Bioweapon

by James Barrington

  Or, to be entirely accurate, at least the population believe they know what happens at Porton Down. As the public’s main sources of information are the British press and broadcast media, most of which have had long careers devoted to disseminating rumours, fictions and half-truths, the accuracy of the ‘facts’ available is somewhat debatable.

  Richter looked at the timeline, such as it was. Vernon had finished work on the previous Friday evening at about the usual time, as far as his colleagues could remember, and this was supported by a report from the security department at Dstl. As a secure site – technically it is a ‘prohibited place within the meaning of the Official Secrets Acts 1911–1939’ – the entry and exit times are logged for all staff. Vernon had left the building in which he worked at 18:11 and staff at the main gate had recorded him driving off the site in his somewhat battered Ford saloon at 18:23.

  The presumption was that he had then driven home. Vernon was unmarried and lived in fairly large house near Warminster, a property that he had inherited from his parents. He’d lived in various locations during his professional career, moving about the country to wherever his appointments had led him, but had taken up residence in the Warminster house some ten years earlier, when he’d been appointed to Dstl and when both of his parents had begun suffering the more severe ravages of old age. It was a convenient location with easy access to Porton Down, and Vernon had also obviously been doing what he could to help them at home. Within five years, they’d both died, and Vernon had simply stayed on in his inheritance.

  So according to those records, the last time Vernon’s location could be absolutely established had been at 18:23 on the Friday evening. None of his work colleagues had seen him after that, and telephone records showed that he’d made no calls from either the landline at his home or on his mobile phone since the Friday. In fact, he’d made no calls on either since the Thursday evening, when he’d used his landline to call a takeaway pizza restaurant in Warminster just after 7:20 to order a margherita, which had been delivered to him at his home a little over thirty minutes later.

  When he’d failed to appear at his desk at the Dstl on the following Monday morning, it was assumed that he’d been taken ill or had arranged an appointment, maybe with his dentist or something of that sort, that he’d forgotten to mention, and nobody had expressed any particular concern at his absence. On Tuesday afternoon, one of his colleagues at the unit rang Vernon’s landline, but his call wasn’t answered. He tried again on Wednesday morning and a couple of times in the afternoon as well, but with the same result – or rather lack of result.

  When he still hadn’t appeared on Thursday, his colleagues started to get really worried and the Dstl administrative staff then began trying to find him. Further calls to his landline went unanswered, and he had no messaging facility enabled. His mobile phone appeared to be switched off. Because of Vernon’s seniority, and the importance of his work at Dstl, a security team of two men was then despatched to his house, with instructions to enter it, by force if necessary, to ensure that Vernon wasn’t lying there sick or injured.

  The local police were informed at the same time and a patrol car, two-up, arrived there at about the same time as the Dstl security men. The first thing they checked, before approaching the house, was the separate double garage to see if the scientist’s car was inside it, because it clearly wasn’t parked on the drive that curved around the front of the property. The building wasn’t locked, and when they lifted the main door the only vehicle they could find inside was a newish ride-on lawnmower parked against the right-hand side wall. An old and dried oil stain on the other side of the garage floor suggested that Vernon normally left his Ford inside the structure rather than outside on the drive, but that was the only piece of information they gleaned, and it wasn’t very helpful.

  Because Vernon’s car wasn’t there, it was a reasonable assumption that neither was he, but they knocked on the door anyway. It was, perhaps, just conceivable that he had taken his car into Warminster for servicing and had returned home by taxi and then fallen ill. Something like that. Conceivable, but unlikely.

  They got no response at the front door, and the rear door was clearly bolted top and bottom when they applied pressure.

  The two constables from the patrol car reluctantly agreed to let the Dstl security men force their way into the property, or at least they agreed not to arrest them on the spot for breaking and entering, which wasn’t quite the same thing. There was a vertical pane of coloured glass either side of the front door, one of which could have been broken to allow them to reach the door handle on the inside, but before they did that one of the Dstl officers – his name-tag read ‘Rosco’ – produced a small pistol-like tool from his pocket, which generated a further objection from the two constables.

  ‘That’s a lock-pick gun,’ one of them said, pointing at it. ‘That’s illegal unless you’re using it on your own property. You could be arrested for going equipped.’

  ‘Take it up with my boss at Porton Down,’ the Dstl man retorted, and turned the tool over to show the unit’s stamp on the handle. ‘We use these at the labs if somebody loses a key or something. And wherever Professor Vernon has got to, I reckon he’d far rather we opened the door with this than kicked in one of those glass panels or used one of your Big Red Keys to smash the door down. But either way, we’re going inside.’

  And without further conversation, he stuck the business end of the lock-pick gun in the Yale, pressed the trigger a few times and then turned his wrist. The gun turned smoothly in the lock and the door swung open.

  ‘Piece of piss,’ Rosco muttered as the four men stepped inside, loudly calling out Vernon’s name as they did so.

