Pandemic (53 page)

Before Ross could say a word, Stein pulled out the silenced SIG automatic pistol, sighted down the barrel and pulled the trigger. The single bullet hit Ross square in the chest, slicing straight
through his heart. He dropped to the floor, killed instantly.

Stein stepped forward warily, with gun-hand extended, conscious that there might be another assassin in the bathroom. He checked both rooms thoroughly before bending over Ross’s body,
looking for the weapon he was sure he would find there.

He discovered instead a mobile telephone, and pulled it out of the dead man’s inside jacket pocket. Ripping out the hands-free lead, he studied the display. The line was still open, so he
pressed the ‘end’ button to cancel the connection, then used redial to display the last number called. He didn’t recognize it, but he didn’t expect to, but he did note that
it was a Cretan mobile number. That confused him for a moment, because he’d been expecting to see an American number, but then, he rationalized, the clean-up team would probably be equipped
with local mobiles.

He tossed the phone aside and ran his hands over Ross’s body. He repeated his search, then sat back, puzzled. An unarmed member of a clean-up team – that didn’t make any sense.
So who was this guy? He pulled open the dead man’s jacket and examined the label sewn inside it. That only puzzled him even more.

Stein shrugged and stood up. He was probably never going to find out anyway, but it was time he was somewhere else. He slammed down the briefcase lid, snapped the catches shut, picked it up and
walked out of the room. He pulled closed the door behind him and jogged lightly away down the corridor.

Friday
Réthymno, Crete

Richter heard what he thought was a cough in his earpiece and ignored it, but then the crash as Ross’s body hit the floor told him that something had gone badly
wrong. He said nothing and listened acutely, but the sounds he now heard made no immediate sense – a rustling noise, a door opening, a couple of footsteps. Next heavy breathing and then
Ross’s phone was abruptly switched off, which told him pretty much all he needed to know. Obviously contestant number three had returned to his room. The more he re-ran the sequence of sounds
in his mind, the more that cough had sounded like the report of a silenced pistol.

Richter started to move: out of the coffee shop and across the lobby to the main stairs and lifts. Not running, because that could attract unwanted attention, but moving quickly and smoothly. He
ignored the lifts – they would just be too slow – and took the stairs. As he reached the first floor, he stopped dead.

Apart from two tiny chambermaids, arms full of linen, he had seen nobody else using either the stairs or the lifts since his colleague had ascended to the third floor. That meant there had to be
a back staircase, something neither he nor Ross had investigated earlier. Hindsight was always a wonderful comfort.

On the first-floor landing, Richter looked in both directions. About ten feet away, he spotted a notice in red lettering screwed to the wall, and ran over to study it. It was an emergency
evacuation plan, in four languages, complete with a diagram of the hotel’s entire floor layout. A fire escape and rear staircase were indicated at the end of the right-hand corridor.

Richter turned and ran, crashed through the fire doors at the far end and began scrambling as quickly as he could down the stairs. As he reached the bottom and pushed open the outside door, he
was just in time to see a light blue Seat saloon – maybe a Cordoba or a Toledo – swing left out of the opposite side of the car park and accelerate hard along the adjoining street and
out of sight.

Richter pulled a small notebook and ballpoint pen out of his pocket and made a brief note, then headed back inside the hotel and climbed the stairs to the third floor. The door to room 306 was
closed and had automatically locked. Unlike Charles Ross, Richter had no lock-picking skills, but he was in no mood to wait around for somebody with a pass-key. He stepped back from the door and
kicked it hard, with the flat of his foot, right above the lock. The door creaked but held firm.

The third time his foot hit it, the door crashed open and Richter stepped inside, his Browning 9mm pistol cocked and safety catch off, held out in front of him in the classic two-handed combat
grip. He saw Ross lying motionless on the floor at the foot of the bed and stepped across to him. One glance at the surprisingly small dark red stain in the centre of his chest told the whole tale,
but Richter checked for a pulse anyway. Two minutes later he left the room, went down the stairs and out through the lobby.

He crossed the street to a café, sat down at a table and ordered a coffee from the waiter. He then pulled out his mobile phone and notebook, checked the emergency contact number Ross had
given him earlier for the duty SIS officer and dialled. A voice answered on the second ring.

