Bioweapon: A Paul Richter Novel

By James Barrington

A spy thriller in a series featuring a British secret service agent whose latest assignment has him battling a threat of biological warfare.A weapons scientist in Cambridge is found dead under suspicious circumstances. Then a researcher at military science center Porton Down goes missing.
Paul Richter is on assignment in Amsterdam, chasing a lead from the GRU. What he finds is deeply worrying. Old weapons research is being unearthed, and powerful people blackmailed to keep the truth behind the two incidents hidden.

As events spiral out of control, leading to an epic culmination on the Red Sea, Richter must battle against time to unravel this sinister plot, or face the full, unimaginable consequences . . .

From bestselling author James Barrington comes the next scintillating installment in the Paul Richter thriller series, perfect for fans of James Deegan, Chris Ryan and Andy McNab.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781911420514

James Barrington

James Barrington is a trained military pilot who has worked in covert operations and espionage. He has subsequently built a reputation as a writer of high-class, authentic and action-packed thrillers. He lives in Andorra, but travels widely. He also writes conspiracy thrillers under the pseudonym James Becker.

Book preview

Prologue

Six weeks ago

Cambridge, England

In almost every profession there are occasions when some spectre from the past surfaces unexpectedly. Sometimes it’s a pleasant memory, but more often than not it’s the reverse. Something that went wrong or that failed to work. The kind of bad memory that most people actively try to forget, usually unsuccessfully.

For Hubert Jefferies the spectre was really neither of these. It was just a telephone call from another biochemist, a man he’d never worked with although he knew his name on a professional basis. The caller wanted to discuss a classified scientific trial that Jefferies had been involved in some years earlier.

One question the caller asked had seemed unusual, and over the following days he occasionally wondered about it. A characteristic exhibited by people who enter any of the scientific disciplines is curiosity, and the subject of the call niggled at Jefferies. One evening he decided to take a look through some of his old records. That didn’t tell him what he wanted to know, so the next day he used the secure computer system in his laboratory to search a database of archived files on a closed intranet.

What he found came as a complete surprise. The files were as he remembered, but somebody had changed the way the database worked, and that worried him for several reasons. He made some changes of his own to the database, and then rang the scientist who had called him to explain what he’d found and what he’d done.

And then he basically forgot about it.

---

Three days later, as Jefferies accelerated his Vauxhall Corsa down Long Road on his way to work in his Cambridge University laboratory, a black 4x4 truck – possibly a Nissan or maybe a Toyota according to the few witnesses who saw the incident – fitted with smoked windows and windscreen and a heavy bull bar at the front, shot out of one of the side turnings on the road, accelerated as if to overtake the Vauxhall, then steered at speed into the right-hand side of the car and carried it straight across the pavement and into a substantial brick wall surrounding a house. The crash bent the Corsa into a curve, the point of impact the driver’s side door. Moments later, the apparently undamaged 4x4 reversed away from the wrecked Vauxhall, then accelerated hard into the badly-damaged car again before driving away.

Several emergency calls were made by witnesses, an ambulance appeared about ten minutes later and a fire engine and two police cars just over five minutes after that. The paramedics immediately tried to stabilise the driver who was trapped in the wreckage and clearly very seriously injured. The fire crews used cutting equipment to free the roof and provide space to lift out the driver, but they all knew they were fighting a losing battle. Jefferies was pronounced dead on arrival at Addenbrooke’s Hospital near the junction of Long Road with Hills Road, just a few minutes away from the crash scene.

Three hours later, fire crews were called to a vehicle fire just off the A1307 main road on Wormwood Hill, to the south-east of the city. When the flames were extinguished, they found themselves looking at a virtually unrecognisable smoking black wreck. Whoever had torched the vehicle had used at least ten gallons of petrol, according to a later report by a fire investigator. What they could confirm was that it was a Toyota Hi-Lux, with an unusually strong bull bar bolted to the front of the chassis.

The police investigation got nowhere. The VIN – Vehicle Identification Number – allowed them to trace the registered keeper of the Toyota. He had reported it stolen from his home in Royston, a few miles south of Cambridge, the previous day, and the fire had removed even the slightest possibility of gleaning any forensic evidence from the vehicle that could indicate the identity of the driver. The best guess by the police was that it had been a teenage joyrider who’d stolen the truck the previous afternoon and who’d then lost control of the heavy vehicle at speed. They assumed that the three witnesses who’d described the Toyota driver deliberately slamming the truck into the side of the car second time, after the crash had happened, had been mistaken.

