James Barrington - Pandemic

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

David Elias had just decided to lock up his desk and office safe, and head off for an early-morning coffee and a crap, not necessarily in that order, when his internal phone rang.

‘Elias? I’ve got a few questions for you. Come up.’

The coffee would have to wait, Elias decided. By now the crap couldn’t, but he’d have to be quick. ‘On my way, Director.’

When he reached the top floor, John Nicholson’s door was already open, but Elias knocked anyway and waited for a response before entering and standing beside the leather armchair that faced the big oak desk. The Director, he thought, looked somewhat irritated, and Elias wondered which of his own recent reports was responsible, and exactly how severe a dressing-down he was about to receive.

Elias was essentially an analyst, and had only worked in the Intelligence Directorate for a little over a year, although altogether he’d been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency for almost ten years. He had been drafted into Intelligence from Administration, where he’d worked as a bean-counter, after a senior officer had noticed that he spoke fluent Malay and workable Japanese. He now specialized in the Pacific Rim, and enjoyed what he did.

‘Sit down, Elias,’ Nicholson said, looking up from the open file lying on the desk in front of him. ‘This has nothing to do with your work here,’ he began. Elias relaxed noticeably, but still felt puzzled. ‘Tell me about your diving skills.’

‘What? Sorry, Director?’ Elias’s puzzlement increased.

‘Your diving. Have you had formal training or is it just a hobby for you?’

‘Both, really, sir. I got given my first scuba outfit when I was a teenager, and it just sort of took off from there. I joined the local sub-aqua club, got all the qualifications I could, and I’ve been diving ever since. I’m a qualified blue water instructor, and I’ve spent about, oh, fifteen hundred hours underwater, I guess.’

‘You done any deep diving, then?’

Elias nodded. ‘I was involved in a couple of projects down in Florida, where we worked at depths in excess of a hundred feet. I’ve used exotic gases a few times, done a bit of saturation work.’ Nicholson now looked puzzled, so Elias enlightened him. ‘You can’t dive safely to great depths by just using compressed air,’ he said. ‘You remember I explained to you earlier about the bends, and about decompressing before you surface?’

The Director nodded.

‘There are other problems as well, like nitrogen narcosis, and believe it or not even oxygen can become toxic in certain conditions. So for very long and deep dives the nitrogen is removed from the air you breathe and replaced with an inert exotic gas, usually helium. That won’t go into solution in your blood, so it doesn’t cause the same problems that nitrogen does.’

‘Any other problems with that sort of stuff, though?’

Elias grinned. ‘Only one. While you’re breathing it, you sound like Mickey Mouse, because the helium affects the vocal chords. Professional divers use voice-alteration devices on their major underwater projects, so that they can be clearly understood.’

‘You mentioned saturation work. What’s that?’

‘It’s a technique which makes for more efficient use of divers. Instead of surfacing at the end of a deep dive, with all the decompression time that requires, saturation divers live for days at a time in a diving bell, or some other kind of underwater habitat, which is anchored to the seabed or in mid-water at the depth at which they’re working.

‘That means they can go out, work for a couple of hours, go back into the habitat, have a drink or a meal, get suited up again and go back out for another dive. They only need to decompress once, therefore, at the very end of their time underwater and before they finally surface.’ Elias smiled at a memory. ‘It’s not too much fun, actually. Everything you eat or drink down there seems to taste of either salt water or rubber – or both.’

‘OK,’ the Director said grimly, ‘I’m satisfied you’re competent.’ He wrote something on a slip of paper and passed it across the desk. Elias looked at it and read the words with increasing confusion. ‘Be there this morning,’ Nicholson said, ‘at ten fifteen. And take your passport.’

Kandíra, south-west Crete

Gravas was still standing irresolute in Spiros Aristides’s simple bedroom, staring down at the body. He looked around the room, then back at the corpse, and realized he had to decide soon. Normally, once he had certified that the victim was dead, photographs would be taken and drawings made of the position of the corpse, the hands would be bagged to preserve any trace evidence, and the body would then be placed in a fibreglass coffin and transported to the forensic suite back at Irakleío for the post-mortem examination.

But something about the man’s death simply wasn’t making sense, and Gravas felt certain that he should look more closely here, in the place where the death had occurred, before moving the body. So he decided to break the rules.

There was a glass tumbler beside the bed and Gravas picked it up and sniffed it. He detected the faint odour of Scotch, and guessed that Aristides had been drunk, or at least intoxicated, when he climbed the stairs to his bedroom the previous evening. The old man hadn’t even undressed, just lain down on the bed wearing his outdoor clothes.

Gravas made a decision. He took a pair of eight-inch scissors from his bag and cut a more or less straight line down the front of the blood-sodden checked shirt, and peeled it away from the torso. He undid the old black leather belt on the jeans, then with some difficulty cut the denim down the top of each leg, and again peeled the material away from the body. Finally, the underpants got the same treatment.

Now Aristides lay naked on his back, exposed to the early-afternoon sunlight streaming in through the window, and Gravas bent to examine the corpse minutely. He began, as he had been taught to do, at the top of the head, and worked his way steadily, and without haste, down along the entire body.

Just below the left breast his sensitive fingertips detected a small lesion, and he carefully cleaned away the crusted blood to examine it more closely. It could, if it proved to be a knife thrust to the heart, explain the huge out-pouring of blood that had soaked the old man’s shirt and the bed sheet underneath the body. But after a few seconds Gravas realized that it wasn’t. The lesion was clearly an old scar, a skin tear from some sharp object years earlier, which had healed badly with a ragged edge.

Gravas continued his examination, but found nothing else. Then he took hold of the right side of the body and gently turned it to allow him to examine the back. He followed exactly the same procedure, and found precisely nothing. No wounds, no lesions, no signs at all of external damage.

He returned the body to its original position and gazed down at it. As far as he could tell, the blood on the chest appeared to have come from the Greek’s mouth, spewed out like crimson vomit. And the blood encrusting the sheet on which the body lay had a most unusual source – it had been ejected from Aristides’s anus. And still Gravas didn’t know what had killed him.

His forensic team was elsewhere in the house, combing it room by room, but so far he had let nobody else into the bedroom. Something was niggling at the back of his mind. Something he’d read or heard somewhere, something that was relevant, that might explain what had killed this elderly man.

He shook his head slowly. It would come to him in time. It always did, sooner or later. The autopsy might clarify things, he hoped. Meanwhile, there was nothing more he could do with the body. It was time to move it and then let his team begin their examination of the bedroom.