Green looked around at the other two men.
‘This is making less and less sense,’ he said. ‘If most of the downloads, or even all the downloads, are unclassified, what’s the point of Vernon doing a download, copying it onto an external hard drive – because that’s what we think he did – and then professionally deleting it from his system? If it’s unclassified, it can’t be important, or am I missing the point?’
‘There has to be a reason,’ Slade said. ‘As I said before, I don’t know Vernon well, but he’s not the kind of man likely to make a joke or do anything without thinking it through first. And he certainly wouldn’t have left the country in the way that he did unless there was a good reason for him to do so. So, unclassified or not, if our deduction about copying the download and then deleting it is correct, there must be something in one of those files he downloaded that made him do a bunk. So all we have to do is find out what it was.’
Just over ten minutes later, Green leaned back slightly in the chair and pointed at the computer screen where he had highlighted one particular entry.
‘I still don’t know if we’re on the right track,’ he said, ‘but what we have here is a really good size match. By my calculations, the size of the random characters equates to 193 gigabytes, and the closest match to that is this download here, which comes in at 189 gigabytes. There’s nothing else in the download list which is even close to that, and it’s not easy to see which other downloads could add up to the same size if Vernon was copying and deleting several separate downloads. And if our assumption is right, I guess it’s more likely that we’re looking at a single download.’
‘What’s the name of the file?’ Slade asked.
Green looked back at the computer screen.
‘The title is “Investigation into the feasibility of employing selective genetic markers in tandem with specific modifications to individual physical characteristics,” which frankly means bugger all to me.’
‘And to me,’ Slade agreed.
‘What’s that other word on the same line?’ Brown asked.
Slade and Green both looked where he was pointing.
‘You often get that,’ Slade said. ‘These bloody scientists never use one word if they can find half a dozen which say almost the same thing. All of these trials and studies have a full name that spells out what they’re intended to achieve, but because that’s usually quite a mouthful they also tend to have a shortened form of the name if that’s feasible, or otherwise they just use a randomly chosen name to indicate the same study. So that word TRAIT is just a kind of shorthand form of the full title.’
‘That makes sense,’ Green said. ‘So let’s go visit that site, download the TRAIT file and see if there’s something in that that tells us what Vernon’s up to.’
Chapter 33
Moscow and London
Wednesday
James Baker was not the only computer expert able to use pieces of exotic software to narrow down the location of Charles Vernon. Nor were the intelligence services of the United Kingdom the only units that had been alerted to the ‘advertisement’ posted on the Dark Web site.
In the lower levels of the new GU building at Khodinka Airport in Moscow, a building that was still known within the service as The Aquarium, just like the old building next door, another team of computer analysts had been monitoring the Dark Web site and had run a very similar piece of software to the one Baker had used and had come to pretty much the same conclusion: the runaway scientist was somewhere in or near Cambrils.
To muddy the waters still further, another team, this one working in one of the most secure sections of the SVR headquarters at Yazenevo, one of the wooded suburbs surrounding Moscow, had done much the same thing and made the same calculations and had, again, come to an identical conclusion.
The fastest way to get the Costa Brava was obviously to fly, and within two hours of Vernon’s approximate location being established, the snatch team from the SVR – two experienced field officers from Yasenevo and a pair of Spetsnaz troopers to provide the muscle – was already in the air, flying commercial to Paris with an onward connection to Barcelona where a hire car had already been booked.
The Spetsnaz is a unit of the Russian army that specialises in everything from so-called ‘wet work’ – assassinations in plain English – to espionage operations and the creation of sleeper cells in countries that either are opposed to Russia and her aims or that might possibly become so opposed in the future. Officially, the Spetsnaz have nothing to do with either the SVR or the GU, the two separate, different and competing Russian intelligence organs, but in practice Spetsnaz personnel are often attached to operational units from the two intelligence services to provide specialist skills or, just as often, to act in an executive capacity, either protecting the field officers from enemy action or carrying out assassinations on their orders.
There had been a short but inevitable delay in selecting, assembling and then briefing a team from the GU and handling the logistics of the operation. That meant the four-man team – its composition almost identical to the SVR unit with two senior field officers and two Spetsnaz troopers – was about two hours behind the SVR snatch team when they left Moscow. The only major difference was that these two Spetsnaz soldiers had been selected to provide the muscle for the GU team, but more specifically they had also been briefed to assassinate Vernon on sight.
Unbeknown to either group, and to Richter and the two CIA men as well, there was a fourth team in play. Despatched from London on the express orders of ‘Michael’ who was a senior officer in the Iranian intelligence service, VAJA, these three men had also been given clear and unequivocal instructions to terminate Charles Vernon as soon as they located him.
It was going to get very crowded in Cambrils, and very noisy, probably quite quickly.
