Vernon paused again, and once more looked at the faces of the men around the table.
‘But what was not a success and was obviously an unintended consequence of the vector was a side-effect of its administration. Accurate records were kept during the field trial, as they always are, and they showed with a hundred per cent reliability that those same soldiers all developed testicular cancer within five years of the inoculation being given. I think it’s that, as much as anything else, which has frightened somebody who was involved with TRAIT.
‘And that is the real reason why the scientists involved with the project have been dropping like flies. It’s because somebody is out there making sure that they do.’
Chapter 43
Hammersmith, London
Thursday
‘This is political dynamite, Professor,’ Simpson said. ‘The British government – at least by extension because Dstl is a government agency – has been inoculating certain members of the Armed Forces with a substance that not only makes them sterile but also causes testicular cancer. It wouldn’t just be the Daily Mail and the rest of the gutter press that would jump all over this. There would be massive compensation claims by the surviving soldiers if the facts were publicly revealed, not to mention some very messy and expensive High Court prosecutions.’
‘There wouldn’t be that many claims,’ Vernon replied, ‘because most of the people who were inoculated are now dead from the cancer and have no immediate families who could make a claim. And, in my experience, major government cock-ups of this sort tend to get buried and forgotten as quickly as possible. That was another reason I wanted to achieve a certain degree of notoriety, so that while I might be a lone voice crying in the wilderness, I would at least have a voice that people would be prepared to listen to.’
‘I don’t disagree with any of that,’ Simpson said, ‘but right now it’s neither relevant nor important because we have a much bigger problem.’ He looked across the table at Vernon. ‘Are you – or to be absolutely accurate, were you – acquainted with a scientist named Martin Wilmot?’ he asked.
‘Not personally, no,’ Vernon responded, with a shake of his head, ‘but I know his name because of several scientific papers he’s authored. Why do you ask?’
‘Because he’s no longer walking amongst us,’ Simpson replied. ‘Somebody took a knife to him on the edge of Epping Forest, and very efficiently gutted him. We got involved because of a kind of post-mortem letter he left in his house. This claimed that Wilmot had been blackmailed for some unspecified infraction he committed five years ago and had been supplying classified scientific information to a man who called himself Michael ever since. He believed Michael was actually a Syrian but had no way of proving it. The implication is that Wilmot was murdered by or on behalf of this man Michael when his usefulness was at an end.
‘This is not an uncommon tale. There are dozens of similar stories about men in positions of power or authority who bizarrely appear to find it impossible to keep their trousers on when they’re in the company of attractive strangers, usually female strangers but occasionally male. We don’t know exactly what Wilmot did, but my guess is that his rampant penis led him into a compromising and possibly illegal situation that Michael then took full advantage of. This unit wouldn’t normally have any interest in discovering this man’s peccadilloes but it was the other stuff that Wilmot wrote in his note that definitely attracted our interest. And the interests of the CIA at Langley, almost every other federal agency in the United States, and various security and intelligence services on this side of the pond. And that, Professor, is where you come in, because the plot that this man Wilmot claims to have become aware of is firmly centred around TRAIT.’
Vernon looked surprised.
‘But I was nothing to do with that programme, as I’ve explained to you.’
‘I know that, but the problem is you’re quite right about the people who were involved in it. Dstl supplied us with the names of all the scientists who took part. We called the roll, and with the single exception of Gregory Quine – and just like you, we can’t find him, or at least we haven’t found him yet – every other scientist on the list is now deceased. In short, Professor, despite the fact that you’ve become involved in this virtually by accident, it looks as if you’re the only properly-qualified scientific expert we have on the TRAIT programme. And that’s why you’re here.’
Vernon nodded.
‘I’ll help however I can, obviously,’ he said, ‘though I’m not totally familiar with all of the project. I know the overall shape, that kind of thing, but I may have to refer to the project files if you need details. I had copies of all the documentation on my laptop, and in the cloud because the laptop is still in Cambrils. Obviously, I have to ask why,’ he added. ‘TRAIT is over two decades old and was an abandoned trial. Why is what happened all that time ago relevant today?’
‘It’s relevant because according to Martin Wilmot the Syrians have come up with a plan to use a modified version of the TRAIT vector to launch a biological attack, but not an attack aimed at the people of sub-Saharan Africa.’
Vernon looked interested, but not convinced.
‘For a different genetic subgroup, they would need to identify the correct markers, and that would not always be easy. What target group did they select?’
‘That’s the reason so many different intelligence services are now in the loop, and particularly those on the other side of the Atlantic. According to the information Wilmot obtained, the target of the Syrians is the United States of America. What we have to do is work out how the vector is going to be introduced, the mechanism, I mean, and how we can stop it from happening.’
That bald statement produced another silence, as the five men in the room stared at Charles Vernon, the only person who hadn’t known the details of the plan. Simpson and the ID had been involved from the start, and Richter and the two Americans had seen the scan of Wilmot’s ‘In the event of my death’ note. Vernon appeared sunk in thought, and it was fully two minutes later before he finally spoke.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said, finally.
