The Learjet landed at RAF Northolt with a total absence of drama just after one fifteen in the morning. Northolt is a useful airfield not far from Heathrow on the western outskirts of London where flights can arrive and depart with the minimum of formalities, and often witnesses government officials, Members of Parliament and the like, as well as people who do not wish to be recognised, such as officers from the security services, passing through on their way to or coming back from undisclosed destinations.
There are, of course, other airfields where a rather less than rigorous attitude can in certain circumstances prevail, when it may be felt by most of the interested parties that no particular advantage is likely to be gained by employing a bunch of officious little men in peaked caps to scrutinise the passengers and/or the cargo of certain inbound flights. If you consult the En Route Supplement or ERS, an official British air traffic control publication, you will discover that most military airfields in the country can provide customs inspection facilities and immigration checks for arriving aircraft on request, but if no request is made, that is more or less the end of the matter. What the eye doesn’t see, and so on. RAF Northolt is special, but mainly for its convenient location, close to fast roads into London, rather than for what goes on there.
Because of the nature of this flight, there were neither customs nor immigration officials present – Simpson had obviously given specific orders to ensure this notable lack of official attention – which was just as well in view of the small armoury Richter and the CIA agents offloaded from the aircraft. One of the regular drivers from Hammersmith was waiting there with a seven-seat Chrysler Voyager MPV, and he drove them smoothly through the almost-deserted streets of West London to Hammersmith, where he waited until the armoured steel gate had slid to one side and then drove down the ramp and into the parking garage.
‘The boss is waiting for you in Conference Room One,’ he said, as he switched off the engine in the parking bay, ‘and he’s a bit twitchy tonight. I can take all that stuff to the Armoury if you want. Save you the trouble and a bit of time.’
‘Thanks.’
Richter led the way to the fire door and up the staircase into the building.
Masters started complaining after the second flight.
‘You guys never heard of elevators?’ he asked.
‘In this country we call them “lifts”,’ Richter replied, ‘and there is one near the front entrance but the staircase is a more convenient way of getting into the building from the garage. What you have to do is look on the bright side.’
‘There’s a bright side?’
‘Yes. Climbing up and down all these stairs gives you a good cardiovascular exercise. It keeps you fit and saves you completely wasting your time pounding a pointless treadmill in some high-priced gym surrounded by a flock of narcissistic gits in patterned leotards admiring themselves in the mirrors.’
‘You’re not a fan of gyms, then?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice, no.’
On the third floor Richter pushed open the stairwell door and led the group along a narrow, cream-painted corridor towards a set of double doors. Outside, a small plaque on the wall announced ‘CR1’ and above the doors were two lights, one green and the other red. Neither was illuminated, probably because the building was virtually empty.
He knocked twice and pushed the doors open. Dominating the room was a longish oblong conference table made of some dark wood like mahogany, surrounded by about a dozen wooden chairs with padded leather seats, two of which at the far end were already occupied. On the table were sheets of writing paper and pencils, a handful of pink Secret files and a collection of somewhat varied cups and mugs, three insulated coffee pots, a milk jug and sugar bowl, and a round melamine tray that held a small and rather dull selection of biscuits in individual packets. At the far end of the room was a drop-down screen on which videos or other images could be displayed by a projector mounted on the ceiling. The other part of projection system was a lectern to one side of the screen that was provided with an HDMI connector to attach to a computer. The screen was not illuminated, but there were a couple of laptops on the table.
On the long wall opposite the door were three large windows, part of the original building. Because of the sensitive nature of the discussions held in the room, all three were fitted with external custom-made wooden shutters that were mirrored by internal shutters that looked like wood but which were actually a composite material designed to block both sound and electromagnetic emanations. Both sets of shutters were closed, as was confirmed by a small glowing green light beside each window. The room had a high ceiling and bland white-painted walls devoid of all forms of decoration. Concealing a microphone or camera was always much easier in a picture frame or something of that sort, so nothing of that sort was permitted.
As Richter led the way inside, the two men at the table stood up and he made the introductions.