The only two oddities were that the owner of the Hi-Lux claimed it had never been fitted with a bull bar of any sort. And, despite what two of the eyewitnesses stated, he was also adamant that neither the side windows nor the windscreen had been fitted with tinted glass, apart from a narrow strip along the top of the windscreen to act as a sunshade, and that had been installed by the manufacturer when the Toyota was built. The logical presumption was that whoever had taken the truck had applied a tinted film to the windows to avoid being identified, which most teenage joyriders wouldn’t bother doing. If, that is, the witnesses had been correct, and with the vehicle reduced to a burnt-out wreck, there was no possibility of establishing the truth. The addition of the bull bar to the vehicle remained unexplained.

The accident was essentially written off as a TWOC – Taking Without Owner’s Consent, police shorthand for stealing a car – and a hit and run crash that had gone very badly wrong.

But actually, it was rather more than that.

Chapter 1

Amsterdam, Holland

Saturday

The red light district in Amsterdam is in De Wallen, the oldest part of the city, and is, to the surprise of many visitors, one of the safest areas for tourists to wander because of the proliferation of security cameras and a larger-than-usual police presence. It attracts tourists who come to gawp at the goods on offer, the almost-naked girls – and in some streets the almost-naked boys who look remarkably like almost-naked girls – sitting in the lighted windows waiting for trade. Most of the tourists just walk the streets peering into the windows, looking surreptitiously at the garish displays of costumes, unusual equipment and devices, magazines and DVDs for sale in the numerous sex shops, glancing at the images displayed outside the buildings that host live sex shows on small stages, and cautiously taking pictures of the girls – photography being banned in these streets – with the cameras in their mobile phones. It’s one of the places in Amsterdam, along with the churches and museums and cafes and restaurants and all the other more conventional attractions, that are on the typical itinerary of almost every tourist.

The tourists tend to visit what is often and incorrectly referred to as ‘Canal Strasse’ in packs and during the day, but there are other people who prowl these streets, usually in the afternoons and evenings, almost always alone, and who haven’t come to take in the sights but to engage with the girls or the boys on a more direct and personal level: to touch and feel and experience them in the most intimate possible fashion, not just to look. Some head straight for a particular girl, but most seem to check out the available talent before making a decision and then they slip unobtrusively through the appropriate door, after which the curtains are closed on that window for as long as the transaction takes.

For the punters, it’s a fairly safe experience, because the girls almost always insist on using a condom – those that offer to go bareback are best avoided, obviously – and they are medically checked on a regular basis for any infections. And of course it’s anonymous. The girls have no interest in the true identity of any of their clients, only in the contents of their wallets, and as far as the men are concerned the girls are just there to provide a service – very probably a service they can’t get at home – that’s readily available, for a modest fee, in the small and anonymous bedrooms of De Wallen.

It was late afternoon when a stocky, slightly untidy man walked down one of the linking roads that gave access to the main part of the red light district and turned north to follow the eastern side of the canal that bisected it. He didn’t look like most of the Johns who frequented the area, who often appeared slightly furtive, glancing round to see if they knew anyone – or, more importantly if anyone knew them – as they selected the working girl who would benefit financially, if in no other way, from an acquaintance measured in a bare handful of minutes. This man appeared to know exactly where he was going, and to be completely uninterested in any of the other browsers and pedestrians on the street.

In fact, this appearance was misleading, because in reality he was taking a keen interest in the people around him, but he was checking them out surreptitiously, looking out for not anyone in particular, but more a particular type of person. A person who was not wandering the streets by the canal looking for the cheap titillation provided by the sight of the available prostitutes, nor seeking the instant gratification that could be provided behind the closed curtains of one of the bedrooms. A person, in short, who was on the street for a different reason.

The stocky man’s destination wasn’t one of the illuminated windows and the illicit pleasures on display, or not directly, because Paul Richter was himself in De Wallen on business of a very different kind. Instead, he crossed the canal to the west side and walked into one of the bars there. His choice of drinking establishment was not random. He was there in that place on that day and at that time for a very specific reason.

