Vernon had travelled from Toulouse to Cambrils on the Spanish Costa Brava by train, paying cash for his tickets to avoid leaving an electronic trail, and thanks to Schengen at no point after leaving Blagnac had anyone asked to see his passport or any other form of identification. He hadn’t even been aware of the moment he’d entered Spain until it dawned on him that the occasional signs he was seeing were written in Spanish rather than French: menu del dia rather than menu du jour, for example.
Along the way he’d shaved off his beard, which immediately took about five years off his apparent age, dyed his hair a shade of dark brown that didn’t look entirely convincing but which certainly made him look different, discarded his ancient tweed jacket and purchased casual clothes designed for a much younger man. A pair of non-prescription sunglasses with graduated smoked lenses completed the illusion: Vernon now barely recognised the man looking back at him from the mirror in the bathroom of his hotel room.
He’d paid cash for the room, booking it for two weeks on a half-board basis, and reckoned he was about as invisible as he possibly could be in the circumstances. He had no doubt that by this time the authorities would be actively searching for him, but he hoped that the trail would have run cold at Toulouse, so they would probably still be looking in the wrong country.
Predictably enough, the television set in his hotel room received predominantly Spanish television channels, but within the mix were the two American channels CNN and CNBC, as well as BBC World, and Vernon had spent most of the evenings since his arrival in the town watching the BBC channel, alert for any mention of an ongoing search for him. What he had been expecting was some kind of a ‘Missing scientist mystery’ news item or something of that sort but so far he’d seen nothing. He’d also visited three different cybercafes and done searches on the Internet, but again without result. He couldn’t be too specific in his search parameters, in case the British had set up tripwires that would flag his searches, and more importantly the location he was using at the time and, as an extra level of protection, he had been using a portable VPN program – a virtual private network – that would disguise his geographic origin from most surveillance technology.
But as far as he could see, whatever search had been mounted for him was relatively low-key and covert and had not, so far, been made public. That was disappointing and meant that he now had to begin the next phase, the actions that would certainly ensure that the British authorities would have to begin an active search for him.
He had identified half a dozen busy cybercafes in Cambrils and that afternoon he picked one at random. He left the hotel, checking that nobody was paying him any particular attention, and certainly that no one was following him, and made his way steadily through the streets to the cafe that he had selected.
Inside, he purchased a coffee and for about fifteen minutes sat at the bar drinking it and glancing through a three-day-old copy of the Daily Mail he’d purchased the previous day at a newsagent on the front. Only when he was completely certain that nobody had followed him or was watching him did he pay for an hour’s Internet access on the desktop computer right at the back of the cafe, inserting a small thumb drive into one of the USB ports, a drive that contained the software that he hoped would protect him from prying eyes.
He started his VPN and input his username – nothing like his real name, of course – and password to start the program, then opened TOR, The Onion Router, the program that would give him access to both the Internet and the Dark Web, the sites that lie below and out of reach of the mainstream search engines. He used the Duck Duck Go search engine, the only practical way of locating Dark Web sites without knowing their exact identifiers, and then began trawling through the Internet looking for a particular kind of site. It was not a part of the web that he had visited with any degree of frequency before, and he was unfamiliar with most of what he saw.
But eventually he identified one particular site that seemed almost ideal for his purposes. He navigated to the appropriate part of the site, typed quickly for a couple of minutes, and then exited, shutting down TOR and his VPN as he did so.
Fifteen minutes later, Vernon was back in his hotel room and wondering just how quickly things would now happen.