‘The smallish man in the sharp grey suit looking irritated is Richard Simpson, who runs this outfit,’ he began, pointing towards the end of the table, ‘and the bloke wearing the dark blue suit next to him is the Intelligence Director. Knowing his name won’t mean anything or help you in any way, so I won’t bother telling you. We just call him the ID. These guys,’ he went on, gesturing to the two Americans and now addressing Simpson, ‘are TJ Masters and Richard Moore from the CIA over at Langley. And finally, the man with the slightly suspect hair standing right beside me is Professor Charles Vernon, who’s been hitting various headlines over the last few days.’
‘Less of the sarcasm, Richter,’ Simpson said. ‘Sit down, all of you. Glad you made it.’
They all shook hands and then sat down, Moore and Masters immediately reaching out for two of the coffee pots and pouring themselves cups. It had been a somewhat dry flight out of Reus for coffee-lovers, with only soft drinks and sandwiches available in the tiny galley of the Lear.
‘I’m very pleased to see you here, Professor,’ Simpson said. ‘Before we discuss what’s happened here in Britain, let me just find out what mayhem Richter managed to create on the Costa Brava, just so I know how many ruffled feathers I have to smooth.’ He pointed a forefinger straight at Richter. ‘Go for it,’ he said.
‘We were, I think,’ Richter said, ‘really quite restrained. We got the location from Baker and his gnomes by phone and left the hotel in a bit of a hurry. On the way out we spotted four men who didn’t look like businessmen. One of them took a telephone call just a few seconds after Baker had called me, and he was speaking Russian so it was pretty clear where they’d come from. Then the four of them immediately hustled outside and jumped in a car parked on the street. It wasn’t exactly rocket science to work out that they were probably on pretty much the same mission as we were, and had just been given the same location, so that meant we had to stop them. TJ here obliged by pumping a couple of nine-millimetre rounds through two of their tyres, just to give us a bit of breathing space while we headed off to find the prof.’
The Intelligence Director stirred in his seat.
‘You discharged weapons on the street in Cambrils because you thought those four men were Russians and had been tasked with kidnapping or possibly killing Professor Vernon? You had no proof whatsoever about who they were or what they were doing. Are you mad, Richter?’
‘Not weapons,’ he said, ‘just weapon. Only one of them. And as I said I didn’t pull the trigger. That was down to our American cousin here—’ Masters smiled and waved at the ID in a friendly fashion ‘—and it was just as well that he did, because about ten seconds later one of those anonymous Russians opened up with a pistol, but by then we were well out of the way and TJ had proved that he could sprint almost as well as he could shoot.’
‘That’s not the point,’ the ID replied. ‘It could have been—’
‘Marcus,’ Simpson said forcefully, ‘just shut up and listen, will you.’
The ID closed his mouth with a snap and looked somewhat sulkily down the table towards Richter.
‘Baker told us the geographic location of the computer the prof had been using from the IP address, but we expected that he would probably have already done his stuff on the Internet and left the cybercafe by that time. We reckoned he was probably out on the streets somewhere, maybe heading back to where he was staying, so we – that was Rich More and I because TJ was still somewhere near our hotel keeping clear of four angry Russians – got to the general area and cruised around for a while. We didn’t see Charles Vernon anywhere, but we did spot a Vauxhall on British plates with three men inside it of Middle Eastern appearance. They were heading in the opposite direction to us and also seemed to be looking for something or someone. I saw the car suddenly accelerate and whip round a corner, and it looked to me as if they’d seen something, so we turned and followed them, just in case. A few seconds after we got to where they’d stopped their car, we heard a shot and saw the professor come running out of an alleyway. We grabbed him, put him in our vehicle and then attended to the three men.’
‘Those were the Syrians, yes?’ Simpson asked.
‘Yes. We took their passports and wallets, so we can try and identify them for certain and backtrack their movements. We got their mobiles as well.’
‘Attended to?’ the Intelligence Director asked. ‘What exactly—’
‘The score was one dead, one probably dead and one wounded when we left,’ Richter said. ‘We were outnumbered three-to-two, and one of the Syrians was toting a submachine gun, so that seems to me like a decent result.’
‘And you weren’t harmed, Professor?’ Simpson asked, looking across the table at the academic.
‘No. I was just grateful when your man turned up with his American friend.’
‘You mentioned other Russians when you called me,’ Simpson prompted.
