Simpson shook his head.
‘I suppose when I called it an advert I was slightly shading the truth. In fact, the post is more of a teaser, just listing the products available and the professional qualifications of the supplier which are, by the way, a really close match for Vernon. Almost identical, in fact. Anyone interested is supposed to stick a post on the same website giving their contact details and what they want and then, presumably, they will be contacted separately to discuss prices, quantity, delivery and all the rest of it. And,’ Simpson added, guessing what Richter was going to ask the next, ‘Baker has already drafted a response which I’ve approved, and he’s posted it.’
‘Pretending to be what? Or who?’
‘We’ve left it vague. Just a request for a price for fifty kilograms weight of liquid Sarin and the shortest possible delivery time to Turkey. That seemed about as far east as we needed to go and implies that the purchaser could be intending to use the stuff in Syria or somewhere in that neck of the woods. Baker created an anonymous email account on a web-based system, and now he’s just waiting for some kind of response.’
‘And Baker reckons the poster was Vernon, does he?’ Richter asked.
‘He can’t be sure, obviously, but it does seem to be stretching the long arm of coincidence more than a little if within a week of a professor of biochemistry, the kind of person who could build these types of weapons more or less in his sleep, going missing, this advert appears. So unless we have another equally qualified renegade academic running around France or Germany or wherever, this does look remarkably like the work of Charles Vernon. And, needless to say, that means we have to stop him.’
‘So where do we start looking?’ Richter asked.
Simpson shook his head.
‘That is a bloody good question,’ he said.
‘But do you have a bloody good answer?’
‘No, I don’t,’ Simpson admitted. ‘You won’t be surprised to learn that the French have been no help whatsoever. As usual. I don’t even know if they’ve done anything at all to try to find out where Vernon went once he walked out of the arrivals hall at Blagnac in Toulouse. All we do know is that he hasn’t used his credit cards since he bought his ticket at Heathrow, but that’s not too surprising bearing in mind the amount of folding money he had in his trousers. So whatever he’s doing and wherever he is, he’s obviously paying cash for everything.’
Richter didn’t respond for a few moments, and Simpson looked at him sharply.
‘What?’
‘I’m not entirely convinced that this is Vernon,’ Richter said. ‘I admit that I don’t know much about the man, but what I do know doesn’t suggest that he’s the kind of person who would have anything to do with ISIS or radical Islam, which I assume would be the organisations most likely to be interested in these kinds of weapons. And what he definitely doesn’t need is the money. He’s not rich, not by modern standards, but he’s certainly quite well off. His house is mortgage-free, he doesn’t have expensive tastes and is hauling in a good salary. He doesn’t even seem to spend what he’s got or earns, as far as I can tell. So why would he do something like this? It’s a risky strategy and if he followed it through it could well end up with him being murdered by ISIS or whoever once he’d delivered the goods. I just don’t see what he could possibly achieve by doing this except to end up dead, and that really doesn’t make sense.’
Simpson looked unconvinced.
‘You may be right. You may be wrong. I have no fucking idea one way or the other. But what I do know is that this advert, for want of a better word, has got Five and Six climbing the walls and screaming at me, mainly, to do something about it. Even the bloody Americans are trying to stick their noses in.’
‘Why? This is our problem, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, obviously, but don’t forget they’ve had those attempts on senior officials using Anthrax over the last few years, and they’ve obviously got markers out for any event even indirectly related to chemical or biological weapons. The Company, I gather, is taking a very keen interest in what’s going on over here on this side of the Pond, and the Fibbies are increasing their domestic surveillance as well, just in case Vernon or some weapon he’s concocted pitches up in the States. There’s not a huge amount we can do until either Vernon pops out of the woodwork or Baker gets a hit on his new email account that might show us where to start looking. But we need to do something. We can’t just sit around here waiting for something to happen.
‘Toulouse was the last place where we know Charles Vernon went, though we have no idea where he might be now, obviously. But we have to start somewhere, so you need to pack your bags, grab a diplomatic passport from the admin section and a pistol and ammunition from the armoury and get yourself over to France no later than yesterday. This has gone a long way beyond the theoretical did he or didn’t he. You are to find Vernon, no matter what it takes, and either bring him back here in one piece or shoot the bastard if you can’t do that. Try to avoid causing too much collateral damage – I know what you’re like when the shooting starts – but one way or the other you are to find and stop Vernon. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Crystal,’ Richter said, stood up and walked out of Simpson’s office.
Chapter 21
Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College, London
Monday
Martin Wilmot had left the Dstl at Porton Down some fifteen years earlier and had taken up his present position at Imperial College only three years ago. In truth, what he knew about the TRAIT trial hadn’t even crossed his mind until near the beginning of his relationship with the man calling himself Michael, when Wilmot had decided that the old paperwork covering the subject would be a harmless bit of originally-Secret but now-declassified information that he could hand over. He’d really offered it just to keep the man quiet for another few weeks and had then virtually forgotten about it.
