The Ford Richter was driving was a lot more recent than the one owned by Charles Vernon and was equipped with a built-in satellite navigation system. In the computer world there’s an old expression – garbage in: garbage out – meaning that the accuracy of the results generated by any computer or computer program are entirely dependent upon the accuracy of the information provided. A satnav is essentially a small computer designed for one specific task, and Richter didn’t entirely trust the Ford’s unit because he had no idea , or even if, the maps had been updated.
So he’d fitted a sucker mount to the windscreen beside the wheel and into that he’d clipped his Blackview mobile phone, plugging the charging lead into the cigarette lighter. All Simpson’s field agents, as he was wont to refer to them in official correspondence, were now issued with that model, because it was essentially indestructible: you could immerse it in water or drive a truck over it and it would still work. It was even robust enough to be used as a weapon if nothing else was available. As well as the usual apps, which included offline maps of the entire world down to street level and three separate navigation systems, all of which were completely up-to-date, it had encryption and decryption programs and a variety of other useful and highly specialised apps that weren’t to be found in any of the publicly-accessible app stores.
To find his way to Porton Down, all Richter needed was a satnav, and he’d programmed both the dashboard unit and the Waze navigation app on his Blackview with the postcode he’d been given – SP4 0JQ – and was switching his attention between the phone and the built-in unit as he drove south-west from London. To his slight surprise, the routes they were suggesting were identical.
As he got nearer his destination, he began seeing indications that he was in the right place. On a gate leading into woodland, and another one opening into a field, identical bold notices proclaimed: ‘Keep out. MoD property’ and ‘Danger. Hazardous area’ accompanied by a visual sign forbidding pedestrian access. Richter knew the whole complex was contained within a Danger Area, a non-specific military designation that could mean anything from a live firing range to a location over which aircraft may not fly for a variety of reasons.
In the case of Porton Down, the reason was obvious. Britain used to have an offensive chemical and biological weapons programme but this was shut down in the 1950s as international opinions changed. But just because Britain no longer produced such weapons had almost no effect upon the rest of the world. It was still vitally important for developments in this field to be studied and analysed, and for effective countermeasures against weapons of this type to be developed. And, inevitably, if you are trying to produce an antidote for Soman, for example, it is absolutely necessary for small stocks of Soman to be produced and stored.
And that was the job of the Dstl at Porton Down. Among the other advances in the field that the unit had produced were Nerve Agent Pretreatment Set tablets, commonly known as NAPS, and which protected against Sarin, VX and other nerve agents. The Dstl also developed the ComboPen, the chemical cocktail of atropine, Avizafone and P2S to mitigate the effects of nerve agent poisoning, and Doxycycline and Ciprofloxacin antibiotics to counter biological weapons including Anthrax and the plague.
But what nobody wanted was an out-of-control aircraft smashing into the laboratories at Porton Down and releasing who knows what types of submicroscopic killers into the atmosphere, and that was why the Danger Area had been created.
At the entrance to the site Richter passed another sign that stated he was on the Porton Down Science Campus and confirmed that it was the location of the Dstl, and minutes later he drew up at the police post that guarded the entrance to the unit, complete with drop-down barriers and a small guardhouse. The police, Richter noticed immediately, were armed, and he saw an armed patrol on the inside of the boundary fence, along with another black-clad officer being led at speed along the inside of the fence by a hefty-looking and dark-coloured Alsatian dog. The dog definitely appeared to be in charge.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ the officer began, leaning down to peer at a Richter through the open window. ‘May I ask your business here?’
‘My name’s Richter, and I should be expected. I’m here to see a Mr William Poulson.’
‘Is that Commander Richter from the Ministry of Defence?’
‘More or less, yes,’ Richter replied, proffering the ID card the Hammersmith admin section had provided for him.
‘What’s your service number, sir?’ the police officer said, studying the card and a piece of paper affixed to a clipboard.
‘Naval officers don’t have service numbers,’ Richter replied. ‘My official number is C021426K.’
‘Thank you. Drive straight ahead up the hill. You’ll see a single-storey building on the right-hand side. There are a few visitor parking slots there. Then just walk in through the main entrance. I’ll call ahead to tell them you’re on your way.’
Richter nodded his thanks, took back the ID card and followed the directions he’d been given. He found two vacant parking places, slid the Ford into one of them and then walked over to the double doors on the front of the building. As he reached them, the right-hand door opened and a slightly dumpy middle-aged woman with a pleasant open face, her head surmounted by a tight nest of blonde curls, looked out at him.
‘Mr Richter? My name’s Margaret. Please follow me and I’ll take you to Mr Poulson’s office.’
Richter registered that the door had only a standard Yale-type lock, and none of the internal doors had anything more secure than what looked like basic three-lever mortice locks.
