Pandemic (29 page)

As is usual in most of Europe, the prevailing wind came from the south-west, and the Merlin settled heavily onto the dusty ground with its nose pointing into wind and away from the cordon
surrounding the village. The sliding access door to the rear compartment on a Merlin is located on the right side of the aircraft, which meant that nobody in the village or even manning the cordon
could see when it was opened. Once the helicopter had landed, a few moments passed before anyone saw the newly arrived passengers approach from around the rear of the aircraft, keeping well clear
of its spinning tail rotor.

Krywald and Stein waited until the helicopter’s passengers had begun ferrying cases and equipment from the aircraft to the cordon, and a good two-way flow of people had been established.
Then he and Stein stepped forward, waved their fake CDC identity cards towards one of the policemen, and walked across towards the helicopter. Stein was carrying the black case which contained the
steel box. The two men slid around the rear of the aircraft, then simply continued walking away from the village and into the olive groves, where Elias was waiting in the hired Ford.

As they approached the lines of stunted trees, Krywald looked back. As he had anticipated, their departure had caused no interest whatsoever. Everyone was still transfixed by the helicopter,
which sat, turning and burning, on the dusty scrub near the tents. Krywald grinned and carried on walking.

‘That’s odd,’ Inspector Lavat remarked, as the three men approached the house where Nico Aristides had lived and died.

‘What?’ Hardin asked. He was moving very slowly in the biological space suit. The garment was undeniably cumbersome, and never intended to be worn by anyone out for a stroll. He was
still wearing the Racal hood, because to have removed it would have meant going through the entire taping and checking procedure again, so he was sweating profusely.

‘My police officer isn’t here,’ Lavat replied. ‘I stationed a man outside each property.’

‘A call of nature, perhaps?’ Gravas suggested.

‘Maybe,’ Lavat said, ‘but he should be somewhere close by. He wouldn’t need to go far to find a convenient bush.’ He gestured at the open countryside stretching in
front of them.

‘He’ll be back in a few minutes, no doubt,’ Gravas said. ‘He’s even left his radio on that window sill. Here, Mr Hardin, let me check you.’

Hardin stood quite still while Gravas prowled round him, visually checking every seam of the Tyvek space suit for any tears and ensuring that the tape was still in place at the American’s
ankles and wrists. Finally, Gravas examined the neck seal where the Racal hood was fitted, and then declared himself satisfied.

Hardin nodded his thanks and turned back towards the building. Like Spiros’s house, and virtually every other property in Kandíra, it was small, white-washed and slightly scruffy. A
narrow wooden door, painted in dark blue gloss, but heavily weathered and faded by the sun, gave access to the building from the street, and there was a steep flight of stone steps on the left side
of the property that ascended to the first floor.

‘Which floor, Inspector?’ Hardin asked.

‘The first,’ Lavat replied. ‘It’s the only door up there. You’ll need a knife to cut the seal on the door.’

‘I have one here,’ Gravas said. He took a small folding penknife from his pocket and opened the main blade. He walked towards Hardin, but stopped when he was a couple of feet away,
then placed it on the ground and backed off.

Hardin stepped forward and picked up the knife. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘Be careful with it,’ Gravas said. ‘It’s very sharp.’

Hardin nodded, crossed the road and began to climb up the stone steps. At the top he paused before walking across to the door itself. Then he stopped and stared for a few seconds at the ripped
fabric seal. One end had been nailed to the door and the other end to the frame, forming a symbolic rather than a literal or physical barrier, and the fabric had torn away from the nail in the
door. Hardin walked back to the top of the outside stairs and called down to the street. ‘Inspector?’

‘Mr Hardin?’

‘We have a problem here. Somebody has broken the seal. Someone has clearly entered this building since you and Dr Gravas were here.’

‘What?’ Lavat exclaimed, and started up the steps. He stopped a couple of treads from the top and stared across at the broken seal.

‘This makes your missing police officer look more worrying,’ Hardin said. ‘Perhaps something has happened to him.’

Lavat nodded, turned back and started down the steps. ‘I’ll check,’ he said.

Hardin put Gravas’s penknife down on the low parapet, then opened the apartment door and stepped inside.

