Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  Spiros shook his head, deciding in that instant to say nothing, yet, about the flasks in the steel case.

  ‘Nothing, really. A wrecked plane, but nothing of value inside.’

  ‘A plane?’ Nico’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He was used to his uncle finding amphorae, statuary, pots and occasionally ancient jewellery, but he’d never expected him to find a recent wreck, far less so an aircraft. ‘Where?’

  Aristides gestured vaguely to the south, but didn’t specify a location.

  ‘What sort of aircraft? Fighter? Bomber? From the war?’

  Spiros grinned at him, revealing a selection of yellowish teeth amid an almost equal number of gaps, then shook his head.

  ‘No, a modern one. Some kind of a small jet – a private jet, that kind of thing. But it had certainly been in the wars,’ he added enigmatically.

  Nico looked at him, then glanced around the tiny bar. Almost every seat was now occupied, and as he looked at the table a couple of feet to his left, he met the level stares of two Cretans who had obviously overheard Spiros’s last remark. Under Nico’s gaze, the two men looked away and seemed to resume their conversation.

  ‘I don’t follow,’ Nico said, leaning closer, and gesturing to Aristides to do the same. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ Aristides rasped in his gravelly voice, ‘that there were three bodies inside it, and another one lying on the bottom, all of them still strapped in their seats.’ Nico’s eyes widened and he shivered involuntarily. ‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ Aristides added, more loudly now, settling down to tell his story and oblivious of the interest still being shown by the occupants of the adjacent table. ‘That plane didn’t crash. Somebody shot it down.’

  Aeroporto di Brindisi, Papola-Casale, Puglia, Italy

  ‘Is that Lomas?’ Perini asked.

  Richter took his time, studying both photographs with exaggerated care. They weren’t bad either, bearing in mind the circumstances in which they had been taken. Each showed two men standing inside a house, illuminated by the light of a small chandelier and framed by a tall window, apparently talking to each other. Because the pictures had been shot from a distance, and through the window glass, the images naturally weren’t as clear as if taken in the open air.

  In both of them, the man on the right-hand side was in profile. In the first shot, the other man was also in profile, but in the second photograph he appeared full-face, apparently staring straight into the lens of the camera. Richter had no doubt, absolutely no doubt at all, that this was Lomas, but he shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s very like him, but I really need to see him in the flesh. Photographs can be deceiving.’

  Perini looked disappointed. ‘We had hoped you could provide us with a positive identification just from these pictures,’ he said.

  Richter shook his head again. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t be completely certain. It could be Lomas, but to be absolutely sure I’ll have to see him face-to-face.’

  Simpson eyed Richter with deep suspicion. ‘Remember what I said, Richter,’ he snapped, ‘not sliced or diced.’ Richter put down the photographs and looked back at him without expression.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Perini said, with a puzzled frown, as he looked from one man to the other.

  ‘Nothing,’ Simpson replied, still staring at his subordinate. ‘Can you arrange for Richter to see this man?’

  Perini was silent for a few moments, then replied slowly. ‘We were going to arrest him tomorrow afternoon,’ he said, some doubt in his voice. ‘I suppose Mr Richter could accompany our team, purely as an observer, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Richter echoed. ‘But what are you going to arrest him for?’

  Perini smiled slightly. ‘We hadn’t decided,’ he said. ‘If you had positively identified him, it would have been for murder, acting on behalf of the British Government. As you haven’t, we’ll probably start with charging him for using a false passport or maybe illegal entry into Italy, and see what happens after that.’

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  Spiros Aristides staggered slightly as he walked through the bar doorway and out into the cool of the night. It was nearly midnight, and he knew he’d drunk far more of the cheap Scotch than he should have. He would no doubt suffer for it tomorrow, but tonight he would certainly sleep soundly.

  Nico put a steadying hand out to the older man, but Spiros shrugged it off. Side by side they each retraced their separate steps back from the bar through the narrow streets until they reached the Greek’s tiny house, where Spiros fumbled for a moment with the door handle.