At that hour of the afternoon, the serious drinkers hadn’t yet appeared, and apart from a young couple sitting at a table towards the back of the bar, heads close together and giggling at some shared secret in a conversation that looked as if it would end up in a nearby hotel room sooner rather than later, the place was empty. Richter ordered a lemonade from the bar, paid, took his drink over to the wide and slightly grubby windows that looked out over the street and the canal, unzipped his black leather jacket and sat down at a small circular wooden table, his attention focused on the view outside. His gaze scanned the street in a repetitive pattern, from right to left and left to right, covering both sides of the canal. He was now obviously looking for something or someone.

He’d been there about twenty minutes when his attention was drawn to a man on the east side of the canal. There was nothing about him that made him stand out from the other wandering pedestrians, except for what he did. He looked up at one of the illuminated windows almost directly opposite the bar, where a slim and startlingly beautiful blonde girl wearing what looked to Richter like a kind of baby doll nightdress – though his knowledge of fashion and clothing of almost every kind that wasn’t made of either denim or leather was virtually nil – sat on a chair, her legs demurely crossed and a book on her lap, her bored expression obvious even from a distance. The man paused briefly outside, glanced in both directions, and then climbed the steps and entered the building. A few seconds later, the girl stood up and drew the curtains across the window.

Although he was not the first man Richter had seen take that kind of action at other houses during that late afternoon, there was one subtle difference between him and the other punters. It was nothing much to do with the way he had looked or behaved, and everything to do with the destination he had selected. Because Richter had been watching that particular room across the canal almost as much as he had been watching the people on the street.

He glanced at his watch. 16:37. The time they had decided on was 16:38 – because only a fool or an amateur ever arranged a meet on the hour or half-hour – and on a Saturday when the streets were busier, so the chances were that he’d seen the right man. But he would soon know one way or the other because he knew that one of two things was going to happen.

Either the man would emerge from the building in about a minute, having been told that the rate the girl was asking was at least five times more than the fifty euros typically being charged by most of the hookers. That would prove he was a punter, a John. Or the curtains would remain closed for a significantly longer time, which would prove that he wasn’t.

Richter guessed that he wasn’t.

He waited just under a minute and then, with the curtains in the room opposite still firmly closed, he pushed his half-drunk glass of lemonade to one side, zipped up his leather jacket because of what he was wearing underneath it – a 9-millimetre Glock 17 in a fabric shoulder holster that hadn’t been in his possession when he’d boarded the British Airways flight to Schiphol at Heathrow two days earlier – and walked down the steps and out of the bar.

They’d picked that bar and that location for the girl because there was a bridge over the canal about twenty yards away, which meant it took Richter only a couple of minutes to make it over the water and up the stairs to get inside the house. He wasn’t expecting trouble, quite the reverse, but he subscribed to the view that a man with a gun in a holster is exactly the same as an unarmed man until he can draw his weapon, so he eased the Glock out of the holster before he gave a sequence of five spaced taps on the door of the girl’s room.

A couple of seconds later it opened, framing the blonde-haired girl in the gap. She looked at him for a moment, then moved aside to let him enter.

‘Afternoon, Tash,’ Richter murmured as he stepped inside.

Tanya Annabelle Simonen-Hawks, commonly known in the lower and less senior corridors of Legoland, the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service at Vauxhall Cross in London as ‘Tash,’ nodded and closed the door behind Richter. He had known her off-and-on for about five years, but this was the first time they’d worked together.

‘Hi, Paul,’ she replied, and gestured towards a thick-set man wearing a badly-cut brown suit under a blue raincoat who was sitting on the upright chair in the window, where the curtains were still closed. He looked to be about forty years old, maybe forty-five, with the face of a street brawler, all lumps and angles hinting at a history of violent impacts with unyielding objects, under a crown of suspiciously thick and even more suspiciously black hair. To Richter, he looked Russian, or maybe Ukrainian, but right then his attention wasn’t focused on the man’s nationality, but on what he was holding.

‘The man sitting in my chair and pointing his Makarov pistol at your stomach says his name is Yuri,’ Tash explained, ‘which may or may not be true. Yuri, this is Paul Richter, from London. He’s come to collect the information you’ve brought.’

‘I have a question,’ Yuri said in Russian, his aim never wavering. ‘You were recently on a Russian ship. What was its name?’

‘The Semyon Timoshenko,’ Richter replied in the same language.