‘This is Summer Lightning,’ Richter said. ‘I need a clean-up team at the hotel in Réthymno. Mickey Mouse didn’t make it.’

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

John Westwood was pleased at the speed with which the Personnel Department managed to generate the information he wanted, but unpleasantly surprised by the number of names
on the list. Over two and a half thousand people fitted his initial criteria, and he knew he’d have to whittle that number down considerably before he could start any kind of a detailed
investigation.

He picked up the internal phone and dialled Personnel. ‘Thanks for the listing,’ he said, ‘but I need to apply some filters to reduce it to a manageable size. Using the
information you’ve supplied as a base, eliminate all agents known to be currently on vacation outside the continental United States, also those who are hospitalized, and any known to be
incapacitated. By that I mean people recovering at home from a broken leg or in long-term care, that kind of thing. Some guy who rang in last Tuesday claiming he had a migraine doesn’t
count.’

Thirty minutes later a new print-out lay on his desk, but there were still just over eighteen hundred names left, far too many to make a search feasible.

Westwood pondered for some time before he applied the next obvious filter, simply because he wasn’t sure he was wise to do so. He had no idea exactly where the killer was based, but
wherever it was it had to be within fairly easy reach of the state of Virginia. Instinctively, Westwood thought Mr X was probably sitting in an office in the same building at Langley as himself
right then, but that was an assumption he certainly couldn’t rely on.

So he made his decision and called Personnel again. ‘Now eliminate all those based outside Washington, DC, Maryland and Virginia,’ he ordered.

After four hours of successive filters, he had whittled the listing down to fifty-seven people, and couldn’t think of anything else to reduce the number any further. So now it was just
down to footwork, checking the personnel file of each agent in turn.

Réthymno, Crete

Three minutes after he’d terminated his call to the duty SIS officer, Richter’s mobile rang.

‘This is Tyler Hardin, Mr Richter, and I’ve got some news for you.’

‘Let me guess,’ Richter said. ‘The man calling himself Curtis is dead?’

‘Correct, but that isn’t the news I think you’ll want to hear. Curtis was going to die anyway: maybe this afternoon, maybe tonight, but he certainly wouldn’t have seen
tomorrow. No, the news is that somebody wasn’t prepared to wait for this pathogen to take its course. The virus didn’t kill Curtis – someone with a pistol did that.’

Richter wasn’t often lost for words, but that stumped him for a moment. ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘Curtis was unconscious, even comatose, and due to die within
a few hours, no matter what, and somebody still felt they had to eliminate him? That makes no sense.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Hardin replied, ‘but there’s no doubt about what happened. I’ve just pulled two nine-millimetre slugs out of the victim’s chest, and the
local police have taken them away for testing. I’ll let you know what they come back with, if anything.’

‘Thanks, Tyler. I wish I could say I knew what the hell is going on here.’

Hardin laughed briefly. ‘Join the club.’

Western Crete

Stein knew he was running for his life. He was still uncertain exactly how he stood with McCready, but he guessed that he was now a disposable asset and that McCready
would have him killed as soon as he’d handed over the crucial file and the flasks. That was one problem.

Another problem was the dead man he’d left behind him in the hotel at Réthymno. He had no idea who he was, but the label inside his jacket had been sewn there by a tailor in
London’s Jermyn Street and, although far from conclusive, it did at least suggest that the man was a Brit.

Whoever he was, Stein guessed that by now the Cretan police would have been called in and furnished with a description of Stein himself, and maybe even a photofit, by the hotel desk clerk. So he
was going to have to rigorously avoid making eye contact with the local cops until he could get off this island.

The mystery dead man also meant that he dare not risk trying to catch a passenger ferry or regular airline flight out of Crete, because the police would be watching out for him at all the ports
and airports. It was looking more and more likely, therefore, that he was going to have to accept McCready’s highly suspect offer of a helicopter flight to the US Navy frigate. That
didn’t please Stein at all.

In fact, about the only good news in his life right then was that at least he still felt fine, so he presumed that his rudimentary precautions earlier had prevented the lethal virus from
infecting him. In the circumstances that was a very, very small consolation.