But what Michael had told him had shaken him to his core. Porton Down had abandoned TRAIT both as a concept and as a vehicle not for practical but purely for ethical reasons. Michael had been right about that: TRAIT had worked, and towards the end of the twentieth century the concept had probably seemed to offer a way of helping to tackle one of the most obvious long-term problems facing the human race. But attitudes and ethics change, sometimes very quickly and, at best, TRAIT left a bad taste in the mouth and had been abandoned, the files classified at a high enough level to ensure that they could never be accessed accidentally. The results of the field trial, without which the project’s documentation was clearly incomplete, had been filed away with even greater and higher-level protection. With hindsight, it might have been better for the entire documentation to have been shredded and any electronic records permanently deleted. But research is expensive and always at least potentially valuable, and somebody had presumably decided to retain the data just in case the concept ever needed to be revived. And, perhaps not as obviously, once any material is uploaded to any part of the Internet or even onto a private intranet, it’s almost impossible to delete all traces of it. There are almost always copies or part-copies held somewhere.
Because of his position at Imperial College, Wilmot had access to a huge variety of databases and other resources that were inaccessible to non-academics, and with Michael’s instructions still ringing in his ears, he knew he could access the archive where he knew the files concerning the project had been stored. He hadn’t personally been involved with TRAIT, but he had known something about it from talking to colleagues at Porton Down when he’d been stationed there.
Alone in his office the following afternoon, Wilmot input his credentials into the appropriate database, then navigated through the listings of reams of projects until he identified the one he was looking for. He didn’t download the files, which is what he would normally have done if he’d been intending to read the information or do any work on it, but he did study the summary sheet that formed the first page of the record, something he’d never usual
ly bother to do. It contained exactly the kind of information that he had expected: the date the trial was authorised and the date it was finally abandoned; a one-paragraph summary outlining the aims of the trial; the full filename and number, the unit or organisation responsible for it and a number of other pieces of static information. Below that was a dynamic field that listed the dates the file was accessed and by whom, which was what he had hoped to find.
He glanced back and saw his own access record dated a little under five years previously, after which nobody had looked at it until just over six weeks ago, when it had been inspected by a man named Jefferies working at Cambridge University, and about a month ago by ‘Vernon, Professor Charles H, Dstl’.
And that was not good news.
Twenty minutes later, Wilmot walked out of the building, telling one of his colleagues that he’d be about a quarter of an hour or so, and just wanted to buy a newspaper and grab a coffee. He made his way to a side street about a hundred yards away where he knew there was one of London’s few remaining public phones. He knew that because he had used that same phone before when Michael had demanded contact with him, contact that was too complex to be handled by the very basic code they had worked out between them.
When he turned the corner, Whitmore saw that there was nobody using or near the phone, and he walked straight over to it. He had memorised Michael’s contact number and dialled it as soon as he picked up the handset.
‘It’s me,’ he said when his call was answered, ‘and I’m using a public phone, as you instructed.’
‘What do you have for me?’ Michael demanded. ‘Have you got the information?’
‘Yes,’ Whitmore said, almost hesitantly. ‘Vernon did look at the files about four weeks ago. And,’ he added, uncertain whether he was conveying bad news or worse news, as he took a slip of paper from his pocket, ‘although the file has been archived for years, another academic opened it about six weeks ago. His name is Jefferies, Hubert Jefferies, and he works at Cambridge University.’
For a few seconds there was no response, then Michael uttered a single expletive – ‘Fuck’ – which was the first time Whitmore had even heard him swear or even raise his voice.
‘What do you want me to do?’
It took a few moments before Whitmore realised he was talking into a dead phone.
Chapter 22
Millbank, London
Monday
The steps involved in carrying out a forensic examination of a computer are fairly standard. Unless it’s unavoidable, the technicians will not work on the original machine at all, but on a cloned version, a byte by byte copy, of the computer’s hard drive. That preserves the original intact and allows multiple copies of it to be made in case the clone becomes corrupted or unusable due to some internal security feature or protection the user has built in.
Initially, the parameters of the disk will be noted, making sure that the visible size of the hard drive corresponds to its stated capacity, a step that can reveal the existence of one or more hidden partitions. When the analysis begins, the technician will not boot from the cloned drive but from a known and safe external source to avoid any possibility of a hidden subroutine being triggered to wipe the drive or corrupt its contents. That also bypasses the user’s password, if enabled, and allows direct access to the directory structure.
Once inside the system, a variety of tools can be used to search for specific information if the subject of the search is already known. This will generate a list of documents containing whatever keywords have been input and is a fast and effective way of identifying documents for individual study. The problem the MI5 technicians at Millbank faced was that they had almost no idea what they were looking for on the laptop computer recovered from Charles Vernon’s house. A series of general searches including obvious words like ‘Porton Down’, ‘Dstl’, ‘chemical’, ‘biochemical’, ‘bioweapon’ and the like generated hundreds of results, none of which helped at all.