‘But that is definitely our information,’ Simpson pointed out, nodding his head. ‘Wilmot was quite specific about it. The target is America, and the payload has been modified to produce much more rapid effects and quite probably a different result. Presumably something much more lethal and unpleasant than sterilisation followed by testicular cancer, though that’s obviously bad enough.’
‘But it’s not his field,’ Vernon said, an apparent non sequitur. ‘I’ve researched the human genome and related subjects. That is far more my area of expertise than TRAIT. And I don’t see how it can be done.’
‘I’m sorry, Professor,’ Richter said, ‘but I don’t know what you’re driving at.’
Vernon nodded and again laced his hands together in front of him, adopting the kind of pose he would probably use when talking to a class of particularly dim-witted students.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll try and keep this as simple as I can. There are genetic markers that essentially make us what we are. Every Inuit child, every sub-Saharan African child, every Chinese child and so on, born of parents from those racial subgroups, will have particular characteristics. These have been developed by selective evolution over the millennia to better equip that child to live in that region of the planet. So a sub-Saharan African child will have brown eyes, dark brown or black hair and dark brown or black skin that will offer greater protection against the rays of the sun than the skin of, say, a child born of Swedish parents. The Scandinavians tend to be fair-haired with blue eyes and very light-coloured or white skin, and they would find it difficult or impossible to cope if they were transplanted to somewhere like Kenya or Namibia. I mean, of course, if they were deprived the trappings of modern civilisation, like shelter, fans and air-conditioning.’
‘That’s just racial stereotyping,’ the ID said.
‘Of course it is,’ Vernon agreed, �
�but that doesn’t in any way negate the truth of the argument. It may not be politically correct to say such things, but political correctness, the facts of the matter and the reality of any situation only very rarely coincide. And the reality in this case is that the human animal, Homo sapiens sapiens, has evolved to suit the very different conditions found in very different parts of the world. That’s why African men – as I was talking about just now – not only have very dark skin, but also tend to have a different body shape from people of some other nations. They tend to be taller and slimmer, as well as stronger with better muscle development, than many other racial groups. Again, this is to better suit their bodies to cope with the environment in which they live. Contrast them with the Sami people of northern Norway, for example, who have light skin and tend to be below average height and above average weight. Again, these are characteristics that help them live more comfortably in the ambient conditions.’
‘Again, I don’t disagree with any of that,’ Simpson said, ‘but I don’t really know where you’re going with that argument, Professor.’
‘It’s fundamental,’ Vernon said. ‘Different racial subgroups have developed, their physical characteristics influenced by selective evolution based upon their surroundings. That’s what Charles Darwin hypothesised and that’s the crux of the matter. But since about the middle of the twentieth century the world has changed. Travel is cheaper and borders in many countries have been opened. So just because a man happens to have been born in Namibia, say, there is nothing to stop him travelling to London and getting a degree from a British university and then moving to Canada to work, and, very probably, marrying a local girl. Their children will inevitably have a mix of racial characteristics from the father’s and the mother’s genome, but they obviously won’t be either pure-bred Namibian or pure-bred Canadian, but a mix of the two. They can’t possibly be anything else. And if the girl has French parents, that would add yet another racial component into the mix.
‘But there are still many racial subgroups where this mixing of the genes very rarely takes place. For example, in a generally totalitarian regime such as mainland China where foreign visitors are uncommon, it would be a rare event for a Chinese girl from a village in the centre of the country to marry anyone except a Chinese man from the same area, simply because there might be no men of a different nationality within perhaps a thousand miles of her. Or there may be religious or other reasons, with groups like the Mormons or the Amish or the Inuit or the Sami tending to always marry people from within those same groups. In these cases, any children born will racially identical, or nearly identical, to their parents.’
‘I’m sorry, Professor,’ Simpson said. ‘I’m with Richter on this one. I just don’t see the relevance.’
‘I’d have thought the relevance was quite obvious. But let me turn the question around. You said Martin Wilmot claimed that the Syrians are planning on launching an attack using a biological weapon that is specifically targeted against Americans. Correct?’
All the other men around the table nodded.
‘So which Americans are they targeting?’ Vernon asked. ‘White Americans? Black Americans? Asian-Americans? Chinese Americans? Spanish Americans? Italian Americans? Native Americans? What, exactly, is the target group, because it can’t possibly be all of them?’
‘Now I get you,’ Richter said. ‘America is a mongrel nation, just like Britain, because it has always welcomed immigrants of almost every nationality. So unlike the Sami of Norway, for example, there are no uniquely American genetic markers. There’s nothing in the genome or whatever you call it that would mark out a particular individual as being an American.’
Simpson nodded as he too had grasped the point the Professor was making.
‘But surely Wilmot would – or should – have known that?’ he asked.
