In fact, Wilmot had correctly identified the part of the world that Michael came from, but his tormentor was not Syrian. If he had realised exactly who Michael was working for, and had possessed some other pieces of information that were not generally known but were nevertheless in the public domain if you happened to know where to look for them, he would have come to a very different conclusion about one aspect of the matter he was involved in.
Chapter 7
Hammersmith, London
Friday
At that stage of the investigation, finding the man was far more important than discovering whatever reason he had for disappearing. And that was why the file had been couriered to FOE at Hammersmith and had ended up on Richter’s desk.
He read the last half-page of information, which laid out the current status of the investigation, and then looked again at the handful of still images which were included in the file. Two came from the ATM at the Warminster supermarket, another three were from motorway traffic cameras and the last two were from Heathrow Airport.
Then he shook his head, because none of it really made sense. Actually, some of it did, but there were enough things that didn’t really add up to make the situation interesting. And possibly sinister. Or not.
He closed the file with a snap and walked out of the room, heading for the stairs and Simpson’s office.
‘So what do you think?’ Simpson asked, as he walked in.
‘I think it doesn’t make sense, and I think we’re wasting our time, because it looks to me like Professor Charles Vernon is quite a few bricks short of a full load. Or at least he’s acting that way,’ he added, as Simpson started to shake his head.
‘Vernon is one of the best and brightest biochemists this country has ever produced,’ Simpson pointed out. ‘That’s according to one of the big wheels at Porton Down. So why do you think differently?’
‘I don’t doubt that he can do all sorts of clever stuff in the laboratory and probably splice together a whole bunch of nasties to wipe out half the bloody human race, but when it comes to living in the real world and trying to evade surveillance, if that really is what he’d doing, he’s a babe in arms.’
Richter opened the file and pointed at the last page.
‘Let me take you through it. First, he visits the ATM at his local supermarket and draws out a whole bunch of cash. Nothing wrong with that, obviously. If he was going to do a runner, having money in his pocket means he wouldn’t leave an electronic trail behind him, so it’s more difficult for anyone to track him down. So that suggests he has flown the coop. But he did his best to hide his face from the ATM’s camera, so that could show that he was under duress and he had been told to cover it so that whoever was pulling his strings wouldn’t be seen, but that’s obviously unproven and inconclusive.’
‘So are you quite sure he wasn’t grabbed by the opposition? Forced to draw that money and then taken out of the country so he could be forced to work for some terrorist group?’
Simpson often seemed obtuse and slow to grasp some things, but Richter knew he had a mind like a steel trap, and always wanted every ‘i’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed when he was being presented with a scenario for approval or an appraisal of a situation.
‘I’m not sure but it doesn’t look like it for a whole raft of reasons,’ Richter replied. ‘If a couple of bad guys are sitting in your lounge pointing a shotgun at your wife’s head and threatening to shoot her and rape your daughter or the other way round, most men will do whatever they’re told to do. But as far as I can tell from this file – which I presume you haven’t read – Vernon has no obvious pressure points. He’s unmarried with no close relatives and, as far as I can tell, no close friends either. Lots of colleagues and acquaintances, but nobody he was really close to. So I can’t see how anyone could come up with a threat that would be enough to make him do what they wanted, unless he’s a raging paedophile or something, and there’s no evidence at all that he’s got a skeleton like that hidden in his closet.
‘And there’s the practical aspect as well. As far as I know Vernon doesn’t go around with a big sign around his neck telling the world he’s a biochemist. Just because he works at Porton Down doesn’t mean he’s a scientist. He could just be an administrator or an accountant or a guard or even a cleaner. He isn’t on Facebook or any other of the totally bloody pointless social media sites, so unless somebody did a hell of a lot of digging they’d have no clue who he is or what he does. And in any case, what he did next more or less proves that he’s acting of his own volition.’
‘Go on.’
‘He did something that was actually quite clever, for an amateur. While he was hanging about in the supermarket car park, he switched the plates from his car onto another oldish Ford that’s the same model and pretty much the same colour as Vernon’s own vehicle. That means that when he drove out of the car park he was apparently then in a car belonging to a man named John Neville, so that when we started to analyse the camera footage around Warminster Vernon would be able to drive straight past any of the traffic Kodaks without getting flagged up.’
‘And you know this because?’
‘It’s all on this last page of notes. Briefly, it’s because John Neville works at that supermarket – he’s the warehouse manager, I think – and when he got home that night he realised that the number plates on his old Ford were showing a different registration to the one they’d displayed when he set off for work that morning. He called the police to tell them, and that meant the Woodentops had a different number to start looking for. So Vernon did manage to muddy the waters, at least a little, and for a short period of time. If he’d actually been abducted, the bad guys would have had their own vehicle – a car or more likely a van – and taken him away in that. But it’s what he did next that really doesn’t make sense.’
Richter pointed again at the file.
