Bioweapon

by James Barrington

  ‘A what?’ Moore asked.

  ‘Syrup,’ Richter replied. ‘Syrup of figs – a wig. It’s Cockney rhyming slang, but that particular expression seems to have made it into normal usage in some parts of Britain. Back in Wiltshire,’ he continued, returning to his theme, ‘Vernon tended to wear tweed jackets, corduroy trousers, that kind of thing, so again he’s probably bought a completely different wardrobe of clothes to make him blend in and be more difficult to spot.’

  ‘Where would he stay?’ Masters asked.

  ‘As far as I know,’ Richter said, turning off the promenade along the Rambla Regueral and heading north towards the centre of the town, ‘Vernon doesn’t speak any language other than English, so he probably wouldn’t be able to rent a room in a house or go to a place that takes in lodgers, like the French do with their chambres d’hôtes. In fact, I don’t even know if Spanish families ever do that kind of thing. I also doubt if he would have gone to one of the big hotels, like the Tryp Port Cambrils over there—’ he straightened up the Peugeot after negotiating a roundabout and pointed to a large newish multi-storey building about 150 yards ahead of them on the right-hand side of the road ‘—because they would probably want to see his passport and take an impression of his credit card, and that would leave an electronic trail that he couldn’t avoid. If he’d done that, we’d already know about it.’

  ‘So what’s left?’ Masters asked.

  ‘A small hotel where he could wave a fistful of Euros at the receptionist and tell them that he’s been robbed or mugged or lost his passport and wallet. Some story to explain what he’s doing here without any personal documentation. Somewhere they wouldn’t ask too many questions, and where a person who insists on paying cash for everything would be their ideal kind of guest. The Spanish have never been wildly enthusiastic about paying their taxes to the Hacienda, the Spanish tax office, and if they could simply trouser the room rental and what he spends on food I’m sure they’d be more than happy to bend the rules to accommodate him.’

  ‘Okey dokey,’ Moore said, looking up from the screen of his smartphone. ‘I just pulled down a list of every hotel in this town onto my phone, so we can start checking them out right now.’

  ‘Can you edit that list?’ Richter asked. ‘And then print it?’

  ‘I guess so, yes, to both.’

  ‘Good. You can probably delete all the four-star hotels, and any five-star hotels as well, if there are any, from the list, because they’re the ones that will be the most expensive and the ones that will want sight of a passport and an impression of a credit card before they’ll let him have a room. In fact, we’d probably do better to start with the no-star and one-star places and work our way upwards. But before we do that it would make sense to check in somewhere ourselves so that we’ll have a base to work from.’

  ‘That big one we passed a couple of streets back would probably be okay,’ Moore suggested. ‘The Trick or whatever you called it. It’ll probably have decent Wi-Fi and secure parking, and with any luck a decent restaurant.’

  Richter couldn’t argue with that. He was on the one-way system, driving along the Carrer de Mossen Jacint Verdaguer, so he took the first left turning and left again at the crossroads to head back the way they’d come. At the T junction, he turned left and almost immediately stopped outside the hotel. Thirty minutes later, the Peugeot was sitting in a space in the huge underground car park below the building, they each had a room on the third floor, and they were sitting in the large open plan lounge and waiting for somebody to deliver the coffees they’d ordered.

  Moore had a small portable inkjet printer in his carry-on bag and up in his room he’d connected it to his smartphone using Bluetooth to produce an edited and printed list of the hotels in Cambrils.

  ‘The other problem we have,’ Richter said, looking at the piece of paper Moore had given him, ‘is that there’s no point in going to each of these hotels and asking if our old friend Charles Vernon is registered there. First, they probably wouldn’t tell us because of some bloody stupid law passed by the European Union and, second, if Vernon has a brain, which he undoubtedly has, he’ll have registered himself as John Smith or Fred Brown or some other instantly forgettable name. And if we are lucky enough to pitch up at the hotel where he’s staying, there’s a good chance that either he’ll see us or someone will mention that an Englishman and two Americans have turned up looking for somebody. He’ll join the dots and then he’ll move somewhere else or go to ground and we’ll have missed him.’

