then left a few minutes later.’

Hardin smiled mirthlessly, then explained what had happened at Nico’s apartment. ‘I myself believe that we’re almost certainly dealing with either the raw material for a new
weapon,’ he continued, ‘or even something that’s already been weaponized, and we have to assume that these killers now have the container in their possession. We know there are at
least two men involved because of the evidence of the policeman stationed outside the scene of the first death.

‘One of these men was carrying a case, it seems, and it’s no great leap of logic to assume that when they didn’t find the container at Spiros’s house, they went on to
look in Nico’s apartment. These men haven’t been seen since, and their descriptions provided by the policeman himself aren’t particularly helpful – Caucasian, mid-forties,
average height, average build. One of them spoke Greek fluently but he wasn’t a native-born speaker. We have to assume that they found the container and have now left Kandíra.
It’s a very small village, so if they were still here I’m quite certain we would know about it.’

Réthymno, Crete

Hardin was quite right: Krywald and Stein were nowhere near Kandíra, and the flask was long gone. The steel case Aristides had recovered from the Learjet was locked
in the larger suitcase they’d brought with them. They hadn’t opened the steel case or even examined it except to confirm that it was the one they had been sent to recover. At his
briefing, McCready had been most specific – they were under no circumstances to open the case or try to inspect its contents. They were simply to return it to the United States and hand it
over to him personally.

Confirming they had found the right case hadn’t been that easy. It had no markings of any sort, and its original leather covering had long since vanished. McCready’s description of
the case had, however, been extremely detailed, including its precise measurements and the types of locks and catch fitted to it. As soon as they’d driven a mile or so away from
Kandíra the previous evening, Elias had stopped the hire car while Krywald compared the object they’d recovered with Nicholson’s description, just in case they’d somehow
picked up one that was only similar.