Stein had no clear idea where he was heading, except away from Réthymno. He’d swung the rented Seat out of the hotel car park as quickly as he dared, just in case the dead
man’s colleagues might guess where he was heading. He hadn’t seen anyone as he’d accelerated away, but that didn’t mean that somebody hadn’t spotted him leave.

Within minutes of driving away from the hotel he’d joined the main north-coast road and headed west towards Chaniá. If he was going to take a chance on the pick-up McCready claimed
to have arranged, at least Chaniá, or even somewhere further west, meant a shorter distance to drive the following afternoon. The email had specified a pick-up point north of the road
heading to the coastal area, beyond Plátanos, on the extreme west side of the island.

Réthymno, Crete

Martin Fitzpatrick, the SIS officer Richter had been told to expect, turned up within twenty minutes and sat himself down heavily next to Richter at the café.
He’d been out on the road when he’d been briefed by the duty officer over a secure radio circuit, and had broken every speed limit ever imposed to get to Réthymno.

Richter explained briefly what had happened, and that Ross was dead. Just as he finished, they heard the whine of police sirens getting closer. Richter guessed that somebody passing had peered
into room 306 and seen Ross’s body lying on the floor.

‘I think the shit’s about to hit the fan,’ Fitzpatrick murmured. ‘I’d better get over there and try to calm things down. I think I can assure the local fuzz that
this is an entirely external matter, not involving anyone local, apart from poor old Charles Ross, and he’s in no position to make a fuss.’

‘One thing before you go.’ Richter pulled out his notebook. ‘I’m fairly sure the guy we’re looking for is driving a blue Seat saloon, and I’ve got a partial
plate number. It’s almost certainly a hire car, rented within the last three or four days. Can you ask your police friends to get me the whole plate number and then issue a watch order for
both the vehicle and occupant. I don’t want this man approached, however. He’s running and he’s likely to shoot first, and second, and not bother asking any questions. What I want
to know is where he’s located now. He’s almost certainly left Réthymno, but he’s likely to have checked in to a hotel somewhere else. If they can find out where he is, even
where his car’s parked, I’ll handle it from there.’

Though it was a bright sunny day, something about the way Richter uttered those last few words sent a chill up Fitzpatrick’s spine. ‘When you say “handle it”, can I
assume this renegade American won’t be bothering us here any more?’

‘You assume correctly,’ Richter said, his face hard and unsmiling. ‘I brought Charles Ross into this mess, and now he’s dead because he was doing his job. That makes his
death my responsibility, at least by implication. The man who killed him won’t just walk away from this, that I can promise you.’

Just then two police cars arrived outside the hotel opposite and squealed to a halt, their sirens dying away in a discordant duet. Four officers scrambled out and ran into the hotel entrance.
Murder’s a fairly rare crime on Crete, and Richter assumed they were all eager to take a good first look at the victim.

‘Right,’ Fitzpatrick concluded, ‘I’ll see what I can do. Can you hang on here until I’ve got things sorted out across the road?’

Richter nodded. ‘Until you find me this bastard’s location, I’ve got nowhere else to go.’ As Fitzpatrick crossed the street towards the hotel, he heard Richter summon a
waiter and order another cup of coffee and a
baklava
.

Between Kolymvári and Réthymno, Crete

Mike Murphy had just passed the north-bound turning for Georgioúpoli, heading back towards Réthymno, when he spotted the light blue Seat Cordoba travelling
in the opposite direction. Murphy had extremely good eyesight and immediately recognized the Seat’s registration number. It helped that he’d been expecting to see the car, having been
copied Stein’s pick-up instructions by Nicholson.

He did nothing until the Seat had got about a quarter of a mile behind him, then he hauled the Peugeot round in a U-turn and floored the accelerator pedal. He didn’t know exactly where
Stein was going, but he figured that the target was on his way to a new location somewhere on the western end of the island, and closer to where the helicopter would land the following day. Murphy
guessed that Stein had the case and file with him, and the easiest option was to follow his target and find out where he was going next. Then he could choose his moment for eliminating the man and
completing the job.