Chapter 34
Porton Down, Wiltshire
Wednesday
It was a big chunk of data but the Internet connection provided a fast download speed, and the three men were able to start looking at the multiple files – because there were dozens of them included within the TRAIT folder – within just a few minutes of the download starting.
And that was where they ran into another difficulty. Slade was a security officer, with an overview of everything that went on at Porton Down, but only in the most general terms. He knew the identities of all the scientists employed there and had a good sense of the overall work being carried out at Dstl, but his scientific knowledge was extremely limited, pretty much to a pre-university level only. Brown and Green were in precisely the same position, being experienced intelligence and counterintelligence officers with a wealth of knowledge in those fields, but not by any stretch of the imagination scientists. They were people for whom biochemistry was little more than the name of scientific discipline, and neither of them could have accurately explained what biochemistry actually was, far less talked about the subject with any degree of authority.
In short, none of the three men had even the faintest idea what they were looking at. Or looking for.
‘We need help with this,’ Green said after a few minutes, stating the obvious. ‘Can you identify somebody here who can tell us what this pile of crap actually means?’
Slade couldn’t, and so he kicked the problem upstairs to William Poulson. About fifteen minutes after he held a very short conversation with the chief executive, the door of Vernon’s office opened and Colin McCarthy walked in.
‘Poulson told me you needed help,’ he said. ‘So what can I do? And who are you two?’ he added, looking at Green and Brown.
‘These two men are from Millbank,’ Slade said. ‘They work for the security service, MI5, and we’re trying to find out why Charles Vernon fled to France.’
He explained about the downloaded file and that it looked as if Vernon had read something in it that had alarmed him – because nothing else seemed to make sense – and had then deleted the file before walking out of the office for the last
time.
‘I accept that we’re making assumptions here,’ Slade finished, ‘but so far this is the only scenario that appears to fit with what we already know happened.’
McCarthy nodded.
‘Let me take a look, then,’ he said.
Green stood up from the chair in front of the computer screen and gestured for McCarthy to sit down instead.
‘The download has finished,’ Green explained, ‘and all the files relate to some kind of an operation or programme that was known by the short name TRAIT. Does that name mean anything to you?’
‘Not a thing,’ McCarthy replied, reaching out for the mouse to look at another part of the document displayed on the screen.
For a couple of minutes he didn’t speak, just looked at different sections of the open file before closing it and selecting another file which he also inspected. He repeated the process with seven or eight files in all, then he sat back in the seat, swung it round and looked at the three men who were waiting expectantly in a kind of a semicircle behind him.
‘Can you be sure that this is the right file, or rather the right collection of files?’ he asked.
‘We can’t be completely certain, no,’ Green replied, ‘but this does fit the bill, at least as far as the download size is concerned. Why?’
McCarthy shook his head.
‘It just doesn’t seem very likely to me,’ he said. ‘This operation, this TRAIT thing, is getting on for two decades old. I think I heard about it years ago, but I’ve never seen any of the material before. From what I’ve seen so far, it ran for about four years and was then cancelled, probably because it didn’t actually work. Mind you, I’m guessing about that because as far as I can tell there are no results included within this material. So why would anything that old be of any interest at all to Charles Vernon, or to anyone else come to that?’
‘That’s what we were hoping you could tell us,’ Slade said. ‘So what was TRAIT all about? What was the trial or study or whatever supposed to achieve?’
McCarthy looked at him, then glanced at the other two men.
‘Do any of you know anything about the human genome?’ he asked. ‘Or genetic markers? Genetic variation within species? Chromosome manipulation? Anything like that?’
As McCarthy had probably expected, the three men gave him completely blank looks and almost simultaneously shook their heads.
‘Why don’t you tell us?’ Green suggested. ‘Preferably in words of no more than three syllables, and we’d obviously like the short and snappy version.’
McCarthy nodded.
‘It’s quite a complex subject,’ he began, ‘though the aims of the trial were really fairly simple. Before I start, let me just ask you one question. What do you think is one of the most pressing problems facing the human race right now? Something that could potentially affect everyone on this planet?’
‘Actually, that’s two questions,’ Green said.
‘Not really. It’s one question and the second sentence is just an elaboration. A hint, maybe. So, any ideas?’
‘This isn’t a guessing game, Dr McCarthy,’ George Slade said, sounding irritated, ‘and we really don’t have time for this. What exactly are you driving at?’
McCarthy nodded and then produced the answer to his own question, which didn’t really help at all.
‘So what’s that got to do with TRAIT?’ Green asked.
‘Almost everything, from what I’ve seen so far. It was postulated as a solution to that very problem.’
‘How?’ Slade demanded. ‘How did it work?’
McCarthy held up his hand and then turned back to the computer, scanning the material on screen and looking for something, for some section of the files that would presumably provide the answer. He read a couple of paragraphs and then turned back to look at Slade.
‘It was intended to be a kind of indirect and long-term solution,’ he said. ‘A solution that would probably have been considered to be very radical even when the trial began, and something that we wouldn’t even contemplate thinking about doing today.’
