Bioweapon

by James Barrington

  ‘You’re not a bloody real estate agent, Richter,’ Simpson snapped, ‘so just shut up and listen while I’m talking.’

  Richter glanced at the two Americans and made a kind of ‘what can I say’ gesture. They both grinned at him.

  ‘Wilmot’s wife was expecting him back in time for dinner at about seven, and he usually got home between about six and half past, obviously depending upon what time he left the college and which train he caught. He’d actually called her that afternoon at about half past four to say he would be home at the usual time. When he didn’t turn up, she rang his mobile but got no reply, then got in her car and drove from their house to the station along the route that he always took when he walked home. There was no sign of him. By about nine o’clock she was getting really worried and called the Woodentops. I’ll do the translation, Richter, to save you the bother. I meant she called the police, who as usual gave her all assistance short of actual help.’

  Richter covered the microphone of his mobile and spoke quietly to the two Americans.

  ‘My boss thinks the British police are a waste of space,’ he explained.

  ‘In this case,’ Simpson continued, ‘it turned out that Wilmot wasn’t missing. He was there all the time, just not actually visible and certainly not in a state fit for public consumption.’

  ‘He was dead?’ Masters asked.

  ‘Well done. Give that man a prize. Of course he was dead. A middle-aged man and his wife were out walking their black Labrador along the edge of Epping Forest later that evening, probably walking very slowly because all three of them – the husband, the wife and the dog – could all stand to lose a few pounds, according to the reporting officer. They weren’t far off the road and when they reached one of the pull-offs the dog started barking and dragged them over to a patch of undergrowth. They followed. The wife looked at what the dog had found, let out a scream and launched her dinner into the bushes, and the husband did the same thing a few seconds later but without the sound effects. When he’d wiped his mouth on his handkerchief he pulled out his phone and dialled triple nine. Twenty minutes later, the usual circus had turned up to investigate the crime scene, blue and white tape and flashing lights everywhere.’

  ‘Knife or gun?’ Richter asked.

  ‘If Wilmot had had any choice in the matter, my guess is he’d have chosen a gun because it would have been faster and a lot less painful if he’d been shot. As it was, somebody used a knife on him, and they didn’t kill him quickly. According to the initial report, Wilmot must have been immobilised, so there were probably at least two other people at the scene, or one really big and strong guy to hold him in position, as well as the man with the knife. The autopsy was a rush job, and there was no doubt about the cause of death, but the pathologist also reported heavy bruising on both arms, consistent with him being held by, most probably, two people, and the marks indicate hands rather than ropes or any other kind of binding. There was also severe bruising on the left-hand side of his left knee, consistent with a heavy kick. He probably wouldn’t have been able to walk as a result of that blow. Whoever killed him stabbed him in the stomach, and then the murderer continued the cutting all the way up to his rib cage, just to prolong the agony. That wouldn’t have killed him, but the knifeman then slid the blade between his ribs and straight into his heart, and that finished him off.’

  ‘That cutting sounds almost like the way you’d dress a deer,’ Moore suggested.

  ‘Clearly the verb “to dress” has a different meaning in the colonies,’ Simpson said. ‘Or I hope it does.’

  ‘I guess so. I mean that when a hunter’s killed a deer he’ll use a knife to open up the gut and take out the intestines and stuff, to just leave the meat. They usually haul the animal up onto a kind of frame to do it.’

  ‘Right,’ Simpson grunted. ‘With Wilmot it’s still early days, but it looks like a deliberate killing rather than a mugging that went wrong, although his wallet was found near his body, missing whatever cash he had and all his credit cards, and there was no sign of his mobile phone either. Muggers might well threaten with a knife, and even stab a victim if they don’t get what they want when they want it, but I’ve never heard of a case where muggers plural – because as I said there must have been at least two and most probably three people involved – would kill a victim the way this guy died. This smacks to me of a revenge or punishment killing. And there’s something else that doesn’t work if you do subscribe to the rabid mugger scenario.’

  ‘Where the body was found,’ Richter supplied immediately.

  ‘Exactly. Wilmot was found well outside Epping in the outskirts of the forest, and that means he must have gone there in some kind of a vehicle. So what the Woodentops are working on at the moment is the theory that he was forced into a car or a van after he left the station in Epping and was taken into the forest to be killed. They’ve got some CCTV confirmation that supports the idea, but only indirectly. There are a couple of cameras at the station that showed Wilmot getting off the train by himself – or at least he wasn’t obviously accompanied by anybody else – and walking out of the station, apparently heading home, but there’s no CCTV footage that shows what happened after that. So it’ll be a matter of looking at every camera in the area and trying to identify whatever vehicle was used to take him out to where he was killed.’

  ‘I suppose it’s just possible he’d arranged to meet somebody at that location and took a cab out there,’ Richter suggested.

  ‘It’s possible, but unlikely. If that had been his plan, he’d probably have told his wife that he’d be a bit late getting back home. There’s a camera covering the road outside the station as well, and that shows Wilmot walking out of the building and heading across the road, towards his home, and to do that he had to walk right by the taxi rank. There’s nothing on the later footage that shows him walking back and getting into a cab.’

