Bioweapon

by James Barrington

  One down, two to go.

  He picked up the man’s weapon – a nine-millimetre Browning Hi-Power – and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers.

  Richter glanced back towards the Peugeot. Moore was just opening the rear door and using his left hand to manhandle Vernon inside the vehicle, his head turning constantly from side to side, looking for threats, his pistol held ready.

  For a brief few seconds, Richter wondered if they had time to just get in the car and go, before the other two men from the Vauxhall turned up to spoil the party. He’d actually taken a couple of fast paces towards Moore and the Peugeot when there was a sudden shout from behind him and an instant later the unmistakable yammering of an unsuppressed fully automatic weapon shattered the silence of the street.

  Chapter 39

  Cambrils, Spain

  Wednesday

  Semi­automatic pistols are rarely accurate beyond about twenty yards because the operating mechanism normally demands that the barrel is not rigidly attached to the frame of the weapon. And the slide which carries the sights – the thing you use to aim the weapon – is not attached to the barrel at all. There are exceptions, of course, the two most obvious examples being the German Luger and Mauser, both of which have fixed barrels. Revolvers, where the barrel is an integral part of the frame, are invariably more accurate weapons, but of necessity have a slower rate of fire and a much smaller magazine capacity, typically six or eight rounds as opposed to the fifteen or sixteen of most semi­automatic weapons.

  The problem of accuracy is compounded in sub­machine guns, which can almost be considered to be fully automatic versions of semi­automatic pistols, but with much larger magazines. And they have another problem was well. With a pistol, when the shooter fires a round he brings the weapon back to the aim, which usually means lowering it because the recoil causes the weapon to rise, before he fires again. The moment the first round is fired from a sub­machine gun, the mechanism is already busy ejecting the fired cartridge case, loading the next round and then firing it. And every time the weapon fires, the recoil kicks the barrel a little bit higher, almost no matter what the shooter does.

  The moment Richter heard the man with the Škorpion opening up, he knew the safest place to be was low down or actually on the ground, and preferably behind something large and metallic, like the heavy steel blade of a bulldozer, for example.

  There was no bulldozer or anything like it in that street in Cambrils, but there was the Vauxhall that the three men had been driving. In the absence of any better ideas or any other places to seek refuge, and as a stream of nine-millimetre bullets slammed into the tarmac road surface and the walls of the properties on the other side of the street, Richter dived down behind the rear of the vehicle.

  He knew perfectly well that the thin metal of the car’s body would offer almost exactly the same degree of protection against a bullet as a sheet of wet cardboard, but right then he was out of options. And although bullets don’t bounce off cars as so many people seem to think but actually go right through them, the engine and other heavy components under the bonnet would deflect or stop most pistol bullets. As would, perhaps surprisingly, the brake, wheel and tyre assemblies. At least for one shot.

  As Richter crouched in the illusory shelter offered by the rear quarter of the Vauxhall, he realised something that didn’t make sense. He wasn’t Charles Vernon, so why had the man with the sub­machine gun opened fire at him? Unless he’d seen the Glock in Richter’s hand and guessed, entirely correctly as it happened, that he had had something to do with Vernon no longer being visible on the street. Or maybe he’d tripped over the man Richter had felled at the mouth of the alleyway and put two and two together.

  But that was kind of academic, and he had other things on his mind, like what the gunman a few feet away from him was going to do next. And that question was answered immediately, or at least partially answered, when the man stopped shooting.

  That proved that either he knew his business, and that continuing to fire the weapon was pointless, the muzzle now probably pointing into the sky and the bullets only being dangerous to low-flying birds. Or that his weapon was out of ammunition – though he didn’t think he’d heard a full magazine fired – or had jammed.

  Richter risked a quick glance towards the parked Peugeot but couldn’t see the American. Or Vernon, come to that. All the doors were shut and there was no sign of anyone inside or near the vehicle.

