But then he had been presented with a fabric document case and told to open it and examine the contents immediately. When he did so he found himself looking at a mass of scientific papers, created in a country thousands of miles away. The documents covered a subject that he already knew quite a lot about, but which explored the topic in much greater depth than any of his own researches. The documents explained in considerable detail exactly how to overcome the principal and obvious problem with the job he had just been tasked with completing.
They had given him half an hour to skim through the information they had provided and then called him back into the same room again.
‘Does that information address the problem you identified?’ the unsmiling cleric had demanded, his unblinking gaze metaphorically pinning Talabani to his chair as effectively as a collector driving a pin through the body of a butterfly.
Talabani had nodded, because there was no other possible response. The papers now in his possession did explain in precise detail a technique that could be used to achieve the objective. He knew it would still require a lot of work because although the technique itself was then clear in his mind he would have to do a considerable amount of research in order to identify exactly how to do it.
‘And the other matter?’ the cleric had asked.
‘There are difficulties,’ Talabani had admitted, ‘about dispersal, particularly in view of the caveat you have specified. At the moment, I cannot see a way of achieving the result you desire without our involvement becoming clear, and I completely understand why that would be unacceptable. May I enquire what timescale you are permitting me, and the budget you have allocated?’
The cleric, who was clearly the spokesman of the triumvirate and very probably the driving force behind it, had replied immediately.
‘The maximum possible duration we can accept is five years, and we would ideally like to have it completed within four. You need not concern yourself about the budget. We will establish a line of communication between the location you choose for the work and Tehran, and all you will need to do is request whatever equipment and facilities you deem to be essential and they will be provided. You may select however many fellow scientists and other workers as you feel are necessary to complete the project, but you are not to divulge the precise objective of the work to anybody. The biochemical research and preparation are to be carried out in isolation from all other aspects of the project, and only when you have addressed the dispersal problem will you take the final steps required to marry together the two separate components of the system.’
Talabani cast his mind back to that initial interview as he walked down the empty and echoing corridor on the upper floor of the laboratory he had created on the southern outskirts of Zahedan. He had given everybody in the building not simply the weekend off, but also the whole of the following week as a reward for the work they had put in. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of a juggler keeping all the balls in the air at the same time, Talabani had spent most of the previous three weeks bringing everything to fruition in accordance with his personal timescale, a series of disparate actions including organising deck space on a freighter, booking a couple of heavy lorries, supervising the purchase, packing and sealing of the drums and even making a request to have an unusual form of transport organised for one part of the journey. Much of this he had done himself, but his staff had also been heavily involved with several aspects of the project, and he had been very happy indeed with their collective performance, hence the time off he had given them.
He was also pleased that he had beaten the deadline he had been given. It hadn’t taken him the five years that he had originally been allowed, and the last lorry had left the laboratory just over three years and eleven months after that initial interview. And he already knew that the powers that be in Tehran were both pleased and impressed with what he had done.
Talabani came to a stop at the end of the corridor, where his way forward was barred by a heavy steel door that required both a handprint and the input of a four-digit numerical code before it would open. On the other side of the door was the main laboratory, the construction of which had consumed nearly seventy per cent of the funds drawn from the effectively unlimited budget that he had been granted access to. For his own information, he had kept an accurate tally of the cost of everything he had ordered, purchased or requisitioned, just in case at some point he might have been required to answer some awkward questions about financing.
He had no need to enter the laboratory, but he did spend a few seconds looking at an instrument panel on the wall beside the door, a panel protected by a locked glass door through which he could see all the relevant information about the functional state and parameters of the laboratory and the storage facilities. He checked the pressure within the central core of the laboratory, the hot zone where the most dangerous substances were handled, making sure that it was still lower than atmospheric pressure to ensure that nothing could ever escape from the core. The reading from the pressure gauges was exactly where it should be, well within limits, which was only a confirmation of what he already knew, because any deviation would have both sounded an alarm audible throughout the building and also caused warning lights to be illuminated. He also noted the temperatures of the locked fridges and freezers where samples were stored. And, again, all the readings were absolutely normal.
He had expected nothing less. All the equipment had been purchased new and he employed two skilled technicians to make sure everything kept working the way it was supposed to. In fact, there was no reason for him to check it by physically walking the corridor: he could have seen exactly the same results on the slaved instrument panel in his office. He wasn’t really inspecting the building at all, just taking a final look around before he too went off on a week’s leave, after which he had no doubt he would be presented with another problem that he would be expected to solve using both his ingenuity and scientific skills.
The final readings he looked at were the fuel tank levels for the pair of ASDEGs – high-capacity auto-start diesel electric generators – that would automatically cut in if the main electrical supply to the building failed. With full tanks both generators would run continuously for up to two weeks, ensuring that the precious, volatile and lethal samples held in the fridges and freezers would not be allowed to degrade, and also ensure that the negative pressure in the central core would be maintained.
