‘What are you lookin’ for?’ Jones said, asking the same thing for the third time. ‘What’s the big secret here?’
‘It won’t be a secret for much longer,’ Richter said, checking that none of the other patrons could hear what he was saying. ‘What we know is that somewhere in this town a bunch of Iranian scientists have manufactured a bioweapon that they intend to deploy against Israel.’
‘You’re shittin’ me.’
‘Definitely not. That information came from the senior Iranian illegal in London, and the circumstances of his interrogation mean we have no doubt that he was telling the truth.’
Jones nodded slowly, clearly recognising the subtext, the information Richter wasn’t revealing about the interrogation. Then he shook his head and looked down at the photographs.
‘Okay, if you say so. This really ain’t my field, but if these guys were building a bioweapon, then it makes sense that they must have turned a part of one of these buildings into a BSL4 – BioSafety Level 4 – laboratory. That means they’d have been using HEPA filters and big fans and a whole lot of other stuff to get a negative pressure environment inside the lab, and the equipment to handle that kinda thing tends to show up real clearly on the roof of wherever they put it, in amongst all the usual aircon boxes. So maybe you should start looking for that. We can ask the guys back in the States to run the analysis if you want.’
‘That’s probably a good idea,’ Richter said, ‘but I’m not entirely sure that we’ve got enough time to wait for that.’
Steve Carpenter pulled a tablet with a seven-inch screen out of his pocket, accessed Google and input ‘BSL4’ as a search term, then selected images. That didn’t generate anything particularly helpful in terms of their search, so he fiddled around with the search terms for a couple of minutes and then slid the tablet across the table towards Richter.
‘That’s not the best picture I’ve ever seen, Paul,’ he said, ‘but it does show the kind of things our Yank friend here was talking about.’
Jones bristled slightly at Carpenter’s description of him, then turned his attention to the image on the tablet’s screen.
They were somewhat hampered by the fact that they really didn’t know what they were looking for, though the image found by Carpenter at least gave them some clues. It was a reasonable guess that the Iranians wouldn’t have tried to reinvent the wheel. If they had needed a BSL4 laboratory, then they would probably have purchased the equipment needed to create it from normal sources, from one of the few companies that specialised in manufacturing that kind of thing. So by looking at the aerial photograph of the roof of an acknowledged BSL4 laboratory and then comparing it to the buildings visible in the Keyhole photographs, Richter thought they had a decent chance of identifying the correct building in Zahedan.
A couple minutes later TJ Masters jabbed his forefinger at the bottom end of one of the Keyhole images in front of him.
‘See this kind of round thing here,’ he said, ‘with this sort of box shape on one side? That looks pretty much like one of those fans on the roof of the picture Steve found.’
For a few seconds, they all stared at what he was pointing at, switching their attention from the tablet to the photograph taken from orbit.’
‘It’s not an exact match,’ Richard Moore said, ‘but it’s the closest I’ve seen so far.’
Carpenter pulled a red felt-tip pen from his pocket and drew a ring around the building on the photograph.
They studied the images for about another quarter of an hour but found no other structure anywhere in the town that possessed any of the equipment that might suggest it contained a high security laboratory.
‘It looks like it’s that one or nothing,’ Carpenter said. ‘I mean, maybe it’s possible they’ve chosen a completely different building, put all the equipment on the roof and then maybe built a false roof above it, something like that, to hide it from the eyes in the sky. But if they didn’t, that’s pretty much gotta be the place.’
Richter nodded.
‘For now, let’s go with that,’ he said. ‘Assume that is the laboratory and see what you can discover about any activity there. What we do know, according to Michael, is that the culmination of this scheme is right about now. The stuff they’ve made in this place, the bioweapon, has pretty much been done, according to him. The production run is complete, so what we’re looking at now is finding out where it went, because what we still don’t know is how it’s being delivered. That was one of the things Michael didn’t know because he had no need to be given that information by his controller in Tehran.’
He took all the satellite images, organised them in date order and then laid them out on the table, the earliest at the left and the latest on the right, and they all stared at them.
‘I don’t know that much about Iran,’ Steve Carpenter said, ‘but there is one thing that kind of strikes me about that building, apart from the stuff on the roof, I mean.’
‘What’s that?’ Richter said.
‘It’s these two oblong shapes outside it but inside the boundary fence.’
‘They look like carports,’ Masters said.
‘I know they’re carports,’ Carpenter agreed, ‘because in most of these photographs you can see the front or the back of a vehicle sticking out of them. My guess is they’re just marked spaces, and the whole lot has been covered with a roof of corrugated iron or something like that to provide a bit of shade so the drivers don’t burn their hands off when they get in their cars at the end of the day. What I meant was it’s not that big a building and there seem to be a lot of car parking spaces. Do most Iranians own cars? Or are we looking at a place where everyone is really well paid so they can all afford a motor of their own? It’s just a question, but I was thinking that if there are a lot of high-paid scientists working inside that building, that would explain the number of cars and the fact there are no bicycles outside.’