Ten minutes later he walked back down the stone staircase, laid the penknife on the ground and looked around. Gravas and Lavat were nowhere in sight, and he assumed they were searching the
immediate area. He turned back to stare up at the house again just as Lavat walked around the corner.

‘Any luck?’ Hardin asked.

Lavat nodded briefly. ‘Yes, we found him.’

‘What did he tell you?’ Hardin asked.

‘Nothing at all,’ Lavat’s reply was low and angry, ‘because he’s dead. He’s been tossed in a ditch like so much garbage, along with the bodies of two elderly
locals. Dr Gravas is examining them all now.’ Lavat paused and shook his head. ‘This is turning into a massacre. It started out as a simple murder investigation,’ he said,
‘and we’ve now got five dead bodies, one of them a police officer. Two men killed by some germ, another two villagers and one of my officers slaughtered like animals by the same people
who created that germ. I knew that young man personally. I’ve known him for three years and I’m the one who’s going to have to tell his wife that she’s a widow, and
that’s not a job I’m looking forward to.’

Lavat stared across at the space-suit-clad figure still standing in the middle of the street, his eyes moist and emotion choking his voice. ‘You didn’t find that missing container,
did you?’ he asked.

Hardin shook his head. ‘No. There’s nothing of that nature anywhere inside the apartment.’

‘No,’ Lavat said, ‘because the bastards who killed my officer got here before us and took it away with them. But I’ll find them. They must still be somewhere on this
island, and if it’s the last thing I do I’m going to track them down. I’ve already set the wheels in motion.’ He turned as the doctor appeared behind him.
‘Well?’ he demanded angrily.

‘They look like professional killings,’ Gravas said, pulling off a pair of surgical gloves. ‘The police officer was struck from behind, then somebody smashed his nasal bone
upwards into his brain. That’s a killing blow taught in certain schools of martial arts. They also crushed his larynx to stop him crying out. The two old men were basically strangled, but
only after receiving crippling blows to their bodies.’

‘I’m really sorry about this, Inspector,’ Hardin said eventually into the long silence that followed the doctor’s remarks, ‘but we have to move on now. Dr Gravas,
could you use the hand-sprayer, please?’

Gravas nodded and opened Hardin’s bag, which he himself had carried from Spiros Aristides’s house. The hand-sprayer it contained was fed with a bleach solution from an attached
bottle. As Hardin stood in the middle of the street with his arms outstretched, Gravas walked all around him, spraying this solution liberally over the CDC investigator’s Tyvek suit. As
instructed, he started at the head, then worked his way slowly down to the American’s booted feet.

The bleach was a high-concentration solution, which filled the still evening air with a stinging pungency.

‘Normally we’d put this stuff in a biohazard bag and just dispose of it,’ Hardin explained, as he pulled off the strips of tape to remove his hood, ‘but we’ve
limited equipment here on Crete and I’ve been very careful not to touch either body, so I intend to re-use this suit. That bleach solution will kill all known pathogens.’

Hardin bundled the suit into the biohazard bag Lavat had brought with him, added the hood and blower assembly, and closed the zipper. Lavat had a separate, smaller, biohazard bag, into which
Hardin put both the pairs of surgical gloves he’d used, then sealed it. That bag and its contents would be destroyed by fire in due course. Hardin picked up the two biohazard bags and the
three men began walking back towards the main street that ran through the village.

‘So,’ Gravas said, glancing back up the alley, ‘no container.’

‘No, so we have to assume that Nico had it in his possession and that whoever killed my police officer and then entered the property has now retrieved it. We also have to consider the
possibility that Spiros found more than one container. We can be fairly certain that they opened one of them, but the fact that somebody has since been onto this scene . . .’ Hardin suddenly
halted, and Gravas turned to him curiously.

Something had been gnawing at Hardin’s subconscious ever since he’d stepped out of the elder Aristides’s house. Something he’d seen or heard that didn’t seem quite
right, but exactly what it was he hadn’t been able to remember. Like a half-seen figure in fog, it had been too indistinct to discern but was equally obviously there. And suddenly he knew
exactly what it was.

