Wilmot hardly dared ask the obvious question.
‘Which part?’
Michael told him.
Less than a minute later Wilmot stumbled out into Dean Street and staggered away towards the Tube station, barely aware of his surroundings, his thoughts racing.
Chapter 9
Wiltshire
Friday
Urgent calls had been made to Millbank and Vauxhall Cross to alert them of Vernon’s disappearance, and almost immediately watch orders had been issued at all ports and airports, and at St Pancras Station in London for Eurostar passengers, with instructions that if Vernon appeared he was to be detained and held incommunicado until he could be interviewed, along with anyone travelling with him.
At the same time, the physical search had started from first principles. Although there had been no sign of a struggle or anything else suspicious at Vernon’s house, a forensic search team from Millbank was assembled and ordered to enter the property and do a detailed search of the house, treating it as a crime scene.
A little under three hours after the two security staff from Porton Down had pulled the front door closed at Charles Vernon’s detached and deserted property, a couple of unmarked white Ford Transit vans arrived and parked on the gravel in front of his house. Six men climbed out and immediately began their preparations.
Knowing that the house had already been entered and checked by the people looking for Vernon, they knew that a detailed forensic examination would probably be pointless and the results confused, at best, but they followed the standard procedure anyway, pulling on white disposable hooded suits, bootees over their shoes, and latex gloves. One of them used a lock-pick gun on the front door’s Yale: it opened immediately and the men stepped inside, each carrying a box containing the specialised tools and equipment he would use in his examination.
They stood in the hall for a moment, getting their bearings, and then separated, each man proceeding to the area he had already been assigned. They were not hopeful of finding much of interest – if Vernon had done a runner, he was hardly likely to have left an incriminating little note somewhere saying ‘Meet Abdul and Ali at Barcelona Sants Station on Tuesday 14th at 13:30 with formula for sarin’ or something – but they did want to seize his computer, just in case there were any relevant emails on it, and his mobile phone if they could find it for the same reason. And on the mobile there might be SMS and WhatsApp messages as well.
Finding the computer was the easy bit.
Vernon very obviously slept in the master bedroom, where there was a super king-sized bed and an en suite shower room, and they knew that because it was the only bedroom in which they found any sign of occupation, and not much of that. On the bedside table were a couple of textbooks dealing with – presumably – chemical or biochemical research, but as the team from Millbank didn’t even understand the titles of the books, far less the contents, they couldn’t be entirely sure about that tentative deduction. They checked for objects hidden between the pages and scanned each book for any kind of handwritten notes, found nothing and left them where they were.
They had more success in the smallest bedroom on that floor, which Vernon had turned into an office. Against one wall was a wide desk made of wood and metal that had clearly been purchased at IKEA because it still had labels on the steel uprights. In front of it was a newish comfortable-looking chair with a swivel base and a black leather seat and back. On the wall next to the desk was a tall bookcase with half a dozen shelves, most occupied by textbooks similar to the ones they’d already found by the bed, a stack of technical journals going back about a decade and, perhaps surprisingly, a couple of dozen novels, mainly westerns and modern spy thrillers.
On the desk was Vernon’s personal laptop, a high specification Dell machine with a seventeen-inch screen, illuminated keyboard and a two terabyte hard drive. The computer was open but the screen was blank and when one of the search team rested his finger on the touchpad the screen came to life, but immediately displayed a prompt asking for the input of a password. That was unfortunate, but not unexpected. Almost everyone these days had at least a rudimentary form of security incorporated into their personal computers, and the IT section back at Millbank had all sorts of interesting gadgets and gizmos and software programs on USB sticks that could be used to bypass it or otherwise allow access to a hard drive without knowledge of the correct password. There was a leather computer case on the floor beside the desk, so they closed the lid on the laptop and slid it into the case along with its charging lead for examination later.
Also on the desk was a small plastic set of drawers, obviously designed to hold the kind of oddments that accumulate in any office – staples, paperclips, pens, pencils and the like – and when they examined those they found half a dozen high capacity external USB3 hard disks and about the same number of thumb drives of different capacities. It looked as if Vernon had been in the habit of backing up his work, probably making multiple copies of important documents on the external drives to provide a measure of redundancy. That, at least, was what they were hoping, because people who protected their computer with a password didn’t always apply the same level of security to their backup disks. The MI5 team removed every drive and memory stick they could find to carry them out to their van.
The two members of the team detailed to search the study or office where Vernon had worked were on their way down the stairs carrying the last of the computer peripherals when there was a sudden shout of alarm from the kitchen.
Immediately, they left what they were carrying on the floor of the hall and ran into the kitchen to find out what had caused their colleague to react so volubly.
They stepped inside the room at the back of the house and just stared towards the far end, where three other members of the team were standing in a loose half-circle around the open door of a large refrigerator.
‘Oh, shit,’ one of them muttered. ‘So what do we do now?’
More or less in the centre of the middle shelf of the refrigerator was a biggish white plastic box bearing the wholly unmistakable spiky red symbols that warned of a biohazard.