Tash glanced from one man to the other, both with their pistols aimed and ready. ‘If you’re going to shoot each other, I’d appreciate it if you could fit suppressors to keep the noise down. I’m trying not to attract too much attention while I’m here. And if you could shoot each other out in the street that would be a bonus, because then I wouldn’t have to clear up the mess in this room.’

Richter nodded, raised the muzzle of his Glock towards the ceiling and then slid it back into his holster.

‘Just a precaution,’ he said in Russian. ‘Sorry, Yuri.’

Across the room, the other man mirrored his action, sliding his Makarov into a belt holster under his jacket.

‘No problem,’ Yuri replied, now in fluent English, his voice deep and gravelly. ‘Men who take precautions tend to live longer than those who don’t. You gave the correct response and you match the description I was given,’ he added. ‘My masters at The Aquarium were very specific about the handover, and that you were to be the recipient. Nobody else. The pistol was just in case the wrong man stepped through that door.’

Richter grinned.

‘How did they describe me?’ he asked, sounding interested.

‘Stocky, scruffy and dangerous, basically. But they did show me a couple of photographs as well, so I’m happy with who you are.’

‘Good.’

Yuri reached inside his jacket and Richter tensed: the Russian could always be carrying a second weapon.

‘Relax, Paul,’ he said. ‘Even if I was reaching for a piece, your lady friend would make sure I couldn’t use it. She’s good. You should keep her.’

Richter glanced to his left at Tash. She was standing in the same spot, but now held a revolver – it looked to him like a hammerless Smith & Wesson Centennial, probably a .38 Special – in her right hand, the barrel not aimed directly at Yuri but close enough to make the threat to him clearly viable. He had no idea where she’d had the weapon concealed, what she was wearing seemingly offering no hiding places for a pistol or anything much else.

Yuri completed his move, his hand reappearing holding a small oblong of clear plastic, a standard case containing a coloured object that Richter recognised immediately as an SD card. The Russian stood up, took a couple of steps forward and placed it on the end of the bed.

‘Anything we should know about that?’ Richter asked.

‘I’m not aware of what’s on it,’ Yuri said, ‘but I’m told it’s self-explanatory and obviously encrypted. You’ll receive the unlock code through a different channel. I was also told that when they view the contents your masters will know what to do with the data. And now I need to get going. It’s been a long time since I was here in De Wallen with money in my pocket and time on my hands. There are a couple of girls at the other end of this street that I’d like to spend an hour or so with. Unless you really are on the market,’ he added hopefully, looking at Tash.

‘In your dreams,’ she replied, still aiming the Smith in his general direction.

Seconds later, the door closed behind him.

Richter watched from the window, pulling back the curtain about half an inch, as the Russian walked away. Then he picked up the case containing the SD card, looked at it for a few seconds and then zipped it into one of his own jacket pockets.

‘Is that it?’ Tash demanded, putting the revolver down on the bedside table. ‘Just one bloody SD card?’

Richter shook his head.

‘Just like you, I had no idea what the information was going to be,’ he said. ‘All we were told was that it was of vital importance to Britain to understand something, and that the messenger would provide the proof of whatever that something was. I presume it was too sensitive to just send it by mail, and there’s no way your people or mine would allow the Russians to download something onto one of our servers.’

‘Yuri mentioned The Aquarium. Presumably that means he’s GRU, or GU as it’s now known, and he’s based at Khodinka?’

‘I don’t know him,’ Richter said, ‘but that’s my guess, yes. And I do have a contact at a fairly high level in the GU, so I’m guessing that whatever data is on the SD card is kosher, and important.’

Tash still looked irritated.

‘So whose brilliant idea was it that I should spend a week pretending to be a hooker at the bottom end of the market here in Amsterdam?’

‘Nothing to do with me,’ Richter said immediately. ‘But I suppose arranging a meeting in a whore’s bedroom – no offence, Tash – at least meant that nobody would be able to see or hear what was done or said, so that does make sense. And you could say no to all the greasy little vermin who popped up outside the door wanting a good time for fifty euros. It wasn’t like you were actually trying to earn a living here. As a working girl, I mean.’

‘I know, and I did say no, most of the time.’

‘Most of the time?’ Richter echoed.

Tash nodded.

‘I get bored easily and sitting on that bloody stool all afternoon and evening reading a book isn’t actually my idea of a good time. So I did say yes to a couple of more-or-less fit guys, just to kind of break the monotony. And I figured I’d need to accommodate the odd punter just to blend in. All the girls here watch each other, you know, and if you don’t get any clients, you don’t make any money, and there was no way I could pass for a hooker unless I acted like one. So I kind of hooked, if that’s the right word.’