Vernon corresponded frequently with professional colleagues, and almost every email that he sent or received, and virtually every document on his computer contained unclassified information about his work. Or at least, information that appeared to be unclassified as far as the MI5 investigators could tell. The reality was that it would take a scientist who specialised in the same field as Vernon a considerable length of time to read and analyse the documents and correspondence they had found in order to determine whether or not they contained any classified information. And knowing whether or not Vernon had inadvertently – or even deliberately – breached the Official Secrets Act was in any case completely irrelevant: what they needed to do was find him.
He appeared to have little in the way of a social life. Virtually all of his contacts were professional colleagues, people he had worked with either at Dstl or at other scientific establishments in the United Kingdom and, in a few cases, scientists working in the same fields in America and Germany. Vernon communicated almost exclusively by email, as far as they could tell, and they could find no trace of any social media account in his name. He really did appear to live for his work and to have almost no life outside it.
The only other conclusion they were able to draw was that Vernon was neither a cook nor a gourmet. About the only non-professional contact details on his computer were the addresses and telephone numbers of a handful of restaurants and takeaways in and around Warminster, and access to his telephone records proved that he ordered in food about three or four times a week on average. Presumably he existed for the rest of the time on microwave food, ready meals and sandwiches, this conclusion also being based upon the sparse contents of his pantry and refrigerator, and on the boxes, cartons and tins they found inside the grey wheelie bin outside his back door, a couple of black bags of rubbish inside it.
And at least the biohazard threat had proved to be completely non-existent. The HazMat team that had been scrambled to Vernon’s house the previous Friday afternoon had been told by Simpson what Richter had discovered at Porton Down. So instead of taking the plastic box for examination in a BSL4 laboratory somewhere, two of the team had suited up completely, taken the box to the furthest point in the garden away from the house and their colleagues and the neighbouring properties and had cautiously pried open one corner of the lid.
Inside, the edges curling upwards as the bread had dried out, they found exactly what Richard Simpson had told them they would find: a week-old roast beef and horseradish sauce sandwich.
The sandwich went into a rubbish bag and the biohazard box went back into Vernon’s fridge.
The search of the house had revealed nothing else of any interest or relevance to the situation. There were clothes in the wardrobe, a couple of suitcases in a spare bedroom and a selection of soaps, deodorants, razors and an electric beard trimmer in the en suite bathroom, but without knowing how many suitcases and trousers and jackets and soaps and deodorants and razors and beard trimmers and all the rest that Vernon owned, it was impossible to tell from what was left whether or not he had taken a suitcase or a carry-on with him when he left the house.
The cameras at Heathrow then confirmed that he had taken a small weekend case with him, which was actually what would have been expected, if for no other reason that passengers who turn up to fly from one country to another invariably have at least some luggage with them. Anyone who doesn’t will immediately attract attention.
The recorded images from the airport also confirmed that Vernon’s carry-on had been passed through the scanner at the security checkpoint, and also produced the additional piece of information that, according to the member of the security staff there who’d been manning the luggage scanner, inside his weekend case Vernon had another laptop computer, which he had been told to remove so that it could be scanned separately, as usual.
That almost immediately rendered the search of the laptop they had seized pointless, because if the renegade scientist had any classified or compromising information in his possession, it woul
d obviously be on the computer that he had taken with him, and not on the one that he had left behind.
Movement and progress are never the same thing: the MI5 team had moved around quite a lot, visiting and thoroughly searching Vernon’s house, and seizing and analysing the contents of the hard disk of his computer, but what they hadn’t done was make any discernible progress.
They still had no idea at all why Vernon had left the country, where his ultimate destination was or what he intended to do when he got there.
Chapter 23
Porton Down, Wiltshire
Monday
Getting into Professor Charles Vernon’s work computer at Dstl didn’t prove anything like as easy as George Slade, or for that matter Jonathan Lewis, had anticipated. When the two men sat down at Vernon’s machine in his deserted office, the login screen refused to yield to the new password that Vernon had supplied to the IT section just under four weeks earlier. Local regulations mandated that all user passwords for that part of the intranet were to be changed at least once every month.
Lewis checked the random series of characters that Vernon had provided in writing to him and input them once more, taking care to make no mistakes at all, but again the login was rejected, together with a message reminding the user that the password had been changed two weeks earlier and that the previous password was no longer valid.
‘Does that mean what I think it means?’ Slade asked.
‘If you’re asking if Vernon created a new password after the one that he sent to me, and didn’t bother telling me about it, you’re quite right. Which is a bit of a bugger.’
‘Can you bypass it? Have you got a trapdoor or back door or whatever it is you call it installed on these machines?’
Lewis shook his head.
‘Most the data held on this system is classified, some of it at a very high level, most of it Secret and usually with SCI – Special Compartmented Intelligence – caveats as well, meaning that you have to have a demonstrable need to access the information and have been given the SCI codeword to view certain files, irrespective of your personal security clearance level. You’ve probably encountered that kind of protection before.’
Bioweapon Page 11