Talabani scanned the entire instrument panel, nodded his satisfaction and then turned to retrace his steps. Back in his office he checked that there were no messages on the telephone answering system, ensured that he had his mobile phone with him, just in case anyone in authority needed to contact him urgently, then switched off the lights, locked the door and walked away. The last thing he did was to increase the temperature of the automated air conditioning system slightly, which would reduce the workload of the system whilst the building was unoccupied. He knew from past experience that the temperature inside could be reduced to a comfortable working level within about half an hour after the first person – and that would most probably be Talabani himself – returned to the building in a week’s time.
Outside, he walked across the parking lot to where his car sat in the shadow at one end of a steel sunshade, opened the driver’s door, started the engine and waited for the air conditioner to haul down the temperature to a bearable level. Then he sat behind the wheel, pulled the door shut, reversed the car out of the bay and headed out of the parking lot. He used a remote control to open the compound gates, then turned north towards the centre of the town and the apartment he rented there.
Unknown to everyone apart from the senior cleric, the two government officials, Talabani himself and about six other people whose services and abilities had been essential to the completion of the project, the unnamed operation – unnamed because if it had been named a certain amount of paperwork would have been generated and paperwork was the very last thing anybody wanted in this case – was running.
The work had been completed and the product despatched. Unlike the overall project, the weapon they had created had been named. Talabani himself had suggested the name Shiva, meaning the Destroyer and one of the three components of Brahma, the Hindu trinity, and that name had stuck. Not that anyone outside the building would ever have any idea what the name referred to.
Now, the laboratory was deserted and would remain so for a further eight days.
Their job was done and the clock was already ticking.
Chapter 14
Cambrils, Spain
Sunday
Charles Vernon was working to a plan, of a sort. He knew that he had left behind both a physical and an electronic trail when he flew from Heathrow to Blagnac airport at Toulouse in France, but that was, somewhat bizarrely, entirely intentional, as well as being completely unavoidable.
He knew that it was very difficult to disappear completely: the proliferation of surveillance cameras, mobile phone tracking and triangulation and the recording of banking and credit card transactions made that almost impossible in the modern world. Living off the grid was a privilege reserved, in the main, either for those people who had so much money that they could spend all their time in private jets and on private yachts or on private islands, all entirely out of reach of modern surveillance systems or, perhaps bizarrely, for those people who had nothing at all. The derelicts of society, living on the streets and sleeping in shop doorways and abandoned buildings; the people who flew beneath the radar, surviving on begging and handouts and soup kitchens and the occasional kindness of strangers, but who were neither registered nor recognised by the official systems in their country of residence. They were nothing more than permanently anonymous shapes on the images caught by the CCTV cameras that dotted the streets.
Charles Vernon fitted into neither category and, in any case, he had no intention of disappearing. He actually wanted to be found, but found on his terms, which is why he had left the country in the manner that he had. He wanted there to be confusion about his motive for leaving and for there to be clear ambiguity about the obvious core question he was sure was now being asked: had he defected or had he been abducted?
That was why he had withdrawn the cash from his bank accounts in Warminster and why he had changed the number plates on his car: he wanted the police or the security services to be aware from the start that something strange was going on. He’d also been very well aware that, probably sooner rather than later, the substitution of the number plates would have been detected and the images from the traffic cameras checked.
That was also why he had purchased by mail order an inflatable doll, a life-size sex toy with three usable orifices, none of which were of the slightest interest to Vernon, who was only concerned about the overall shape of the figure. Before he left Warminster, he’d used an air pump powered by his car’s cigarette lighter to inflate the doll, pushing the flaccid limbs into the sleeves of his old jacket and then, when it was almost fully inflated but still bendable, he’d wrapped a couple of scarves around the neck and lower part of the face to hide the figure’s plastic staring eyes and pouting, wide-open red rimmed mouth. An old battered cap forced onto the doll’s head helped to complete the illusion.
Anyone peering in the windows of the car would immediately see exactly what the figure jammed into the back seat of the old Ford actually was, but Vernon had hoped that all a traffic camera would register was the overall shape, and that anyone viewing the footage would come to the obvious conclusion that there was a second man in the car. Again, that would help to muddy the waters.
At Heathrow, he’d deflated the doll in the long-term car parking and just dumped it on the ground a few dozen yards from where he’d parked his car and put the jacket and the other items of clothing out of sight in the boot of his vehicle.
What Vernon had been trying to do was pose questions, not provide answers.
Chapter 15
Bandar Abbas, Iran
Sunday
VAJA, the Vezarat-e Ettela’at Jomhuri-ye Eslami-ye Iran, the Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, had not had a single good reason for selecting Zahedan.
