Pandemic (24 page)

Perfect
. Krywald estimated they had at least a couple of minutes.

The two men stood up and walked calmly, and without haste, towards the nearest houses. The distance they needed to cover was less than forty yards, so within seconds they were out of sight,
heading down a narrow twisting street towards the village centre.

Hammersmith, London

The Central Intelligence Agency isn’t the only organization that reads newspapers gathered from around the world.

The British Secret Intelligence Service, popularly and incorrectly known as MI6, has a section which is given very much the same remit as that for which Jerry Mulligan worked at Langley. The
source they were using was different: the SIS man on the spot in Athens had missed the local press but had picked up a broadcast on one of the radio stations. He had then telephoned three of his
local contacts – two of whom were newspaper reporters and believed that he was too – and within an hour he had amassed pretty much the same information as Mulligan had gleaned from the
newspaper.

Rather than wait for the normal end-of-business encrypted email to Vauxhall Cross, the SIS officer had then written, enciphered and dispatched a one-off high-priority email to SIS London, with a
copy to his opposite number on Crete.

In London, after the message was decrypted and its originating station identified, it was automatically diverted into the electronic ‘in-box’ of the head of the Western Hemisphere
Controllerate. He scanned it, and copied it to his number two, with a bald instruction to investigate and report.

Ninety minutes after this email had arrived at Vauxhall Cross, Richard Simpson, who’d arrived at Hammersmith from Heathrow Airport less than ten minutes earlier, was looking at a hard-copy
printout of the message, which was annotated with the ‘investigate’ request from SIS.

Simpson hated computers and refused to have a terminal in his office, which meant that every message for which the Foreign Operations Executive was an action addressee had to be printed out and
presented to him. This caused a considerable amount of irritation to – and a lot of extra work for – the staff at Hammersmith, but as Simpson was the head of the department there
wasn’t a lot, apart from muttering and complaining to each other in the canteen, that anyone could do about it.

‘Typical of bloody Six,’ Simpson muttered sourly into his empty office, putting down the printed message. Then he glanced at his desk calendar, nodded, picked up his telephone and
pressed three keys for an internal number.

‘Simpson,’ he said when his call was answered. ‘Come up, please.’

The Intelligence Director walked into Simpson’s office four minutes later and sat down in front of his desk.

‘Have you seen this?’ Simpson demanded, passing the printed sheet across.

The ID looked at it and nodded. ‘Yes. It could, of course, just be a bad case of Asian ’flu, but I doubt it. I have been wondering whether it might be some kind of biological weapon
test. The obvious worry is that al-Qaeda or some other group of terrorists might have developed a biological weapon of mass destruction and they’re trying it out on Crete as a sort of test
run. If so, it would be somewhat reminiscent of the Aum sect in Japan.’

Simpson looked irritated. He had great respect for the Intelligence Director’s breadth of knowledge, but had always found his pedantic delivery and frequently incomplete answers somewhat
annoying. He was, however, well aware of the details of the Tokyo attack.

In March 1995 the Aum sect – its full name was Aum Shinrikyo, which translates more or less as ‘Aum Supreme Truth’, and it was led by Shoko Asahara who was half-blind and
certainly more than half-mad – launched a gas attack using sarin on the Tokyo subway on a Monday morning in the middle of the rush hour. Twelve people died and over five and a half thousand
had to receive hospital treatment. The low mortality rate was attributed to impurities in the sarin nerve gas manufactured by the cult. Because of the inevitably confined space and lack of fresh
air in the subway, the death toll would have been hundreds or even thousands if the sect had developed a pure strain.

‘And what exactly has a gas attack in Tokyo got to do with a virus infection on Crete?’ Simpson demanded.

‘Nothing directly, but it might indicate the same kind of pattern. What isn’t generally known is that before the Tokyo attack the Aum sect carried out a trial run in Australia of the
sarin gas it had itself developed. They bought a remote sheep ranch – the Banjawarn Station deep in the outback of Western Australia – specifically to test their concocted strain. It
was an expensive test, since the ranch alone cost them four hundred thousand Australian dollars.’

