‘Exactly,’ Charles Vernon said. ‘So for Iran to pull this off without being suspected, it would make perfect sense for them to use a disease-creating bacterium as their weapon of choice.’
‘Plague, for example?’ Simpson asked.
‘Possibly, but probably not. Or not if I was directing this scheme. I’d go for something that already has an established role in biological warfare, and that has the ability to form resistant spores that retain their infective capability for years. It’s also cheap, readily available – it’s found in soil all over the world – and very versatile. The spores can be produced quite easily and then turned into either a liquid or a powder, so they can be stored and can also be used in several different types of weapons and delivery systems.’
‘You’re talking about Anthrax?’ Richter suggested.
‘Exactly. Bacillus anthracis. That would be my weapon of choice.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Simpson said.
‘I thought you said the Iranians would pick a naturally occurring bacteria,’ Connolly said from his position by the door. ‘Isn’t Anthrax a manufactured weapon?’
‘Weaponised Anthrax is,’ Vernon agreed, ‘but it’s caused by a naturally-occurring bacterium that’s been around for a very long time. The name Bacillus anthracis is derived from the Greek word for coal, the same root as anthracite, because a sufferer classically develops a sore on their skin that has a really black centre, as black as coal, in fact. This is such a distinctive characteristic of the disease that we can trace its history back to the Bible because there’s a mention of it in Exodus. Most of the Greek and Roman writers described epidemics occurring in antiquity that were almost certainly caused by Anthrax. There were other epidemics in mediaeval times and in the period between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries it was fairly common in the southern part of Europe, killing both farm animals and human beings. It wasn’t until the second half of the nineteenth century that the bacterium was finally identified and a vaccine against it was produced in 1881 by Louis Pasteur. So the reality is that an outbreak of Anthrax would be unusual in today’s world, but certainly not unknown.’
‘So would the Iranians use weaponised Anthrax, or the naturally occurring bacterium?’ Simpson asked.
‘If they’re clever,’ Vernon replied, ‘they’d use the natural strain and just modify it so that it will only function if it detects the genetic markers inherent in the Jewish race. That way it would appear to be a natural mutation, albeit an unusual natural mutation, and not any kind of a weapon. And they’d probably tweak it so that no known vaccine would be effective against it.’
‘What about the delivery mechanism?’ Simpson went on. ‘If you’re right and they are using a mutated natural strain of Anthrax, could they still deliver it as a liquid or powder that would be completely soluble in water, assuming that that would still be the preferred delivery system?’
‘That’s what still makes sense to me and, yes, all forms of Anthrax can be stored and delivered as a liquid or a powder. The only other point, I suppose, is that we still don’t know exactly how they plan to introduce it into the Israeli water supply. This is not really my field, but I would assume that the security forces there would be unlikely to allow a group of non-Israelis to drive up to their main reservoir and start emptying drums of an unidentified liquid into the water. I suppose it’s even possible that their reservoir might be guarded, or at the very least there’ll probably be a fence around it. But even if for some reason the reservoir was unguarded and an Iranian team could gain access to it, just upending a few drums of contaminated liquid or powder into the water would be too dangerous for the people doing it, unless they were wearing full NBCD suits and face masks, and also too uncertain. The contaminant needs to be dispersed evenly to ensure the correct concentration.’
‘I had a thought about that,’ Richter said.
‘Let’s hear it,’ Simpson instructed.
‘The Iranians have spent about the last four years preparing for this,’ he said, ‘or at least that’s what we believe based upon the information we have. The one thing they wouldn’t leave to chance would be the delivery mechanism. They must have worked out a way of getting the bioweapon into the water supply without anyone being any the wiser. Realistically, that would have been one of the first things they did because otherwise there’d be no point in developing the bioweapon. Building the thing and then deciding how to deploy it would be completely arse backwards.’
‘So how do you think they intend to deploy it?’ Simpson demanded.
‘As far as I can see, there’s only one method that could possibly work, given the restrictions and parameters they have to be operating under.’
And for the next three minutes, Richter described the method, the only method that made sense to him, that would permit the introduction of a lethal bioweapon into the Israeli water supply without anyone having the faintest idea what was going on. In fact, better than that, the idea he had formulated would mean that the Iranians would have nothing to do with the pollution of the water system at all, because the Israelis would be doing it for them.
Chapter 50
Hammersmith, London
Thursday
When Richter stopped talking, there was a brief silence in the conference room as the men there mentally probed and prodded at his suggestion to try to tease out any flaws in his logic. It was Simpson who spoke first.
‘That’s fucking devious and fucking clever,’ he said, ‘and it makes perfect sense. If they haven’t done exactly that, then I’d be prepared to lay money that they’ve done something very similar. So what we need now is as much information as our cousins across the Pond can provide us about Zahedan.’
There was a communications panel built into the conference table in front of where Simpson was sitting, and he flicked a couple of switches on it and depressed a button. Nothing apparently happened.
‘How do you work this fucking thing?’ he muttered.
