James Barrington - Pandemic

‘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.

Haywood, Virginia

‘It’s no good,’ Westwood said, tossing down the red Ultra-Secret classified file and looking across his study at the couch where Richter lay sprawled, half-asleep.

‘No?’ Richter sat up, yawning, but looking interested. Tired but interested.

‘I was going to use this,’ Westwood tapped his finger on the file in front of him, ‘to cross-reference the names of any agents who fitted the rough profile I prepared. I’d already checked out the senior agents listed on the inside front cover. That got me nowhere, because they’re all dead.

‘In fact,’ he added, ‘it was the killing of the two retired Company agents that sparked our interest in what was going on in the first place. The problem is that all the junior agents are referred to in the file either by their initials, sometimes only by single initials, or by their Christian names. Sometimes they used two or three initials at the start of a memo and then only used single letters after that. It’s real confusing now, but probably made good sense at the time, when everybody knew exactly who “B” and “R” and “John” and “Mike” were.’

‘How many different sets of initials are we looking at?’

Westwood glanced down at the paper on which he’d been making notes. ‘I’ve got eleven sets of three initials, six sets of two letters, and fifteen single initials, and there’s really no way I can make any sense of them. I mean, right here in this tasking sheet I’ve got “CRP”, “P”, “CP” and “RCP”. That could be one person if the “RCP” is a misprint for “CRP”, or two, or three, or even four different people, and I can’t see any way of finding out which at this stage.’

‘And the Christian names?’

‘Half a dozen different ones,’ Westwood said, again reading from his list. ‘I’ve got Dave, George, John, Mike, Oliver and Steve. And unless I’ve missed something, these guys are never referred to by their initials, because none of them match. There’s no “J” or “D”, for example. And I’ve checked the initials and the names with the agents that I’m guessing might have been involved way back, but none of them match, apart from “John”, three times, but that’s not real surprising.’

‘Can we look at it from the other side?’ Richter interposed. ‘Is there anything in the memos to show what CAIP was supposed to achieve?’

‘No. Apart from the medical stuff, they’re all just routine: requests for motor transport, inquiries about aircraft availability, booking briefing-rooms, that kind of thing. Nothing with any details. I think you’re right. Almost everything in this file deals with the very specific medical aspects of CAIP. The other files, the ones that as far as I know were destroyed back in nineteen seventy-two, probably dealt with the overall picture. Unless we can identify Mr X and persuade him to tell us what the aim of the operation was, I think the only way we’re going to find out is if the Company vets some of our senior medical specialists and gives them clearance to analyse this file. Maybe they could translate this stuff into something mere mortals could understand.’