‘Well, at least you can pack your bags and get out of here now,’ Richter said. ‘I’ve got the SD card and that means the op is over.’

‘When are you flying back?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon, I suppose. I’ve got to return the weapon to the consulate here, and I guess you’ve got to do the same with that revolver.’

Tash nodded.

‘I’ll make you a deal,’ she said. ‘I’ve been existing on sandwiches and takeaways since I got here, so as we’re both free tonight, why don’t we treat ourselves to a decent meal? Or to be exact, why don’t you treat me to a decent meal? After all, I was watching your back while Yuri was here.’

‘No problem,’ Richter said. ‘Is that the deal?’

‘Not exactly,’ Tash replied. ‘I’ve been living here in this sodding basic knocking shop for over a week. When I walk out of here I don’t want to come back. I presume you’ve got a hotel booked somewhere, so once we’ve eaten you’ll have to squeeze me into your room for the night. If that’s okay? Maybe there’s a sofa or something in the room? Or a spare bed?’

Richter shook his head.

‘My expenses are cut to the bone, thanks to my boss, so all I’ve got is a double bed, one chair and a TV set bolted to the wall, plus a really small en suite shower room. But,’ he added after a moment, ‘I’m sure we can work something out.’

‘Works for me,’ Tash said.

She grinned at him and dragged a small suitcase out from under the bed. Then she dropped her knickers, pulled the nightie over her head, stood there stark naked for a few seconds, then clicked open the suitcase and began putting on fresh clothes.

Richter watched her carefully, taking mental notes and recording images in his mind.

‘Works for me, too,’ he muttered.

Chapter 2

Khasab, Oman

Saturday

To a casual visitor or a tourist, the port of Khasab at the northern end of the Musandam Peninsula – an exclave of Oman bordered to the south by the United Arab Emirates that had remained largely cut off from Oman and everywhere else until the recent construction of a new coast road – probably looked like almost any other port in the country, or in fact in the region. There were a few hotels and restaurants and cafes and a fairly limited range of shops to cater for visitors to the town, though it was not a major tourist destination like Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Muscat. The harbour was bustling and busy, open boats zipping back-and-forth carrying bags and boxes and bales filled with unidentified products, while other larger vessels, most of them traditional dhows, brown hulled and opulently decorated, their open decks covered with canvas awnings to provide a measure of shade to the people on board, proceeded in a slower and more stately manner.

These were the tourist boats, their cargoes pale-skinned and sweating Europeans on the rare occasions when a cruise ship visited Khasab, but more often chattering families of Arabs, from both Oman and the UAE located further south on the peninsula, all taking a trip to see the Musandam Fjords. Although the resemblance to the dramatic fjordland on Norway’s Atlantic coast is somewhat tenuous, the inlets in the white limestone cliffs, backed by the majestic Hajar Mountains and lapped by the calm turquoise waters of the Strait of Hormuz, are a sufficiently unusual sight to have earned the region the nickname the ‘Norway of Arabia’.

As well as the fjords, the boats also convey tourists to look at the ruined buildings on Telegraph Island, where British engineers built a telegraph repeater station in the 1860s as part of the cable that ran from India to Basra in Iraq. And where it was so hot and so unpleasant to work that folklore claims the expression ‘to go round the bend’ was first coined. This was at first a spoken wish to sail around the top of the peninsula, to go ‘round the bend’ and into the Gulf of Oman to head somewhere cooler and more civilised, but over time the expression morphed into meaning to be driven mad, the insanity being produced by the incessant heat from which there was no escape. There are other explanations for the expression, but that was the one favoured by the local tour guides.

As always, first impressions are only rarely accurate. A visitor to Khasab who did anything more than look at the activity in the harbour and perhaps snap a few pictures with a camera or more likely use his or her mobile phone to capture some colourful images, a person who took the time to see what was actually happening rather than just looking at what was in front of them, would quickly notice something rather odd. Not about the dhows, because they were doing exactly what they appeared to be doing, just taking tourists around the local sights, but about the open boats carrying different cargoes.

What they were doing would depend, strangely, not upon whether or not they were loaded or empty, but upon the time of day, because the activities of the crews of these vessels were almost entirely governed by external factors over which they had no control.

