That was why the three men had been forced into travelling by road. The almost complete lack of border security at Dover meant that there was virtually no chance of the vehicle being searched and the weapons and ammunition discovered. And before they returned to Britain, they would reduce the Brownings and the Škorpion to their component parts and discard them and the remaining ammunition in widely-separated locations.
And they would be able to do that just as soon as they had found and killed Professor Charles Vernon.
All three men had mobile phones which they kept charged using the cigarette lighter and twelve-volt power outlets in the car and had remained in frequent contact with their operational command – in the person of the man Martin Wilmot had known only as ‘Michael’ – on the journey. They knew that there was a team in London monitoring the radical Islamic website for any further postings from Vernon, but through a contact of a contact of an asset they had one additional ace to play.
Two years earlier a married junior officer of the DGSI had been sexually compromised by an extraordinarily beautiful woman he had met in a bar in Paris who had turned out around five hours later to be an extraordinarily beautiful man, and who had an album of high quality full-colour digital photographs and a full length DVD of their encounter to prove it. Facing both certain career suicide and the abrupt end of his marriage, the man had agreed to ‘help out’ the team that had set him up. At least two of the Middle Eastern intelligence services had been playing him ever since.
The DGSI officer had been tasked with providing any information he could about British intelligence activity in the Toulouse area, the last location known to have been visited by Charles Vernon, that information having been derived from another low-level intelligence source, this one in the Security Service at Millbank. The arrival in Toulouse of an alleged British diplomat named Paul Beatty, for no known diplomatic function or purpose, raised an obvious red flag with the DGSI, which the asset had duly passed on. The positioning of the tracking device on his hired vehicle had been little more than a formality, but when the tracker showed Beatty heading for Spain, at about the same time as the software intercepts being run in London revealed that Vernon was somewhere near Cambrils, the conclusion was fairly obvious.
The Syrian team had been given a single primary objective: they were to find and kill Charles Vernon. But if the diplomat Beatty got in the way, they could kill him too. And they didn’t have to just rely upon the data hauled up from the Dark Web to find the missing scientist. The only possible reason for Beatty being in Spain was because he, too, was looking for Vernon, so if the Syrians simply followed the tracker’s signal, with any luck that should take them to the location of the scientist and allow them to complete their mission.
As soon as they turned off the autovia, the driver began looking for somewhere to park the car out of sight for a few minutes, and quickly found a patch of unmade ground beside the road that was largely shielded by bushes and shrubs. It wasn’t a layby, but it was the next best thing.
‘Wait,’ the driver – Bjasar – said, checking his mirrors to ensure nobody was coming towards them from behind. ‘All clear.’
The three men climbed out of the car, a mid-range Vauxhall saloon, and clustered around the rear of the vehicle, leaving open the rear door that faced away from the road. Bjasar opened the boot and they lifted out their three overnight bags and an empty black rucksack. They were travelling light, with only the bare minimum of clothing and toiletries.
Once again they checked the road, and then while the other two men kept watch Bjasar lifted the carpet out of the boot and followed it with the space-saver spare wheel.
‘Still clear?’ he asked.
‘Clear,’ the other two replied, virtually simultaneously.
Bjasar used the eyebolt to lift the metal cover, then picked up the empty rucksack and, moving swiftly and economically, he slid the Škorpion, the three Brownings and the spare magazines, inside it. Then he took a couple of steps around the car to the open side door and placed the rucksack on the middle of the back seat. Then he stepped back to the boot, replaced the sheet of metal, the spare wheel and the carpet, and put their overnight bags back inside.
‘It’s done,’ he said briefly. ‘Get back in the car.’
In the vehicle, each man took a Browning and gave it a basic check to ensure nothing had been damaged on the pistols during the journey: they had stripped, cleaned, oiled and test fired all the weapons back in London before they’d set off. Then each man chambered a round, set the safety catch and concealed the pistol in his clothing. All three men were wearing western garb, the better to bend in. With their brown complexions, black hair and dark brown eyes all three of them could pass for locals in Spain. Or at least they could until they opened their mouths, because none spoke more than a few words of Spanish. Bjasar checked, loaded and cocked the Škorpion and passed it to Marfan, the man sitting in the front passenger seat.
‘So what now?’ Asaad asked from the back seat.
‘We’re only a few miles from Cambrils,’ Bjasar said, starting the car and pulling out onto the road. ‘If Vernon follows the pattern he’s established so far, he won’t be logging onto the Internet until later this evening, so there’s nothing we can do about him at the moment. But we can still follow the tracker, just in case this man Beatty has already discovered where Vernon has been hiding. Where is it now?’
Asaad pressed a button to switch on the Android tablet they’d been using, swept his finger up the screen to activate it and then navigated to the correct app. It took a few seconds for the tablet to log onto the system and then to locate the geographical position of the tracker.
‘It’s still in Cambrils, but it seems to be moving,’ Asaad reported, increasing the scale of the displayed map using his thumb and forefinger.
