Bioweapon

by James Barrington

  Some of these were part of a blanket course on close and distant surveillance, the art of following somebody as a part of a team. This could either be carried out with the subject completely unaware that he was being followed because the surveillance team just wanted to find out where he was going and what he was doing. Or the team could make sure that the subject absolutely knew that he was under surveillance if they were trying to provoke him into some kind of a reaction.

  But the course he had probably enjoyed the most was the one covering defensive and offensive driving, not only because Richter enjoyed being behind the wheel of a car – or, even better, sitting on the seat of a powerful motorcycle – but he also had a real knack for it, an instinctive ability to know what the car was doing and how he could get the very best performance out of it. One of his instructors had commented that he could have been halfway decent racing driver if he had started earlier and chosen a different career path.

  Richter had spotted the dark blue saloon car in his mirrors the moment it had appeared behind him and had instinctively realised, because of the way it was being driven, that the occupants were probably up to no good. His instincts proved to be correct seconds later, when the driver of the other car swung out as if to overtake the Peugeot but was so close that Richter guessed he was actually going to try and attempt a PIT manoeuvre, to hit the offside of the target car with the front of the pursuing vehicle hard enough to spin it off the road.

  That would have been bad news for the three of them, so as the saloon – it looked like a mid-range Opel but to Richter’s eyes most Euroboxes were pretty much indistinguishable one from another so it could have been almost anything – started to steer around him, he dropped down two gears, hit the accelerator hard, then swung out towards the middle of the road and braked hard.

  ‘Brace yourselves,’ he ordered.

  A split second later, the front of the pursuing car hit the left-hand rear of the Peugeot, the force of the impact jerking all three men in their seats, but not triggering the airbags.

  His tactic was simple enough. The Peugeot had a decent turbo-charged diesel engine, which gave it good performance, but he guessed that the Opel probably had about the same power under the bonnet, so he couldn’t easily outrun the pursuing vehicle. So his next best option was to stop it and do his best to disable it. He was also aware that curved sections of bodywork, like the rear quarters of a car, are stronger than flatter steel panels, and that there are remarkably few vital components located at the rear of a modern car. Almost everything – the engine, the gearbox, cooling system, engine management system and all the rest – are under the bonnet, and by getting directly in front of the dark saloon, swerving and then braking he had ensured that the front centre of the Opel had borne the brunt of the impact. Specifically, that the other car’s radiator had borne the brunt of the impact.

  The saloon shuddered to a halt just behind them in an instant cloud of steam.

  ‘Use the Škorpion,’ Richter said, keeping the pressure on the brake pedal and sliding the car to a stop a few feet beyond the disabled Opel. ‘Vernon, stay right where you are. Just keep your head down.’

  Richter and Moore jumped out of the Peugeot, weapons extended in front of them, separating as they did so and watching the car behind them. The two front seat airbags had deployed with the frontal impact, and they could see two figures inside trying to wrestle their way around the fat white balloons that were effectively pinning them in their seats.

  There were another two men sitting in the rear seats of the car, and as Richter and Moore ran up to the stationery vehicle, the person sitting behind the driver pushed his door open and pointed a pistol towards the two approaching men. Moore instantly stopped and squeezed the trigger on the Škorpion, aiming the sub­machine gun directly at the open door. He fired a short burst, perhaps half a dozen rounds, that ripped through the thin metal of the car door.

  The result was immediate. The man holding the pistol dropped the weapon onto the road and thrust both his arms straight up into the air.

  Moore moved slightly to one side so that he could see the two men in the back seat more clearly and gestured with the muzzle of the sub­machine gun for them both to get out.

  At the same moment, Richter ran to the other side of the vehicle – it was an Opel, he noticed – and smashed the driver’s side window with the butt of the Glock. He seemed to be getting quite good at that. Then he stuck the business end of the pistol into the side of the driver’s head. The man immediately stopped moving and just sat there, as did his companion.

  Less than half a minute later, all four men from the saloon car were standing beside the vehicle, arms in the air and cowed by the silent but lethal threat of the Škorpion held in Richard Moore’s eminently capable grip.

  Richter made sure he kept out of Moore’s line of fire as he disarmed each man, and for good measure also removed their wallets and passports. When he’d finished, he’d acquired four more Glocks, each with a spare magazine, and four distinctive passports.

  ‘If we keep going like this,’ Moore said, ‘we can think real seriously about opening a gun shop.’

  ‘No argument here,’ Richter said, ‘but I’m just slightly surprised that we aren’t expanding our product range to include Makarovs or Stechkins. It seems our new boyfriends here are Russian, or at least that’s what the passports say they are.’

  ‘You’re English and I’m American. We had Russians at the hotel, Syrians on the streets, and now another bunch of Russians getting in our way. It’s looking like a regular international convention down here in Spain.’

  ‘What were your orders?’ Richter asked the driver in Russian.

  ‘Whoever you are,’ the driver of the car said, ‘you have no right to question us or detain us. We are each carrying a diplomatic passport and that is all you need to know.’

  And with that he shut up.