‘Yes, on the way back through Cambrils. Four of them in an Opel saloon tried to run us off the road, but I blocked it.’
‘Do you think they were working with the group you ran into outside the hotel?’ Simpson asked.
‘Good question, and the answer is that I don’t know. I don’t think the first Russian team could have spotted us as we drove away, because we were off the street and out of sight before TJ ventilated their tyres. I think it’s more likely we were spotted as we left the ambush site where we’d encountered the Syrians and this second group followed us until they could mount an intercept. Anyway, we disarmed them and immobilised their car, and I somehow managed not to kill any of them. I’ve got their passports too, as well as their weapons.’
Richter didn’t think the Intelligence Director really needed to know that the four Russians had been carrying diplomatic passports, because that would create another minor verbal shitstorm from his general direction.
‘Good.’ Simpson rubbed his hands together and glanced round the table. ‘A decent result all round, in my opinion,’ he said. ‘But that was then and this is now and this is where we need your help, Professor. We do know that this whole mess started with this thing called TRAIT, so why don’t you kick off with why you were so worried about it. After all, the trial had finished about twenty odd years ago, so why is that relevant today? Why did you get involved at all?’
‘I got involved because the TRAIT programme may have finished two decades ago, but the trial didn’t.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t suppose any of you around this table has a scientific background or know how the scientific world operates, but in simple terms any new theory or proposal always involves two separate phases. In the first, the scientists involved work out the theory and the background, explaining what they are trying to achieve, how they’re going to do it and what they expect the results to be. And the second part is usually some kind of a field trial to see whether or not the expected results based upon the theory are matched by the actual results in the real-world environment. That’s a simplification, but it’s more or less correct. The initial work on the project is also designed to attract funding, if that’s appropriate, or approval from the company or government department running a particular laboratory, and permission to go ahead will normally be based on the projected cost and the likely benefits or financial return if it works as expected. It’s a kind of estimated cost-benefit analysis, I suppose you could call it.’
‘That’s clear enough,’ Simpson said. ‘We understand that TRAIT was run by the Dstl at Porton Down, so presumably the powers that be there saw some kind of advantage in the proposal.’
Vernon nodded.
‘Of course, many projects run there attract a high security classification because of their nature, and they’re also ring-fenced so that only the scientists who need to know about them are given access to the files and experimental results. I only got to know about TRAIT because of research I was doing in a related field. A couple of links directed me to the project, and I followed them up out of casual interest more than anything else.’
For a moment, the scientist looked almost embarrassed.
‘I actually thought at first that TRAIT was something like a joke, but scientists don’t make jokes, or certainly not in project files, but it still seemed amazing to me that it had been given the go-ahead in the first place. You see,’ Vernon clasped his hands together on the table in front of him and leaned forward, ‘although the idea behind the programme was valid, perhaps even laudable, the solution that had been devised to address the problem was both problematic in terms of its chances of success, and also morally repugnant.’
‘We need specifics,’ Richter said.
‘I know,’ Vernon said. ‘I still don’t know why somebody at Porton Down came up with the idea, unless he was responding to some kind of a government directive, because it was really too big a concept for the Dstl to get involved with. We tend to provide expert assistance for very specific tasks. And this task was specific, certainly, but global in its scope.’
He paused for a moment, then got to the meat of the matter.
‘For several years warnings have been sounded about this planet, and about what we’re doing to it. These warnings have come from a wide variety of different scientific disciplines, but in a nutshell one core problem is that the human race is a population that is expanding out of control. Already, there are more people in the world than the planet can comfortably support in terms of food production alone, not to mention numerous other problems relating to overpopulation. If you could reduce the population by, say, ten per cent, there would be a corresponding reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, use of non-biodegradable plastics and so on. Not a direct correlation, obviously, but if you have less people they will use less stuff, obviously, and that would help the planet and improve the quality of the lives of everybody.
‘I’m not a racist,’ Vernon said firmly, ‘so please do not assume that I am because of what I’m going to say next. In most of the northern hemisphere and the Western world, men and women tend to act responsibly when it comes to having families. Most couples have two or perhaps three children, and that produces entirely sustainable slow and steady population growth for most countries. Even those families that produce four or more children do not really pose a problem because they will be balanced out by childless couples and by the inevitable deaths of some people before they can reproduce. That is the norm that we are used to, and it works.
