‘Got it in one. And we’ve both got “get out of jail free” cards we can use if we get stopped over here by some French flic or a customs officer who can’t take a joke. Langley picked Carcassonne because it was a smaller airport with much less security than Toulouse, and we didn’t have a problem coming through. But what we ain’t got is ammunition. Wondering if you could help us out with that.’
Richter nodded.
‘No problem,’ he said, ‘as long as we’re talking nine mil rather than forty calibre.’
Morris nodded, a fork-load of burger on a one-way journey to his mouth.
‘Okay. I’ve got a box of fifty back at the hotel. Now,’ Richter added, ‘I know what I’m supposed to be doing here, but what’s your tasking from Langley?’
‘Simple,’ Masters replied, making Richter switch focus. They really were working like a kind of double-act, taking turns to reply to him. ‘We find this Vernon character and either gift-wrap him and mail him back to good old Great Britain if we’re sure he’s gonna keep his mouth shut, or we take him somewhere quiet and permanently solve the problem with a double-tap nine-millimetre retirement package.’
‘And then?’
‘And then we get the hell out of Dodge.’
Chapter 28
London and Epping
Tuesday
Professor Martin Wilmot, in the words of the adage he’d often heard repeated but without any knowledge of what it actually referred to, was between a rock and a hard place.
The information he had gleaned from Michael – he had never learned the man’s real name but he was absolutely certain that ‘Michael’ formed no part of it – frankly terrified him. The TRAIT project had been sufficiently repugnant to him that he had always been surprised that it had got off the ground in the first place, even though he understood the reason it had been initiated and, to some extent, he even agreed with its aims, just not with its methods.
But if what Michael had told him was true – and he had no reason to doubt what he’d said – then what the Syrian or Iranian or Iraqi scientists, whoever they were, had done was create a bioweapon that was much, much more dangerous. TRAIT as originally conceived had been necessarily limited in its scope, relatively slow acting and aimed at one very specific target. The modified version of TRAIT was apparently none of these things, and what terrified Wilmot more than anything was what Michael had revealed about the target group.
That had sent Wilmot into a mental flat spin and he simply did not know what to do.
He knew what he should do, of course. That was perfectly obvious. The information he now possessed was not conclusive proof that a clearly hostile regime in the Middle East had developed a biological weapon of mass destruction, but it was the next best thing to a smoking gun. And for the safety and security of the West Wilmot knew that what he should do, and as quickly as possible, was to bring this matter to the attention of the authorities, to the Secret Intelligence Service and the Security Service, so that they could do everything possible to minimise or, better, to eliminate the risk. That was perfectly simple, perfectly obvious, and undeniably the right course of action.
The problem Wilmot faced was that if he did that, if he did the right thing, then his own appalling personal secret would have to be revealed at the same time, because pretty much the first question that the SIS or MI5 or even a police interrogator would ask was how he’d come by the information. It was not the kind of thing that a man would be likely to overhear sitting in a pub or restaurant or walking down the street. He would have to explain that he had been blackmailed, and that would mean explaining the entire sordid business in order for him to be believed. In fact, even if he did manage to come up with some kind of a story that would satisfy a sceptical interviewer, he had no doubt that Michael – who from past experience seemed to be exceptionally well-informed on a whole range of subjects – would find out what he’d done quite quickly and would then have no hesitation at all in releasing copies of the DVD he’d got to the British police and the media and anyone else he could think of.
If that happened, instead of being thanked for revealing details of the plot, there would be a good chance that he would be reviled as the foulest kind of pervert and the information he had provided would probably be ignored. He would be assumed to be trying to save his own skin.
But at the same time, he knew he really couldn’t just say nothing. His conscience wouldn’t let him do that.
About half an hour after leaving work that afternoon, Wilmot was still completely undecided. Along with a couple of hundred other people, he stood on the platform of the London Underground station waiting for the next Central Line train out to his home in Epping. He’d even, he realised as the warning sign changed to ‘Stand back. Train approaching,’ forgotten to buy a newspaper, something he did as a matter of course every single day. No matter. He could pick one up when he left the station at the other end of the line.
As usual, he had to stand for the first part of the journey, until the train reached Stratford and many of the seats were vacated. He emerged from the gloom of the Epping Underground station into the weak sunlight of late afternoon and walked unhurriedly towards a corner shop located a short distance from the station. In addition to almost everything else, the Indian family that ran it sold newspapers.
He never got there.
As he crossed the main road and headed down the side street, part of his normal walk home from the station, the side door of a parked Chrysler Voyager people carrier slid open right beside him. He glanced at it incuriously as he walked by but saw no one inside the rear of the vehicle. And, slightly unusually, there seemed to be no seats in there either.
As he looked away, somebody cannoned into him from his left-hand side. An automatic apology sprang to his lips, but he never got the chance to utter a sound. The heavily-built man half-dragged and half-carried him the yard or two across to the Chrysler and forced him into the back of the vehicle. Immediately, the side door slammed shut and the driver pulled away from the kerb.