‘Casualties?’ Simpson asked.

‘Twenty-nine sheep, no humans, but that was because the only people in the area were Aum technicians wearing full biological space suits. Despite its impurities, the Australian test proved
that the sarin they had manufactured was lethal – which was all Asahara needed to know. The Aum sect is long gone, but what worries me is if al-Qaeda are following a similar path and
they’ve chosen Crete as a testing-ground for some bioweapon they’ve developed or, worse, bought illicitly.’

‘From Russia?’

‘From Russia, or Britain or America or Iran or Syria or China or any one of about a dozen other nations. There are hundreds of biological and chemical weapon stockpiles dotted around the
world, and making such agents isn’t actually that difficult as long as you possess the right facilities. Sarin – its chemical title is isopropyl methylphosphonfluoridate – is
basically an insecticide, so its ingredients are readily available. You have to take care in making it, to ensure that there are no leaks, but any reasonably well-equipped chemical laboratory could
manufacture it easily.’

‘The Tokyo death toll seems low. How dangerous is sarin?’

‘Very,’ the Intelligence Director replied. ‘The lethal dose is about six milligrams – that’s about decimal zero zero zero two of an ounce – and it
doesn’t have to be inhaled. Just getting a drop of it on your skin is enough to kill you. And sarin is benign compared with some of the more modern concoctions.’

‘And you think this might be a bioweapon attack using sarin?’

The Intelligence Director shook his head.

‘Yes and no. Sarin is a nerve gas. That makes it a chemical agent, not a bioweapon. If sarin had been used and had been properly deployed it would have affected a large number of people
– perhaps even the entire population of this village on Crete. It would also have affected them all at about the same time, and in more or less the same way. No, what we’re looking at
here is almost certainly some kind of a biological agent, but it could also be entirely natural and nothing to do with any terrorist organization.’

‘Explain.’

‘In my opinion, this incident on Crete is one of two things. The most likely explanation is that it’s just an isolated outbreak of some already known but rare disease that the local
doctor hasn’t recognized for some reason. Despite what the medical profession would like us to believe, no doctor knows everything, and a Cretan general practitioner is going to spend most of
his time treating tourists for sunburn and stomach upsets. He isn’t likely to be familiar with some of the rarer illnesses, like Lassa Fever, Marburg or Ebola—’

‘Hang on,’ Simpson interrupted. ‘I know a bit about those myself, and they’re
highly
infectious, so we wouldn’t just be looking at a single case.’

‘That’s not necessarily true. Even if this Greek diver had contracted Ebola, the disease’s incubation period is long enough that he may have been infected with it some time
ago. He could subsequently have infected other people, but they may not yet be showing any signs of the disease. Within a week or two, there might be another dozen cases.’

‘OK,’ Simpson brooded, ‘that makes sense. What’s the other explanation?’

‘The least likely, but most worrying, scenario is that it is some kind of a biological weapon, but one with a low mortality or low infectivity. Only one death has been confirmed, I
understand, and unless there are a lot of other very sick people in that village right now that we haven’t heard about, it suggests the cause is an inefficient killer.’

Simpson stroked his chin in silence for a few moments.

‘Right, the problem as I see it is that there’s no way of telling at this stage which explanation is the right one. The potential causes are completely different – a rare but
naturally occurring virus or other biological agent, or some kind of manufactured bioweapon – but the result at this stage is the same: one man is dead and there are possibly a number of
other people incubating the virus but not showing any signs of distress at the moment.’

‘That’s a fair summary.’

‘Well, Vauxhall Cross have asked us to investigate it, so we’d better do something. What are your recommendations?’

‘There’s not a lot we can do from here. No doubt the Americans will be taking satellite pictures of the island that we’ll be granted access to, and I’m sure Sky News and
CNN and the rest of the news organizations will be sending teams out to the Mediterranean if they haven’t already done so. Six have got a small presence on the island. Probably our best
option is to analyse the data already in the public domain and supplement that with satellite and local intelligence.’

Simpson nodded. ‘I agree with that for background and general analysis, but I’ve a better idea. Richter.’

