James Baker was not the only computer expert able to use pieces of exotic software to narrow down the location of Charles Vernon. Nor were the intelligence services of the United Kingdom the only units that had been alerted to the ‘advertisement’ posted on the Dark Web site.
In the lower levels of the new GU building at Khodinka Airport in Moscow, a building that was still known within the service as The Aquarium, just like the old building next door, another team of computer analysts had been monitoring the Dark Web site and had run a very similar piece of software to the one Baker had used and had come to pretty much the same conclusion: the runaway scientist was somewhere in or near Cambrils.
To muddy the waters still further, another team, this one working in one of the most secure sections of the SVR headquarters at Yazenevo, one of the wooded suburbs surrounding Moscow, had done much the same thing and made the same calculations and had, again, come to an identical conclusion.
The fastest way to get the Costa Brava was obviously to fly, and within two hours of Vernon’s approximate location being established, the snatch team from the SVR – two experienced field officers from Yasenevo and a pair of Spetsnaz troopers to provide the muscle – was already in the air, flying commercial to Paris with an onward connection to Barcelona where a hire car had already been booked.
The Spetsnaz is a unit of the Russian army that specialises in everything from so-called ‘wet work’ – assassinations in plain English – to espionage operations and the creation of sleeper cells in countries that either are opposed to Russia and her aims or that might possibly become so opposed in the future. Officially, the Spetsnaz have nothing to do with either the SVR or the GU, the two separate, different and competing Russian intelligence organs, but in practice Spetsnaz personnel are often attached to operational units from the two intelligence services to provide specialist skills or, just as often, to act in an executive capacity, either protecting the field officers from enemy action or carrying out assassinations on their orders.
There had been a short but inevitable delay in selecting, assembling and then briefing a team from the GU and handling the logistics of the operation. That meant the four-man team – its composition almost identical to the SVR unit with two senior field officers and two Spetsnaz troopers – was about two hours behind the SVR snatch team when they left Moscow. The only major difference was that these two Spetsnaz soldiers had been selected to provide the muscle for the GU team, but more specifically they had also been briefed to assassinate Vernon on sight.
Unbeknown to either group, and to Richter and the two CIA men as well, there was a fourth team in play. Despatched from London on the express orders of ‘Michael’ who was a senior officer in the Iranian intelligence service, VAJA, these three men had also been given clear and unequivocal instructions to terminate Charles Vernon as soon as they located him.
It was going to get very crowded in Cambrils, and very noisy, probably quite quickly.