His guide noticed what he was looking at and smiled slightly.
‘This isn’t a high-security building,’ she said. ‘It’s just admin and offices. No bugs in here, and nothing worth stealing unless you collect old office furniture and even older computer equipment.’
‘I’m pleased to hear that. I seem to have left my AGR at home.’
Margaret shook her head.
‘I don’t think an anti-gas respirator would help you very much against some of the stuff we’ve got here,’ she replied. ‘Luckily it’s all kept under lock and key, and in a different building. And here we are,’ she added, opening a door at the end of the corridor and stepping back so he could precede her.
It was a largeish office with a line of upright chairs against one wall, presumably intended as a waiting area, with a modern desk topped with a flat-panel computer monitor and keyboard at one end, a swivel chair behind it. In the other side wall was a single door, and as Margaret closed the door to the corridor, the internal door swung open.
‘Mr Richter? I’m William Poulson, and I’m the Chief Executive here at Dstl. Welcome to Porton Down.’
He was a prosperous-looking fifty-something, wearing a light grey suit over a white shirt topped with a tie emblazoned with a crest or device that Richter didn’t recognise. It could have been the man’s former regiment or his golf club or just a random symbol: Richter wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter. He was a little under six feet tall, with a slim build, dark hair showing grey at the temples, clean-shaven and with pinkish, well-scrubbed regular features. He exuded an aura of competence and power, and reminded Richter inescapably of Richard Simpson, his boss. Poulson could well have been another former mandarin, or at least cast from the same mould, and he had no doubts that the man would be good at his job.
Poulson extended his hand, and Richter took it, noting that his skin was dry and that he had a firm, but not strong, grip.
‘Coffee?’
‘I never say no,’ Richter replied.
‘Good. Margaret, if you’d be so kind.’
Poulson turned away and led Richter into his own office. This was about twice the size of Margaret’s sanctum outside, a wide oak desk at one end, a small conference table positioned parallel to one of the long walls and surrounded by eight chairs, and with a low coffee table and four easy chairs on the other side of the room. Two large windows provided a moderately uninspiring view of the side of the adjacent building, an expanse of grass and, in the distance down a gentle grass-covered slope, a part of the boundary fence.
Poulson sat down in one of the easy chairs and gestured Richter to a seat on the opposite side of the coffee table.
‘Good journey?’ he asked, which Richter guessed was just the start of some polite small talk until the refreshments arrived.
Less than five minutes later, with a cafetière on the table between them, flanked by a plate of chocolate digestive biscuits and a milk jug and sugar bowl, Poulson got down to it.
‘You want to know about Vernon, obviously. D’you want me to give you an overview of the man first, and then you can ask whatever questions you decide are relevant?’
‘Yes, please,’ Richter said, ‘but before you do that, just tell me what you think has happened to him. You know him and I don’t, so do you think he’s done a runner?’
‘No, I don’t, or not in the sense that you mean it.’
Richter looked interested.
‘You need to explain that,’ he said.
Poulson appeared slightly uncomfortable.
‘The senior scientists we employ here at Porton Down are right at the top of their respective fields. They’ve never been measured, as far as I know, but probably most of them have IQs of around 140, meaning genius level. People with that sort of intelligence really do operate in a different way to most people, but they are often somewhat – err…’
Poulson appeared to be struggling to find the right word, so Richter tried to help him out. ‘Flaky?’ he suggested.
‘Yes, that probably covers it. They sometimes do things that make perfect sense to them at the time but which we ordinary mortals—’ he clearly didn’t consider Richter to have anything approaching a genius level IQ and had included him within the ranks of the common herd ‘—find inexplicable.’
‘You mean he might have had some kind of a brainstorm and decided that the best thing he could do was hop on a flight to France?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
Richter didn’t respond immediately. He had briefly wondered if Vernon was highly-strung and had flipped for some reason, but that didn’t begin to explain inconvenient facts like the way he had swapped his car’s number plates in Warminster. If he really had temporarily lost his marbles and wanted to leave the country, he could just have done nothing more than driven to Heathrow and booked a flight. So Poulson’s suggestion was certainly comforting, because if it was correct it would remove the twin spectres of defection and abduction from the situation, but it was almost certainly wrong.
‘That’s not the way we see it,’ he said, ‘but I’ll bear it in mind. So could you tell me what you know of Vernon, but only the short version. If there’s anything else I need to know, I’ll stop you.’
‘As you wish. Right, he got double first in chemistry and biochemistry, then a steady progression to a doctorate and then a professorship, and he’s been here at Porton Down for just over ten years. He’s not wealthy but because of his personal circumstances, which I assume you already know about, he’s quite well-off. He has no expensive habits or hobbies that we know of – and I can assure you that we would – and has always been dedicated to his work. I know it’s a cliché, but he really does live for the job he does. He’s apolitical and never even bothers to vote, as far as I’m aware, and holds no strong views outside of his chosen specialisation.’