‘We’re already online here at the embassy,’ a disembodied but clearly American voice said. ‘As agreed, we’re locked down in a secure facility, and we’ve been monitoring your discussion. You’ve got the Chief of Station at this end – that’s me, Richard, in case you don’t recognise my voice over the scrambler – plus four Company reps including Jack Jones listening in.’
That was a slight surprise to Richter who had assumed that ‘Jack Jones’ was a very obvious alias and that the man they’d met was actually called Clint Jabotinsky or something else equally unlikely.
‘We really hope you’re wrong about this,’ the American voice continued, ‘but we can’t find any holes in the logic and what you’re suggesting does seem to fit the available facts, so for the moment we’re going to have to run with it. We also agree that we really don’t want to let the Israelis in on any part of this, at least for the moment. But if we can’t sort it between us, then obviously we’re going to have to call Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and make sure the right people there know what’s going on, and hope we can persuade them not to start nuking everything in sight.
‘What you need from us, I guess, is as much satellite imagery as we can lay our hands on, because what we haven’t got for fairly obvious reasons is boots on the ground anywhere near this Zahedan place. No HUMINT at all, basically, and no chance of getting any real soon. The only thing we can bring to the table right now is technical intelligence.’
‘Thanks, Bill,’ Simpson said. He knew William Bennett, the London CIA Chief of Station, on both a personal and a professional basis. ‘There’s no doubt we’re going to need that as well.’
He selected a different button on the communications panel.
‘Anything from you, Cheltenham? Anything in your intercepts from that part of the world that might help us?’
A new voice responded immediately.
‘Nothing specific so far. The traffic volume from that region isn’t showing any spikes, and none of our filters have picked up anything that might appear to be r
elevant. We’ve already plugged the name Zahedan into the matrix as well as other appropriate search terms and our analysts will flag up anything Echelon pulls out of the ether.’
A light began flashing on the console in front of Simpson, and he held up his hand before pressing another button.
‘Wait one, Cheltenham,’ he said. ‘Go ahead, Legoland.’
‘This is Charles Lucas at Vauxhall Cross. We would prefer it if you referred to us as Vauxhall Cross or just SIS or even Six,’ a clearly upper-crust and moderately irritated sounding voice stated from the speaker system. ‘We find the term Legoland somewhat demeaning.’
‘It’s just a name,’ Simpson said, ‘and if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined. Do you have anything for us, or did you just interrupt to try to start an argument?’
‘We might have something,’ Lucas said, still sounding irritated, ‘but not directly to do with Iran or Zahedan. We have an undeclared low-level asset in Khasab.’
‘Where?’
‘Khasab. It’s a small port town located on the Musandam Peninsula in an exclave of Oman. The location is important because it lies just south of one of the narrowest parts of the Strait of Hormuz, and our asset is tasked with sampling, rather than continuously monitoring, the tanker traffic through the Strait. He is also tasked with advising us of anything unusual that he witnesses in the area. Khasab itself is of interest because it’s one end of a smuggling route between Oman and Iran. Iranian smugglers run open boats between Bandar Abbas and Khasab. They bring live sheep and goats down to Khasab and mainly take cigarettes and high-value electronic goods from Oman north to Iran. It’s a regular route for the smugglers, who are called shooties, though I don’t know why.’
‘There’s a point in here somewhere, is there?’ Simpson asked.
‘There is,’ Lucas snapped. ‘In his last report our asset stated that on one of the overnight smuggling runs out of Bandar Abbas several of the boats were not carrying livestock but instead had a cargo consisting only of steel drums, and not the sort they play in the Caribbean. He watched what happened during the day and reported that in all about sixty to eighty drums – he wasn’t watching the entire time – each with an estimated capacity of about fifty gallons were unloaded in the harbour from the smugglers’ boats and stacked in one place. Each drum took three or four men to lift and manoeuvre, so clearly they were filled with something. He also reported that the shooties appeared to defer to one man who arrived on the boat that made the first delivery of the drums and he remained in the harbour until they were all unloaded. He appeared to be checking each drum for damage before he allowed the shooties to leave that part of the harbour to go and load whatever goods they were taking on the northbound run.’
‘That could be the link we’re looking for, Vauxhall Cross,’ Simpson said, the tone of his voice and his manner clearly having changed.
‘Was anything written on the drums?’ Vernon asked, raising his hand to attract Simpson’s attention.
‘Just a moment,’ Lucas said, apparently checking a paper or electronic file for the information. ‘Yes. Just one word: Zeolite. Does that help?’
Vernon nodded.
‘That really confirms it,’ he said, ‘because that’s pretty much the last piece of the puzzle, at least in terms of the theory, the overall plot. And it means that Richter here was spot on. We now know exactly how they intended to deploy the bioweapon.’
‘Right,’ Simpson said briskly. ‘That changes our focus. Bill, forget about identifying trucks leaving the laboratory in Zahedan, because now we know where they would have been going: straight down to Bandar Abbas to be loaded onto the boats used by the smugglers. At least we don’t have to bother about trying to trace them through the airport, which was always going to be bloody tricky if they’d opted for that route out of the country. Can you pull whatever Keyhole pics you’ve got of Khasab so we can find out where they go from that port? And keep looking at the building in Zahedan so we can try to confirm that it was the source if the weapon.’