‘What the—’ Wilmot spluttered, then fell silent as he looked around him.
He realised that his first impression, that there were no seats in the back of the Voyager, was erroneous. It was a seven-seater vehicle, and only the central three seats were missing. Michael sat comfortably on one of the two seats at the very back of the people carrier, a small black automatic pistol held casually in his right hand, the barrel pointed at Wilmot. That was one incongruous note. The other one was that Michael was wearing a kind of one-piece plastic suit that covered him completely apart from his face and his hands.
The man who’d forced him into the vehicle was blocking his access to the closed door. He looked like a bouncer or a wrestler: over six feet tall with extraordinarily broad shoulders and a shaven head. He looked to Wilmot as if he could snap his spine with a single blow, and that he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it if that’s what Michael told him to do.
‘What do you want?’ Wilmot tried to sound confident and assured, but the tremor in his voice was as obvious to him as it was to everyone else inside the vehicle.
Michael smiled at him, his expression pitying, almost compassionate.
‘I don’t want anything from you,’ Michael said softly. ‘Not any more. I’m afraid your usefulness to me is at an end. You’ve just become another loose end that I need to take care of.’
For a moment Wilmot hoped that he was finally going to be freed from the tyranny Michael had imposed on him for half a decade, a tyranny that had been entirely self-inflicted. But a glance at the other man’s expression and the sight of the gun in his hand meant something rather different.
‘I won’t say anything,’ Wilmot said, his voice high with panic. ‘I’ll never say a word.’
‘I know you won’t,’ Michael agreed, ‘but the fact is that now you know too much. Just like Hubert Jefferies.’
Wilmot had no idea what he was talking about.
‘Who? I don’t think—’
‘But what’s interesting is that you discovered Vernon had also looked at the files, but my software tripwire didn’t detect that, so it looks to me as if Vernon managed to work out a way of entering the database without leaving a trace, except within the database itself. That obviously means he must have worked out that if he used the usual route he would be flagged up. That in turn means that he probably already knew something about TRAIT before he went into the archive, and that bothers me.’
Wilmot had little idea what Michael was talking about.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘You don’t need to,’ Michael said, smiling slightly. ‘I’m really just making conversation while we get to where we’re going. All this just means that Vernon is a very dangerous man. Or at least, he’s dangerous to me and to what we’re trying to achieve. And that means he’s going to have to meet with a serious accident, once we find out where he is.’
Then Michael shifted his glance to look ahead through the windscreen of the people carrier and again called out to the driver. ‘This’ll do,’ he said. ‘Pull in on the left.’
Wilmot shouted suddenly, a yell of utter terror as he realised what was happening, and what he knew was going to happen. But almost before he opened his mouth, the huge man beside him clamped his hand around his throat, cutting off the sound almost as soon as it had begun.
The side door of the van slid open and Wilmot was dragged out, physically helpless in the grasp of Michael’s enforcer. The van had stopped on one of the many narrow roads that ran through the outskirts of Epping Forest. The road was barely wide enough for two cars to pass side-by-side, and the layby was surrounded by trees and shrubs that, along with the bulk of the Chrysler, provided an effective barrier to prevent anyone witnessing what was going on.
Michael climbed out as well and stood in front of Wilmot, the scientist’s body shaking with terror, his eyes wide and staring. Michael stepped close, right in front of him and pulled open Wilmot’s jacket, reaching into the inside pockets. He took out a mobile phone and his wallet. He handed the mobile to the driver of the Chrysler, another man who looked like a doorman or a bouncer, opened the wallet and took out the cash and credit cards which he also handed to the driver, and then tossed the wallet to one side.
‘The world is about to change,’ Michael said, ‘and in part that’s thanks to you, and to the information you’ve supplied. But you’ve caused me a lot of trouble as well, and now you’re going to pay for that. I need to send a message to some of the other people I use as sources, just to remind them what might happen if they don’t behave. And you’re going to be that message. There is one concession I can make,’ he added. ‘At least this way you’ll die with your reputation intact. No sordid stories in the newspapers, no appearances in court, no years spent in prison wondering when somebody was going to come for you. And I’ll trash the DVD as well. It’s not much, but I can do that for you.’
Wilmot was still struggling, trying desperately to speak – his voice strangled by the grip of the man beside him – and he tried to fight for his life, but he was a man of words and ideas and not a man of violence. And, in any case, there were three of them and only one of him.
Michael also handed the driver his pistol, and then held out his hand to the man, who produced a long black and silver metallic object and handed it over. Michael held it comfortably in his right hand, snicked off the safety catch and then pressed the button on the side. With an ominous metallic click the flick knife opened up, the eight inch single edged blade glinting in the sunlight.
‘Hold him still, both of you,’ he ordered, ‘and keep his mouth covered. I don’t want him screaming.’
The driver took Wilmot’s left arm and held him steady, supporting him by clamping one massive hand around his shoulder. The other man repeated his actions on the other side of their victim, his hand clamping Wilmot’s mouth firmly shut.