‘That could mean we’re looking at the right place,’ Richter agreed, ‘but obviously it’s not conclusive. Right now, I’m more interested in trucks or anything like that. Some vehicle that they might have used to move the weapon.’
Jones leaned across and pointed to the last picture taken in the chronological sequence.
‘That might be the tailgate of a flatbed or something like that,’ he said pointing at a thin oblong shape at the very bottom of the last image. ‘The rest of it has already moved out of the frame. Of course,’ he added, ‘it’s on the road outside the building, so there’s no proof that it was actually taking something from there. It might just have been passing along the road outside. But there are a couple of figures inside the compound, and I haven’t seen that in any of the other pictures, and the gates of the compound are open as well.’
‘Good call, Jack,’ Richter said. ‘For the moment, and until it’s proved to be wrong, we’ll assume that building is our target. Can you go back to the embassy and pull out all the other images for say the last ten days that show it, and see if you can confirm that that was a truck leaving the place, and if you can identify any other vehicle movements there apart from cars and small vans? If you can, squirt the images over to us by secure means, otherwise give us a bell.’
Chapter 49
Hammersmith, London
Thursday
The conference room was full of people, who were not just occupying the seats around the long table but were also sitting on folding chairs at the end of the room opposite the screen, and about half a dozen who had found standing room only at the far end.
As well as Simpson and the Intelligence Director, Richter, Charles Vernon, Richard Moore and TJ Masters, the other people were specialists and operatives drawn from the ranks of employees at the section, all of whom had some form of expertise that Simpson had decided might potentially be useful. The screen had been lowered to its fullest extent and displayed on it was the best image they had of the building at the southern end of the Iranian town of Zahedan, the structure that they believe
d was most likely to be the laboratory where the bioweapon had been fabricated.
As well as the people physically in the room, the briefing was going to be listened to by CIA staff at the American Embassy in London, and there were audio and video links to the Secret Intelligence Service at Vauxhall Cross, to the Security Service at Millbank and the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, out at Cheltenham.
At that moment, Simpson was speaking in a low voice to the Intelligence Director who was sitting on the opposite side of the table, while the other people in the room talked quietly together, the combined voices creating a low hum of conversation. Then he nodded, checked his watch, glanced around the room and then rapped his knuckles sharply on the table three times. Instantly everyone fell silent and turned to look at him.
‘Right,’ Simpson said. ‘First things first.’ He looked towards the double doors and at the man standing closest to them. ‘You’re nearest, Connolly, so make sure we’re not disturbed.’
The man he was addressing, about six feet tall, heavily-built and with a nearly bald head, nodded, opened a small metal box bolted to the wall and reached inside it. He flicked up the single switch that the box contained, and immediately a red light illuminated on a caution panel above the box, the light signal being duplicated on the panel in the corridor outside the room and above the door. At the same moment everyone in the conference room heard a kind of metallic snicking sound as four electrically driven bolts were driven into the steel-lined double doors from the reinforced metal frame that surrounded them.
‘Well,’ somebody murmured from the back of the room, ‘let’s just hope there isn’t a fire.’
It was an old joke that most of them had heard before, but a couple of people chuckled at the remark.
‘Right,’ Simpson said again, ‘let’s get the admin out of the way first. The subject matter of this briefing is classified as Secret with some parts that are Confidential and one section that is Top Secret, so the overall classification is Top Secret. Additionally there is a WNINTEL caveat that applies to some sections, meaning that intelligence collection methods may be compromised if details of this briefing were to be revealed to a third party. Practically speaking, what all that means is that if anybody in this room talks out of turn, even within this building, I will personally see to it that they will be singing as a soprano for the rest of their lives because I will be using their testicles as cufflinks. Is there anyone in this room who does not understand that, or who does not have a Top Secret or better security clearance?’
Simpson scanned the faces of everyone there, but nobody responded until Vernon tentatively lifted his hand.
‘Forget it, Professor,’ Simpson said. ‘If we can’t trust you, then we’re completely buggered. And while we’re on the subject,’ he added, raising his voice slightly and pointing a finger at Vernon, ‘for those of you who don’t know, this man is Professor Charles Vernon. He’s a biochemist and he’s here to provide technical and scientific expertise and to answer any questions that we might have about what we’re dealing with.’
Simpson stood up and outlined everything that had happened since Charles Vernon had driven away from Porton Down what seemed like weeks earlier, though it was only a few days, and concluded with the Keyhole spy satellite images that had been supplied, only slightly reluctantly, by the CIA unit based in the American Embassy in London.
‘This is a long way from being confirmed,’ Simpson said, using a red laser pointer to indicate the image on the screen at the end of the room, ‘but as things stand at the moment our best guess is that the bioweapon was created inside that building in a BioSafety Level 4 laboratory in a town named Zahedan near Iran’s eastern border. If we’re wrong about the precise location,’ he added, ‘that doesn’t really matter because what we do know for sure is that the lab is somewhere in that town.’
