‘So, what do we know about this guy Vernon?’ Masters said, taking a seat next to Richard Moore in the dining room of the Campanile hotel and sipping cautiously at a cup of black coffee. Both Americans were wearing casual clothes, their jackets roomy enough to conceal their shoulder holsters and Glocks although the weapons, now reassembled and loaded with bullets from Richter’s stash, were still in their carry-on bags in their hotel rooms.
‘Not a hell of a lot, if I’m honest about it,’ Richter replied. ‘He’s never appeared on the radar of the British police or intelligence services until now, and according to his boss and the people that he works with, he’s acting way out of character.’
‘Which is why your people figured he might have been abducted, I guess,’ Richard Moore suggested.
‘Exactly.’
Richter explained that the curious circumstances surrounding Vernon’s actions in Warminster and at Heathrow.
‘What really threw us was the sight of a second man in Vernon’s car when he drove to Heathrow airport,’ he said. ‘The figure was recorded by several traffic cameras and that made the idea of an abduction seem much more likely.’
‘But,’ Masters said, and Richter looked at him quizzically.
‘That just sounded to me like a sentence that was going to have a “but” tacked onto the end of it,’ the American clarified.
Richter nodded.
‘You’re right, it did. We sent a forensic team to the long-term parking at Heathrow to check Vernon’s car. We didn’t really expect them to find anything, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. And we were right, at least about the car. Plenty of forensic traces, all of which I have no doubt could be linked directly to Vernon himself. As a matter of course, the team also looked around the area where the car had been parked, and behind another vehicle that had been there even longer than his car, they found a deflated blow-up doll.’
‘A what?’
‘A sex toy,’ Richter clarified. ‘A life-size inflatable woman.’
The two Americans glanced briefly at each other, and then back at Richter.
‘They’re the best kind,’ Masters said. ‘They don’t talk or argue and never answer you back, and they’re always willing and able.’
Richter just stared at him.
‘I assume that was a joke?’ he asked.
‘Obviously,’ Masters said. ‘I prefer my women to have both a pulse and an attitude. Just ask Rich here.’
‘So, what, you’re assuming Vernon is some kind of a pervert?’ Moore asked.
‘He may well be,’ Richter said. ‘I have no idea, one way or the other. But also in his car the search team found an old jacket, a scarf and a hat, and what we think happened is that Vernon bought the blow-up doll and put those clothes on it in the back seat of his car so that it would look like there was another man inside the vehicle with him. They also found a tyre pump that ran off the cigarette lighter which he probably used to inflate the thing. I only found out about this when I had a message from my section this morning, but that pretty clearly shows that Vernon has gone off the reservation for reasons of his own, and that there’s no possibility that he was abducted.’
‘And that could be a good thing for us,’ Masters said. ‘If he’d been snatched by the Commies or whoever, then by now he’d probably be well out of our reach and be sitting in a room at the Lubyanka in Moscow or out at Yazenevo or somewhere and having a bunch of unpleasant options explained to him in words of one syllable. But if he decided to skip for reasons of his own, then he’s probably still somewhere around here and we’ve got a pretty good chance of finding him before he does something even more stupid than what he’s done already.’
That seemed a fair assessment of the situation. All they needed now was some kind of a lead, anything that would tell them where they should start looking.
The two CIA agents already knew about the post believed to have been written by Charles Vernon on the Dark Web site, and on the drive back from Carcassonne the previous evening Richter had explained the reply that Baker had sent to try to flush out Vernon, wherever he was.
As they sat over the remains of their breakfast, Richter’s mobile emitted a double tone indicating the receipt of a text message. He immediately swiped his finger up the screen to wake up the phone, then read the message he’d just received.
‘News?’ Moore asked.
‘Yes,’ Richter said. ‘We might have something now. Vernon – assuming that it is him we’re dealing with, of course – replied to Baker late last night. The delay in my section passing the message to me is because they had to run a whole bunch of software to try to establish where he was, and that took time. I don’t understand all the technicalities of it, but apparently he’s using a VPN to disguise his location, unless he really is sitting in a café in Michigan, which is what the VPN is claiming. Baker’s got some clever pieces of software that can work out more or less where he is.
‘According to this, VPNs work really well at concealing your location if you log into one, visit whatever dodgy websites you’ve got in mind, then shut down the Dark Web browser and close the VPN. According to Baker, that’s pretty foolproof. But when Vernon typed his response to Baker’s message, one of the programs Baker had installed forced the connection, the link between Vernon’s computer and the website where he was posting, to remain open, even after Vernon had closed down his browser, and that was our way in. The VPN still showed that Vernon was in Michigan but for a very short time before he logged off the Internet the computer he was using reverted to its normal IP address when he shut down his VPN. And the IP – the Internet Protocol – address is based upon his geographical location. That’s what this says but it’s not my field so I don’t really know exactly how it all works. They can’t tell me his exact location, not his street address, but they have established the general area and you were right, TJ. He isn’t that far away.’
‘Where?’ Moore and Masters said almost simultaneously.
‘Baker and the goblins that work with him down in the cellar reckon he’s on the Costa Brava in Spain, either in or very close to a coastal town called Cambrils. From Vernon’s point of view, that would be a pretty good location, because that coast is lined with big cities like Tarragona and Valencia and Barcelona where he could lose himself, and they’ve all got really good transport links, road, rail and air, so it’d be easy enough for him to move on easily and quickly when he needs to.’
‘So we need to get on the road,’ Masters suggested.
‘That’s definite,’ Richter replied, ‘so if you can throw the rest of that breakfast and coffee down your throat we can get going.’
It took less than fifteen minutes for Richter to check the three men out of the hotel, load their cases into the back of the Peugeot and drive out of the Campanile car park. Both Americans were now wearing their shoulder holsters and pistols, because although it was a long drive down to the Costa Brava there was always a chance that they might encounter the wanted man sooner rather than later. And, just like Richter, Masters and Moore both subscribed to the view that a man with a weapon in a case or somewhere else inaccessible rather than readily available on his person was exactly the same as a man who was unarmed.
They knew they were probably heading for trouble of some sort, and they all wanted to be prepared, ready for whatever happened.