Richter didn’t have the benefit of access to a time machine and was therefore unable to comply with Simpson’s peremptory order to travel to France no later than the previous day. But he did his best.
As soon as he’d left Simpson’s office he’d collected a diplomatic passport in the name of Paul Beatty that he’d used previously. Retaining an agent’s genuine first name as part of an alias was always a good idea, because everyone was conditioned to reply to their real Christian name immediately but responding to a learned first name was never going to be anything like as fast or as natural. The admin section also provided him with a British and an international driving licence and two unlimited credit cards in the same name plus a thousand euros in cash. They also handed him a compact Dell convertible laptop running Windows 10 and the latest version of the Microsoft Office suite, as well as several other programs that were not commercially available to civilian users, the laptop’s charging lead and a couple of continental adapters.
The armourer had clearly been pre-briefed by Simpson, and as soon as Richter stepped through the door he handed over a nylon shoulder holster, a Glock 17 with one spare magazine, both fully charged, and an unopened box of 9-millimetre shells. Richter was already in date for the weapon so he didn’t need to fire any rounds or be given a safety briefing on it. He just signed for the pistol and ammunition and walked away.
As part of Simpson’s regular efficiency drives, all his agents were required to have two carry-on cases packed at all times with everything they needed for a stay of at least a week, one case in the locker room of the building at Hammersmith and the other at their residence, so that they could be on their way virtually immediately whenever necessary. Richter collected his case from the locker room, opened it briefly to put the laptop, pistol, holster and ammunition inside it, then walked out of the building where one of the pool cars was already waiting at the kerb, engine running and the rear door open.
At Heathrow, Simpson had clearly pulled a number of strings and had had at least one passenger bumped from the next British Airways flight to Toulouse to allow Richter to take his seat. He bypassed the security checks on the strength of the Beatty diplomatic passport and was the first passenger onto the aircraft. He put his carry-on bag in the overhead locker and then sat down, checking for the latest messages from Hammersmith on his mobile phone, because he knew better than anyone that what he was doing was moving, but not necessarily progressing. Getting to Toulouse simply meant that he was in Europe and would probably be able to get elsewhere on the continent more quickly and have a much wider choice of means of transport than if he had stayed in London.
But what he wasn’t was necessarily any closer to finding Charles Vernon. All he knew for certain was that Vernon had landed in Toulouse about a week earlier. In that time, he could have flown to any part of the world and neither Hammersmith nor any other part of the British security establishment would necessarily know about it until quite some time after the event. If he’d flown somewhere, it all depended upon whether or not the man’s passport had been scanned at a departure airfield, in which case its details would be in the system somewhere, or simply checked for validity, in which case they wouldn’t. Chartering a light aircraft at a small civilian airfield, for example, would entail a routine document check but probably nothing more, and that would have allowed Vernon to get elsewhere in France or into Germany or Spain or other Western European countries almost certainly undetected.
But Richter knew that situation was only temporary. With the clear belief in the corridors of power at Vauxhall Cross and Millbank that Vernon was offering his services as a renegade biochemist to the highest bidder, the low-level searching that had been carried out so far would now be at an end. Within the day, perhaps even within a few hours, Europol, Interpol and virtually all of Europe’s police forces would have been formally alerted to the search for Charles Vernon, a search that would include his passport details, credit card numbers, a full description of him and a couple of the best quality photographs of his face that could be found.
Getting out of Blagnac airport at Toulouse was completely painless and very fast. Richter was the first person off the aircraft and, with only his carry-on, he walked out into the arrival hall less than fifteen minutes after the jet had touched down. The diplomatic passport had enabled him to walk almost straight through French passport control. In his pocket he had the printed reservation details for a car pre-booked in the name in his passport by Hammersmith, and inside twenty minutes he was sitting in the driver’s seat of a virtually new diesel Peugeot 3008. The car had insurance cover for the whole of Western Europe, a built-in satellite navigation system and a full tank of fuel.
All he had to do then was to decide where to go.
The Hammersmith admin section hadn’t made any hotel bookings for him, simply because neither he nor they had the slightest idea where he would be that evening. All the information they had so far gleaned from the French was what Vernon hadn’t done. As far as was known, the scientist would have had to use his genuine documentation in order to fly anywhere out of Blagnac or to hire a car, and there were no records which suggested he had done either of those things. None of the airlines had sold a ticket to a man named Vernon and no car hire companies had rented him a vehicle. On the other hand, the airport was served by buses and trams and Toulouse itself had a busy SNCF railway station only a couple of miles from Blagnac, and none of those forms of transport required any identification whatsoever from their passengers, only the money to pay for their fares.
‘All dressed up and nowhere to go,’ Richter murmured to himself as he checked his phone once more for any helpful emails or SMS messages, but found none.
He knew there was no point in heading out of Toulouse, because whatever direction he moved in might well be diametrically opposite to the direction which Vernon had taken, so in the absence of any better ideas he drove the short distance towards Toulouse and the Péripherique ring road that surrounds the city and checked into the Campanile hotel at Purpan. He chose that establishment because it was only about half a kilometre from the nearest junction on the ring road. That location and the immediate access to the fast roads of France would ensure that he could move very quickly north or south out of Toulouse as soon as he or Hammersmith came up with any kind of a lead.
By the time he’d checked in, parked the Peugeot and found his room, it was already late afternoon. Richter started the laptop, put it and his mobile on charge and, again, checked the email account he had been provided with. There were a couple of messages from Hammersmith, but only of a routine nature, just confirming that the hunt for Charles Vernon had now stepped up a couple of gears and that the European police and security services had been officially informed about the renegade biochemist and asked to assist in locating him as a matter of extreme urgency. But so far there had still been no sightings of the man, nor any indication about even which country he might be hiding in.
Richter subscribed wholeheartedly to the old Royal Navy adage: never run if you can walk; never walk if you can stand; never stand if you can sit; never sit if you can lie and never be awake if you can be asleep. He had nothing to do and nowhere to go and all the rest of the day to do it, so he set his alarm for seven, in time for dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, stripped off to his underwear, sent a quick email to Hammersmith telling Simpson where he was and why he was staying there, then slid between the sheets of one of the two single beds in the room, snapped off the lights and quickly fell asleep.