‘God, I’ve been slow,’ Hardin said. ‘I should have realized back at the first house. I think you told me you closed his bedroom door after you, Dr Gravas?’

‘Yes. I closed all the internal doors – it seemed a routine precaution.’

‘But when I went upstairs, both bedroom doors were wide open. That means somebody else had access before I got there. I think we’re up against somebody who knows exactly what’s
going on here and what they were looking for. And the fact that they’re prepared to kill a police officer and two innocent bystanders tells me that the stakes are high, and are only going to
get higher.’

Lower Cedar Point, Virginia

A little after eight that evening Hawkins arrived at Lower Cedar Point and parked his car close to the water’s edge, his watery pale blue eyes gazing across the
Potomac towards Dahlgren and the setting sun. To the north there was a constant stream of traffic crossing the Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge, which carries US 301 from Virginia to Maryland.

After a few minutes, the passenger door opened and he turned to greet the man who had telephoned him earlier. He was grey haired, big and bulky, and despite the warm weather was wearing a long
black leather coat.

‘John,’ Hawkins said in brief greeting.

‘CJ.’

‘How did this happen?’ Hawkins asked. ‘I thought the wreck was too deep for divers to find it.’

‘It should have been, but when the Lear was hit it looks like the pilot managed to retain some directional control and pointed the aircraft towards the nearest landmass, which happened to
be Crete. That shouldn’t have been a problem, because the water at that end of the Mediterranean is really deep, but unfortunately when the Lear finally speared in it was right between two
islands about twenty miles south-east of Crete.

‘Everywhere else in the area the seabed is far enough down that only really specialized equipment can reach it, but right where the Lear crashed the water’s only about a hundred feet
deep. It’s not my field, but apparently that’s pretty deep for a free diver using an aqualung, but it’s not an impossible depth to reach as long as the diver knows what he’s
doing.’

‘How sure are you that the right plane’s been found?’ Hawkins said after a few moments. ‘There must be lots of wrecked aircraft at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
What’s your evidence?’

John Nicholson shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘It’s mainly circumstantial at the moment, but I think it’s convincing enough. You remember the satellite watch we placed on the
crash site?’ Hawkins nodded. ‘OK. A few days ago a work boat, which N-PIC later identified as a diving tender, was spotted in the area. In fact, it was anchored within a quarter of a
mile of the original impact point. Only one image was available and that showed no activity – just the boat riding at anchor with nobody on board.’

‘And from that it was inferred that there were divers underwater and at the wreck site? That sounds very thin, John.’

Nicholson nodded. ‘I agree,’ he said, ‘but I did regard it as a wake-up call and requested N-PIC to take additional pictures there every time the bird passed overhead. There
was no other activity for a couple of days, then another series of images all showing the same scene – the same diving tender in the same place. This time, we could see the diver as well, and
he was hauling three aqualung sets back into the boat. My diving specialist tells me that using three aqualungs suggests either a very lengthy or a very deep dive, and the logical conclusion is
that he went down deep. Very few divers will stay in mid-water, as the most interesting marine activity is usually on or just above the seabed.’

‘It still sounds circumstantial to me,’ Hawkins said. ‘What you’ve got is a diving tender spotted in the area. That doesn’t prove the diver found the wreck itself.
In fact, we don’t even know for sure that there’s anything left to find after thirty years underwater.’

Nicholson nodded again. ‘Yes, but there’s more. The last frame received showed that one end of the rope he’d secured his aqualungs to was still in the water and there was
almost certainly something else still attached to it.’

‘Could have been a weight,’ Hawkins suggested, ‘or just another aqualung, maybe.’

‘Yes, indeed it could,’ Nicholson agreed, ‘but I don’t think so. N-PIC counted the aqualung racks visible on the tender, and that number matched the sets you can see in
the pictures, so I don’t think it was an extra lung. Furthermore, the diver cleated down the rope after he’d got the aqualungs up on deck. If all that was still in the water was a
weight at the end of the rope, why would he bother to do that?’

Hawkins shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘I think this diver found the wreck and retrieved something from it. The reason he didn’t haul it straight into the boat was because he wanted to make sure that nobody was watching
him.’