Before Richter could speak to Poulson, the office door opened and two men walked inside. They were both dressed in smart but casual clothes and weren’t wearing the white lab coats that Richter had more or less expected. They also didn’t look much like the popular idea of a professor. Poulson introduced them as Walter Keele and Colin McCarthy. Keele was short, maybe five-eight or nine, with neatly combed black hair, dark eyes and something of a five o’clock shadow, while McCarthy had strangely similar facial features, but was about three inches taller and maybe four or five years older.
‘We’re not related, Mr Richter,’ McCarthy said, correctly interpreting Richter’s glance. ‘It just looks that way.’
The two scientists settled in the remaining couple of easy chairs and waited expectantly, looking at Richter with a kind of casual interest.
‘Before we start,’ Richter said to William Poulson, ‘I’ve just had an interesting conversation with my boss.’
‘You’ve found Vernon?’
‘Not yet, no. But a team from MI5 was sent to Vernon’s house to carry out a search, just to see if they could find anything that might indicate where he’s gone to or why he left.’
‘And did they?’ Poulson asked.
‘No, or not as far as I know. But they did find something interesting in Vernon’s fridge.’
He paused for a moment and glanced at Keele and McCarthy before looking back at Poulson.
‘You just spent a few minutes telling me that there’s no way Vernon could have taken any samples or bugs away from here because of all your security precautions. So have you any idea why there’s a biohazard box sitting in his fridge?’
The colour instantly drained from Poulson’s face, but Walter Keele’s reaction was entirely different. He nodded, then burst out laughing.
Richter stared at him.
‘What?’
‘I’m sure you’re an intelligent man, Mr Richter, so just think it through. Charles Vernon has apparently skipped the country, and your fear is that he’s trying to do some kind of a deal to work with a terrorist group? Or that he’s offering his services to concoct a chemical or biological weapon for the highest bidder? That’s the big worry, isn’t it? Something like that?’
Richter nodded, but didn’t respond.
‘And your people are frightened that he’s stolen something from one of the laboratories here to prove the access he had in his work or as a kind of proof of his abilities? A bug or pathogen to show to potential buyers?’
Richter nodded again.
‘Right,’ Keele said. ‘So if that’s the case, why is the box containing the bug still sitting in his fridge when we know he’s already left the country? Why didn’t he take it with him?’
Richter noticed that McCarthy was also smiling. He had the feeling he was the only person in the room who wasn’t getting the joke, because even Poulson was starting to grin. And the inherent contradiction in the situation Simpson had described was now perfectly obvious to him as well, and he was amazed that it hadn’t occurred to him until that moment.
‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I must be a bit slow today. So why is there a biohazard box sitting in Vernon’s fridge? Do you know?’
‘Of course we do. We work with him. Vernon always makes sandwiches for his lunch, and ever since he’s been working here he’s brought them in to the office in that box. It’s always been a bit of a joke between us. No doubt you’ve got a HazMat – Hazardous Materials – team heading for his house right now?’
Richter nodded once more.
‘Well, when they pry it open under controlled conditions in a BSL4 laboratory somewhere, it’ll either be empty or what they’ll find is the remaining half of the sandwich that he didn’t eat the last Friday he was here.’
‘Beef and horseradish sauce, if I remember rightly,’ McCarthy suggested. ‘Charles said he thought the horseradish was a bit fierce, so he left the final half. Mind you, that was a week ago, so by now I suppose it’s quite likely that some dangerous bugs might well have taken up residence in what’s left of his sarnie, so maybe the HazMat team is a good idea.’
‘Give me a minute,’ Richter said. ‘I need to make a call.’
Simpson was relieved though less than impressed when Richter told him the box that had spooked the Five team most probably held a week-old beef and horseradish sandwich, and said he’d pass the message on.
‘The trouble is,’ Simpson finished, ‘that this, scrambling the HazMat team, is a bit like a train. Once it’s moving it’s sodding difficult to stop. So they’ll probably go through with it all anyway. Still, the exercise will do them good.’
With that slight embarrassment out of the way, Richter asked the handful of questions he’d mentally prepared, and received no useful information of any sort in return. There had been discussions – not arguments, both were keen to point out – over their various works in progress, just as there were every day of the week.
‘What exactly were you discussing last week?’ Richter asked.
‘Mainly organophosphate acetylcholinesterase inhibitors,’ McCarthy said, with a wide smile.
‘If you mean variants of Novichok,’ Richter replied, ‘you could have just said so.’
McCarthy looked slightly crestfallen.
‘You know about Novichok? More than what’s been published in the newspapers, I mean?’
‘In my job I see classified briefing sheets and files every day, so I know more than the man in street, yes, but not much more in this case. I was never a hell of a lot of good at chemistry. What I do know is that calling it Novichok is a bit of a misnomer, because it’s been around for a long time, and the Russian name translates as “newcomer” or “new boy,” something like that, but according to our sources development started as long ago as 1971. And we also know that in 1995 it was used to kill a Russian banker named Ivan Kivelidi and a woman called Zara Ismailova who was his secretary, on the orders of an unidentified senior Russian state official. But I thought you’d identified the nerve agent used on the Skripals, so why were you still working on it?’