  ‘Okay,’ Richter said. ‘That analysis sounds right, but the killing is obviously a police matter and nothing to do with us. Or am I missing something?’

  ‘No, that’s it as far as Wilmot is concerned, but my worry is that British scientists seem to have a really short shelf life at the moment. Vernon’s gone walkabout for reasons unknown, Wilmot walked into the sharp end of a knife and what you don’t know is that another scientist, a man named Hubert Jefferies who was working at Cambridge University, was killed in a hit-and-run accident a few weeks ago. And when I say hit-and-run, what I mean is that that’s what it looked like but there were some things that suggest it was a lot more like a deliberate killing that was disguised as a road accident. I can email you an abstract of the police report if you want to see it.’

  ‘Yes, please. I’d like to read it. But are you sure you’re not adding up two and two to make five here? These all could be completely unrelated incidents and you only picked up on them because they involve scientists, nothing more than that.’

  ‘They could, Richter, yes. After all, it’s a fact that all three of these scientists were working in very different jobs at different scientific laboratories and centres. As far as I’m aware, and this is obviously something that I will be checking, they didn’t know each other and have not been in contact with each other, but despite that there is a kind of link.’

  ‘There is? What is it?’

  ‘Charles Vernon worked at Porton Down until he decided to fly cattle class to Toulouse and offer to make chemical nasties for anyone with deep enough pockets, and the other two – Wilmot and Jefferies – both worked at the same place earlier in their careers.’

  Richter hadn’t expected that and said so.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ he replied, ‘but it still might not be significant. I have no clue about the way the scientific establishment works, but maybe if all three of these scientists were biochemists, Porton Down might be one of those places that they have to work at just to tick the right boxes on their CVs. I mean, every pilot I met when I was in the navy had done a tour of duty at Yeovilt
on because that station had the biggest variety of aircraft types and so everyone kind of gravitated there at least once while they were wearing a dark blue suit. Maybe Porton Down is something like that.’

  ‘I’ve got somebody looking into that right now, because the same thought occurred to me. Anyway, that’s just a heads-up for you, and I’ll get someone to email you the police report on the Jefferies accident. But don’t sit around reading it. I want all three of you out on the streets tracking down Vernon and sorting him out.’

  ‘That’s what we’re here for,’ Richter said, ended the call and slid the phone back into his pocket.

  ‘Your boss – Simpson – is right,’ Masters said.

  ‘He usually is,’ Richter agreed. ‘And about almost everything.’

  ‘What I meant is that we definitely aren’t going to find Charles Vernon if we just sit around here and drink coffee all evening. We do need to get out and about, so what’s the plan?’

  ‘My section in London will contact me the moment they see Vernon going online, and hopefully they’ll be able to provide a half-way accurate location. Until that happens, it would make sense for us to take a walk around the town just so we know where the cybercafes are located.’

  Richter took a sheet of paper out of his inside pocket and unfolded it on the table in front of him. As well as printing a list of all the sub four-star hotels in Cambrils, Richard Moore had also printed a list of the cybercafes, one copy for each of them.

  ‘There are only six of them,’ he said, glancing at his watch, ‘so let’s do two each and then meet up again here once we’ve finished. Vernon probably won’t be going online for at least another couple of hours, so we’ve easily got time to do this and then get ready to try to intercept him. You’ve both got copies of Vernon’s official photograph, so just imagine him without the beard, maybe with a wig and wearing different clothes, and keep your eyes open for anyone who fits that bill.’

  ‘We’re probably wasting our time,’ Masters said. ‘If this guy knows the opposition are prowling around the town looking for him, most likely he’ll stay tucked up safely in the hotel where he’s gone to ground and only venture out when he needs to go online.’

  Richter nodded.

  ‘You’re probably right, but at least doing this we’ll work out the lie of the land so when he does surface we’ll stand a better chance of grabbing him.’

  * * *

  The three men were making their way back towards the hotel independently when Richter’s mobile rang. He answered immediately.

  ‘Richter.’

  ‘More news just in,’ Simpson said, ‘and you’re not going to like it.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The Woodentops seem to have been working a lot more efficiently than usual on this one. Once they found Wilmot’s body and identified him – his driving licence was still in his wallet beside his corpse – they went to visit his home to tell his wife what had happened and also to have a snoop around, just in case. The usual statistics: most wives are killed by their husbands and vice versa. Using a knife isn’t the usual way that most women would decide to end their marriage, but it was just within the realms of possibility that if Mrs Wilmot was wildly unhappy with her husband she might have hired a hit team to take him out. Though I agree that filing for a divorce would be much easier, much safer, and just as effective.

  ‘But Mrs Wilmot appeared to be completely shattered by the news, and apart from the twenty minutes or so when she was driving from their home to the station and back again, which was after the time of Wilmot’s death, her movements were accounted for by their two teenaged children and by a neighbour who’d dropped in for a coffee and had been invited to stay for dinner. The plods organised a family liaison officer because of what had happened, and then asked if they could look around the house and in particular any room used by Martin Wilmot as a study.

