The smuggling community in Iran was small, tightly linked and had a long collective memory. Betrayal by any organisation was never going to be forgotten, or forgiven, and everybody knew that.
Chapter 16
Cambrils, Spain
Sunday
Vernon had travelled from Toulouse to Cambrils on the Spanish Costa Brava by train, paying cash for his tickets to avoid leaving an electronic trail, and thanks to Schengen at no point after leaving Blagnac had anyone asked to see his passport or any other form of identification. He hadn’t even been aware of the moment he’d entered Spain until it dawned on him that the occasional signs he was seeing were written in Spanish rather than French: menu del dia rather than menu du jour, for example.
Along the way he’d shaved off his beard, which immediately took about five years off his apparent age, dyed his hair a shade of dark brown that didn’t look entirely convincing but which certainly made him look different, discarded his ancient tweed jacket and purchased casual clothes designed for a much younger man. A pair of non-prescription sunglasses with graduated smoked lenses completed the illusion: Vernon now barely recognised the man looking back at him from the mirror in the bathroom of his hotel room.
He’d paid cash for the room, booking it for two weeks on a half-board basis, and reckoned he was about as invisible as he possibly could be in the circumstances. He had no doubt that by this time the authorities would be actively searching for him, but he hoped that the trail would have run cold at Toulouse, so they would probably still be looking in the wrong country.
Predictably enough, the television set in his hotel room received predominantly Spanish television channels, but within the mix were the two American channels CNN and CNBC, as well as BBC World, and Vernon had spent most of the evenings since his arrival in the town watching the BBC channel, alert for any mention of an ongoing search for him. What he had been expecting was some kind of a ‘Missing scientist mystery’ news item or something of that sort but so far he’d seen nothing. He’d also visited three different cybercafes and done searches on the Internet, but again without result. He couldn’t be too specific in his search parameters, in case the British had set up tripwires that would flag his searches, and more importantly the location he was using at the time and, as an extra level of protection, he had been using a portable VPN program – a virtual private network – that would disguise his geographic origin from most surveillance technology.
But as far as he could see, whatever search had been mounted for him was relatively low-key and covert and had not, so far, been made public. That was disappointing and meant that he now had to begin the next phase, the actions that would certainly ensure that the British authorities would have to begin an active search for him.
He had identified half a dozen busy cybercafes in Cambrils and that afternoon he picked one at random. He left the hotel, checking that nobody was paying him any particular attention, and certainly that no one was following him, and made his way steadily through the streets to the cafe that he had selected.
Inside, he purchased a coffee and for about fifteen minutes sat at the bar drinking it and glancing through a three-day-old copy of the Daily Mail he’d purchased the previous day at a newsagent on the front. Only when he was completely certain that nobody had followed him or was watching him did he pay for an hour’s Internet access on the desktop computer right at the back of the cafe, inserting a small thumb drive into one of the USB ports, a drive that contained the software that he hoped would protect him from prying eyes.
He started his VPN and input his username – nothing like his real name, of course – and password to start the program, then opened TOR, The Onion Router, the program that would give him access to both the Internet and the Dark Web, the sites that lie below and out of reach of the mainstream search engines. He used the Duck Duck Go search engine, the only practical way of locating Dark Web sites without knowing their exact identifiers, and then began trawling through the Internet looking for a particular kind of site. It was not a part of the web that he had visited with any degree of frequency before, and he was unfamiliar with most of what he saw.
But eventually he identified one particular site that seemed almost ideal for his purposes. He navigated to the appropriate part of the site, typed quickly for a couple of minutes, and then exited, shutting down TOR and his VPN as he did so.
Fifteen minutes later, Vernon was back in his hotel room and wondering just how quickly things would now happen.
Chapter 17
Khasab, Oman
Sunday
Not all agents employed by the Secret Intelligence Service in London are given a Walther PPK, a double 0 rating meaning they’re licensed to kill and issued with a customised Aston Martin, not least because of the first word in the title of the agency. ‘Secret’ means covert, and the very idea of employing a kind of ‘James Bond’ figure, a man instantly recognisable by the gadgets he possesses and the alcohol that he favours, who shags his way around the world and somehow manages to make the time to find easy and violent answers to complex problems, is simply ridiculous on every possible level.
A genuine secret agent is the man or woman nobody notices, the kind of person who can walk into a bar, buy a drink or eat a meal and then walk out an hour later, and leave so little impression upon the memories of the other patrons that they have no recollection whatsoever of what that person looked like, what they did while they were there, or ideally even whether they were there at all.
Of course, nobody can ever be completely invisible, but Salah Barzani did his best. He was Omani born and bred, and had lived in Khasab his entire life, just as his parents had done before him. He was exactly what he appeared to be, and he made sure that there was almost nothing about him or his wife or his lifestyle that could attract any form of unwelcome attention. He tried to be the man that everybody saw but nobody noticed. He had been recruited nearly a decade earlier, not primarily because of who he was or what his skills were but just because of where he lived.