  ‘You’ll take a last glass with me?’ he inquired. Nico nodded and followed him inside.

  ‘That was all I found,’ Spiros gestured towards the still-open steel case lying on the dusty floor. Nico walked across and picked it up. He opened and closed it several times, and looked closely at the shaped and padded recesses designed to hold the flasks.

  ‘This is a very expensive item,’ he murmured. ‘This case was custom-made for some very special purpose, I think.’

  ‘Can you sell it?’ Spiros demanded somewhat hoarsely as he walked into the kitchen, returning with an open bottle of beer. He put the beer down on the table, sank into a chair and filled a glass with Scotch.

  ‘No,’ Nico replied firmly, sitting down and picking up the beer, ‘or not easily, anyway. It’s too specialized in purpose, and in any case it’s been in the water for too long.’

  He studied the objects on the table with interest, picked up first the red-covered file, flicked through it, then put it down. Unlike his uncle, Nico spoke a little English – it was always useful in dealing with the annual influx of tourists – but he’d never learned to read more than a few words of the language.

  ‘Those were in the case as well,’ Spiros said, nodding at the objects on the table.

  ‘Twelve of them?’ Nico asked, pointing at the case.

  ‘No,’ Spiros said, ‘just the four. All the other spaces were empty. And look at this,’ he added, picking up the flask from which he’d stripped the wax and passing it to Nico.

  His nephew hefted the flask in one hand, exclaimed at how light it was, and peered closely at the lock securing the top.

  Spiros looked at him appraisingly. ‘Something valuable inside, maybe?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe,’ Nico replied. ‘This was sealed just like the others?’

  ‘Yes. I cut the wire away and stripped off the wax.’

  ‘It’s very light, but there must be something inside, otherwise it makes no sense to seal it.’ He looked over at his uncle. ‘I don’t think we can pick this lock,’ he said, ‘but we could still open the flask. Do you have a hacksaw handy?’

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  ‘Elias? It’s the Director. I need to pick your brains for a minute. You’ve done plenty of recreational diving, right? Why would a diver attach aqualungs to a rope dropped underneath a boat?’ On the top floor at Langley, the CIA officer leaned back in his chair and gazed out of the window as he waited for David Elias, a junior officer in his own section, to reply.

  ‘That’s easy, Director. If you dive using compressed air cylinders – what you would normally call an aqualung – below a particular depth for longer than a certain time, you have to decompress yourself before you surface, otherwise you could suffer from the bends.’

  ‘That’s a bit vague. “Particular depth” and “certain time”? What depth, and what time?’

  Three floors below, David Elias unconsciously mimicked his superior officer, leaning back in his seat and staring out of the window. ‘I can’t tell you precisely, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s variable, depending on a lot of different factors. Should I come up? I can explain it better in person.’

  ‘Yes, do that.’

  Elias entered four minutes later, holding a dark blue book in his hand. John Nicholson waved him to a chair and watched as his subordinate opened the book.<
br />
  ‘I’ve some idea about the bends, but what’s the actuality of them?’

  ‘It’s all to do with pressure, sir. The deeper you dive, the greater the pressure on the human body from the water surrounding you. The pressure increases by about one atmosphere for every thirty feet of depth. When there’s significant pressure, say when you dive below about sixty feet, the nitrogen in the compressed air mixture you’re breathing isn’t expelled completely from your lungs, but starts going into solution in your bloodstream.’

  ‘Is that dangerous?’

  ‘Not as long as your body is under pressure, no. The problem comes when you re-surface. If you come up too fast without decompressing, the nitrogen comes out of solution as bubbles in the blood, usually at your joints. That will cause excruciating pain and often forces the sufferer into physical contortions, hence the name. To prevent that, a diver must pause at certain depths on the way back up to the surface and wait for the nitrogen to emerge from the bloodstream gradually.