‘What about within his specialisation?’
Poulson gave him a brief smile.
‘That’s a different matter. As I said, because of the work we do here we tend to attract the brightest and the best brains, or at least we try to, and in my experience extreme competence and ability is very often accompanied by an extreme professional ego. Egos the size of small planets, as my predecessor in this job used to say. People who would never even argue about any subject in normal conversation can virtually come to blows over a new biochemical theory or technique or even a questionable formula.’
‘Does that apply to Vernon?’ Richter asked.
‘Not as much as with certain other members of the staff here,’ Poulson said, ‘but he did have the occasional dispute with other scientists over some protocol or technique or other. You should know that I have very little to do with what goes on in the labs here, though obviously I’m aware of the programmes we’re running in broad terms. But I’m not a scientist and my function is administration. Having said that, I don’t think for a moment that his disappearance has got anything to do with his work here.’
‘I don’t know the man but I’m not sure I can agree with that,’ Richter said. ‘You’ve just told me that he lived for his work and had no real interests outside it. If that’s true – and I’m not disputing it for a moment – then what else could possibly have caused him to do what he did? What was the trigger?’
‘We still don’t actually know what he did,’ Poulson pointed out, ‘or do you know something that I don’t?’
Richter shrugged.
‘I doubt it. But if he genuinely was that committed to his profession and had nothing much happening in his life outside, surely it’s at least possible that something that took place here could have made him decide to run? I mean, that could have been the trigger, even if we don’t know why he flew to France or what he hoped to achieve by doing that.’
Poulson took a bite out of a dark chocolate digestive biscuit and dabbed his lips with a paper napkin before he replied.
‘What did you read at university, Mr Richter? I’m guessing it was nothing science-based.’
‘You’re right. It was classics,’ Richter said shortly, ‘and I can see where you’re going with that. I know that professional arguments very rarely escape outside the halls of academe, as it were, but we’re really stumbling around in the dark here. We still don’t know if Vernon left the country for some reason of his own or if he was abducted somehow – what little evidence we do have is oddly ambiguous – and I really need to find something, anything, that will point me in the right direction.’
‘You are quite certain he has left Britain, then? He didn’t buy a ticket but not get on the flight, I mean?’
Richter nodded.
‘He bought a ticket to Toulouse and we have security camera images proving he went airside at Heathrow. If he hadn’t then got on the aircraft the airline would know about it and so would we. What we don’t know, of course, is where he might be now. If you’re right and he had some sort of brainstorm and just fancied taking a continental holiday without bothering to tell anyone, maybe he’s out there right now sunning himself on the French Riviera or somewhere and not giving a thought to what might be happening back here. But our worry is that he might not. He could be sitting in a tent in Syria with a couple of guys from ISIS or some other clump of lethal loonies and telling them how to make Sarin or VX gas or ricin or something.’
‘I see the dilemma,’ Poulson said, ‘but I do not believe Vernon would be prepared to disclose any information of that sort, even under duress.’
‘I think if the guy with the pliers in his hand is just about to pull out his second fingernail, it’s amazing what Vernon or anyone else would do or say to make him stop.’
Poulson, to give him his due, blanched slightly at Richter’s bald description.
‘You don’t paint an attractive picture,’ he said.
‘I don’t mean to, but if Vernon has been snatched, we have to assume that it’s for what he knows, not because of who he is. So if that scenario is correct, could he provide enough information to allow a group of terrorists to build a bioweapon or a chemical WMD?’
‘The short answer to that is yes,’ Poulson replied. ‘Our work here today is purely defensive and research-based, but precisely because of our remit we are inevitably involved in the manufacture of lethal chemicals and the cultivation of biological agents. You need to know the chemical make-up and manufacturing process to fully understand any substance, because if you don’t you really can’t devise a cure or treatment to combat it. As a result, we both make and hold stocks – very limited stocks, obviously – of a wide variety of such substances here. So to answer your question, just like all the other senior scientists at Porton Down, Charles Vernon certainly knows how to create such agents.
‘But,’ Poulson raised a finger, ‘none of these chemicals are the kind of things somebody can knock up in their garage. You’d need extensive laboratory experience and facilities to do it.’
Richter looked unconvinced.
‘It’s amazing what some groups can achieve if they’re sufficiently motivated,’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard of Aum Shinryko? Shoko Asahara’s glee club?’
‘Yes, of course. That was the doomsday cult that launched an attack in 1995 on the Tokyo subway using Sarin gas that they’d manufactured. It was far from a complete success as far as the sect was concerned.’