The Strait of Hormuz is, in many ways, the lifeline of the world, or at least the lifeline of the developed world, because of the quantity of oil that is transported through it every day. It is also a natural choke point because it is comparatively narrow and would be fairly easy to blockade should some hostile nation wish to do so.
This might appear to be a somewhat remote possibility, because the oil producing nations need the revenue derived from their exports to pay their bills, and the oil-consuming nations need their product simply to keep everything moving and working, so both communities have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But precisely because of the reliance of the West on oil and the somewhat volatile situation that routinely exists in much of the Middle East, many nations have always kept, and no doubt will continue to keep, a close watch on what goes on in and around the Strait of Hormuz.
Much of that surveillance is of course carried out by the so-called spy satellites which travel very quickly in low polar orbits, enabling them to photograph every part of the surface of the planet repeatedly, but all the satellite can do is provide a snapshot of one specific area at one specific time, and sometimes that’s nothing like enough. Every intelligence agency in the world is very much aware that while orbital surveillance is an essential part of their armoury of assets, along with other technical resources like SIGINT, signals intelligence, and COMINT, communications intelligence, it is only one part of it. And they all know that there is never any substitute for HUMINT, human intelligence, eyes on the ground.
Salah Barzani was one pair of those eyes on the ground. By trade he was a small-time trader with a small shop in Khasab’s town centre that was staffed by a middle-aged woman who was a long-time friend of Barzani’s wife. It wasn’t a particularly profitable enterprise, and some of his friends in the town occasionally wondered how it made enough money to support Barzani and his small family, though of course they never asked him.
And the answer was that
it didn’t. Not quite. Which was why he’d taken on his second job.
Barzani owned a small apartment on the top floor of a modest block on the outskirts of the town, beyond the Khasab Fort and near the harbour. The building was only five storeys high, but that was a useful increase in height when it came to observation. The flat had a pair of unusually large windows that looked almost directly north, over part of the harbour and out towards the Strait. Every day Barzani spent a couple of hours, one in the mid-morning and the other six hours later in the afternoon, as he had been instructed to do, sitting in a comfortable chair with the windows open, a pair of powerful binoculars on a tripod in front of him and a notebook and pencil beside him. His job was to count and if possible to identify whatever tankers were within visual range at that time, to note whether they were empty or loaded and the direction they were heading, and to record the information.
Every week, he collated the data that he had obtained into an email that he prepared in draft format only every Sunday on his web-based Gmail account. He had been given simple instructions on how to do this, and what time to do it, and each week when he accessed the email account the following day he would note that the draft email had been deleted. This meant that his controller had read and copied the contents of the message.
In return for this minimal but mundane and boring assignment he received a monthly payment in Omani rials into his local bank account from an investment company based in Jordan, though the origin of the funds was some distance away from the Hashemite Kingdom. The payment was never exactly the same amount each month, because obviously the market fluctuated, but it was always within five per cent of the agreed amount and was allegedly based upon investments Barzani had made.
And that comparatively modest sum, including an annual increment based upon the Omani rate of inflation, was what made Barzani comfortably off, rather than right on the breadline. The amount had been suggested to him by the Arabic-speaking Englishmen who had met him in Muscat almost ten years earlier and who had outlined the arrangement he wished to initiate.
The man had been quite open about who he worked for – the British Secret Intelligence Service – and had explained to Barzani that, should he choose to accept the assignment, he would become a kind of support agent, in the terminology of the SIS. He would not be required to do anything illegal under Omani law and would simply be assisting the British to obtain early information of any actions likely to affect the supply of oil to the West. His job was simply to sample the oil tanker traffic. Nothing more, nothing less.
Oman and the other states that form the United Arab Emirates have a long history of friendly relations with the United Kingdom, dating back to even earlier than the Perpetual Maritime Truce with the United Kingdom that was agreed in 1853, and that gave rise to the expression ‘Trucial States.’ In a further example of this relationship, back in 1892 Dubai’s foreign relations were placed under British control in the so-called ‘Exclusive Agreement’. In 1971, when the British left the Gulf, six of these states merged to form the United Arab Emirates, and the seventh joined a year later. Despite the name ‘emirate’, none of the rulers of the constituent states are called emirs – all of them are sheikhs. The word ‘Emirates’ was included in the name of the federation by default, because the Arabic word mashyakhah or sheikhdom was already in use for the smallest Arab administrative unit, comparable to a parish or township.
Bearing this history in mind, it was an easy offer for the Englishman to make and for Barzani to accept. Implicit in his tasking was to note and describe anything the Omani saw which struck him as being unusual, whether or not it involved the tanker traffic through the Strait.