  ‘It turned out that he had a kind of box-room on the top floor with a desktop computer in it, which was where he used to work if he needed to, or just to cruise the web. They made arrangements to remove the computer for analysis, and the constable who was in the study decided to unplug everything ready for it to be taken away. When he lifted the system unit off the desk, he found a sealed envelope underneath it. On the envelope somebody had written “To be opened only in the event of my death.”

  ‘The plods assumed, obviously, that it was written by Martin Wilmot because it was in his office. And they guessed it might be nothing more than a copy of the man’s will or perhaps something to do with his wishes for burial. Or something of that sort. The other possibility, bearing in mind what had happened to him, was that Wilmot might have exhibited a startlingly high nasal penetration factor with somebody from the wrong side of the tracks who might have decided that they would prefer it if Wilmot suddenly stopped breathing in as painful a fashion as they could manage. The kind of people you tend to associate with, Richter.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The plods showed it to Mrs Wilmot and asked if it could be opened just in case the contents helped explain what had happened to her husband. She agreed, and a scan of what it contained will arrive in your email account any minute now.’

  ‘Give me the short version,’ Richter said.

  ‘The short version is that we have a fucking big problem.’

  Chapter 38

  Cambrils, Spain

  Wednesday

  ‘Have you read it?’ Simpson demanded, about five minutes later when Richter again answered his mobile.

  ‘Yes,’ Richter replied shortly, sitting down in the lounge of the hotel and glancing towards the main door in case either of the two American agents was on his way back, ‘and it seems bloody unlikely to me.’

  ‘As far as I know you’re not a biologist or a geneticist, so your opinion is uninformed.’

  ‘Agreed, but I really don’t understand how they could be so specific with the targeting. Or the dissemination. The rest of it pretty much makes sense, repellent though the idea is.’

  ‘But if what Wilmot is claiming is true, and this isn’t new research. The concept is nearly two decades old, and the original project, this TRAIT thing, did work. The mechanism, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that,’ Richter admitted, ‘but from what Wilmot said the original infective mechanism was highly specific and incredibly limited. I mean, you can’t get much more limited than infection on a direct, one-to-one basis. I fully accept that this isn’t something I know too much about, but I can’t see how they could administer the stuff in the kind of quantities they’d need to make it work, to make it a viable threat.’

  ‘I don’t think, if Wilmot is right, that it’s intended to be a threat. What he says is that the substance is virtually ready to be deployed. What he’s talking about is a pre-emptive attack that will be, by definition, completely undetectable by every modern intercept method and technique that we know about, and that will manifest itself not immediately but within days or weeks or months, or maybe even years, depending on how it’s been programmed. This is a bioweapon with a really long lead time that will be impossible to counter and that we won’t even know has been deployed until it’s far too late to do anything about it.

  ‘And even with a positive identification of the country that had deployed the bioweapon, that wouldn’t be enough to justify responding. The lead time is so long that any response would be considered a first strike, and it just wouldn’t happen because of the inevitable consequences. The death toll would be potentially catastrophic and as you now know that wouldn’t be the worst of it. The real kicker will be the secondary effects. And if Wilmot’s note is correct, about the only person left who actually understands TRAIT and how it works, apart from the bad guys, obviously, is Vernon, so the priority for finding him – and now we definitely need him alive – just got kicked a hell of a long way further up the list.’

  ‘The CIA guys aren’t here right now,’ Richter said, ‘but I presume you want me to brief them about this?’
>
  ‘You’re damn right I do, bearing in mind that the intended target of this foul scheme is America.’

  Moore and Masters walked into the hotel together about five minutes after Richter had finished his conversation and strode over to where he was sitting.

  ‘You find anything?’ Masters asked.

  ‘If you mean did I see Vernon, the answer’s no, but I did eyeball the two cybercafes. But I’ve just been talking to Simpson, and we have a real problem that you need to know about, and so does Langley.’

  Richter quickly reran his conversation with Simpson, and then showed the two Americans the scan of the note Wilmot had left.

  ‘Is this for real?’ Masters asked.

  ‘Simpson seems to think so. I mean, there are a whole bunch of obvious technical problems to overcome, but the bottom line is that the original concept was proved to be working about twenty years ago. Take that working concept and give it five more years of further intense development, which is what Wilmot claims has happened, and I guess you could have a viable bioweapon of this sort.’

  ‘Is your boss expecting us to talk to Langley?’

  ‘He’s taking care of that, and he’ll copy everything he’s got to the Company, so you may get fresh marching orders any time now if they decide they want you to do something different somewhere else.’

  ‘So we just keep looking for Vernon, right?’

  ‘Got it. That’s my job until somebody tells me otherwise, and that’s why you’re here as well.’

  The call Richter had been expecting occurred just over twenty minutes later.

  ‘He’s online,’ Baker said, ‘and we’re just interpreting the location right now for the IP address, doing the audit and peeling back the layers. I’ll call you as soon as we have it.’

  ‘We’re mobile,’ Richter said, gesturing to Moore and Masters, who still looked a bit shell-shocked. He stood up, the two Americans doing the same. ‘We’ll take the car.’