  ‘So, what do we do, then?’ Masters asked. ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘Two things, I think,’ Richter replied. ‘First, we split up and wander the streets individually. That will make us less noticeable and there is I suppose a faint chance that one of us might spot him. Second, we wait for Vernon to log on to that website he used before and hope that Baker and his gnomes back in London can actually pull an accurate address off the Internet while he’s online or as he gets off, however they do it. Cambrils isn’t a big place, and whichever cybercafe Vernon is using is not going to be more than a few hundred yards away from where we’re sitting right now. So the moment I get the call, we can leg it to wherever he is and grab him. Job done. Anyway, then we can all go home, either with Vernon sitting in the backseat if he agrees to play ball or with a photograph of his corpse if he decides to take the other option.’

  It sounded easy if you said it quickly, but it was a plan – if what he’d just suggested could be dignified by such a name – that contained a whole bunch of variables and a lot of maybes and uncertainties. But it was the best he’d been able come up with.

  ‘So we just sit around and wait?’ Moore asked, and Richter nodded.

  Then he had a second thought.

  ‘In fact,’ Richter said, ‘I know I parked the car in a space under the hotel, but maybe it’d make better sense to leave it on the street outside, just in case Vernon’s location is more than a short walk away and we need to get mobile in a hurry. I’ll go and move it right now.’

  ‘Works for me. You go and do that,’ Moore said. ‘Then let’s get ourselves outside these cups of java—’ he gestured at the approaching waiter ‘—and after that we can see what this fine establishment is able to offer three hungry men for dinner.’

  Richter took the lift down to the underground car park, glanced around him as he stepped onto the concrete floor and then started walking towards the Peugeot. When he was a few yards away a thought struck him and he pulled out his Blackview mobile phone to check the signal strength. He looked at the screen and saw he still had two bars, which was better than he’d expected in that location, and he also noticed a small slowly pulsing red light at the very top of the screen in the notification area.

  Bearing in mind where he was and what was near him, that was not entirely unexpected, but it was still worth checking out.

  He glanced around again, but the garage was entirely deserted, the only occupants about twenty cars parked in various places, the space monitored by several cameras positioned within the garage itself and covering the wide concrete ramp that gave access to the road outside. It was a reasonably secure location under a fairly expensive hotel and most of the cars that surrounded him were a reflection of the typically upmarket clientele who were staying there. He saw three or four Mercedes saloons, at least half a dozen BMWs, a couple of Audis and a Porsche 911 tucked away in one corner. Any one of those vehicles could have been responsible for the warning that his phone was telling him about. Most of the other cars, predictably enough, were Seats.

  Richter selected the app – one of several on the mobile that were not available to the general public – and checked the screen. Immediately, a listing appeared with nine entries recorded, each one representing a single vehicle tracker active within the garage, together with a basic meter at the bottom of the screen. That recorded the transmission from the closest tracker to him, the strength of the signal being converted into a rough measure of distance, and simultan
eously the appropriate listing began pulsing so that he could tell which of the nine trackers was being interrogated.

  It was potentially a useful gadget, and Richter had used it in the UK as a matter of course, mainly to check that the tracker fitted to whichever one of the pool cars he was intending to use was actually working. Clearly the owners of most of the expensive cars in the garage believed that fitting a tracker was a good idea, which it undeniably was.

  But then something unexpected happened.

  Richter continued looking at the screen of the phone as he walked across to the Peugeot, passing two BMWs and a Mercedes on the way, the signal strength meter reacting as he strode past each one. But as he reached the Peugeot, the meter still indicated that it was receiving a strong signal from a tracker. He glanced behind him, but the closest BMW was about twelve feet away. He stopped, turned round and walked back towards that car, closely watching the screen of his mobile as he did so.

  Almost immediately, the app indicated that it was receiving a signal from a different tracker. Richter turned again and took two steps back towards the Peugeot just to confirm his suspicions.