‘Are we absolutely certain that this bioweapon exists?’ one of the men seated around the conference table asked. ‘We couldn’t possibly be dealing with some kind of a disinformation exercise?’
‘What Simpson didn’t say,’ Richter said, stepping into the breach to answer the question, ‘is that we had suspicions that something was going on and we managed to identify the senior Iranian illegal in London. We took him somewhere nice and quiet and pumped him dry. Before you ask, he’s no longer walking amongst us. He confirmed the plot as far as he could, and the information we gleaned from him suggested that he was one of the prime movers, maybe even the genius who came up with the idea in the first place. The circumstances of his interrogation mean we believe he was telling us the complete and unvarnished truth.’
A couple of people around the table grimaced slightly, knowing full well what Richter was implying but not saying.
‘Taking all that as a given,’ Simpson went on, ‘the problems we face are considerable. We don’t know exactly what the bioweapon is in terms of what it is intended to do to the target population, though realistically that’s not our major concern. Whether the weapon simply kills the victims in a matter of minutes or induces some kind of terminal disease that kills them ten years later is irrelevant at the moment. Our focus is obviously on stopping it being deployed in the first place. And at the moment all we can really do is make some educated guesses about how the Iranians intend to accomplish that. And that’s a subject that the Professor here knows far more about than I do, so I’ll let him do the next bit. Over to you, prof.’
‘I’m a scientist,’ Vernon began, standing up as Simpson resumed his seat, ‘and that means I deal in certainties, with facts. Unfortunately, in this case the available facts are somewhat thin on the ground. We know that the Iranians obtained copies of several files dealing with an experimental programme here in Britain. They described a way of tailoring a particular vector – in this case a type of bacterium – so that it would only affect one particular racial group. I don’t want to get bogged down in detail here, but because of their history the genetic profile of the Jewish people is so insular that markers could be identified and used to turn them into targets for this vector. That meant the bioweapon could be administered to Israeli citizens as well as Palestinians, Jordanians or Egyptians or even everybody in this room, and the only group that it would affect would be the Jews or those people with a Jewish ancestry.’
‘So are you saying that if the Iranians modified the bacteria that causes the common cold and then administered it to a room full of people from the Middle East, the only ones who’d catch a cold would be the Jews?’ The questioner was seated at the far end of the conference table.
Vernon looked across at him and shook his head.
‘No, because the common cold isn’t caused by a bacterium but by a virus, the Rhinovirus to be exact, from the Picornaviridae family. But otherwise yes, that’s exactly what I mean.’
‘So what bacteria are you talking about?’
‘The options are literally endless,’ Vernon replied, switching to lecture mode. ‘The Earth has existed for well over four and a half billion years, and bacteria have been around for roughly three quarters of that immense period of time. They were one of the first life forms to appear and today they are by far the most pervasive and dominant living organism on this planet. Since they appeared they have occupied and colonised virtually every possible ecological niche. They are found everywhere from the bottom of the deepest oceanic trenches to the tops of the highest mountains, and they are all around us and inside all of us right now. The vast majority are entirely harmless and in most cases are actually beneficial to the creatures whose bodies they inhabit.
‘For any nation wishing to create a bioweapon the choices are more limited, because they’d need to select a bacterium that would either kill or so seriously incapacitate a human being that their chances of survival would be virtually nil. Two obvious candidates would be Yersinia pestis, responsible for the plague and Mycobacterium tuberculosis which causes tuberculosis. A third possibility is Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium that produces b
otulinum toxin, one of most powerful poisons known, but that acts in a different way. It doesn’t cause a disease but instead the botulinum toxin attacks the autonomic nervous system by preventing acetylcholine to be released. That leads to paralysis and the sufferers die from paralysis of the respiratory muscles. They become unable to breathe and suffocate.’
‘If you were the architect of this scheme, Professor,’ Richter asked, ‘what would be your preferred choice?’
Vernon thought for a few moments before replying.
‘If our deductions are correct,’ he said, ‘then what the Iranians are trying to do is to create a massive loss of life in Israel within the Jewish community. That’s the first thing. The second factor is that the last thing Iran will want, is to be blamed for that loss of life, so they would probably pick a bioweapon that creates or replicates a serious or terminal disease. It would be far easier for the Israelis to accept that their country had suddenly been struck by an unusual but natural pandemic than, say, a sudden massive outbreak of botulinus toxin. That would be a lot less likely.’
‘An injured animal will always fight back,’ Richter pointed out, ‘and if the Government of Israel knew that they were looking at the dead or dying bodies of half of the country’s population, say about four million people, and they had even the slightest inkling that Iran had been responsible, I have no doubt that within a matter of hours Israeli fighter jets and bombers would reduce Tehran and every other major centre of population in Iran to a smoking radioactive ruin. And that’s why I said we should keep Israel out of the loop,’ he reminded Simpson. ‘And it might not just be Iran that Israel would flatten. They might decide to inflict serious damage on Egypt and Jordan and Iraq and Syria, just to complete the set, as it were, and because at that stage they really would have nothing to lose.’
Bioweapon Page 30