‘But what doesn’t work is the situation in the Third World, where almost no forms of birth control are ever practised. It may be because they are unaware that such methods even exist, or because the people do not have the money to purchase condoms or birth-control pills, or because for cultural reasons the men refuse to take precautions, or probably for a host of other reasons with which I am not familiar. The result tends to be spiralling populations, the numbers kept in check by periodic mass starvations that bring untold misery, by prolonged droughts and sometimes by the genocides that we have seen in some parts of Africa in particular.’
‘You’re not trying to tell us that Porton Down was developing a new kind of birth control?’ Simpson asked, the tone of his voice revealing his disbelief.
‘No, and at the same time I suppose yes,’ Vernon replied. ‘The full title of the project that you’ve been referring to as TRAIT was “Investigation into the feasibility of employing selective genetic markers in tandem with specific modifications to individual physical characteristics.” That probably sounds like a typical piece of scientific gobbledygook, but the moment I read that I had an inkling of what the scientists involved might have been trying to achieve. Just the title told me that TRAIT was probably a programme intended to target a particular genetic group and to somehow change some of the characteristics of that group.’
‘You mean give them some feature they wouldn’t normally have?’ Richter asked. ‘Something like target the Chinese, say, and give them all blonde hair?’
‘Well, not exactly that, obviously, but that was the general idea, yes.’
Now Simpson leaned forward as well.
‘What genetic group?’ he asked. ‘And what characteristics?’
Vernon glanced at the other men around the table before he replied.
‘The target genetic group was sub-Saharan Africans, and the characteristic that TRAIT was intended to alter affected the male reproductive system.’
Nobody spoke for a few seconds, absorbing that piece of information.
‘Affect the male reproductive system how?’ Simpson asked.
‘It was designed to render the recipient sterile.’
That produced another uncomfortable silence, that Vernon clearly felt obliged to fill.
‘It was simply intended to dampen the rate of population growth in Africa,’ he said. ‘If only one in ten, or even one in twenty, men in the overall African population were affected by TRAIT, that would still have achieved a significant and measurable reduction in the overall average birth-rate in that continent.’
‘Have you ever heard of eugenics, Professor?’ Simpson asked, his voice tight and angry. ‘Or the Nazis? Hitler’s Final Solution, all that sort of thing?’
Vernon held up both hands in a gesture almost of surrender.
‘It wasn’t my project,’ he said, ‘and you’re preaching to the converted. As I said, the solution proposed by the TRAIT scientists was and is totally repugnant to me. That, if you recall, was the whole reason why I skipped the country and tried to raise my profile, so that when I explained exactly what TRAIT was, people would have to listen to me.’
‘I think that almost anyone would have listened to you if you’d just told them how TRAIT worked,’ Richter suggested.
Vernon shook his head.
‘As I told you before, my worry was not that people wouldn’t listen, but that I would meet with an unfortunate accident before I could explain what I knew,’ he said. ‘As soon as I started reading the TRAIT information, I prepared a list of the dozen or so scientists whose names appeared in the documentation. Before I studied the various files in detail, I was intending to talk to them about the project and find out how far work on it had progressed before being abandoned. But as I worked my way down the list of names I found a problem. The leading scientist for the project, a man named Gregory Quine who’d worked at Dstl until about five years ago, seemed to have dropped out of sight. I had no telephone number for him, and he didn’t respond to the messages I sent to his last known email address. That was unusual but could be explained if he was out of the country, for example, and was working somewhere without Internet access. But it was the other scientists that began to bother me.’
‘Bother you why?’ Simpson asked.
‘Because they were dead, mainly,’ Vernon replied. ‘Every one of them that I tried to contact had either met with a fatal accident or had succumbed to a fast-acting terminal disease. In fairness, many of these men – and they were all men – were quite elderly, and so the fact that they had died was not in itself suspicious. But it was the final person I spoke to, and what happened to him that convinced me that my life could also be in danger. That was about six or seven weeks ago and he had almost forgotten about—’
‘Hubert Jefferies,’ Simpson said.
Vernon looked shocked, but nodded, his eyes never leaving Simpson’s face.
‘You knew?’