‘We have, yes,’ Keele said, joining the discussion, ‘but it’s not quite as easy as analysing a sample of the agent and just saying it’s Novichok. Have you ever heard of a Russian development programme called FOLIANT?’
‘I know the name, that’s all.’
‘Right. FOLIANT was a kind of Russian umbrella project intended to develop chemical weapons in the 1970s and 1980s, and Novichok came out of that. It’s a binary agent, meaning that it’s formed by combining two fairly benign chemical compounds together before it’s used, and it was designed to penetrate standard protective clothing like NBCD suits and also be undetectable by most chemical detectors. We still don’t know exactly which flavour of Novichok the Russians used in this attack. Under FOLIANT, they reportedly developed hundreds of variants, some of which they began selling as fertilisers – the chemical elements of the nerve agent, the organophosphates, work in that field, no pun intended, as well – as a cover for their weaponisation of the substance, and five of these were selected for military use. The most versatile is Novichok-5 or A-232, and that was probably the one used in Salisbury.
‘It’s significantly more potent than VX gas and works in the same way. Briefly, the chemical used in the human body to transmit nerve impulses to muscles is the neurotransmitter acetylcholine – ACh – and as soon as the muscle contraction has been completed this is broken down by acetylcholinesterase – AChE – into acetic acid and choline. What VX gas, Sarin, Soman and Novichok all do is to block the action of AChE, causing a build-up of ACh. The result of that is constant muscle contractions leading to convulsions, paralysis and respiratory arrest. And last week that was what we were talking about most of the time with Charles.’
‘I presume that wasn’t all you were doing,’ Richter said, after a moment. ‘I know that Charles Vernon was a very highly qualified scientist and I’m quite sure the both of you have similar expertise and qualifications. I also know that Novichok is a bit of a new boy in terms of its recent exposure, so I would have thought that your discussion about it and your attempt to determine exactly which strain of the chemical was used against the Skripals was only one part of your workload.’
McCarthy nodded.
‘Yes, of course. We all have a number of projects and studies for which we are individually responsible. I don’t suppose you’re in any way interested in what Walter and I are working on, but I can tell you something about what Charles Vernon was doing. His interests and his workload were quite wide ranging. If you provide me with access to his notebooks and computer, William—’ he glanced at Poulson as he said this ‘—I can tell you exactly what he was looking at, but I do know that he was studying everything from several new biochemical reactions that had been recently been reported internationally, working not just on Novichok but studying all of the other known acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, and also investigating the work done on possible vaccines intended to combat filoviruses, and particularly Ebola. Remember that Vernon is both a chemist and a biochemist, and his areas of interest and competence are extremely wide-ranging.’
That helped, slightly.
‘I think we would all like to know more details about the precise studies that Vernon was involved in looking at,’ Poulson said to McCarthy. ‘I’ll get his notebooks released to you so that you can provide a summary for me and for Mr Richter, if possible by close of business on Monday. Will that be long enough?’
McCarthy nodded.
‘That shouldn’t be a problem,’ he replied, then glanced at Richter. ‘I presume you’ll just want a general description of what he was doing, but we can always provide more detail about specific topics on request. But could I just remind you that because of the classification of his work, whoever is going to read even the summary will have to have a high-level security clearance, at least up to Secret. And there may be some documents that require a further clearance based upon the need to know principle.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Richter said, ‘but you can leave that aspect of the matter to us.’
And that was more or less that. Neither man claimed to have noticed anything unusual in Vernon’s behaviour in the week prior to his disappearance; he had not said anything that struck them as odd, and they had been surprised when he hadn’t appeared for work on the following Monday, and more surprised that he still hadn’t turned up a week later. As far as they knew, he had planned a quiet weekend at home, just like almost every other weekend.
So what had happened on that Saturday morning?
Twenty almost entirely unproductive minutes later, Keele and McCarthy stood up, shook hands all round, and left the room.
‘I think that’s about all we can do to help,’ Poulson said. ‘The answer to this conundrum obviously lies with Charles Vernon himself. Once he has been found and questioned, we’ll obviously discover exactly what his motives were for walking out. I’m sure he had a good reason for what he did.’
‘Hopefully he has,’ Richter agreed, ‘but we’re not quite finished with you yet. A forensic team from MI5 will be arriving here pretty soon to find out what Vernon has on his work computer and in whatever office he uses here at Porton Down. Perhaps you’d be good enough to give them the summary of projects and workload that McCarthy was talking about.’
Poulson didn’t look impressed at this piece of news, at the idea of a bunch of strangers rooting around in his establishment and immediately said so.
‘There may be security implications,’ he finished. ‘Almost all of our work here is highly classified.’
‘I think you’ll find the team that arrive here will have much higher security clearances than you or any of your scientists,’ Richter said. ‘And this isn’t optional. Until Vernon’s found we’ll be exploring every possible avenue to try to find out what he’s up to.’
‘Oh, very well. When will they be arriving?’
‘I don’t know,’ Richer replied, standing up ready to leave. ‘I haven’t requested them yet. Good day to you.’
Somebody at Porton Down, he reflected as he walked the short distance to his car, had to be telling porkies about something, but right then Richter had no idea who it was, or what they were covering up, or why they were doing it.