  It was of course always possible that the car hire firm in Toulouse had fitted a tracker to the vehicle, but he knew there was nothing in the documentation to suggest that, because he’d already looked through it back in the Campanile. Maybe it wasn’t something that the company advertised. Or maybe it was enemy action. Before he moved the vehicle, it was worth checking it out.

  The other function of the tracker app was a search or location facility. Richter tapped the screen to select the highlighted tracker, and the screen immediately changed to a much more detailed meter display. He walked around the car pointing the top of the mobile at the vehicle. The signal strength was much greater at the front of the Peugeot, which was predictable, as the engine bay was often the obvious place to secure such a device.

  He used the remote to open the doors, reached inside and unlocked the bonnet, then lifted it so that he could see into the engine bay. Rather than use the torch on his mobile, he just watched the meter display as he moved the phone around. When the signal strength peaked on the chassis near the left-hand side of the engine bay, he knew he’d located it, and only then did he switch on the torch.

  Clamped onto the chassis, obviously by internal magnets, and barely visible – like every other modern car, the Peugeot’s engine bay was absolutely filled up by the engine and the ancillary components – he saw a small plastic box, and he reached down and pulled it off the metal.

  ‘Interesting,’ he murmured, put the box on the floor in front of the passenger seat, closed the bonnet and drove the car out of the parking garage and up onto the street, leaving it in a spot where it couldn’t be boxed in by other vehicles. Then he picked up the tracker and walked along the road, glancing inside the parked cars as he passed. Then he crossed over and did the same thing on the opposite side of the road.

  He stopped where a small white van was parked after glancing briefly through its windscreen. Then he bent down as if tying a shoelace and, with a single deft movement, slid his hand under the chassis of the van and allowed the tracker’s magnets to clamp onto the steel and hold it in position.

  Five seconds later, he stood up unhurriedly and walked back into the hotel.

  ‘You took your time,’ Masters said, pointing at the cup of lukewarm coffee in front of Richter’s seat. ‘Was there a problem?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Richter replied, and explained what he’d found on the Peugeot.

  ‘You’re sure it wasn’t Hertz or Avis or whoever you got the car from who installed it?’ Moore asked. ‘Just so they could keep an eye on where the vehicle was?’

  ‘Definitely not. If they’d fitted a tracker it would have been hidden well out of sight and hardwired in somewhere with a permanent feed from the car’s battery. It wouldn’t be a temporary tracker with an internal battery and a couple of magnetic clamps.’

  ‘So, who was it?’ Masters asked. ‘And do we have a problem?’

  ‘It had to be the bloody French,’ Richter replied, ‘because the only times we’ve stopped since leaving Toulouse on the drive down here have been for fuel, food and drink and bogs. I can’t think of any reason why some guy in a truck stop or motorway service area would want to stick a tracker on a hired Peugeot. So that means it had to have been done the night we spent in that hotel in Toulouse.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Masters said, ‘but it’s not exactly an answer, is it? You’re right that it was probably done in France by a Frenchman, but that’s a hell of a wide field. Any idea which particular Frenchman it was? And why he did it?’

  Richter had been pondering that question ever since he’d pulled the tracker off the chassis of the Peugeot, and the best answer he had come up with didn’t make that much sense.

  ‘The only thing I can think of,’ he said, ‘is that I’m travelling on a diplomatic passport – that’s how I got my weapon and ammunition onto the aircraft without the security staff at Heathrow having the vapours or throwing a fit – so the French couldn’t legally touch me or question me. But they probably don’t get that many diplomats turning up in Toulouse.’

  ‘Could I just say,’ Masters interrupted, ‘that you don’t look anything like any diplomat I’ve ever seen. You look mean and kind of dangerous, and you’re far too scruffy.’

  Richter took that as a compliment.

  ‘Thanks. My best guess is that they identified the vehicle from the car hire company records, found it in the car park of the Campanile and stuck a tracker on it just so they could see where I was going. As for who, or rather which, bits of the French security apparatus did the deed, I doubt if it was the gendarmes, because it’s really not their scene, so it was probably the DGSI, the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure.’