  Then he heard cautious footsteps from the other side of the car he was hiding behind. It sounded as if the man was moving towards him.

  And all Richter could do was keep his head down and wait for him to appear, and then hope he could shoot him first before he got ventilated. He listened intently, trying to work out what the other man was doing, and looked under the Vauxhall, trying to check the man’s position.

  Then he heard a brief command, the sound of movement stopped, the feet reversed direction, back towards the alleyways, and two voices spoke urgently from nearby, conversing in what sounded to him like Arabic. Obviously the third man of the trio had made it out of the alleyway, and that meant Richter was now facing two – presumably both armed – assassins.

  Vernon had vanished, and that should have confused the two men.

  Richter guessed they would probably want him alive, so they could find out what he knew about the professor’s disappearance, and that might just give him an edge. Or at least he hoped that they wouldn’t shoot him out of hand. And he hadn’t fired his pistol yet, so he guessed it was just possible that they might not know that he was armed.

  Then he heard the footsteps again, this time two sets and moving in two different directions. They had to be approaching him around the car, one around the front, the other from the back. He knew he couldn’t take them both if he let them do that. So he decided not to.

  Richter glanced under the car once more. He could now see two pairs of feet clad in trainers and watched as one pair started walking slowly towards the back of the car.

  He moved a couple of feet to the driver’s side door, reached up and smashed the butt of the Glock hard against the side window, which shattered, a cascade of glass falling inside the car. He stood up in a crouch and peered through the width of the vehicle. He saw one of the men right beside the open front passenger’s door, frozen in place by the noise of the shattering glass and perhaps by the sight of the Glock pointing at him. He was bringing his sub­machine gun swinging around, trying to aim it at him. Richter didn’t hesitate, just fractionally altered his aim and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet took the man in the stomach and he lurched backwards with a howl of pain, his weapon tumbling to the ground as he fell.

  Richter ducked back down and whirled round, shifting his point of aim as he looked for the remaining assassin. The third man. The man who had to be somewhere near the front of the car.

  But even as he moved the Glock towards the threat, he knew he was too late.

  The third man, his swarthy complexion and black hair clearly visible in the early evening light, was standing beside the front of the car and staring straight at him over the sights of an automatic pistol. It looked to Richter like another Browning Hi-Power. Not that the identity of the weapon made the slightest difference.

  Time seemed to slow down, his right arm moving as if through water. Too slow. Far too slow. He could actually see the slight whitening of the man’s forefinger as he increased the pressure on the trigger. Richter was less than a second away from death. And he knew it.

  And then he heard the shot. Followed immediately by a second shot.

  At the same instant, and while he was still trying to aim his own weapon, he flung himself sideways, into the road. A move of desperation, certainly. As he rolled across the tarmac, he pulled the trigger of the Glock twice. That was more, as the expression goes, in hope than expectation of actually hitting anything.

  But when he stopped and focused on the scene, what he saw didn’t make sense. He knew he ha
dn’t been hit, but the third man, the last of the trio of assassins, was falling backwards, the Browning dropping from his hand.

  For a couple of seconds, and against all the odds, Richter assumed that one of his two hasty shots must have hit him, while the assassin’s own rounds had somehow missed. But at point-blank range – less than five feet – that was a nonsense.

  ‘You okay?’ Richard Moore asked, crouching down beside him.

  Richter nodded and scrambled to his feet.

  ‘He didn’t get a shot off,’ Moore said, ‘but it was fucking close. He was partly hidden behind the car and I had to open the angle before I could get a couple of clear shots at him.’

  ‘Thanks. I mean, really. Thanks. When I heard those shots I figured the next person I was going to see would be Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates holding a sodding great long list giving all the reasons why I should be heading the other way.’

  Richter looked up and down the street. There was nobody in sight, but that state of affairs was going to change really fast. Gunshots, and particularly shots from an automatic weapon, in a small and usually quiet upmarket seaside town like Cambrils were going to start attracting a crowd any second, not to mention every Guardia Civil officer within about twenty miles, all baying for blood.