Michael checked he was immobilised, then pulled on a pair of latex gloves and stepped forward.
Wilmot kicked out desperately, trying to knock the knife out of Michael’s hand, but missed by a couple of feet.
‘Get him on his knees,’ Michael ordered.
Wilmot felt a massive kick on the side of his left knee, sending an agonising wave of pain screaming through his body and almost immediately he collapsed. The two men holding him dragged him up and forced him onto his knees. They each placed a foot on the back of his calf to hold him down and in place and bent his body slightly backwards. It was clearly not the first time that they had performed such actions. And Michael had learned some of his grisly trade in the cellars of a VAJA building in Tehran. He, too, had appetites that needed feeding.
He stepped right beside the immobilised scientist, turned the switchblade around in his hand so that the blade faced downwards and slid the point between the top two buttons of Wilmot’s shirt, then pushed the blade towards the ground. The razor-sharp edge parted material and cut off buttons. The shirt flapped open to reveal the scientist’s pale and somewhat flabby torso.
Still without saying a word, Michael changed his grip on the knife so that this time the cutting-edge faced upwards, and without any particular fuss or even much apparent effort he drove the full length of the blade into Wilmot’s stomach.
The scientist’s body bucked and he screamed at the unbelievable pain of the stab wound, but all that was audible through the gag formed by the enforcer’s hand was a muffled grunt.
Michael moved his feet slightly to brace himself, then wrapped both hands around the handle of the switchblade and began moving it steadily upwards, cutting through skin and muscle and subcutaneous fat, sawing the blade in and out as he did so. Blood poured out of the gaping wound, soaking Wilmot’s trousers and the ground on which he knelt. Michael stopped the jagged wound at the base of the rib cage, pulled out the blade and then slid it accurately between the ribs just to the left of the centre line of the body, pushing it firmly home and deep into Wilmot’s heart.
Instantly, the savagely mutilated man stopped struggling, his whole body going limp, his head slumping down onto his chest as the man holding his face let go.
Michael pulled out the knife, cleaned the blood off the blade on an untouched portion of Wilmot’s shirt, and then felt for the artery in the man’s neck to check for a pulse, though his total lack of mobility and staring wide-open eyes told their own story.
He nodded at the two men who simply released their grip on the dead body between them, and Wilmot’s corpse slumped to the ground in an untidy and unmoving heap.
‘Just leave him here,’ he ordered, pulling off the latex gloves and then removing the blood-splattered plastic over-suit that had protected his clothing. ‘Just another innocent victim of the knife crime that infests this area. I have a feeling this is one that the cops won’t solve.’
The driver laughed, walked across to the Chrysler and came back with a black dustbin bag which he held open to allow Michael to stuff the gloves and the suit inside it. They would dispose of that in a convenient waste bin somewhere on their way back into London.
Less than a minute later the driver re-started the Voyager’s engine but didn’t turn the vehicle around to and drive back the way they’d come, just in case anyone had noticed the vehicle as they’d headed for the forest. Instead, he drove on a further three miles or so until he found another quiet and unoccupied layby, where he stepped out of the Chrysler and removed the false plates – cloned from another almost identi
cal people carrier – to reveal the car’s real number underneath. With the number of traffic cameras in Britain, Michael never believed in taking chances. If by some fluke a Chrysler Voyager did become linked to the murder of the scientist, and the number plates had been recorded on a camera, that would be a problem for somebody else entirely.
‘Will you destroy the DVD, boss?’ the driver asked as they headed back towards north-east London. ‘Like you told the boffin you would?’
Michael stared at him as if he was mad.
‘Of course not. What do you think I am? About the only useful thing Wilmot did was provide the TRAIT files, so fuck him.’
The driver glanced round almost hesitantly.
‘You mind if I take a copy of it, then?’ he asked.
Michael smiled somewhat cynically.
‘I didn’t think your tastes ran in that direction.’
The driver shook his head decisively.
‘They don’t, boss, honestly. But you’d be amazed how much that kind of stuff sells for on the right site on the Dark Web. And I could do with the money.’
Michael thought for a few moments then laughed.
‘Yes, no problem. You can have it and start a small side-line business flogging copies, as long as you stay below the radar. Nothing traceable to us, obviously. And,’ he added, ‘I’ve already got a customer for you, but this one will be a freebie. You can send one to Wilmot’s wife. Let her know what her husband was really into.’
Chapter 29
Cambrils, Spain
Tuesday
Charles Vernon consumed a leisurely dinner in the hotel dining room then took the lift back up to his room. He made a cup of instant coffee and took it and a small liqueur out onto the tiny terrace, barely big enough for a round table and two folding chairs. For about an hour he just sat there as darkness gathered around him, an unread English newspaper on the table beside him, and stared out towards the Mediterranean Sea. From his vantage point, he could both see and hear the waves breaking on the beach a couple of hundred yards or so away from the building.
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