  ‘Counter-espionage and counter-terrorism, right?’ Moore asked. ‘The spy-catchers and terrorist hunters of France. It’s not good that you’re on their radar.’

  ‘Well, I’m probably not on it any more because we’ve crossed the border into Spain, so the Frogs have probably mentally washed their hands of me.’

  ‘Where’s the tracker now?’

  Richter glanced over to his right and then pointed out of the window.

  ‘Right now it’s heading west along the street outside.’

  ‘That small white truck?’ Masters asked, looking round.

  Richter nodded.

  ‘I checked most of the cars in the street, but when I looked through the windscreen of the van I saw the keys were still in the ignition, so I guessed it would be on the move fairly quickly, either being driven away by the owner or by some local passing tea leaf who spotted the same thing I did.’

  ‘Tea leaf means a thief, right?’ Moore asked.

  ‘Well done.’ Richter applauded silently.

  ‘Think I’m getting the hang of this sort of stuff now.’

  Chapter 36

  Cambrils, Spain

  Wednesday

  While Richter and the two CIA agents were perusing the dinner menus in the Tryp Port Cambrils hotel dining room, three other men drove towards the seaside town. They’d left the N-340/A-7 autopista at the Quatre Carreteres junction and taken the C-14 Carretera de Salou a Reus down to Salou before turning west to follow the coast and enter Cambrils from the east. They had been told that their target was hiding somewhere in the urban area and wanted to see as much of the town as possible to allow them to get their bearings. Knowing the layout of your environment, of the territory and the terrain, is essential in any kind of hunt.

  They had left London the previous morning, crossing the Channel on a ferry to Calais, and had then stayed on the French autoroute system as far as the outskirts of Paris, a reasonably central location for getting elsewhere in Western Europe by road, then pulled into a service area to wait for further instructions. Or, to be absolutely accurate, to be given a destination, because their instructions were already clear and simple. As soon as
they’d stopped, they’d filled the car’s fuel tank, checked the tyre treads and pressures and the engine oil level, and everything else they could think of. Then they’d bought a selection of canned soft drinks, packets of sandwiches and biscuits for the forthcoming journey.

  Once the message had come through, they’d programmed the satnav, got back on the autoroute and headed south, keeping the car’s speed about five kilometres an hour below the legal limit, and sticking religiously to any and all lower speed restrictions due to roadworks and the like, because the one thing they couldn’t afford to do was get stopped by a car full of gendarmes.

  They stayed on the autoroutes all the way down to the Spanish border, stopping only to refuel, change drivers, buy more food and drink and make use of the lavatories in the service areas. They hadn’t even noticed when they left France and entered Spain, though the satnav on the dashboard had shown when they crossed the border.

  Flying to Spain would have been a lot faster and a lot more comfortable for the three of them but they had had no choice in the matter because of what they were carrying. In the boot of the car underneath the carpet was a space-saver spare wheel rather than the full-size wheel that would normally be kept there. Lifting out the wheel would reveal a metal surface that appeared to be the steel floor of the boot, but it was actually nothing of the sort.

  On the one side of the metal was a small hole, and in one of the door pockets in the car was a small eyebolt, the thread of which precisely matched that on the interior of that hole. Screwing the eye-bolt into the hole and pulling upwards revealed a hidden compartment in which were three nine-millimetre Browning Hi-Power semi­automatic pistols, chosen because they were solid, dependable and reliable, each with a fully-loaded magazine inserted and with three spare fully-loaded magazines, one for each pistol. The metal compartment was lined in foam rubber to avoid the weapons rattling and lying on top of the pistols was a thin sheet of foam rubber. On top of the sheet was a Škorpion sub­machine gun, also in nine millimetre and also with three fully-charged magazines. All the weapons had been sanitised, their serial numbers removed, and none had ever been used in any previous operations, ensuring that even if the weapons themselves or any cartridges fired by them were recovered by the authorities, there would be no link back to the Syrians.