Urgent calls had been made to Millbank and Vauxhall Cross to alert them of Vernon’s disappearance, and almost immediately watch orders had been issued at all ports and airports, and at St Pancras Station in London for Eurostar passengers, with instructions that if Vernon appeared he was to be detained and held incommunicado until he could be interviewed, along with anyone travelling with him.
At the same time, the physical search had started from first principles. Although there had been no sign of a struggle or anything else suspicious at Vernon’s house, a forensic search team from Millbank was assembled and ordered to enter the property and do a detailed search of the house, treating it as a crime scene.
A little under three hours after the two security staff from Porton Down had pulled the front door closed at Charles Vernon’s detached and deserted property, a couple of unmarked white Ford Transit vans arrived and parked on the gravel in front of his house. Six men climbed out and immediately began their preparations.
Knowing that the house had already been entered and checked by the people looking for Vernon, they knew that a detailed forensic examination would probably be pointless and the results confused, at best, but they followed the standard procedure anyway, pulling on white disposable hooded suits, bootees over their shoes, and latex gloves. One of them used a lock-pick gun on the front door’s Yale: it opened immediately and the men stepped inside, each carrying a box containing the specialised tools and equipment he would use in his examination.
They stood in the hall for a moment, getting their bearings, and then separated, each man proceeding to the area he had already been assigned. They were not hopeful of finding much of interest – if Vernon had done a runner, he was hardly likely to have left an incriminating little note somewhere saying ‘Meet Abdul and Ali at Barcelona Sants Station on Tuesday 14th at 13:30 with formula for sarin’ or something – but they did want to seize his computer, just in case there were any relevant emails on it, and his mobile phone if they could find it for the same reason. And on the mobile there might be SMS and WhatsApp messages as well.
Finding the computer was the easy bit.
Vernon very obviously slept in the master bedroom, where there was a super king-sized bed and an en suite shower room, and they knew that because it was the only bedroom in which they found any sign of occupation, and not much of that. On the bedside table were a couple of textbooks dealing with – presumably – chemical or biochemical research, but as the team from Millbank didn’t even understand the titles of the books, far less the contents, they couldn’t be entirely sure about that tentative deduction. They checked for objects hidden between the pages and scanned each book for any kind of handwritten notes, found nothing and left them where they were.
They had more success in the smallest bedroom on that floor, which Vernon had turned into an office. Against one wall was a wide desk made of wood and metal that had clearly been purchased at IKEA because it still had labels on the steel uprights. In front of it was a newish comfortable-looking chair with a swivel base and a black leather seat and back. On the wall next to the desk was a tall bookcase with half a dozen shelves, most occupied by textbooks similar to the ones they’d already found by the bed, a stack of technical journals going back about a decade and, perhaps surprisingly, a couple of dozen novels, mainly westerns and modern spy thrillers.
On the desk was Vernon’s personal laptop, a high specification Dell machine with a seventeen-inch screen, illuminated keyboard and a two terabyte hard drive. The computer was open but the screen was blank and when one of the search team rested his finger on the touchpad the screen came to life, but immediately displayed a prompt asking for the input of a password. That was unfortunate, but not unexpected. Almost everyone these days had at least a rudimentary form of security incorporated into their personal computers, and the IT section back at Millbank had all sorts of interesting gadgets and gizmos and software programs on USB sticks that could be used to bypass it or otherwise allow access to a hard drive without knowledge of the correct password. There was a leather computer case on the floor beside the desk, so they closed the lid on the laptop and slid it into the case along with its charging lead for examination later.
Also on the desk was a small plastic set of drawers, obviously designed to hold the kind of oddments that accumulate in any office – staples, paperclips, pens, pencils and the like – and when they examined those they found half a dozen high capacity external USB3 hard disks and about the same number of thumb drives of different capacities. It looked as if Vernon had been in the habit of backing up his work, probably making multiple copies of important documents on the external drives to provide a measure of redundancy. That, at least, was what they were hoping, because people who protected their computer with a password didn’t always apply the same level of security to their backup disks. The MI5 team removed every drive and memory stick they could find to carry them out to their van.
The two members of the team detailed to search the study or office where Vernon had worked were on their way down the stairs carrying the last of the computer peripherals when there was a sudden shout of alarm from the kitchen.
Immediately, they left what they were carrying on the floor of the hall and ran into the kitchen to find out what had caused their colleague to react so volubly.
They stepped inside the room at the back of the house and just stared towards the far end, where three other members of the team were standing in a loose half-circle around the open door of a large refrigerator.
‘Oh, shit,’ one of them muttered. ‘So what do we do now?’
More or less in the centre of the middle shelf of the refrigerator was a biggish white plastic box bearing the wholly unmistakable spiky red symbols that warned of a biohazard.
It looked as if Charles Vernon might have been bringing some of his work home with him, and that put an entirely different spin on the situation.