It looked as if Charles Vernon might have been bringing some of his work home with him, and that put an entirely different spin on the situation.
Chapter 10
Porton Down, Wiltshire
Friday
The Ford Richter was driving was a lot more recent than the one owned by Charles Vernon and was equipped with a built-in satellite navigation system. In the computer world there’s an old expression – garbage in: garbage out – meaning that the accuracy of the results generated by any computer or computer program are entirely dependent upon the accuracy of the information provided. A satnav is essentially a small computer designed for one specific task, and Richter didn’t entirely trust the Ford’s unit because he had no idea , or even if, the maps had been updated.
So he’d fitted a sucker mount to the windscreen beside the wheel and into that he’d clipped his Blackview mobile phone, plugging the charging lead into the cigarette lighter. All Simpson’s field agents, as he was wont to refer to them in official correspondence, were now issued with that model, because it was essentially indestructible: you could immerse it in water or drive a truck over it and it would still work. It was even robust enough to be used as a weapon if nothing else was available. As well as the usual apps, which included offline maps of the entire world down to street level and three separate navigation systems, all of which were completely up-to-date, it had encryption and decryption programs and a variety of other useful and highly specialised apps that weren’t to be found in any of the publicly-accessible app stores.
To find his way to Porton Down, all Richter needed was a satnav, and he’d programmed both the dashboard unit and the Waze navigation app on his Blackview with the postcode he’d been given – SP4 0JQ – and was switching his attention between the phone and the built-in unit as he drove south-west from London. To his slight surprise, the routes th
ey were suggesting were identical.
As he got nearer his destination, he began seeing indications that he was in the right place. On a gate leading into woodland, and another one opening into a field, identical bold notices proclaimed: ‘Keep out. MoD property’ and ‘Danger. Hazardous area’ accompanied by a visual sign forbidding pedestrian access. Richter knew the whole complex was contained within a Danger Area, a non-specific military designation that could mean anything from a live firing range to a location over which aircraft may not fly for a variety of reasons.
In the case of Porton Down, the reason was obvious. Britain used to have an offensive chemical and biological weapons programme but this was shut down in the 1950s as international opinions changed. But just because Britain no longer produced such weapons had almost no effect upon the rest of the world. It was still vitally important for developments in this field to be studied and analysed, and for effective countermeasures against weapons of this type to be developed. And, inevitably, if you are trying to produce an antidote for Soman, for example, it is absolutely necessary for small stocks of Soman to be produced and stored.
And that was the job of the Dstl at Porton Down. Among the other advances in the field that the unit had produced were Nerve Agent Pretreatment Set tablets, commonly known as NAPS, and which protected against Sarin, VX and other nerve agents. The Dstl also developed the ComboPen, the chemical cocktail of atropine, Avizafone and P2S to mitigate the effects of nerve agent poisoning, and Doxycycline and Ciprofloxacin antibiotics to counter biological weapons including Anthrax and the plague.
But what nobody wanted was an out-of-control aircraft smashing into the laboratories at Porton Down and releasing who knows what types of submicroscopic killers into the atmosphere, and that was why the Danger Area had been created.
At the entrance to the site Richter passed another sign that stated he was on the Porton Down Science Campus and confirmed that it was the location of the Dstl, and minutes later he drew up at the police post that guarded the entrance to the unit, complete with drop-down barriers and a small guardhouse. The police, Richter noticed immediately, were armed, and he saw an armed patrol on the inside of the boundary fence, along with another black-clad officer being led at speed along the inside of the fence by a hefty-looking and dark-coloured Alsatian dog. The dog definitely appeared to be in charge.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ the officer began, leaning down to peer at a Richter through the open window. ‘May I ask your business here?’
‘My name’s Richter, and I should be expected. I’m here to see a Mr William Poulson.’
‘Is that Commander Richter from the Ministry of Defence?’
‘More or less, yes,’ Richter replied, proffering the ID card the Hammersmith admin section had provided for him.
‘What’s your service number, sir?’ the police officer said, studying the card and a piece of paper affixed to a clipboard.
‘Naval officers don’t have service numbers,’ Richter replied. ‘My official number is C021426K.’
‘Thank you. Drive straight ahead up the hill. You’ll see a single-storey building on the right-hand side. There are a few visitor parking slots there. Then just walk in through the main entrance. I’ll call ahead to tell them you’re on your way.’
Richter nodded his thanks, took back the ID card and followed the directions he’d been given. He found two vacant parking places, slid the Ford into one of them and then walked over to the double doors on the front of the building. As he reached them, the right-hand door opened and a slightly dumpy middle-aged woman with a pleasant open face, her head surmounted by a tight nest of blonde curls, looked out at him.
‘Mr Richter? My name’s Margaret. Please follow me and I’ll take you to Mr Poulson’s office.’
Richter registered that the door had only a standard Yale-type lock, and none of the internal doors had anything more secure than what looked like basic three-lever mortice locks.