  ‘I don’t suppose it really matters,’ Richter said. ‘I was just interested, that’s all.’

  He raised his Glock and took careful aim, the four Russians watching him closely but not daring to move. Then he squeezed the trigger and the left-hand front tyre of the Opel blew with a satisfactory bang.

  ‘We’re out of here, Rich,’ Richter said. Then he holstered his pistol and bent down to pick up the other four weapons, the spare magazines and the passports.

  ‘We need our passports,’ the Russian driver said, as Richter started to walk away, his arms full.

  ‘If you’re really diplomats,’ he said, ‘you’ll have no trouble getting new ones issued. If you’re not, then you’ve got problems. But either way, they’re your problems, not mine.’

  At the Peugeot, he pulled open the rear door and looked inside, where Charles Vernon was sitting fairly comfortably and staring out of the rear window of the car. Richter dumped the weapons on the back seat beside the scientist, then picked up each of the Glocks in turn, dropped the magazine out of the butt of the pistol and worked the slide to clear the loaded round from the chamber. Then he put the pistols and the magazines in the foot well and tucked the Russian passports in his jacket pocket.

  ‘Don’t touch the weapons,’ he said to Vernon, then closed the door and took a step back to check on the damage to the rear of the Peugeot. The panels were dented, and the rear lights on that side had been smashed, but the fuel tank on the right-hand side rear of the car appeared to be still intact – or at least, there was no sign of diesel fuel under the car – and there didn’t appear to be any chassis distortion. The vehicle was bent and battered, but it still looked driveable.

  He glanced around.

  Moore had almost reached the car, his body twisted around so that the Škorpion was still pointing back down the street towards the four Russians and their disabled vehicle. He stood beside the open passenger door, still covering the Russians, and nodded at Richter.

  ‘Get in,’ he said, ‘and see if this heap of cheap French crap will start.’

  Richter started the engi
ne, and it ran just a smoothly as it had done before the impact, which didn’t surprise him. He checked that the brakes still worked and that he could engage the gears.

  ‘It’s okay for the moment,’ he said, ‘but we’ll need to find something else pretty soon. I don’t think this is going to hold together for too long.’

  The moment Moore sat down in the front passenger seat, Richter hit the accelerator pedal and the Peugeot spun the front wheels briefly, the tyres squealing, and then sped off down the street. As always, he was watching the mirrors carefully, and as soon as the Peugeot had started to move, one of the Russians ran back to the Opel saloon and opened the boot.

  Richter didn’t think he was going to check on the condition of the spare tyre or find out if the jack was working and realised that they should have checked the other vehicle before they drove away.

  ‘Vernon, get down,’ he said. ‘You too, Rich. I think they might have a rifle or something.’

  He’d intended to drive to the end of the road they were on, which the satnav showed ended up on the seafront, but that now seemed like it would be a really bad idea. Richter spotted a right turn, a fairly narrow street, and swung the car around the corner and into it, out of sight of the Russians. As he straightened up, they all heard an automatic weapon firing behind them, and saw the impacts of bullets on the side wall of the building on the left-hand side, flakes of brick or stone tumbling to the ground. But then they were out of immediate danger.

  ‘Sounded like an AK to me,’ Moore said, feeding nine-millimetre rounds into the Škorpion’s magazine to reload it. ‘We should have guessed they might have had something bigger than a handful of Glock peashooters. Still, they’re not going anywhere in a hurry now.’

  Richter nodded and took the next available turning on the left. Ahead of him he could see the seafront promenade, and at the end of the road he turned left to head east towards Tarragona, the gentle waves of the Mediterranean lapping on the beach to his right.

  ‘Keep your eyes open for TJ,’ Moore said. ‘He should be hanging about somewhere along this road.’

  He was.

  Less than half a minute after Richter had turned onto the promenade along the seafront, Moore pointed ahead through the windscreen at a single figure standing alone on the right-hand side of the road. Richter had been half expecting the American to be concealed outside one of the buildings on the town side, but then he realised that by standing out in the open Masters would be more easily able to see, and react to, any hostile activity, like a couple of angry Russians down a couple of tyres on their car and busy looking for someone to blame.

  As they got closer, Richter flicked the headlights a couple of times and indicated right. He stopped the car right beside the American, who opened the rear passenger door and looked inside to be confronted by Charles Vernon looking straight back at him.

  ‘Evening, Prof,’ Masters said. ‘You want to squeeze up a bit so I can get in?’

  Vernon nodded, but didn’t respond, just shuffled sideways across the rear seat to make room.

  ‘You’ll need to have the bags in the back with you, TJ,’ Moore said. ‘We had a kind of fender bender back in town, and that trunk lid is never going to open again unless some guy in a garage decides to fix it.’

  Masters took a couple of steps to the rear of the car, glanced at the damage and nodded. Then he lifted their three overnight bags onto the rear seat between himself and Vernon. As soon as he’d sat down and pulled his door closed, Richter accelerated away.

  ‘Because you’ve managed to fuck up the back of this car and dug the prof here out of whatever hole he was hiding in,’ Masters said, ‘I guess you encountered some more of the opposition. More Russians, right?’