  ‘The simplest way to cope is to lower a line with a heavy weight on the end from the diving tender, and attach separate sets of aqualungs to the line at the correct decompression depths. Then all the diver has to do is ascend until he reaches the lowest set, wait there for the appropriate time, then ascend to the next one. You have to use these additional compressed air cylinders,’ he accurately anticipated his superior’s next question, ‘because after a very long or deep dive the diver would use up all the remaining air in his aqualung long before he could safely surface.’

  Elias gestured to the book he’d opened on the desk in front of him.

  ‘These tables show the recommended decompression depths and times for particular diving depths and durations, sir. Unfortunately, as I said on the phone, the equations are highly variable, and to complicate things there are a whole bunch of different tables to consider. The US Navy’s tables, as a matter of interest, acquired themselves some notoriety for getting divers out of the water quickest but also into the decompression chamber fastest.’

  Nicholson looked at him blankly, and Elias explained.

  ‘It’s a kind of joke, sir. If a diver surfaces too quickly, which anybody using the US Navy tables would almost certainly do, getting them straight into a decompression chamber is the only way to stop them suffering from the bends. The chamber is basically a pressurized cylinder carried on the deck of the bigger diving tenders, which allows divers to get re-pressurized in controlled conditions. No aqualungs involved, so no hanging around twenty feet below the surface for half an hour.

  ‘To give you an example, sir, the US Navy tables list a total decompression time of only twenty-one minutes for a dive of half an hour down to a depth of one hundred and thirty feet. The Buhlmann tables give twenty-eight minutes as a minimum, and the DECOM tables, which are derived from the Buhlmann figures, recommend thirty-eight minutes, which is nearly twice as long as the US Navy suggest. Me, I’d go for the DECOM figures every time.’

  ‘So,’ the Director asked, ‘taking a hypothetical case, what would be your best guess at a dive depth that required three aqualung cylinders for the decompression pauses?’

  ‘It’s impossible to be sure,’ Elias replied, ‘but if I had to guess I’d say you were looking at either a very deep dive – down to maybe one hundred and fifty feet – or an unusually long dive at some intermediate depth.’

  When the door had closed behind Elias, Nicholson opened the wide central drawer in his desk, pulled out the photographs and spread them out in front of him again. He was once more examining the fifth picture through his magnifying glass when the telephone rang.

  ‘This is the Duty Interpreter at N-PIC, sir, with a follow-up call. On the Keyhole’s next pass, the diving tender was no longer in the area. We’re doing a wide area survey to see if we can pick it up in port somewhere, but that might be difficult. That area of the Med is full of boats just like the one in question, and it’ll be a real needle-in-a-haystack job to find it.’

  ‘Did you have any other assets in range between the Keyhole’s passes?’

  ‘No, sir, sorry. It’s a low-interest area.’

  ‘OK, do the best you can. On my authority, identifying and finding that boat is now a Class Two priority task. Use all available assets, but do not deviate any of the birds from their normal routes.’

  ‘Understood.’

  The Director replaced the telephone and bent again over the photographs. The fifth picture had been taken at a somewhat oblique angle, as the satellite was moving away from the target, which paradoxically made it slightly clearer than all but one of the preceding shots, because the sun was no longer reflected off the surface of the sea directly towards the camera. Of course, the surface of the Mediterranean was still dappled with light reflected from wavelets, but the area on the port side of the diving tender was comparatively dark.

  But there in the water, close to the protuberance identified as a cleated-down rope by N-PIC, was a small bright blob. Even using the magnifying glass, Nicholson was unable to determine what it was. To his naked eye it looked like either an unusually square-shaped wavelet or something metallic hanging suspended just below the surface. Through the magnifying glass it looked exactly the same, only bigger.