‘Having switched number plates, he then drove straight to Heathrow, left his car in the long-term car park, bought a ticket to Toulouse with one of his credit cards, showed his genuine passport and then climbed into a seat in the cattle class section of an Airbus or something and took off for France. And we know that’s what he did because the traffic cameras on the M25 picked up his car on its borrowed plates three times as he got near the airport. And we know exactly which parking bay he left it in. It was a kind of “now I’m hiding and you can’t see me” followed immediately by him standing up, waving his hands and shouting “I’m over here.” I mean, if he was going to fly to France using his own passport and credit card, why did he do all that fannying around with the number plates on his car?
‘And, while we’re on the subject, if he was planning to defect or whatever, why didn’t he just take a couple of weeks’ leave and head east? That way, nobody would even know that he’d gone until he didn’t turn up again when he was supposed to return to work. In fact, in two weeks, he could easily have got anywhere in the world, done some kind of a deal and then come back again, and none of us would be any the wiser.’
Richter paused for a moment before mentioning one of his concerns.
‘There is something, though. The pictures from the traffic cameras aren’t the clearest, apart from the number plates, but in all three it’s obvious that Vernon has a passenger in the car with him. There’s the clear shape of a figure in the back seat, but that’s all it is – just a dark shape. No features visible. And, if Vernon had been abducted, the logical place for his captor to sit would be right where this person is sitting, which is in the back seat behind the prof, aiming a shotgun or pistol at the middle of his spine.’
‘So do you mean he was abducted?’
‘I still don’t know.’
Richter pulled the photographs out of the file, leaned over the herbaceous border of small cacti that ran along the perimeter of Simpson’s desk and dealt them out like a hand of cards.
‘Despite Vernon putting his hand over the camera lens while he stood in front of the ATM at the superma
rket,’ he said, ‘in the last shot, as he’s walking away, I can’t see anyone near him who looks like a threat, or even anyone paying any attention to him. And as I said before, I can’t find any obvious pressure points that would make Vernon follow somebody’s orders.’
He tapped another photograph with his finger.
‘That’s the best of the traffic camera images, and it’s obvious that there’s a figure in the car with him, so we have to assume that somebody was telling him what to do. Then in these two pictures taken at Heathrow, this man here is believed to be Charles Vernon. The images aren’t completely clear and the analysts from Five can’t say it definitely is him, but they certainly can’t be sure that it isn’t. On the tapes or data files these stills were taken from, various people are recorded standing and walking near the target individual, so they conclude that, if it is Vernon, it’s possible he was being escorted by one or more men. But that can’t be confirmed. And I know it’s subjective, but in those pictures taken at the airport Vernon – and I’m pretty sure it is him – he doesn’t look nervous or concerned. He just looks like any other airline passenger, fed up with all the hanging around and pissed off by the pointless security procedures.’
‘In short, you don’t know?’
‘No, I don’t. I mean, if he has been abducted, how have the bad guys done it? And if he’s doing all this himself, what’s he playing at? What’s he trying to achieve?’
‘I don’t know,’ Simpson said, somewhat snappily. ‘That’s exactly the kind of thing I pay you – or rather the Queen pays you – to find out.’
‘Well, it doesn’t make sense,’ Richter said again. ‘Not to me. So what, exactly, do you want me to do about it?’
‘I want you to find out what’s going on, obviously. Somebody will have to nip over to France, find Vernon and haul him back here so we can question him, and as the file has ended up on my desk, that might as well be you. You’re not doing anything very much at the moment. I’ll get the admin section to sort out a flight for you.’
Richter looked at his watch and shook his head.
‘There’s no point in doing that, at least not yet. It’s the middle of the afternoon, so because of all the usual fannying about at Heathrow or Gatwick it would probably be late evening before I walked out of Toulouse or some other French airport, and I’d have no idea where to even start looking for Vernon. We know he flew to France, but that was a few days ago. He might just have used Toulouse as a jumping-off point and that means he could be anywhere by now, especially if somebody else is telling him where to go and what to do. We don’t have direct access to French airline flight records, so he could have walked straight over to the Air France office at the airport and bought a ticket anywhere they fly to. Or he might have bought a ticket on a non-French airline, just to add an extra layer of complication. If he paid in cash, we’d have to wait for Interpol or Europol or some other outfit to check all the flight manifests looking for him and it could take days before we got the results. Toulouse is a busy airport.’
‘The requests are already in through Six to the DGSI,’ Simpson said, ‘but I won’t argue about the timescale, especially not where the bloody French are concerned.’
The DGSI is the French Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure, which replaced the DST, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, in 2008. It’s the principal French agency charged with counter-terrorism, counter-espionage, detecting and countering cybercrime and providing surveillance of suspect individuals and organisations. Its functions are analogous to those of Britain’s security service, MI5, but has proven less successful than the British agency at avoiding the limelight. In 2013, for example, it was involved in a very public spat with Wikipedia over an article about a military radio station at Pierre-sur-Haute in the Rhône-Alpes region of France, the result of which was almost precisely the opposite of what the DGSI wanted.