The Intelligence Director looked interested – puzzled, but interested. ‘Sorry?’ he asked, glancing over at Simpson.

‘Richter. He’s been taking a holiday on that floating gin palace in the Med, and when I spoke to him this afternoon he told me the ship was loitering off Crete to help with this
medical emergency, so he’s right on the spot. After the cock-up he made in Italy he can bloody well start earning his money again. Tell the duty Ops Officer to signal him to find out
what’s going on. Richter’s good at digging. If there’s anything we need to know about happening in Crete, he’ll find it for us.’

Kandíra, south-west Crete

‘So what now?’ Dr Gravas asked. ‘I presume you’ll want to examine the bodies of the victims?’

Hardin’s answer surprised him.

‘No, not yet. I’m quite satisfied with your preliminary diagnosis of what killed these two men, at least in broad terms. It was definitely some kind of fast-acting hot agent, perhaps
a filovirus, or maybe something totally unknown. Once my people get here we’ll be able to do complete autopsies, take tissue samples and so on, but if I go and look at the bodies, pretty much
all I’ll be able to confirm is that they’re dead, and that isn’t a lot of help to us right now.

‘The normal procedure in an investigation is to take blood samples from anyone who may be infected. Then we separate the serum from the red blood cells using a centrifuge: there’s a
small battery-powered unit in one of the cases I brought. Then we separate the different sera into aliquots, label them, pack them in dry ice and send them back to Atlanta. Our technicians there
will try to confirm the virus, and even its precise strain, by identifying specific antibodies within the sera.

‘Our problem here is that the subjects are dead and their blood will by now have degraded, so will probably be useless for that kind of test procedure. This case is very different, and not
simply because the only two victims known to have contracted this illness are already dead. Our first priority, I suggest, is to try to find out how and where Spiros and Nico Aristides became
infected. If we can localize the source, we might be able to prevent any further casualties.’

‘And how do we do that?’ Lavat demanded.

Hardin grinned somewhat ruefully. ‘I don’t have a comprehensive answer to that, Inspector,’ he said, ‘so all we can do is apply simple logic and start from the last place
the two men were seen together alive.’

‘The
kafeníon
?’

‘Exactly. We start from Jakob’s bar and work our way slowly along towards Spiros Aristides’s house.’

‘And what will we be looking for?’ Gravas asked.

‘I have no idea. All we can assume is that somewhere along that route they saw something sufficiently interesting or unusual that they stopped and touched it, or tasted it, or otherwise
allowed the infection to enter their systems. I’m just hoping that we’ll see and recognize the same thing.’

‘Suppose they picked up whatever this thing is and took it into Aristides’s house with them?’

‘Then we’ll find it there, I guess,’ Hardin replied. ‘OK, could you ask a couple of your men to take the bigger of my two cases over to Spiros Aristides’s house?
I’ll need to put on a space suit before I go inside, but I don’t think we’ll need to take any precautions until we actually get there.’

‘Why? Isn’t there a risk that this agent is still outside somewhere, and still infectious?’

‘Yes, of course, but whatever the source is, I don’t think it uses airborne transmission.’

Lavat looked quizzical, but it was Gravas who answered. ‘Look at the timescale, Inspector,’ he explained. ‘Spiros and Nico were drinking in that pigsty Jakob calls a bar until
around midnight, but by mid-morning next day Spiros was dead, and probably Nico as well. The two women went into Spiros’s house just after he died, and they’re still both fit and well
and complaining about having to stand around in the street without their clothes on.

‘Whatever this thing is, the one thing we do know for certain is that it attacks really quickly. If the two women had breathed in any virus particles – assuming for the moment that
it
is
a virus – I would have expected one or both of them by now to be showing some signs of physical distress. I mean bleeding, choking, vomiting or something, to show that the
infection had taken a hold.’

Lavat nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That makes sense. I think you’re probably right.’

‘And,’ Gravas added, ‘I’m pleased to say that the same logic applies to us as well. We’ve been inside both properties without wearing the right protective equipment
– the paper mask would help, but it’s certainly not a proper defence against an airborne pathogen – and we’re still fine.’