‘Well, is it moving or isn’t it? It has to be one or the other. And where is it, exactly?’
‘Yes, it’s mobile,’ Asaad replied. ‘It’s at the other end of the town and moving slowly through the streets towards the seafront.’
‘That’s to the west of us,’ Bjasar said, expanding the scale on the satnav in front of him. ‘Tell me which direction he turns when he gets to the main road along the seafront.’
‘It’s stopped,’ Asaad said, ‘and it’s still in the back streets. I’ll let you know as soon as I can tell which way the tracker’s going.’
Bjasar was referring to the satnav as he drove, making sure that they were still heading towards the tracker’s now stationary position. There had been no word from London about the precise location Vernon had used the last time he’d gone online, so heading for the vehicle the alleged diplomat Beatty was known to be using appeared to be the only viable course of action they could follow at that moment.
Maybe this man had already located Vernon and was intending to drive him to the airport at Tarragona or Barcelona to get him back to Britain. Though if that were the case, the progress the vehicle was making was somewhat unexpected. Surely if Vernon was already inside it, then they would be heading directly towards whichever airport they had chosen, probably Tarragona, not stopping and starting in the back streets of Cambrils.
Bjasar gave a mental shrug and carried on heading in the same direction.
‘Keep alert,’ he instructed. ‘Make sure your weapons are out of sight, especially the Škorpion, and watch out carefully for the Spanish police, the Guardia Civil. We must do nothing to draw attention to ourselves until the job is done.’
‘The tracker’s moving again,’ Asaad exclaimed. ‘Still going quite slowly but heading towards the seafront. Perhaps the car is stuck in traffic.’
For about half a minute, none of them spoke. Asaad was bent over the tablet computer, all of his attention directed at the single slowly pulsing symbol that indicated the location of the tracker they were following. He muttered something under his breath, then looked up briefly.
‘He’s still going quite slowly,’ he said, ‘but he turned left
at the junction, which means he’s heading towards us.’
‘Excellent,’ Bjasar said. ‘We might be able to finish this today.’
‘He’s increasing speed now, still following the road beside the sea.’
Bjasar was making mental calculations, trying to come up with a plan on the fly. He was switching his attention between the road ahead, the speedometer – because he didn’t want to attract attention by going too fast – and the screen of the satnav. He pressed the ‘plus’ symbol on the screen of the device to expand the scale so that he could see most of the roads between his present location and the target vehicle. Unfortunately, like all satnavs, it was programmed to display road junctions, road signs, street names and the like, and conveyed little information to him about the kind of terrain he would be driving through. In particular, what he was looking for was a quiet stretch of road where they could ambush the vehicle, and for that the device was of almost no use.
He would have to just seize the opportunity if it presented itself.
‘You can see our location on that tablet?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course,’ Asaad replied.
‘Good. Let me know when he’s about two miles away from us, assuming he stays on this road. If he turns off, tell me immediately.’
But the vehicle fitted with the tracker didn’t turn off, just continued heading directly towards the Vauxhall, the two vehicles closing at a combined speed of about sixty miles an hour.
‘That’s about two miles now,’ Asaad reported, using his fingers as a rudimentary measuring stick. ‘And he’s still on the same road, the road that we’re on right now,’ he added, correctly anticipating Bjasar’s next question.
‘Right, this will have to do.’
Bjasar looked ahead but saw no traffic and checked his rear-view mirrors as well. Without signalling, because he knew that the flashing yellow lights of the indicators would be visible for a considerable distance in the fading light of early evening, he swung the Vauxhall across the road in a U-turn and started driving very slowly back the way that they had come.
‘That will have to do,’ he said, repeating himself, and steered the car into an opening that appeared to lead into a field on the right-hand side of the road. He checked that all the lights on the vehicle were extinguished, and then all three of them climbed out.
‘Keep watching the tracker,’ he ordered Asaad. ‘It’s essential that we get the right vehicle. According to the source our people tapped, it’s a French car, a Peugeot.’
He looked up and down the road. He would have preferred a bend, but this stretch was almost arrow-straight so they would have to make the best of it.
‘Marfan, take the Škorpion and wait with it up there, behind that tree.’ He pointed to the east where the greyish trunk of a substantial tree was located a few feet off the edge of the carriageway and about fifty yards away. ‘We’ll identify the vehicle as it comes past. If you hear us open fire at it, step out with the submachine gun and stop it. Aim low for the tyres and as the weapon fires the muzzle will lift. That will send bullets into the engine compartment and through the windscreen. If you do not hear us shoot, do not fire. Is that clearly understood?’
Marfan nodded, reached into the back seat of the car to pick up the Škorpion and jogged away up the road.
‘Range?’ Bjasar demanded.
‘Less than a mile now.’
‘When the range is down to a quarter of a mile, put the tablet back in the car and take out your pistol. We are looking for a French car, but we must be sure that there are two people inside it. If there is only one man, then it will mean that this Beatty has not yet made contact with Vernon, and in that case we must not engage him.’