‘We’re already on it.’
‘Anything further from your asset in Khasab, Six? Can you task him specifically or is it a one-way street?’
‘No, we can message him, but I can’t tell you how long he’ll take to respond because he normally only contacts us once a week, just with a summary using a draft message on a web-based email account. The usual method for support agents, really. I’ll ask the question, but that’s all we can do. Because his tasking is really very low level and low priority stuff we have no emergency contact routines in place.’
‘Did the asset mention any other people in Khasab taking an interest in these drums?’ Richter asked.
‘There’s nothing in the reports,’ Lucas replied, ‘apart from the mention of that one man, who was presumably an Iranian official of some kind, most probably a senior officer in VAJA, there to make sure that the drums were undamaged.’
‘I’m just kind of thinking aloud,’ Richter said, ‘but the only reason why those drums would have been shipped to Khasab is for them to be loaded onto a cargo vessel, but not one of Iranian registry. Smuggling the drums from Bandar Abbas to Khasab sanitised their origin, but this is the end of a four-year operation. I don’t believe that the Iranians, or rather VAJA, would just load the drums onto a ship with a note saying please deliver to Haifa or whatever, and hope for the best. They would have sent a bunch of men to accompany the load, probably all the way to the destination, to make sure everything worked as expected. And I would have thought the obvious way to do that would be to land their people at Khasab using the smugglers’ boats to transport them.’
‘Again,’ Lucas said, ‘I’ll ask the question but I don’t know when I’ll get an answer.’
‘Yes, Bill?’ Simpson said, in answer to another flashing light on the communications console in front of him.
‘This is just a quick and dirty extract of the stuff we pulled out of Keyhole,’ William Bennett said from the secure briefing room at the American Embassy. ‘If your techies and our techies are on the same page, you should see a picture any time now. This is probably the clearest image in the sequence for our purposes.’
As he finished the sentence, the picture being displayed on the screen at the end of the room changed. The new image was headed at top and bottom with the word Secret in red block capitals and with a kind of data panel off to one side which gave the identification of the satellite and all the other relevant information, including the grid reference of the centre of the image, the height of the satellite when the picture was taken and the date and time. The picture showed an obvious harbour scene, with buildings of various shapes and sizes surrounding the water. The three jetties used by the shooties were clearly visible, as were numerous small boats either alongside or in the waters nearby. Just to the west of the jetties and alongside the main part of the harbour, close to where a couple of police patrol boats were moored and where a ferry was secured stern-on and either loading or unloading, was the unmistakable shape of a small cargo vessel.
To Richter, it looked like a typical coaster, the kind of workaday ship that plied its essential trade along the coastlines of almost every country in the world, nipping in and out of harbours that were too small to handle a larger vessel. They were the lifelines of so many small and scattered communities, delivering essential supplies and collecting goods and products for export.
This particular ship was clearly being loaded or unloaded, the jib of its onboard crane casting a shadow over the deck: the image was a moment frozen in time and the load could have been going in either direction.
‘It’s being loaded,’ Bennett supplied, answering the question Richter hadn’t asked but was thinking about raising. ‘The next two images in the sequence confirm that. And the load appears to be a wooden pallet or frame with either four or eight steel drums on it. The bird is right overhead, so we don’t have the angle to tell exactly how many.’
‘Can we confirm those are the same steel dru
ms that the asset worked by Six saw being unloaded from the open boats?’ Simpson asked.
‘Not with complete certainty, no,’ Bennett replied, ‘but none of the other shots the Keyhole took of the harbour over the last week or so show any drums at all, so it’s a reasonable guess. It’s also relevant that when the drums had been unloaded from the smugglers’ boats they were stacked behind the three jetties to the east of where the ship is positioned, but in these images they’ve clearly been moved to the main part of the harbour, right beside the ship. We’ve got analysts here and back in the States going over the material right now, but unless we’ve missed something fairly major – like an entirely different set of drums that we never saw being delivered – those are the cargo we’re interested in.’
And that really only left one question that needed answering, and Simpson asked it.
‘Have you got a name for the ship?’
‘No, but we don’t really need it,’ Bennett replied. ‘We know what it looks like from orbit because of the deck cargo, and we should have no trouble tracking it as soon as it leaves the harbour. The weather shouldn’t be a problem in that part of the world, and I’ll make sure my people keep you guys posted on where it is and what it’s doing. Our birds are good, and the resolution of the cameras is pretty much state-of-the-art and close to the theoretical optimum, but we can’t read something as small as the name of a ship.’
There are a lot of misconceptions about the efficiency and abilities of the so-called spy satellites, based mainly on an ignorance of basic optics. To put that into perspective, a spy satellite photographing a street might be able, at best, to identify a make or model of car if the vehicle is sufficiently distinctive in its shape, but reading the car’s number plate or identifying the driver or a passing pedestrian is now, and forever will be, impossible unless someone can find a way of bypassing the laws of physics, and that doesn’t seem particularly likely.
‘Anybody got any questions?’ Simpson asked, glancing around the table.
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