‘The problem I have,’ Richter said, ‘is that I know pretty much nothing about Charles Vernon, and what’s in that file doesn’t even begin to tell me what kind of a man he is.’
‘You mean is he likely to be a defector trying to sell lethal bugs to ISIS or some other bunch of nutters, that kind of thing?’
‘Yes,’ Richter replied, nodding. ‘That would be a start. The other obvious question to ask is whether or not he took any souvenirs from Porton Down when he did his runner. Samples to prove his worth, that kind of thing. I presume that whatever they have in their fridges and labs is counted and kept under lock and key, but I’d like to check that as a first step.’
‘Well, don’t just sit there. Get off your arse, get a car from the pool and get yourself down to darkest Wiltshire.’
Chapter 8
Soho, London
Friday
Wilmot walked into the bar at five minutes to four, the specified time, and saw Michael was there already, sitting by himself in a booth against the back wall. Wilmot collected and paid for half a pint of bitter at the bar, then walked over and sat down opposite him.
‘What you want with me this time?’ the professor asked, his irritation showing.
‘Do I really have to answer that?’ Michael said. ‘Can’t you guess?’
‘I have no idea,’ Wilmot said.
‘I’m talking about Charles bloody Vernon. You have heard about him, I suppose?’
Wilmot nodded.
‘I don’t know the man,’ he said, ‘but I know of him. Why?’
‘Because according to one of my other sources, he’s done a runner, which is bad enough, but what we really need to know is what triggered it. Specifically, did he have access to the TRAIT files, or is this something completely different?’
For a few seconds Wilmot just looked at the man sitting opposite him. Then he leaned back and took a sip of his beer.
‘Why do you mention TRAIT?’ he asked. ‘That’s ancient history.’
‘Maybe it is to you, but it’s not to me. What I want to know is why Charles Vernon decided to leave the country.’
‘I don’t know,’ Wilmot replied.
‘I know you don’t know,’ Michael snapped. ‘You’re here because I’m telling you to find out. That is now your highest priority. If Vernon had some kind of brainstorm and just walked away from his job, that’s fine. But if he dug out the files relating to TRAIT and put two and two together that’s a completely different situation. You need to find out if that’s what he did.’
‘I’m not sure that I can. I’m a scientist, not an administrator. I don’t have access to the acquisition history of the files in the archive, or anywhere else for that matter. And I don’t even work at Porton Down any more.’
‘Then you’d better work out a way of getting it. Maybe if you request the files yourself you could see who looked at them last. I don’t care how you do it. I’m just telling you to get the information. You told me before that there’s a kind of central science archive where information relating to trials is held. You can start by checking that.’
‘But why do you think this is anything to do with TRAIT? That’s ancient history,’ Wilmot said again.
Michael stared at him for a long moment, then nodded.
‘The programme took place a long time ago, yes, but it was clear from the first that it had the potential to be successful. It worked, in simple terms. We can even see why you tried to develop it. No doubt whoever came up with the idea genuinely believed that it would ultimately benefit mankind. But we decided that its scope was too narrow, too genetically limited, and above all it was too slow in action. So our scientists took the extremely detailed information that you so kindly and helpfully provided five years ago and modified it. The variant we have produced has an entirely different target, and the payload is completely different. The original TRAIT is now just being used really as a delivery vehicle, and we’ve even heavily modified that.’
As Michael explained the concept as casually as if he was discussing the menu he was planning for a dinner party, Wilmot genuinely felt him
self turning white with shock.
‘I gave you details of TRAIT just as background information,’ he said, almost stammering. ‘But the project was abandoned. I told you why we had to stop development, why it was a mistake even to have started working on it. You cannot possibly, you cannot ever—’
‘You would be amazed what we can do given the right encouragement,’ Michael said, ‘and events in the Middle East, recent as well as historic, have been all the encouragement we have needed. TRAIT provided an excellent starting point, but the weapon we have developed is very different. It’s so different, in fact, that we’ve even given it a new name. But that’s not important. What is important is finding out if Vernon knew or found out about the original trial, because if he did and that’s why he’s left the country, that could alert the British authorities to what’s been going on. And we don’t want that to happen. It’s important that there are no disruptions to our plans.’
Wilmot sat in silent despair for a few seconds, staring down at the scarred wooden table in the booth. Then he lifted his head and stared at Michael. One particular phrase the other man had used had stuck in his memory.
‘You said you thought TRAIT was too genetically limited,’ he said. ‘So what have you done with it?’
Michael shrugged.
‘You’re obviously aware of the original target,’ he said, and Wilmot nodded. ‘We have no particular interest in that genetic subgroup, so our scientists spent a couple of years studying the human genome and the various different genetic markers. And then they modified the weapon. I’m not a biochemist or a scientist of any sort, and I’m sure you would understand the technicalities of the matter much better than I do. But the result is that the original TRAIT weapon can now be aimed at an entirely different part of the world’s population.’
Bioweapon Page 5