‘I can only assume that he didn’t think it through,’ Vernon said. ‘I suspect that he was so shocked at the idea of this bioweapon that he never actually questioned the validity of what he was hearing. And he probably also knew that because TRAIT had worked on one racial group it would not be that big a leap to redesign the vector to target another racial group. What he didn’t do was think through the last part of that statement.’
Masters and Moore had been listening to the discussion as it flipped from one side of the table to the other, but finally Masters made his own contribution.
‘So what you’re saying is that there is no bioweapon, so we can all go home and forget about it? Is that it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Richter replied. ‘If I’m reading the situation correctly, then Michael was most probably feeding Wilmot a large slice of disinformation, telling him the target was America just to head him down the wrong track. In fact, I’m a bit surprised he told him anything at all but, from the note Wilmot left, Michael had made such a fuss about the TRAIT files and who had accessed them that maybe Wilmot deduced there was a biological threat and put the rest together from things Michael had said or just hinted at. I guess we’ll never know.’
‘So you mean there is a biological weapon out there?’ Moore asked.
‘That would certainly be my assumption,’ Vernon replied, ‘but there’s one other thing that you need to know. When I talked to Hubert Jefferies about the scientific archive and the TRAIT files, he told me that he’d looked at the source code of part of the access history of that section of the archive, and a routine within it had been written to transmit the identification of anyone who looked at the archive to a specific website. He followed the trail to the website and found something that suggests the Syrians have absolutely nothing to do with this matter, except for the three-man team we encountered in Cambrils who were carrying Syrian passports.’
‘So what did Jefferies discover?’ Simpson asked.
‘The website address was anonymous, and the site itself was hosted on a server down in the Dark Web. It contained a huge database of scientific papers. Almost every document he looked at had been written in English and covered a wide variety of different subjects including TRAIT and papers dealing with genetic manipulation and advanced biochemical techniques. It looked to Jefferies as if the creators of the website had plundered the archives of Western universities and laboratories looking for references to the human genome and related subjects. The implication was that the website acted as an archive for scientists working in the country that created it.’
‘You mean Syria, right?’ Masters asked. ‘Or have I missed something?’
Vernon nodded.
‘You have, rather,’ he confirmed. ‘Jefferies discovered there was another language used on the site to provide additional information, things like where a particular document had been obtained, the date of acquisition, and so on. All these pieces of text had been written by the creators of the website and the language they had used for this was Persian.’
‘Persian?’ Simpson asked. That obviously wasn’t what he had expected.
‘Jefferies told me he’d checked the language carefully and it was definitely Persian, or Fārsī to be exact. There are four main languages spoken in Iran, and Fārsī is the commonest and most important. The others are Dari, Kurdish and Balochi, while the main language of Syria is Arabic. If the website was constructed by a Syrian I can’t think of any good reason why he would use Persian as their default language. It would be like a group of Britons building a website but writing all the supporting text in French or German. Logically, the creators of that website have to be Iranian.’
Richter tried to put it all together.
‘So when this character Michael,’ he said, ‘hinted to Wilmot that he was being blackmailed by one of the Syrian intelligence services, that was another red herring. If the orchestrators of this scheme are the Iranians then that opens up another whole new can of worms.’
The Intelligence Director stirred uncomfortably in his chair.
‘If that conclusion is correct, then the scheme was most probably fomented by the Vezarat-e Ettela�
��at Jomhuri-ye Eslami-ye Iran, the Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Iran,’ he said. ‘It’s also known as VAJA, and before that it was called VEVAK, the Vezarat-e Ettela’at va Amniyat-e Keshvar. It was formed in 1984 as pretty much the straight lineal descendant of SAVAK, the intelligence agency set up by the Shah of Iran. It now employs over thirty thousand people and has a long history of carrying out assassinations of dissidents, anyone else who is even slightly critical of the ruling regime or anyone that they simply don’t like very much.’
‘They are not, in any sense of the words, very nice people,’ Richter confirmed. ‘I’ve not encountered them myself but there are plenty of examples of their operational tactics, like the case in Denmark in October 2018 when they planned to assassinate the leader of the Danish branch of ASMLA, the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz. The supposed crime that ASMLA was guilty of was trying to establish a separate state for ethnic Arabs in south-west Iran. Luckily, that was detected by the Scandinavian authorities and the hitman was arrested in Sweden and then extradited to Denmark.’
‘I think we’re in danger of missing the point here,’ Simpson said. ‘At this stage it doesn’t really matter which nation or intelligence service is trying to mount this attack. What we have to do is find out the actual target, how the attack is being launched, and how we can stop it.’
‘There’s probably not too much I can do to help,’ Vernon said, ‘except to tell you again that this can’t be an attack against the entire population of the United States. What it can be is an attack against a very specific part of the population of America, or an attack against a completely different racial grouping.’
‘I’m not sure you’re right,’ Richter said to Simpson. ‘We do need to find out which nation or service is behind this, because otherwise I don’t see how we can identify the target. Let’s assume that we are looking at Iran, just because of the language used on the website, and that’s pretty much all we have to go on. Who is Iran really pissed off with? Which countries?’
Bioweapon Page 26