‘It still killed a dozen people and injured about another thousand,’ Richter said, ‘and the manufacturing plant that Aum Shinryko set up in Japan was assessed as being capable of producing thousands of kilograms of Sarin every year. And it wasn’t just Sarin. They also fabricated or cultivated phosgene, botulinus toxin, Anthrax and Hydrogen Cyanide. And they knocked up supplies of a substance I’m sure you’ve heard of: venomous agent X, better known as VX gas, which was developed right here at Porton Down in the 1950s.’
‘That was a long time ago, when the post-war world was a very different place,’ Poulson said. ‘As I said a few minutes ago, now we focus only on research programmes against natural pathogens and on defensive measures, developing counter-measures to poisonous substances. And of course we get involved in occasional odd jobs like the work we did to identify the causative agent in the recent Russian attack on the Skripals here in Salisbury.’
‘I do understand that, but the point I’m trying to make is that Aum Shinryko’s facilities might have been crude, but they still managed kill a lot of people using the various substances they manufactured. In fact, the biggest problem they had with all of them was the delivery mechanism. In the Tokyo subway attack they carried liquid Sarin in plastic bags onto the trains, surrounded by newspaper to conceal the contents, and the sect members who launched the attack simply used the sharpened points of umbrellas to puncture the bags to allow the Sarin to vaporise before they got off at the next station. If they’d had time-release aerosols to disperse the gas, it could have been a massacre and a catastrophe.
‘So despite not having the kind of facilities and experience you have here, they still managed to produce lethal chemicals and bioweapons, and that was nearly a quarter of a century ago. With modern materials and techniques, the vast information resources on the Internet and with the direction of somebody like Charles Vernon, a terrorist group could put together a bioweapon or poison gas that could wipe out half a city, maybe half a country. And that’s why Vernon’s got everybody worried.’
Poulson nodded slowly.
‘I take your point, Mr Richter.’
‘And the other obvious worry is not just what Vernon is carrying around inside his head. If he did leave the country voluntarily – and that’s a long way from being proven, obviously – is it possible that he also took a sample or two with him, just to establish his bona fides with whatever group he planned to approach?’
Even before Richter had finished speaking Poulson was already shaking his head.
‘I can absolutely set your mind at rest there,’ he said. ‘Our facilities here are second to none and completely secure. The laboratories where work is done on the most lethal natural pathogens – we also work on viruses and particularly filoviruses like Marburg and Ebola, trying to develop either a vaccine or a cure – and dangerous chemical agents all conform to BSL4 standards. That’s BioSafety Level 4 and that means a negative pressure environment in the laboratory so that air can never leak out, only in, airlocks for entry and exit, self-contained suits with independent breathing systems, HEPA filters, decontamination showers, high-temperature incinerators and all the rest of it. And, of course, all specimens and samples are rigorously controlled and accounted for. Anyone who tried to get out of one of the BSL4 suites with anything would be immediately detected. It simply couldn’t happen, no matter how cunning somebody was. And it’s also worth saying that Charles Vernon’s work was more theoretical than practical. Most of the people who go inside the labs are technicians and the younger scientists, so he really wouldn’t have had an opportunity even if he had wanted to do something like that.’
That door, at least, seemed to be firmly and securely closed. But Richter still needed to learn a lot more about Charles Vernon the man than the bland assurances Poulson had provided. He was starting to detect an undercurrent from the chief executive: the man clearly wanted the Vernon matter put to bed with the minimum amount of fuss possible. Having a man defect from Porton Down on his watch, as it were, wouldn’t do his career any good at all.
‘I accept that,’ Richter said, ‘but I still need to get more of a handle on Vernon. I’d like to speak with some of his colleagues, the people who spent most time working with him here.’
‘I expected you’d want to do that, and I’ve asked the two scientists who worked in the same section to be ready to come over here and talk to you.’
Poulson walked over to his desk, depressed a key on his telephone console and murmured something into the microphone.
Richter didn’t hear what he said because at that moment his mobile rang.
‘Richter.’
‘Where are you?’ Simpson asked.
‘Still at Porton Down. What’s happened?’
‘We have an ongoing NBCD incident.’
The acronym stood for Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defence, and whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t good news.
‘What? Where?’
‘Charles Vernon’s house in Warminster,’ Simpson replied. ‘The forensic search team from Five found a plastic box with bright red biohazard markings on it in his fridge.’
‘Oh, shit.’
‘Funnily enough, I think that’s what the bloke who found it said as well. We have a HazMat team en route. The Five people have closed up the house again, and the fridge door, obviously, and they’re waiting in the grounds, where they’ll be decontaminated as a precaution. Then we’ll get the box taken away and have whatever’s inside it analysed. You might want to see what the idiot in charge at Porton Down has got to say about it.’
‘Got it. I’ll call you back.’