‘What happened to Jefferies was flagged up to us a short while ago, mainly because it was a hit-and-run that wasn’t, if you see what I mean. He was clearly deliberately targeted, and that fact alone caused a number of people to start asking why. So you think that somebody was permanently wrapping up the TRAIT project, and eliminating anyone who knew about it?’
‘That’s what it looked like to me,’ Vernon agreed, ‘and that’s why I ran.’
‘I’m not sure I’m buying this,’ Richter said. ‘The TRAIT project was abandoned about twenty years ago, so if the average age of the scientists who were working on then it was, say, sixty most of them would be over eighty by now, and statistically a lot of them would be dead from natural causes. As you found out, in fact. Why were you so convinced that there was some kind of a conspiracy about this, and if there was a conspiracy, who do you think was orchestrating it?’
‘It was a combination of things, really. First of all, the documentation about TRAIT was held in a scientific archive. It had been declassified, but not by one of the scientists involved in the project. In fact, as far as I could tell, the declassification had been done by an administrator, probably as part of a regular house-clearing operation. Quite a lot of scientific stuff may be classified as a level of Secret or even above that for certain periods of time, and certainly while the project is live, but after a decade or so a lot of information can no longer be considered to be sensitive. Secret documents have to be recorded and handled in a special way, as I’m sure you all know, and so there’s always pressure to declassify documents as soon as possible, just so you no longer have to take the standard precautions, like recording them in Classified Documents Registers, storing them in appropriate safes and so on to protect them. I think that’s probably what happened in the case of the TRAIT documentation.
‘As for who was responsible for the deaths of the other scientists, those whose demise was perhaps less than easily explicable, like Hubert Jefferies, I have no idea, unless the reason I’ve been unable to locate Gregory Quine is because he’s been acting as an amateur hitman. That seems rather unlikely to me, though I don’t know Quine personally. But I definitely think that somebody is out there doing that, and perhaps on Quine’s instructions, because he was the driving force behind the programme. But there’s something else you need to know about TRAIT.’
‘Yes?’ Richter and Simpson said almost simultaneously.
‘We know that the TRAIT files were sent to the archive about twenty years ago when the programme was shut down. But as I said before, most scientific projects involve two parts: the theoretical basis and the practical results. So although the project was shelved, it was only shelved after the field trials had been started.’
‘You mean the people behind this got it working and then administered it in Africa or somewhere?’ Simpson sounded appalled.
Vernon nodded.
‘The documentation confirms that the scientists involved were able to identify genetic markers on people of African descent and developed the payload of the TRAIT vector to selectively target the male reproductive system. The next inevitable step was to carry out a field trial to prove that the vector would function as they anticipated.’
‘So what did they do? Send a team of doctors out to Africa to inoculate every African male they could lay their hands on and tell them it was against malaria or something? And include what you’re calling the vector in the same dose?’ Simpson’s voice was coldly furious.
‘I’m really sorry to say,’ Vernon replied, ‘that they didn’t do that. They did something even more disgusting, and a whole lot closer to home.’
‘What did they do?’
‘They identified members of the British Armed Forces who were going to be shipped out to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan and who met the genetic criteria – they were all young black soldiers – and they inoculated them as part of their pre-departure preparations. They claimed the inoculations would provide protection against some of the chemical and biological weapons that it was feared the Iraqi soldiers and possibly even the Taliban might deploy against them.’
This time, the silence lasted even longer, and was again broken by Vernon himself.
‘And that’s the other side of the coin, I suppose,’ he said. ‘The results that I saw from parts of the TRAIT field trial show clearly that none of those black soldiers who had the vector administered to them subsequently went on to produce children. So although it was a comparatively small sample, the results did seem to suggest that the vector worked as it had been intended to do. It was a success in those terms.’
Vernon paused again, and once more looked at the faces of the men around the table.
‘But what was not a success and was obviously an unintended consequence of the vector was a side-effect of its administration. Accurate records were kept during the field trial, as they always are, and they showed with a hundred per cent reliability that those same soldiers all developed testicular cancer within five years of the inoculation being given. I think it’s that, as much as anything else, which has frightened somebody who was involved with TRAIT.
‘And that is the real reason why the scientists involved with the project have been dropping like flies. It’s because somebody is out there making sure that they do.’