Charles Vernon consumed a leisurely dinner in the hotel dining room then took the lift back up to his room. He made a cup of instant coffee and took it and a small liqueur out onto the tiny terrace, barely big enough for a round table and two folding chairs. For about an hour he just sat there as darkness gathered around him, an unread English newspaper on the table beside him, and stared out towards the Mediterranean Sea. From his vantage point, he could both see and hear the waves breaking on the beach a couple of hundred yards or so away from the building.
The most difficult and dangerous phase of his plan was just about to start, and for a few minutes his mind engaged in a kind of mental wrestling match as he tried to work out whether or not he was doing the right thing, and if there was another way of achieving his objective. He knew he could walk away right then. He could simply take a taxi or a bus to Tarragona or Barcelona, buy a ticket back to England and hop on a flight to Heathrow or Gatwick. And, he knew perfectly well if he did that he would be met on arrival by a group of angry and probably armed police officers and immediately arrested. But he also knew he couldn’t afford for that to happen, because if he lost his freedom he knew with a fair degree of certainty that he would very quickly lose his life.
The actions of one person, a person he couldn’t identify because he only knew they were out there because of their actions, or perhaps even those of a group of people, had already convinced him that that would be the case. Vernon knew he would certainly not be safe in prison: the promise of quite a small payment or favour to the right – or rather to the wrong – man behind bars could end with him getting stabbed to death in the showers or beaten to death in his cell. Vernon had no illusions about that. And if he died, the information, or at least the conclusion the information pointed to, would die with him.
He had spent much of his time over the last three weeks he’d still been in England trying to decide exactly what he should do, and the plan he had come up with still represented what he thought was his best possible chance of achieving what he needed to do, of seeing justice triumph over evil.
Bars and restaurants in Spain open late and close later. Vernon had been unsurprised to see entire families arriving at particular eateries for dinner at eleven at night as a matter of course and it was actually difficult to find anywhere open for a meal much earlier than eight in the evening. That was one reason why he had chosen to travel to Spain rather than staying in France or going elsewhere in Europe.
He glanced at his watch and saw that it was just after ten. Probably the timing was about right. He checked that he still had the thumb drive containing his VPN and TOR software, then picked up the newspaper, closed his hotel room door and walked out of the building.
He walked slowly through the streets of Cambrils, pausing frequently to glance in the windows of shops that had already closed, trying to make sure that nobody was following behind him. Counter-surveillance was an art that he knew almost nothing about, but he was doing the best he could to make sure he was unobserved.
Fifteen minutes after walking out of the hotel lobby he pushed open the door of another cybercafe on his list, ordered a café con leche – a white coffee – and took it to an unoccupied terminal on one side of the room. He began browsing the Internet, using Google and just checking to see if any stories or news reports had been released about him, but found nothing. He wasn’t really interested in whether they had or not, but he was one of only three customers in the cafe and he didn’t want to insert his USB stick in the machine until he was sure the man behind the counter was occupied elsewhere.
Within seconds, he discovered that the news had broken. Feeds in Britain, Europe and America had learned about his advertisement, either direct from the Dark Web or from other news agencies and were busy running stories about the ‘renegade scientist’ who was ‘running rampant’ and offering terrorist groups the opportunity to use a bespoke chemical or biological weapon to ‘kill tens of millions’ of innocent people. Most of which, of course, was a grotesque exaggeration, but that was the way the gutter press and many of the Internet sites conducted their business. None of them were ever prepared to let the facts get in the way of a good story. A couple of them had even given the Dark Web address of the website on which he had posted his advertisement. As far as publicity was concerned, what he had done so far had been entirely successful.
A few minutes later, a couple of young Spanish girls, probably in their late teens, walked in and began an animated conversation with the barista, or whatever the appropriate term was for a man who ran a cybercafe. As soon as he was certain that the man’s attention had been completely diverted by the impressive chest of one of the two girls, Vernon connected his thumb drive and in a couple of minutes was working its way through the hidden channels and links of the Dark Web to the site he had posted on.
He hadn’t been sure how long it would take somebody to notice what he was offering, but when he checked he had already had three replies. One was a litany of abuse, written by somebody who was clearly and violently opposed to all forms of chemical and biological warfare, and who suggested as a parting shot that Vernon should try taking a bath in Soman and see how much he liked it. The respondent’s views weren’t that dissimilar to Vernon’s – all his professional life he had worked on the other side of the equation, trying to develop vaccines or antidotes or cures rather than the weapons themselves – not that that was relevant.
The second response was a simple request for the price for a consignment of Sarin to be delivered to Turkey, and the third was an offer of a cooperative venture, with Vernon joining what was very clearly some kind of far-right group of terrorists – or perhaps would-be terrorists. Vernon copied the response onto the thumb drive, just in case they were more than a bunch of rabid fantasists, then looked again at the second reply.
The wording – crisp and business-like, as if the author was doing nothing more than requesting a quotation for some kind of household appliance or device rather than asking for the cost of an entirely lethal nerve agent that could kill hundreds or perhaps thousands of people – chilled him, because it looked entirely and frighteningly legitimate.
Up to that point, Vernon hadn’t really thought through, or at least not in any great detail, how he would react to that kind of response. Was it genuine? What should he quote as a price, and what would be a realistic timescale? He had known he would probably be dealing with people who cared more for a cause than for the innocent victims who might die in their pursuit of whatever ideal they had set their sights on, people to whom human life mattered hardly at all. That was why he had chosen the radical Islamic website as his contact vehicle. At least, that was one of the reasons.
In the end, he decided that his reply should match the enquiry. He calculated a figure for the manufacturing that would include the hire or rent of suitable premises and the purchase of the necessary raw materials, just as if he was really going to complete the order, added a guesstimate for the delivery journey, which would have to be by road, probably by private car rather than a commercial vehicle to avoid possible hold-ups and inspections at border crossings. Then he doubled the combined estimate and rounded it up to the nearest ten thousand dollars and specified that payment would have to be made to a bank in the Cayman Islands, half on acceptance of the price and half on delivery. Details of the account name and number would follow once his quotation had been accepted. Vernon read through the text he had prepared three times before he posted his response.
Once he’d done that, he quite deliberately looked at several other pages on the website, taking his time, before he shut down the browser. He again waited about thirty seconds before he closed the VPN program, and about another thirty seconds before he logged off the computer. Then he removed the memory stick and left the cybercafe.
The die had now been cast, and at least to some extent matters were out of his hands.