James Barrington - Pandemic

Aeroporto di Brindisi, Papola-Casale, Puglia, Italy

Richter just stared at Simpson, ice-blue eyes unblinking as his mind span back through the years to the last, in fact the only, time he’d seen Andrew Lomas. And whenever he thought of Lomas, Richter remembered Raya Kosov.

Richter had been the totally expendable bait in a complex trap laid by Richard Simpson to ensnare a high-level traitor somewhere within British Intelligence. Sent to Austria on what purported to be a courier assignment, Richter had unwittingly been set up as the tethered goat to attract the tiger. Not knowing where the traitor was employed, Simpson had disseminated his story throughout all arms of the intelligence community. He had portrayed Richter as a disaffected Russian cipher clerk, a renegade from the SVR, a man running from his former masters and carrying documentary evidence that would expose the traitor. His confrontation with Gerald Stanway, the treacherous SIS officer, had nearly cost Richter his life, but when the shooting stopped it had been Stanway who lay dead.

Then, in a bizarre example of reality imitating art, a genuine cipher clerk – in fact the deputy manager of the SVR computer network – had run from Russia to seek sanctuary in the West. Raya Kosov had had her own agenda and her own reasons for running, and she had applied her own conditions. One of these was that she would not meet with any serving or even retired member of British Intelligence. Richter was not only on the spot, he was the only man Simpson could find who met all the criteria that Raya had specified, and Simpson was desperate to access the information she possessed before the CIA, or even worse the SVR, found her.

It was only after Richter had met Raya, and the two were making their way through France to Britain, that he had learnt the reason for her refusal to be handled by a ‘proper’ intelligence officer. She knew the identity of a traitor so highly placed in the British Secret Intelligence Service that she wasn’t prepared to trust anybody in that organization or in any of the other arms of the intelligence community. And the man she could identify wasn’t Gerald Stanway.

With both SVR hit-squads and SIS assassination teams looking for them, Richter and Raya had literally run for their lives and, perhaps inevitably, had become ‘involved’ with each other. Finally they had made it to London, where an analysis of the data Raya had obtained pointed at one man – Sir Malcolm Holbeche, the head of the SIS – and Richter and Simpson had confronted him together.

And then, as the operation wound down, Holbeche’s own Russian case officer, Alexei Lomosolov – a deep-cover illegal using the cover name Andrew Lomas – had counter-attacked. With Holbeche dead, and the operation over as far as Richter was concerned, he had let his guard slip and had been followed back to the hotel where he had hidden Raya.

Ten minutes after he got in, there had been a knock at the door. Without thinking, Richter had opened it and looked straight into Andrew Lomas’s dark, almost black, eyes for less than a second before the taser dart had stabbed into his stomach. When he had come round, he found himself lying on the bed – and Raya’s horribly mutilated body was lying beside him. The only good news was that Simpson had already taken custody of the disks and data that Raya had smuggled out of Moscow.

‘Where is he?’ Richter growled, finally.

‘Here in Italy – somewhere near Taranto, to be exact,’ Simpson replied. ‘At least, that’s what the Italians think. They’ve got a couple of photographs of somebody who matches Lomas’s description, and also a copy of the photofit you did back in London. But you need to confirm his identification, because you’re the only person in the service who’s known to have met him in the flesh, so to speak. And Richter,’ Simpson warned, ‘we – that’s myself as well as the Italians – want Lomas in one piece, not diced, sliced or blown away.’

Kandíra, south-west Crete

Spiros Aristides slumped back in his chair, disappointment evident in every line of his face. He didn’t know exactly what he’d been expecting, but what he’d actually found definitely wasn’t it. The case was lying on the floor, where he’d tossed it in irritation, and its contents were now spread across the table in front of him. The biggest and heaviest item was a thick file enclosed in a bright red cover. Aristides had opened it and looked at some of the papers it contained, but they’d been meaningless to him. He’d simply recognized that the writing was in English, a language he didn’t speak, though he could read the odd word.

The only other things in the case were four small heavily sealed steel vacuum flasks, each bearing a white label with the legend ‘CAIP’ on it, and below that a number. Their tops were held in place with red wax and wire, and the flasks had been fitted snugly into shaped and padded recesses inside the case. There were also spaces for a further eight flasks of the same size, but none of these had been occupied.

The flasks were light and, as far as Aristides could tell, empty, but that made no kind of sense. Why would anyone seal up empty flasks and lock them securely in a briefcase then chained to a courier and carried on board an expensive private jet? There simply had to be something significant inside them.

For the third time, he picked one up and shook it, close to his ear, but could still detect no sound of anything moving inside. Perhaps, he surmised, they might contain small amounts of some very pure drug: heroin or maybe cocaine. The only way to find out was to open one.

Aristides studied the top of one flask. He couldn’t see the stopper at all, because the whole top end of the container was covered in a thick red covering of some sort, as if the mouth had been dipped into a bowl of molten wax to seal it. Confining the wax was a wire net, whose thin strands cut deep into the surface and were twisted together round the neck of the flask to secure it. Whoever had sealed these flasks had definitely not intended that one might come open by accident. Aristides nodded to himself. Perhaps it was drugs. Perhaps he might be able to make a profit out of his efforts after all.

In his toolbox Aristides had a pair of sharp wire-cutters, and it was the work of only a few seconds to snip off the twisted knots of wire at the neck of the flask. Pulling the wire strands out of the wax took longer, but after ten minutes he had removed them all, and was examining the unconfined wax itself.

The simplest way to get the stuff off, Aristides thought, was to melt it again, so he walked through to his kitchen and reached down beside the cooker to turn on the gas supply from the large blue cylinder attached to it. Then he rotated the discoloured knob on the front of the cooker and struck a match to light the gas. He’d actually walked back to his dining table and picked up the sealed vacuum flask before his natural caution reasserted itself.

Suppose the heat from the gas destroyed the contents before the wax melted? Or, worse, what if he was wrong about what it contained – maybe an explosive, not drugs – and the flask blew up in his hands?

No, the safest option was his knife. Aristides went back and switched off the gas cylinder, then returned to the table. He opened his old clasp knife again and eased its point gently into the red wax covering the neck of the container, then rotated the flask in his left hand while the right held the blade of the knife firmly, at an angle, against the flask itself. The knife was sharp and cut easily through the wax, the blade spiralling closer and closer to the top of the flask as he turned it. Then he stopped, put down the knife and seized the loose end of the wax, pulling it off like the skin of a peeled apple. The wax covering the actual mouth of the flask was much thicker than that on its sides, so he had to insert the point of the knife blade under it to lever it off.