Ten seconds later, Asaad reached through the open rear window of the Vauxhall, dropped the tablet on the back seat and took out his Browning.
‘A quarter of a mile.’
Both men moved around to the front of the Vauxhall saloon, where they would be able to step out into the road and have a clear view of – and a clear shot at – the approaching car. They stared out to the west, where a white-painted vehicle was now clearly visible and heading directly towards them.
‘That isn’t right,’ Asaad said urgently. ‘According to the information we were given, the Peugeot is grey, not white.’
‘We wait,’ Bjasar ordered. ‘Check the plates as it approaches.’
‘We don’t know the number.’
‘Not the number. The nationality. French number plates look different to Spanish ones.’
The vehicle was then less than a hundred yards away, and now probably travelling at around forty miles an hour, covering the intervening distance very quickly.
At fifty yards Bjasar realised that Asaad was correct. What they were looking at was small white van displaying Spanish number plates. He didn’t know what make it was, but he was certain it wasn’t a Peugeot. And there was only a single person in the vehicle, a heavily-built and unshaven man sitting behind the wheel, a cigarette burning in one corner of his mouth.
‘Don’t shoot,’ Bjasar ordered, lowering his own weapon.
Asaad did the same, and then they both stood in silence, their pistols concealed behind them, and watched the van approach the tree where Marfan was waiting with the Škorpion submachine gun. But obviously he’d got the message as well and didn’t react as the van drove past his hiding place.
The van driver would never know how lucky he’d been.
A couple of minutes later, the three of them assembled beside the car.
‘So now what do we do?’ Marfan asked.
‘This changes nothing,’ Bjasar said. ‘Following the tracker to find this man Beatty was always a second option. We are much more likely to be told Vernon’s location through the intercept software on the Internet. So we proceed as planned. We’ll find somewhere cheap to stay and wait for the call from London. Then we’ll hit Vernon and be on our way out of here.’
As he drove away, following both the road signs and the satnav’s instructions, Bjasar mulled over what had just happened, and very quickly came to two conclusions.
First, Michael had clearly been right to choose him as the leader of the three-man assassination team, because neither of the other two men had apparently possessed the wit or the brains to ask one perfectly obvious and inevitable question: why was the tracker the DGSI had planted on the Peugeot hire car now fitted somewhere on a small and scruffy white Spanish van being driven by somebody who looked like a workman or a market trader?
And as the obvious corollary to that, who was Beatty? No diplomat would ever be aware that his vehicle even had a tracker fitted unless somebody told him. But the Englishman had not only detected the tracker but had clearly also found it on his hire car, removed it and attached it to another vehicle entirely. If Bjasar had had any doubts before, that action had removed them completely. Whoever Beatty was, he certainly wasn’t a diplomat, but somebody much more dangerous.
The apparently simple act of finding one man and killing him, a task all three of them had performed countless times in the past, somewhere in the quiet seaside town of Cambrils might just turn out to be a whole lot more complicated than Bjasar had expected.
They would have to move with considerable care to complete their mission.
Chapter 37
Cambrils, Spain
Wednesday
The three men had found themselves a table in the corner of the dining room, ordered what they wanted and then bounced ideas back and forth about exactly how they were going to try to locate Charles Vernon. They’d finished their meals but were still sitting at the table when Richter’s phone rang.
‘Richter.’
‘Found him yet?’ Richard Simpson demanded.
‘Give me a chance. We’ve only been here a couple of hours. Have you got anything for me?’
‘At this moment, I don’t know,’ Simpson said. ‘But there has been an incident and I have a feeling in my water that it might be connected, if only
because it involves another scientist.’
‘Hang on,’ Richter said. ‘To save me explaining it here and missing something vital, let me put you on speakerphone now.’
‘Ah, your two tame Yanks are with you, are they?’
‘This is my boss, Richard Simpson,’ Richter explained, putting down his mobile face up in the middle of the table. ‘He’s not keen on Americans, but to be fair he’s not keen on anyone, so don’t take it personally.’
‘I like a man who’s all business,’ Moore said.
‘Flattery will get you nowhere with me,’ Simpson said, the waspish tone of his voice obvious even through the tiny speaker on the Blackview. ‘Bloody colonials.’
‘You’re lucky we’re here, helping to pull your nuts out of the fire again,’ Masters said. ‘We haven’t forgotten that this is your problem, not ours, so keep your crappy remarks to yourself.’
‘Who was that?’ Simpson demanded.
‘My name’s Masters, not that it’s any of your goddamn business.’
Simpson laughed.
‘Welcome aboard,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear Americans who are so bloody polite all the time. I think we’d get on. Now, listen up, all of you. We’ve lost another scientist, but this time permanently and at least we know where he is. A man named Martin Wilmot, who was working at the Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College here in London was reported missing by his wife on Tuesday evening. They live out at Epping—’
‘That’s a suburb of London,’ Richter explained, ‘a few miles out to the north-east of the city. Quite a pleasant place to live, I think.’
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