  ‘You guessed right, TJ,’ Moore replied, ‘but it looks like there were two separate teams sent out by Moscow, because the group that we encountered was a long way from the hotel. Maybe one was a backup to the outfit we stopped outside the Tryp, or maybe we were looking at a kind of duplication of effort.’

  ‘You mean the SVR was running one group and the GU the other?’ Masters asked.

  ‘Maybe. No easy way of telling as we didn’t exactly have time for social chitchat with any of them. And it wasn’t just a bunch of Russians that we met.’ Moore lifted up the Škorpion sub­machine gun so that Masters could see it. ‘We also had a slight difference of opinion with three Syrians. Or at least, three men carrying Syrian passports. It’s been a real dis-United Nations evening.’

  ‘A Škorpion? That’s a bit antisocial, isn’t it? I presume they are no longer with us because you’ve got that?’

  ‘One of them is being interviewed by Allah right now,’ Richter said, ‘thanks to Rich here. He really saved my bacon back there.’ He paused for a brief instant, then chuckled. ‘Bearing in mind the religion of the people we’ve been dealing with, I guess I could have phrased that slightly better. Another one may still be in the land of the living, but he’ll be hurting because I gut-shot him, and the third one definitely has a really bad headache, if he’s still breathing.’

  Richter glanced back at Masters, then pointed over his shoulder at Charles Vernon.

  ‘The important thing is that we did manage to grab the prof. We also seem to have acquired quite an armoury. Rich here has three Brownings as well as the Škorpion, and the prof is pretty much knee­deep in Glocks and spare magazines.’

  Masters fished a small pen light out of his pocket and shone it down at the foot well in front of Vernon.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ he said, snapping off the light. ‘So that’s objective one we can tick off, I guess, but has anyone in this car worked out what the fuck we’re going to do next?’

  Chapter 41

  Costa Brava, Spain

  Wednesday

  A little over an hour later, the four men were sitting at a table in the cafeteria of an autovia service area, each of them with a cup of coffee and a somewhat stale-looking Spanish equivalent of a French pain au chocolat in front of him.

  Richter was probably nominally in charge, and he set the ball rolling.

  ‘Short term,’ he began, ‘we definitely need to keep moving. We left eight pissed-off Russians behind us in Cambrils, and what we did to their cars won’t hold them up very long. The Syrians are probably out of the running, but my guess is they were just hired for the job, which means somebody else was pulling their strings, so there may well be another hit team prowling around here trying to pick up our trail. I need to talk to my section about sorting out an aircraft, maybe a private jet or an RAF aircraft, to get us back to London so we can—’

  ‘Does anybody here have the slightest interest in what I have to say?’ Vernon interrupted, somewhat petulantly. ‘Or why I’m here? Or even why you’re here?’

  ‘We’re just trying to keep you safe, Professor,’ Richter said reassuringly. ‘That was what we were tasked with doing.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that,’ Vernon said, ‘but have none of you stopped to wonder why I did what I did?’

  ‘You said something about generating publicity,’ Moore said, ‘but I’ve got no idea why you thought you needed to do that.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Vernon snapped, as if he had just scored a point in a debate. ‘You have no idea. None of you have any idea what I was trying to achieve, or why. If you did know, then you would probably be doing everything very differently.’

  That silenced Richter and the two CIA officers for a few moments. Then Masters put down his coffee cup and nodded encouragingly.

  ‘Okay, Professor. I’ve known you the shortest time out of the three of us, so why don’t you just assume that I’m an idiot who knows nothing at all about anything and tell me what the hell is going on and what you would like us to do about it.’

  Vernon fixed Masters with a stare that at least suggested he was in agreement with the American’s assessment of his own level of intelligence.

  ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘I imagine you—’ he pointed his right forefinger directly
at Richter ‘—being English have signed the Official Secrets Act, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing the job you appear to have been given. But please tell me that you have done that, and what your security clearance level is.’

  ‘I think I’ve signed it four times now,’ Richter replied, ‘and in my present employment my clearance is CTS – Cosmic Top Secret.’

  ‘Good.’ Vernon swung his finger to point at each of the Americans in turn. ‘And you two?’

  ‘We’re subject to the DoD – Department of Defense – classification system in the States,’ Masters replied, ‘and Rich and I both rate Top Secret on that scale, which I guess is pretty much the same as Paul’s CTS, except his covers him for atomic stuff.’

  ‘That means your clearances are higher than mine,’ Vernon said, looking slightly irritated by the realisation. ‘But I suppose that could be a good thing.’

  Then he nodded, leaned forward and began to speak in a low, intense voice.

  ‘I’ve worked at the Dstl at Porton Down for several years, and I have a kind of roving brief. I am directed to do certain research as and when the situation warrants it, such as the recent poisoning attack in Salisbury using the Novichok nerve agent, but I am also able to pursue research of my own as long as it has some kind of relevance to the overall direction I have been given. I do not need to seek individual approval for this research unless I need help in carrying it out and have to ask one of my colleagues employed there or a scientist working at another establishment to assist me. That very rarely happens.’