An observer watching the harbour for an entire day would first see the boats arriving, usually in the early morning but always after sunrise, approaching Khasab from the north and carrying a cargo that would probably be unexpected: mainly live sheep and live goats. These animals would be unloaded in the harbour where there were three jetties used exclusively by the crews of these boats, backed by a parking area under an awning that protected the vehicles left there from the worst of the heat of the sun. The animals would be transferred into lorries and driven away, the vehicles eventually travelling along the coast road that leads to the United Arab Emirates.

During the day other trucks would arrive in the harbour and park behind the jetties. They would be loaded with boxes and cartons and packages, most of them unmarked, but some whose contents could perhaps be guessed from the shape of the box or covering, and from the way that the lorry drivers and boatman handled them. Many of these anonymous boxes contained cartons of cigarettes, bulky but lightweight and valuable goods, while the heavier boxes held various types of expensive electronic equipment, principally computers and tablets, mobile phones and cameras, but occasionally a large oblong box hinted at the size of the flat-screen television it contained.

The other obvious peculiarity about the harbour scene at Khasab was that even when the open boats – almost all of them rugged fibreglass hulls about twenty feet or so in length and powered by one or more powerful outboard engines – were loaded and ready to depart, none of them did once the sun had set. Instead, the crews – usually only two or three men – would remain on board their vessels relaxing and trying to get some sleep.

And the reason for all this inactivity was that the trade being followed by the primarily Iranian crews of these vessels was smuggling between Oman and Iran, and they were taking advantage of a convenient loophole in Omani law. The sheep and goats were exported from Iran and legally imported into Oman, the animals destined for the tables of restaurants and the meat markets in the United Arab Emirates or even in Saudi Arabia. The cigarettes and electronic goods were legal exports from Oman, purchased from retailers or wholesalers but destined to be sold on the Iranian black market.

None of which was illegal under Omani legislation, subject only to two conditions: the boats were required to arrive in Khasab after sunrise, and to leave the port before sunset, night-time arrivals or departures not being permitted. But the trade being followed by the smugglers, who were known locally as ‘shooties,’ was completely illegal under Iranian law. And it wasn’t just the law of their country that was a problem.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the busiest stretches of water in the world because of the large numbers of oil tankers that pass through it on a daily basis, heading into and out of the oil-rich Gulf states, all of which the smugglers had to avoid while they navigated across almost seventy miles of sea without lights or radar or even much in the way of navigational instruments or charts towards Bandar Abbas, their principal destination port in Iran. And waiting for them off the Iranian coast every night would be at least one and probably several armed coastguard and other official vessels operated by the Iranian government, which would be quite likely to open fire on them without warning.

And if that wasn’t enough, because of the hazardous profession being followed by the shooties, and the likelihood of them either smashing into the side of a laden oil tanker because they’d seen it too late to avoid it or getting blown out of the water by gunfire from an Iranian patrol boat, they tended to load as much cargo onto their vessels as they possibly could, so that each successful run across the Strait of Hormuz would bring in the maximum possible profit. But the downside was that the overloading of the boats made them much less manoeuvrable and more vulnerable than they should be and made it more likely that they would not complete their voyages successfully.

There was no sign of the trade disappearing because demand for their smuggled goods in Iran was not just constant but increasing significantly, entirely due to the imposition of additional sanctions against the country by the United States and other nations. This had, somewhat bizarrely, led to a slight relaxation in the anti-smuggling activities of the Iranian authorities, because people in positions of power in Iran wanted the newest phones and the newest cameras and the newest tablets and the newest computers just as much as the ordinary citizens of that economically isolated country.

As a result, many of the officers and men on board the Coast Guard cutters and other vessels had become quite adept at using their radar and their eyes to look out for the shooties heading back towards the secluded beaches and coves around the port of Bandar Abbas, and even more adept at somehow not quite being able to see them in time to stop the vessels. It was situation that seemed to suit all the parties involved fairly well.

Chapter 3

Salisbury, Wiltshire

Saturday

A little after nine forty in the morning, a mid-grey, mid-range, and almost middle-aged Ford saloon nosed its way somewhat uncertainly into a newish housing estate on the western outskirts of Salisbury.