  There’s something about an empty house that seems to communicate itself to anybody entering the building and, even before they’d checked the bedrooms on the upper floor, all four men guessed that they weren’t going to find Charles Vernon there. The only bit of good news that Brian Rosco, as the senior of the two Dstl security staff, was able to pass to his boss at Porton Down was that at least they hadn’t found Vernon’s rotting corpse inside the property, which meant that he was somewhere else, and hopefully still alive.

  Rosco was told to search the grounds, just in case, and a couple of minutes later the two police constables were ordered by radio to check for any signs of a struggle inside or outside the house, and to then get back on patrol unless they found something. The search of the square plot of land, bordered by stone walls, only served to confirm that Vernon wasn’t an enthusiastic gardener, which wasn’t particularly helpful in the circumstances, and there were no signs whatever of a struggle in the house itself.

  As far as they could tell from their inspection of the property, at some point after about 19:00 on the previous Friday evening – if Vernon had driven straight home after he had left Porton Down that was about the time he should have arrived there – the scientist appeared to have got back into his car and driven away. Or, perhaps, he had driven directly from the unit to a completely different destination. Or maybe he did something else altogether. There was simply no way of telling, not at that stage.

  Less than an hour after they’d arrived, the four men drove away from Vernon’s house and almost immediately the search for the missing scientist moved in several new directions.

  The Dstl administrative staff briefly questioned all of Vernon’s colleagues, but none had any idea where he might be. He hadn’t been particularly close to any of them and had certainly not socialised. No evening barbecues or weekend dinners with them. Nothing of that sort.

  Then they accessed his personnel file and began calling every number they found in it. His next of kin was an obvious place to start, but they couldn’t because Vernon hadn’t really got one. He was an only child, he had never married, his parents were both deceased and his only living blood relatives were two elderly aunts, one of whom lived near Hexham in Northumberland and the other in North Wales at a place called Buckley. Both women w
ere telephoned and, after some small confusion because neither of them appeared to know anyone called Charles Vernon – he had been referred to by both of them as ‘Little Eddie’ because they’d preferred to use his middle rather than his first name when he was a child and had just dropped the ‘Little’ when he became an adult – they confirmed they’d neither spoken to him nor seen him for over three decades. So that was a dead end.

  Telephone calls to the three units where Vernon had previously worked were similarly inconclusive. Checks of records confirmed that he had been employed at each of them, but nobody in current employment had been there at the same time as him, scientists moving about the country fairly frequently as they chased grant monies or moved up the promotion ladder. Another dead end.

  He appeared to have had no romantic entanglements, or at least none that anybody they spoke to – mainly his colleagues at Dstl – were aware of. As far as they were concerned, Vernon was wedded to his work and not much else.

  Because his car was missing, the vehicle provided a possible early line of enquiry, and the police began an exhaustive search of traffic and speed camera recordings in the area, beginning with the most likely cameras. In parallel with that a financial check was initiated on Vernon.

  The first positive sighting was on a single traffic camera that lay on Vernon’s route home from Porton Down, and that showed him driving past it at 18:47 on the Friday evening. That at least confirmed that Vernon had been heading for his property, and that in all probability he had reached it a few minutes later that evening, though of course that couldn’t be proved. Footage from the same camera was studied for the rest of Friday evening and night, without result, but Vernon’s car was again identified by the camera as the vehicle travelled in the opposite direction the following morning, and a figure looking very like the missing scientist could be seen in the driver’s seat. There appeared to be nobody else in the car. None of the later recordings showed the vehicle, so the surveillance was expanded to cover the rest of Warminster.

  And that’s where the search ran into problems.

  Another traffic camera had detected Vernon’s Ford entering the western outskirts of the town later that morning but after that the trail went cold. Then the first of the financial enquiries returned a positive hit. In fact, it returned three positive hits. Charles Vernon was a fairly wealthy man, being paid a substantial salary, having apparently modest tastes and living in a house on which the mortgage had been cleared by his parents almost half a century earlier, and he had a debit card and three very high-value credit cards to his name.

  What the check had thrown up was conclusive, but not immediately helpful. That morning, Vernon had used all four cards to draw out the maximum amount of money he could on each – the daily limit – from the ATM at a supermarket in Warminster, pocketing almost £3000 from the four transactions. The camera in the machine had shown a man who looked like Vernon stepping up to the keypad, but he had then placed his left hand over the camera’s position.

  That was unlikely to be accidental, as most people drawing money from ATMs used both hands to handle their card and wallet, and to take the cash and receipt. The obvious conclusion was that Vernon – assuming that it was him – had wanted to hide his face from the camera or, possibly more likely, had been told to do that so the camera wouldn’t record anyone standing nearby and threatening him. That made it look as if they weren’t dealing with a defection, but with a possible or probable abduction.

  Vernon, or whoever the shadowy figure actually was, drew out the money as quickly as possible, feeding in a new card as soon as he’d completed each previous transaction. Once he’d removed the last credit card and cash from the machine, without getting a receipt for any of the withdrawals, he removed his left hand from the camera at the last possible moment so all the recording showed was the back of a figure walking away and moving out of shot. There appeared to be nobody anywhere near him or paying him any attention at all, but that was inconclusive. There were numerous figures visible in the area, any one of whom could possibly have been threatening him with a concealed weapon. There simply was no way of telling.