It had chosen the location over four years earlier following detailed orders and instructions that had come from the very highest levels of the Iranian government and had been relayed to VAJA by a man named Saloun Talabani who unusually had neither a military nor a government background. He was a scientist who appeared to be in charge of the entire covert project. But rather than finding one good reason, VAJA had actually come up with no less than five separate and entirely valid good reasons for choosing Zahedan.
First, the town was very close to Iran’s eastern border, and only about thirty miles due south of the triple border point between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. From the eastern edge of Zahedan to the Pakistani border the distance was even less, under twenty miles. Talabani had decided that, with the prevailing winds generally blowing from west to east, that provided an obvious safety margin should any airborne contaminants escape from the laboratory. It was also about as far to the east as it was possible to get whilst still remaining within the borders of Iran, which was important for an entirely different reason.
Second, although Zahedan was the capital of the region it wasn’t a very big place, but it was certainly large enough to conceal the laboratory where the bioweapon was being fabricated. The third, fourth and fifth factors were that the city had an airport, making access easy to the rest of Iran when required; it was the location of the Zahedan Medical University, meaning that specialist medical care and knowledge was available on site should the scientists need it and, finally, it was the closest suitable location to the port of Bandar Abbas and there was a decent road network between the two places. Access to the port was important because VAJA had been instructed from the start that the device the laboratory was producing would have to be transported by sea to its final destination, and the route out of Bandar Abbas was obvious and had allowed them to take advantage of a well-established but entirely illegal smuggling operation.
That part of the operation had in many ways been the easiest of all, simply a matter of assembling and briefing a team of men hand-picked from the ranks of VAJA enforcers a week earlier and then sending them down to Bandar Abbas to explain the facts of life to a group of roughly thirty of the more experienced and accomplished smugglers, the shooties. And the facts of life in this case – atypically bearing in mind the way that VAJA usually operated – were actually to the benefit of both the smugglers and VAJA itself.
The instructions the shooties had been given were clear and simple. For one night – Saturday – they were to forget their normal cargo of sheep and goats on the southbound leg that would see them arriving in Khasab shortly after sunrise on Sunday. Instead, each boat would carry a load of between two and four sealed steel drums each with a capacity of about fifty gallons, the load depending upon the size of their individual boat. Additionally, each boat would have an additional passenger – a VAJA officer – and a heavy-duty bag, both also to be deposited at Khasab. The vessels were not to be overloaded, and once they had reached Khasab the drums were to be unloaded in the harbour and left there to be collected. The VAJA officers were not going to pay the smugglers for the journey south, but they did undertake to ensure that their craft would not be intercepted on the return journey to Bandar Abbas, which was the leg upon which they expected to make the bulk of their profits. It wasn’t an ideal arrangement, but it was quite a good deal for the shooties, and much better than most of them had realistically expected when the men from VAJA had turned up.
The drums were heavy, clearly full of a substance of some sort, possibly a powder or a liquid rather than something solid, and each was labelled with a single stencilled word that meant nothing to any of the smugglers. The word was ‘ZEOLITE’ and apart from that the drums, which appeared to be brand-new, carried no other form of identification whatsoever, and certainly no indications that the content
s were either fragile or dangerous. Despite the lack of signage, the VAJA officers verbally explained to the smugglers before they set off that if any of the drums arrived damaged, or didn’t arrive at all, the lives of all the smugglers, not just those crewing the boat on which the loss or damage had occurred, would be forfeit. And forfeit in as painful a way as the ranks of experienced and inventive torturers employed by the VAJA could devise.
No cargo handled by the smugglers had ever been treated with such absolute and elaborate respect, and by mid-morning on Sunday the last of the drums had been positioned in the designated spot in the harbour at Khasab to the clear satisfaction of the most senior VAJA officer, who had accompanied the shooties in the first boat to arrive that morning and had then remained in the Omani port to supervise the unloading of all of the vessels.
For their part, the smugglers who had participated in the operation ensured that their boats were loaded up with the most profitable items they had been able to source from the Omani wholesalers for the journey back to Iran. On that Sunday afternoon there was a certain degree of nervousness within the group as they waited for the approach of sunset and their usual departure time, because it was always possible that the VAJA officers were both treacherous and had been lying – that was the well-deserved reputation the organisation enjoyed in Iran, after all – and that when the boats approached Bandar Abbas they would be met by a barrage of heavy machine gun fire.
But in the event, nothing happened at all the following day and the shooties were able to unload their cargoes unmolested by anybody. That too was a part of the overall plan, because it wasn’t necessarily going to be the only time an operation being conducted by VAJA needed to make use of the abilities of the smugglers to run the gauntlet of the Strait. And keeping their word on this occasion meant that they would be more likely to find the shooties willing to cooperate the next time they needed to use them.
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