That morning, when Barzani took up his post, stared through his binoculars at the distant tankers and began jotting down notes, was unremarkable in almost every way. The level of traffic was about the same as usual and several of the vessels within visual range were ships that he had seen on numerous occasions before. Situation normal, in fact.
It was only when he sat back from the tripod-mounted binoculars and stood up to walk across to the large windows that he saw anything out of the ordinary at all. And even then it was just unusual and not apparently significant, something he hadn’t seen before.
He watched the activity, which was in the harbour over to his right-hand side rather than out in the deep waters of the Strait, for a few minutes, wondering if it was something that his controller – a man he knew only as John – would be interested in. He was doubtful, because it clearly had nothing to do with the tanker traffic, but in the end he gave a kind of mental shrug and decided to include it in his next report, due that evening.
* * *
Three hours later, when Barzani’s latest list of tanker traffic data arrived at Vauxhall Cross, the junior clerical officer responsible for entering the information into the database read the final paragraph twice before deciding what to do about it. Like Barzani himself, it didn’t seem particularly important, but the Omani was right – it was unusual. So he included it in an addendum to the weekly intelligence briefing covering the Middle East, and left it at that.
Chapter 18
Swindon, Wiltshire
Sunday
At a little after ten thirty, two smartly-dressed men, one carrying the kind of black bag often used by doctors making house calls, appeared at the door of a narrow terraced house on the northern outskirts of Swindon. As the other man pulled the door shut behind him, they both glanced up and down the largely empty street before walking away.
They’d parked their car in a vacant bay on a street about a quarter of a mile away, just as a precaution, though they both doubted if it was really necessary. The chances of anyone remembering a vehicle’s registration number in a district like that were remote at best, but neither of them was prepared to take the risk. That was also why the plates were false, the registration number copied from a similar vehicle and prepared in a backstreet garage. They’d remove them once they’d finished what they were doing that day.
‘I don’t like this,’ the man who’d been carrying the bag said as he dropped into the passenger seat of the Vauxhall.
‘You don’t have to like it,’ the other man said. ‘You just have to do it. You should have done it years ago, and you know it. Where to next?’
His companion pulled a small cheap notebook from his pocket and flicked through the pages until he found what he was looking for.
‘A place called Hook,’ he replied. ‘It’s near Basingstoke, so just follow the signs for the M4 motorway and I’ll program the satnav to take us to the address.’
The driver indicated and pulled out. With any luck they’d make at least three visits that day, maybe four, depending on traffic, and always assuming that the people they were visiting were at home. If they were out somewhere, that would just delay everything.
But it had to be done. There was no doubt about that, in the mind of either man.
Chapter 19
Khasab, Oman
Monday
On the Monday, the day after the drums had been unloaded in the harbour at Khasab, a small and moderately rusty cargo ship with an Egyptian name and with its home port at Alexandria, but registered in Valletta, Malta, was manoeuvred alongside the jetty at Khasab and began loading a mixed cargo of boxes of various sizes using its own crane as the harbour didn’t possess equipment of that type. Almost the last components to be lifted on board were the drums. These were loaded in fours onto wooden pallets, held in place with webbing straps and then craned onto the vessel.
The ship sailed late that same afternoon, heading north out of Khasab before turning south-east to head into the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea.
Chapter 20
Hammersmith, London
Monday
‘You may take it,’ Simpson said, ‘that the faeces have impacted the air-conditioning. A lot of shit, with a lot of force and straight into a very powerful fan. We still don’t know where Vernon is, but we do now know what he
intends to do. I had Baker more or less waiting outside the door of my office this morning when I got in, chafing at the bit.’
James Baker was the resident IT specialist employed at Hammersmith, so Richter had a pretty good idea of the kind of thing that was coming next.
‘You probably know more about this than I do,’ Simpson went on, ‘but Baker has set up what I suppose you could call monitoring stations or tripwires or something that alert him and his staff when certain things happen on the Internet. When certain information is posted, or some event takes place, that kind of thing. And obviously he watches the radical Islamic sites pretty much all the time, because everybody except a few politically-correct dickheads in London who object to racial profiling and manage to completely ignore the reality of the situation knows that’s where the next terrorist threat is going to come from.
‘Yesterday afternoon a whole clump of alarm bells started to ring after a new post appeared on one of those sites. An unnamed individual posted what amounted to an advertisement, offering to professionally concoct a bioweapon or a lethal chemical cocktail, basically for the highest bidder. Delivery could be arranged for any part of Western or Eastern Europe in return for a cash payment. It even listed the type of weapons available, which was basically the usual suspects, things like Anthrax, botulinus toxin, ricin, Soman, Sarin and VX. And, as a matter of interest, Novichok, I guess because it’s been in the headlines recently.’
The question was obvious, but Richter asked it anyway.
‘What were the contact details?’ he asked.
Bioweapon Page 10