His guide noticed what he was looking at and smiled slightly.
‘This isn’t a high-security building,’ she said. ‘It’s just admin and offices. No bugs in here, and nothing worth stealing unless you collect old office furniture and even older computer equipment.’
‘I’m pleased to hear that. I seem to have left my AGR at home.’
Margaret shook her head.
‘I don’t think an anti-gas respirator would help you very much against some of the stuff we’ve got here,’ she replied. ‘Luckily it’s all kept under lock and key, and in a different building. And here we are,’ she added, opening a door at the end of the corridor and stepping back so he could precede her.
It was a largeish office with a line of upright chairs against one wall, presumably intended as a waiting area, with a modern desk topped with a flat-panel computer monitor and keyboard at one end, a swivel chair behind it. In the other side wall was a single door, and as Margaret closed the door to the corridor, the internal door swung open.
‘Mr Richter? I’m William Poulson, and I’m the Chief Executive here at Dstl. Welcome to Porton Down.’
He was a prosperous-looking fifty-something, wearing a light grey suit over a white shirt topped with a tie emblazoned with a crest or device that Richter didn’t recognise. It could have been the man’s former regiment or his golf club or just a random symbol: Richter wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter. He was a little under six feet tall, with a slim build, dark hair showing grey at the temples, clean-shaven and with pinkish, well-scrubbed regular features. He exuded an aura of competence and power, and reminded Richter inescapably of Richard Simpson, his boss. Poulson could well have been another former mandarin, or at least cast from the same mould, and he had no doubts that the man would be good at his job.
Poulson extended his hand, and Richter took it, noting that his skin was dry and that he had a firm, but not strong, grip.
‘Coffee?’
‘I never say no,’ Richter replied.
‘Good. Margaret, if you’d be so kind.’
Poulson turned away and led Richter into his own office. This was about twice the size of Margaret’s sanctum outside, a wide oak desk at one end, a small conference table positioned parallel to one of the long walls and surrounded by eight chairs, and with a low coffee table and four easy chairs on the other side of the room. Two large windows provided a moderately uninspiring view of the side of the adjacent building, an expanse of grass and, in the distance down a gentle grass-covered slope, a part of the boundary fence.
Poulson sat down in one of the easy chairs and gestured Richter to a seat on the opposite side of the coffee table.
‘Good journey?’ he asked, which Richter guessed was just the start of some polite small talk until the refreshments arrived.
Less than five minutes later, with a cafetière on the table between them, flanked by a plate of chocolate digestive biscuits and a milk jug and sugar bowl, Poulson got down to it.
‘You want to know about Vernon, obviously. D’you want me to give you an overview of the man first, and then you can ask whatever questions you decide are relevant?’
‘Yes, please,’ Richter said, ‘but before you do that, just tell me what you think has happened to him. You know him and I don’t, so do you think he’s done a runner?’
‘No, I don’t, or not in the sense that you mean it.’
Richter looked interested.
‘You need to explain that,’ he said.
Poulson appeared slightly uncomfortable.
‘The senior scientists we employ here at Porton Down are right at the top of their respective fields. They’ve never been measured, as far as I know, but probably most of them have IQs of around 140, meaning genius level. People with that sort of intelligence really do operate in a different way to most people, but they are often somewhat – err…’
Poulson appeared to be struggling to find the right word, so Richter tried to help him out. ‘Flaky?’ he suggested.
‘Yes, that probably covers it. They some
times do things that make perfect sense to them at the time but which we ordinary mortals—’ he clearly didn’t consider Richter to have anything approaching a genius level IQ and had included him within the ranks of the common herd ‘—find inexplicable.’
‘You mean he might have had some kind of a brainstorm and decided that the best thing he could do was hop on a flight to France?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
Richter didn’t respond immediately. He had briefly wondered if Vernon was highly-strung and had flipped for some reason, but that didn’t begin to explain inconvenient facts like the way he had swapped his car’s number plates in Warminster. If he really had temporarily lost his marbles and wanted to leave the country, he could just have done nothing more than driven to Heathrow and booked a flight. So Poulson’s suggestion was certainly comforting, because if it was correct it would remove the twin spectres of defection and abduction from the situation, but it was almost certainly wrong.
‘That’s not the way we see it,’ he said, ‘but I’ll bear it in mind. So could you tell me what you know of Vernon, but only the short version. If there’s anything else I need to know, I’ll stop you.’
‘As you wish. Right, he got double first in chemistry and biochemistry, then a steady progression to a doctorate and then a professorship, and he’s been here at Porton Down for just over ten years. He’s not wealthy but because of his personal circumstances, which I assume you already know about, he’s quite well-off. He has no expensive habits or hobbies that we know of – and I can assure you that we would – and has always been dedicated to his work. I know it’s a cliché, but he really does live for the job he does. He’s apolitical and never even bothers to vote, as far as I’m aware, and holds no strong views outside of his chosen specialisation.’
‘What about within his specialisation?’
Bioweapon Page 6
