Bioweapon Read online

  Bioweapon

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Author’s note

  Copyright

  Bioweapon

  James Barrington

  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 bann
ed 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.