  A little later the traffic camera footage picked up Vernon’s car again, this time in the southern part of Warminster and in the early evening, so one obvious assumption – if he’d drawn the cash of his own volition – was that he had spent the day in the town, possibly spending the money he’d drawn, though neither the man nor his car showed up on any of the CCTV cameras dotted around the shopping area and in the car parks. And most people used credit cards if they were making a major purchase to avoid carrying around great wads of cash in their wallets, so that scenario didn’t really make sense.

  In fact, only one scenario did make any kind of sense based upon what little the police and Vernon’s superiors at Dstl knew for sure: the scientist had vanished after withdrawing a large amount of cash. If his intention had been to skip the country, to do a runner, that would have been an obvious first step.

  But if Vernon had been acting under duress, then an entirely different scenario – or to be exact two entirely different scenarios – had to be considered. Had he been robbed? Identified as a wealthy individual, threatened by a man holding a pistol in his pocket and forced to withdraw the cash? Or, even more worrying, had he been identified both as a wealthy individual and as a leading biochemist and abducted, his kidnappers forcing him to draw the cash as a kind of bonus?

  And the idea of Charles Vernon as either a defector or an abductee raised red flags everywhere, because his work at Dstl meant that he possessed skills and knowledge that would be of enormous value to a hostile regime. A leading contender would be the so-called, and by then allegedly defunct, ISIS fundamentalist Islamic movement that had openly expressed an interest in obtaining or developing biological and/or chemical weapons to use in their attacks. For any fledgling or, worse, established terrorist group, having the assistance of somebody like Vernon could easily turn that interest into a lethal reality.

  That was the real worry.

  Chapter 6

  Soho, London

  Friday

  The telephone call that morning on his mobile had been short, entirely uninformative to a third person listening in, but completely comprehensible to the two participants.

  ‘This is Todd. Can I speak to Sandra, please?’ The male caller had spoken English entirely fluently but with a faint and unidentifiable accent.

  Professor Martin Wilmot had been expecting a call, but not quite so quickly. He found himself clutching his mobile phone a little more tightly than he had before as he answered.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong number,’ he’d said, the response that he had learned by rote half a decade previously.

  ‘Isn’t that 369356?’

  ‘No,’ Wilmot had replied. ‘This is 369326.’

  ‘Sorry,’ the caller had replied, and then immediately disconnected.

  Wilmot’s mobile phone number did genuinely end with the six digits 369326, and misdialling by touching the two rather than the five on a smartphone’s virtual keyboard was an easy mistake to make, so the call sounded genuinely innocuous and an eavesdropper would have dismissed it as harmless. But, in reality, every word spoken had been quite deliberate and conveyed a very specific meaning as part of a remarkably simple code. Wilmot had known nothing of the covert world and the code that had been agreed with the man who was acting as his handler was about as basic as it was possible to get.

  The name ‘Todd’ meant that the caller wanted to see Wilmot today, the first three letters of ‘Todd’ and ‘today’ being identical. If the meeting was being arranged for the next day – tomorrow – the caller would have used the name ‘Tommy’ instead. The name ‘Sandra’ referred to the address of one particular bar in Dean Street in Soho, and Wilmot had memorised a list of half a dozen addresses in London and the codewords that indicated them. And the final three digits of the telephone number the caller had apparently been trying to ring – 356 – simply speci
fied the time of the meeting: nothing more complex than 3:56 pm.

  Martin Wilmot, fifty-seven years old, just over six feet tall, thin to the point of looking cadaverous, bespectacled, and with a lined and furrowed face that made it appear that he was bearing all the cares in the world on his shoulders – an impression that in his case was substantially correct – was an extremely unwilling participant in the arrangement.

  Wilmot had a secret that he would have died rather than reveal, and some five years earlier he had encountered a man who called himself ‘Michael’ and who appeared to share the same taste for forbidden fruit. In reality, Michael’s agenda was entirely different, and he had used Wilmot’s unnatural craving simply to ensnare the man and to ensure that he would do exactly what he was told. Wilmot had become Michael’s creature, held in check by the professional-quality DVD recordings Michael had arranged to be made of the events of one particular evening that had been memorable for several reasons.

  Michael had laid out his terms: Wilmot was to provide information to him as and when requested, information that was specific to the kind of work the scientist was engaged in and which he would have access to as a normal part of his job. He had been providing highly classified and very specific information to Michael ever since. Along the way, he thought he had identified the man’s actual nationality, which hadn’t come with even a crumb of comfort. Because of occasional remarks Michael had made, he believed the man who held his life almost literally in his hands was from the Middle East, possibly Iranian or Iraqi, but most probably Syrian. Whether his guess was right or not, the escalating conflict in Syria had made liberal use of a variety of chemical weapons, and every time Wilmot saw a news broadcast or read a newspaper article about the conflict he cringed inside as he recognised some of his own handiwork – the classified information he had been providing to Michael about such devices – as being the agency of much of the death and misery in that war-torn country.