Almost as soon as the vehicle had left the main road, the driver, who in many ways resembled the vehicle he was in charge of, being both greyish and middle-aged, drew the car to a halt and looked closely at the screen of the satnav attached by a sucker mount to the windscreen to the right of the steering wheel, the power lead running untidily across the dashboard and terminating in the cigarette lighter socket. At the top of the small screen were a couple of virtual buttons labelled with plus and minus signs, and the driver tapped the minus sign twice, expanding the screen display to show more of the tangled network of roads in front of him.

The problem he had was that the satnav was old and he had ignored the messages the unit generated on an irritatingly frequent basis telling him that the map badly needed to be updated. For an occasional and, more than occasionally, incompetent, driver the unit had worked well enough, providing accurate directions to most of the destinations the man had selected. But the housing estate was so new that, even if the latest available map update had been installed, the street the driver was looking for would probably still not have been included.

So he already knew that the road he was looking for would not be shown but the good news was that Google maps did possess enough detail. Google had inexorably become the font of all knowledge and wisdom for most of the population of the world, and the newly-minted verb ‘to Google’ was passing easily into everyday conversation.

The driver switched on the Ford’s hazard flashers so that the driver of any other vehicle approaching him would realise the car was stationary and pulled a sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket. He unfolded it to reveal a printed map that his laser printer at home had spat out the previous night and held it up beside the satnav display. Every street displayed on the satnav’s screen was also printed on the sheet of A4 paper, along with about a dozen that were not. One of these had been indicated by yellow highlighter, and it only took a minute or so for the driver to identify the streets he would need to drive down in order to reach his destination.

‘Easy enough,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Along this road to the end. At the T-junction I turn right, take the second left, then the first right and then the first right again. Right, second left, first right, first right.’

He dropped the paper on the seat beside him, angling it so that he could glance at it while he was driving, then put the car into gear and lifted his foot off the clutch. The sudden blare of a horn from close behind him caused him to stamp on the brake as a small Vauxhall, painted a notably hideous shade of yellow and with flared arches covering unnaturally wide wheels and tyres, swept past him, far too close and far too fast. He caught a brief glimpse of the driver, a clearly young male with particularly prominent ears, their appearance emphasised by the ‘fashionable’ haircut the youth affected, the lower part of his head shaved almost bald to leave what amounted to a prominent and rounded bird’s nest arrangement on the top of his skull. From behind, the combined effect looked something like a giant erect circumcised penis, which made the driver’s verbal response to the young man not only predictable but also visually accurate.

‘Dickhead,’ he muttered.

This time, he checked the rear-view mirror before he pulled away from the kerb, making sure that the road behind him was clear. As he shifted up into second gear, he became aware of a ticking sound coming from the dashboard. He realised that the hazard flashers were still working and switched them off.

Charles Vernon was not a natural driver and never felt comfortable behind the wheel, a sensation almost invariably shared by all of his infrequent passengers.

He saw no other vehicles driving around the estate as he worked his way towards his destination, though there were cars and the occasional van and motorcycle parked in the short driveways or, just as commonly, on the street in front of the houses, sometimes partly on the pavement. Vernon wondered briefly, as he weaved his way through the greatly reduced width of the road between two cars parked against opposite pavements, why their owners didn’t park their vehicles in the garages of the houses, but the simple reason was that in most cases they couldn’t.

The estate had been built down to a price rather than up to a specification, and wherever the builders had identified the merest hint of a corner, they had immediately done their best to cut it. The garages appeared to be the normal size but could in fact accommodate only the very smallest vehicles on the road. It looked as if the architects had assumed that all the property owners were still driving original Austin Sevens or the like.

Vernon stopped the Ford once more to check the printed map before making the final turn into the street – actually a cul-de-sac – where the house was located. He drove slowly down towards the end of the road, checking the house numbers as he went. He stopped the vehicle outside a property on the eastern side of the road, a house that appeared virtually identical to its neighbours.

There was a small black leather briefcase resting in the passenger foot well. It had originally been on the passenger seat but had shot forward a few minutes earlier when Vernon did his emergency stop as the small Vauxhall had overtaken him. He picked it up, walked to the front door of the semi-detached house and rang the bell.

A minute or so later the door swung open. A heavily-built black man stood in the opening and stared at Vernon, who extended his right hand and murmured a few words. The man shook his hand and Vernon stepped inside the house.

---

Almost two hours later the front door opened again and Vernon stepped out, shaking the other man’s hand