  ‘Where’s Vernon?’

  ‘In the back of the car, lying down in the foot well. Or at least, that’s where I put him.’

  ‘Just check that he’s still there,’ Richter said, ‘because we need to be somewhere else like ten minutes ago.’

  While Moore jogged back the few yards to the parked Peugeot, Richter checked the three fallen assassins. The one Moore had shot was dead, two bullet holes in the upper part of his torso, at least one of which must have torn through his heart. A classic double-tap. He had been dead before he even hit the ground. He picked up the man’s Browning pistol, quickly searched the body and removed a Syrian passport and a spare magazine for the Hi-Power.

  The man he’d clotheslined at the end of the alleyway hadn’t moved, and Richter guessed he was dead but there was no particular point in checking. Again, he found a spare magazine for the Browning and another Syrian passport in his jacket. The third man was alive and moaning, both hands clutching his stomach where Richter’s bullet had taken him down. He was no further threat, and unlike the three Syrians, Richter wasn’t in the business of acting as a killer, except in self-defence, so he did nothing to him apart from take his pistol – another Hi-Power – his passport and two magazines, one for the Browning and the other for the Škorpion, which he also picked up.

  Then he started heading for the Peugeot but stopped and ran back to the Vauxhall. He checked the three men again and recovered three mobile phones and their wallets, which Richter guessed might prove useful in working out who the men were and who they had been working for. Then he ran over to the Peugeot.

  Moore already had the engine running when Richter pulled open the driver’s door and passed him what amounted to a small armoury. Then he dropped into the seat, put the car into gear and drove straight to the end of the road, where he turned right. In the distance, he could already hear the sound of sirens, which meant somebody had blown the whistle on the shooting, so what they had to do now was get out of Cambrils as quickly as they could.

  Moore checked that each of the weapons had the safety catch engaged, then placed them in the footwell in front of him, along with the magazines and the passports Richter had picked up.

  ‘Syrians, eh?’ he said, opening one and flicking through the pages. ‘I figured they looked Middle Eastern, but I was kind of expecting them to be Iraqi.’

  ‘They might be,’ Richter replied, concentrating on getting the car moving as quickly as he could whilst still keeping within the speed limit and doing nothing to attract attention to the vehicle. ‘Just because they’re carrying Syrian passports, that doesn’t mean they’re the real thing. We could be looking at three decent forgeries. Or not,’ he added.

  Moore turned his attention to the satnav and suggested a route to get them away from the scene of the shooting as quickly as possible and down to the seafront near the hotel, where TJ Masters would hopefully be waiting for them.

  ‘You okay in the back, Prof?’ Moore asked, turning round.

  Vernon looked almost entirely unlike the photograph that had been supplied to Richter. Without the beard, he looked a few years younger and his white hair was now an unconvincing shade of bottle brown. He sat on the rear seat of the car and peered uncertainly at the American, leaning forward slightly.

  ‘Who are you people?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re the good guys, I think,’ Moore replied. ‘The guy driving the car is Paul Richter and he’s from some secret squirrel outfit based in London that I’ve never heard of. My name’s Richard Moore and I work in a big-assed building out at Langley in Virginia in the US of A.’

  ‘You mean you’re CIA?’

  ‘Got it in one. So you’re not just a pretty face.’

  ‘What orders were you given about me?’ Vernon asked.

  ‘To make sure we get you back to England safely,’ Richter said, shading the truth more than somewhat.

  Vernon nodded and sat back in the seat, appearing to relax. Then he leaned forward again and tapped Richter on the shoulder.

  ‘Who were those men?’ he demanded. ‘You said they were Syrian, didn’t you?’

  ‘They were carrying Syrian passports,’ Richter confirmed, ‘but as I said, that isn’t exactly proof positive of their identities.’