‘So, how did it work, exactly?’ Green asked, repeating Slade’s question.
McCarthy told them. Not in any detail – because the probability was that none of them would actually understand the mechanics of the solution – but just in broad-brush terms that they found easy enough to comprehend. When he’d finished, nobody said anything for what seemed like quite a long time. Then Slade spoke.
‘That’s disgusting,’ he said. ‘I can see how it would have solved the problem, or help solve it anyway, but nobody in their right mind could possibly think it was a good idea. Not even the Nazis came up with something like that.’
‘That’s probably because the Nazis were always thinking short-term. If Hitler had won the war, I think it’s very likely that his scientists would have developed a programme that would have been something quite similar to this. Not that any of this matters,’ McCarthy finished, ‘because the project was cancelled. Common sense obviously prevailed.’
‘But only after four years of work and research,’ Green pointed out. ‘And do you know whether it succeeded or not?’
McCarthy shook his head.
‘Without looking at the results, and they don’t seem to be here in this collection of files, the answer is no. But this would have been cutting-edge research at the time, and so my guess is that it didn’t work and that’s probably the main reason why the authorities here at Porton Down pulled the plug on it.’
‘So, what we have here,’ Slade said, as much as anything else in an attempt to confirm that he understood the situation himself, ‘is that Charles Vernon read about a trial that finished almost twenty years ago, and that quite probably never produced the results that the scientists involved in it were anticipating. And because of what he read, he suddenly decided to walk out of his office here and fly to France.’
‘And,’ Green said, almost finishing Slade’s summary, ‘as soon as he got to France he posted an advert on a radical Islamic website hidden deep in the Dark Web offering his services to anyone who could pay who wanted him to manufacture a chemical or biological weapon.’
‘Really?’ McCarthy sounded utterly incredulous. ‘I would never have thought Vernon would be capable of anything like that.’
‘I’m afraid he did, Doc,’ Green said. ‘The problem is that unless I’m missing something here, I don’t see how these two events – reading the TRAIT files and then leaving the country – can possibly be related. I’m wondering if what we’re seeing is just a coincidence. Maybe Vernon did read and research the concept behind TRAIT, but that had nothing to do with him deciding to do a bunk. Maybe he’d been planning to go rogue for months, or years, and just decided that the time was right.’
‘I’m not a great believer in coincidence,’ Brown said.
‘Nor am I,’ Slade agreed. ‘I think the timing is too fortuitous. I think there must be something in those documents that Vernon read and whatever it was prompted him to run. The trouble is, I’ve got no idea what that could be, what the triggering event or piece of information actually was.’
‘This is the best lead we’ve got at the moment,’ Green said, ‘so what we’ll need to do is go through these files as quickly and as thoroughly as we can and see if we can work out what spooked Vernon.’
‘Does that mean you’re finished with me?’ McCarthy asked. ‘I’ve got a pile of stuff I need to be getting on with.’
Slade looked across at the two MI5 men.
‘I don’t think what we’re looking for will be buried deep in the scientific explanations,’ Green said. ‘I think it’s more likely we’ll find some kind of statement that confirms the trial was successful or that it was implemented somewhere or something like that, and that made Vernon flip. Maybe he couldn’t handle the fact that the scientific establishment he’d worked at for over ten years had been involved in something as repellent as TRAIT. Okay, I know that doesn’t explain why he went to France or poste
d that advert, but we have to start somewhere. And maybe if we can work out what he discovered that might tell us why he left. Or at least give us a clue.’
Slade nodded and turned to McCarthy, who was now standing up beside the computer.
‘Just stay on the end of the phone,’ he said, ‘just in case we need you again to explain something to us. And give me a call here in this office before you leave tonight.’
‘No problem,’ McCarthy replied. ‘You know where to find me.’
Chapter 35
Cambrils, Spain
Wednesday
Richter steered the hired Peugeot along the seafront promenade in Cambrils between the sea to the south-east and the built-up area of the town to the north-west. Cambrils was kind of long and thin, spreading out along the coast but with not much depth behind the seafront, and with the two main coast roads – the E15/AP-7 Autopista de la Mediterrània toll road and the non-toll N-340/A-7 Autovia de la Mediterrània – running behind the built-up area.
He was taking note of his surroundings and studying the layout of the roads and streets as best he could, just as the two CIA agents were doing, Moore sitting beside him and Masters in the back seat.
‘Vernon’s not an idiot,’ Richter said, ‘though as far as I know he’s got almost no experience of the world that we walk through every day. Because of what he’s done he must be expecting that somebody would come after him, so my guess is that he’s probably done his best to disguise his appearance. He had a beard according to his photograph and that was confirmed by his colleagues back at Porton Down, so he’s probably shaved that off as an obvious first step. What hair he’s got is white, and there’s not much of it, so he might have tried to buy a syrup.’
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