  He thought back over what Elias had just told him. This could be merely the weight the diver had used to anchor the rope to which he had attached his compressed air cylinders. But, in that case, why hadn’t he recovered the rope and its weight immediately? Why would he stop hauling in the rope with the weight so close to the surface, cleat it down and go to the wheel-house? Perhaps he’d received a call on his radio, if he possessed one. Or maybe he’d gone to make a radio call. An urgent call?

  No, that didn’t make sense. Only one possible sequence of events made sense, and that was the one that for thirty years he had endured nightmares about.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ he muttered grimly. He shook his head and reached out a hand to the black telephone.

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  Spiros didn’t own a vice, so he clamped the flask as firmly as he could against the edge of the wooden table with his hands and a towel, while Nico began to use the hacksaw on its neck. The blade was blunt, with teeth missing, which didn’t help, and the steel was tougher than it looked. And Spiros’s hands shook a little after so much whisky.

  But finally the blade began to bite, and after five minutes Nico had cut about a quarter of an inch into the neck of the flask. He stopped for another swig of beer, and then they turned the flask over to rest on its base before he continued cutting, just in case any contents escaped through the incision before he finished. Holding the flask upright against the pressure of the hacksaw was much more difficult, and it took another twenty minutes before the last unsevered fraction of steel finally parted and the top of the flask tumbled to the floor.

  Nico put the hacksaw down on his chair and opened up the metal case resting on the table. Then he positioned the flask over the lid, carefully tipped it on its side and gently tapped its base. A thin trickle of grey-brown dust emerged, then with a rush a small piece of what looked like dried mud shot out of the flask, and landed on the centre of the case’s lid.

  ‘What is it?’ Spiros asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Nico replied, prodding at the strange lump with a screwdriver. As the blade touched it, the solid piece crumbled into the same grey-brown dust.

  ‘Drugs?’ Spiros inquired hopefully, pinching some of the powder between forefinger and thumb and smelling it.

  ‘I don’t know. It could be heroin, perhaps. I’ve heard that some of the very pure varieties are brown in colour.’

  Nico was almost right. About ninety per cent of the heroin that finds its way to Western Europe, and particularly to Britain, is extracted from the opium poppies – Papaver Somniferum – of Anatolia in Turkey. Known as Turkish Brown, among other pseudonyms, this heroin looks something like Demerara sugar, and it’s usually either smoked or the fumes inhaled as the heroin is burnt in a spo
on or piece of tinfoil held over a candle.

  In contrast, the American addict’s heroin of choice is Thai White, culled from the poppy fields of Thailand’s Golden Triangle. Pure white, and suitable for snorting or injecting, this is gram for gram the most expensive heroin, and hence by definition the most expensive illegal drug, in the world, worth about three times as much as Columbian Pure, which is the very best quality cocaine.

  Nico leaned forward to smell the powder and found it was almost odourless – perhaps just a slight hint of mushrooms. He dampened the end of one finger and applied it gently to the edge of the little heap of powder, then touched it to his tongue. He grimaced and spat. ‘This is not heroin,’ he complained. ‘Whatever it is, it’s disgusting.’

  ‘That’s it, then,’ Spiros muttered. ‘This can go to the dump.’ He tossed the two pieces of the opened flask into the steel case and snapped it shut, securing the lid with the over-centre catch. ‘Five days I’ve wasted on that aircraft wreck, and nothing at all to show for it.’

  Nico shrugged and looked over at his uncle. ‘If you really don’t want it, I’ll take the case and see if I can get something for it.’

  ‘Take it, take it,’ Spiros grumbled. ‘And take the rest of this rubbish as well.’ He opened the case once again, dropped the three remaining flasks into their empty recesses, added the red file, and slammed the lid shut.

  Ten minutes later, Nico left Aristides’s house and began the short walk to his own apartment – actually three rooms, accessed by an outside staircase, on the upper floor of a two-storey house owned by a friend – which lay on the northern edge of the village. As he walked through the silent streets, deserted but for a handful of near-feral cats noisily disputing their territorial rights, Nico became more conscious of the weight of the object he grasped with his right hand.