  ‘If they were,’ Vernon said slowly, ‘I wonder why they were trying to kill me?’

  Richter and Moore glanced at each other briefly, then Moore replied.

  ‘We’ve got no idea,’ he said. ‘But you do seem to have pissed off quite a lot of people over the past couple of weeks, so maybe they were just a hit team sent out here to silence you forever. What do you think?’

  Vernon nodded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I was expecting to attract attention. That was the whole idea. I was even expecting that somebody might come along and try and kill me. But I was also expecting that any assassin sent out here after me would be British.’

  For a couple of seconds, nobody spoke, then Richter half glanced over his shoulder before turning back to the road ahead.

  ‘I’m not going to pretend that the British government doesn’t occasionally decide that it would be better for the world as a whole if a particular person stopped breathing and then takes positive steps to bring about that state of affairs,’ he said, ‘but why were you expecting Britain to send a hitman after you? And if you were expecting that, why did you get in this car? Why didn’t you try and run away in the street back there? As you may have noticed, I’m British, so why didn’t you see me as a threat?’

  Vernon pointed at Moore.

  ‘You may be British,’ he said, ‘but he’s American, and that’s why I got in the car. I was hoping that what I was doing would attract attention on the other side of the Atlantic as well as in Europe. And I didn’t think that the British government would take out a contract on me: I understand that that is the correct expression. What I was anticipating was a rather more low-key assassination attempt, orchestrated probably by one man and for one very specific reason. I was hoping to be able to dodge a bullet – hopefully not literally – here in Spain and then get back to England and explain myself. Or, better still, just create a bit of a stir and then head home.’

  The conversation seemed to be heading in a direction that didn’t make too much sense to Richter.

  ‘If you were hoping to attract attention,’ he said, ‘you certainly managed it, but what I don’t understand is why. Why the advert on the Dark Web? Why the offer to make Sarin or VX or supply Anthrax some other nasty?’

  Vernon snorted.

  ‘I had hoped you’d have worked it out by now,’ he said sharply. ‘I needed publicity. And obviously I had no intention whatsoever of actually creating a chemical weapon or cultivati
ng a bioweapon.’

  That still didn’t make sense.

  ‘Why did you need publicity?’

  ‘Because of what I found while I was working at Dstl, at Porton Down. If I’d just tried to blow the whistle as an unknown scientist, nobody would have taken any notice. But when a renegade biochemist goes on the run and has to be chased down and hauled back to England, people will have to listen to what I have to say, and that might keep me alive for a lot longer than I had originally expected. And then I might be able to right a terrible wrong, or at least see the orchestrator of the foul scheme sent to jail.’

  Richter knew more about the case than Moore, but he still genuinely had no clue what Vernon was talking about.

  ‘And by the way,’ the professor added, ‘it took you a lot longer to find me than I had expected.’

  At that moment a dark-coloured saloon car emerged from a side street right behind the Peugeot, accelerated hard and moments later smashed into the rear off-side quarter of the French car, the driver intent on forcing it off the road.

  It obviously wasn’t just the three Syrians who seemed to have a terminal interest in Professor Charles Vernon.

  Chapter 40

  Cambrils, Spain

  Wednesday

  Very early in his employment at the Foreign Operations Executive, the nicely anonymous name of the covert-action section headed by Richard Simpson, a name that basically could mean more or less what anyone wanted it to mean in any particular circumstance, Richter had attended numerous training courses designed to better equip him to handle any situation in which he found himself. Or, as Simpson was wont to refer to it, ‘when he was handed the shitty end of the stick’. These included close-combat training, weapon handling and marksmanship courses, several painful sessions under the auspices of the Special Air Service at Hereford and in the colder and bleaker bits of the Welsh mountains, lock-picking, counter-surveillance, basic cryptography – very basic in Richter’s case, because he quickly realised, as did his instructors, that he had almost no aptitude for it – and several courses involving motor vehicles of various sorts.